230205 Sermon on identifying true spirituality (Epiphany 5) February 5, 2023

 Audio recording

Sermon manuscript:

The word “spiritual” brings to mind a lot of things. For me
it brings to mind a lot of things that aren’t good. What one person regards as
spiritual, another person regards as a delusion. For some there seems to be no
limits for what is acceptable when it comes to spirituality. Folks might talk
about energies, crystals, disciplines, psychedelic drugs, and many other
things. I don’t understand these things, and they make me nervous. But this is
not just some personal problem. This comes from my training as a Lutheran. The
Lutheran Church has a very guarded attitude towards anybody who shows up and
wants to start talking about spirits, energies, and stuff. There is a reason
for this guarded attitude from our history.

As you perhaps remember, Martin Luther posted his 95 theses
against the Catholic church’s sale of indulgences on October 31, 1517. Not long
after this Luther was forced to conclude that it was possible for the pope to
err and that church councils could err. The church was not infallible. What led
Luther to that conclusion was not some rebellious, independent spirit within
him. Luther wasn’t like that; just the opposite actually. What led him to
believe that the church could err was that popes and councils have contradicted
one another. And, more importantly for Luther, they contradicted the
Scriptures. The Scriptures became for Luther, and later the Lutheran church,
the only infallible, pure source for what we believe and teach.

This brought about a profound change in society. The way
that things had been handled spiritually speaking up until the Reformation was
that the Catholic church officials would decide what was right and what was
wrong instead of individuals reading the Scriptures for themselves. Once the
Catholic church had decided what was right or wrong they would go on to enforce
those decisions, up to and including death.

John Hus, for example, was a Bohemian reformer who lived
about 100 years before Luther. Even though he was promised safe passage, he was
burned at the stake at the Council of Constance in 1415. Luther, also, was
convicted of heresy by the Catholic church and would have been put to death if
he has fallen into the wrong hands. Obviously, then, folks didn’t just mess around
with spiritual teachings under the Catholic church. To do so was deadly
serious.

But perhaps you can anticipate what happened in Germany
after the Reformation started to break the power of the Roman church officials.
No longer was it the church officials who decided what was right and wrong.
Everybody could decide for himself or herself what he or she wanted to believe.
This was a bit like taking the lid off of a pressure cooker. Spiritual teachers
started to come out of the woodwork.

Some said they had visions. Some said they had the Holy
Spirit. Some said that the end of the world had come. Some said your baptism
didn’t count; you needed to do it again. Some said you should live in communes.
Some said not only the church officials needed to go, but all those in
authority—the lords and princes needed to go too. Less than a decade after
Luther posted the 95 theses it appeared that all hell had broken loose. And you
can be sure that the Roman church officials were quite happy to blame all that
on Luther.

So, what was to be done? Should we get the stake back out
again to start burning heretics? That is what the Roman church wanted to do.
When it was politically feasible for them, that is what they did do. Should we
embrace tolerance? Live and let live? That would be how our modern world would
handle it. Luther had a different way of handling it. He and the Lutheran
Church didn’t always live up to what Luther said, but by and large they did,
and what Luther said was right. Luther said that heresies need to be rooted out
by the preaching of the Word from the Scriptures. Hard work must be done with
the Scriptures to refute errors. Only by going more thoroughly into what the
Scriptures say can errors be revealed for what they are so that people can be
led away from them. And hard work should be done, because it is important that
we not err in spiritual matters.

This is where Luther’s attitude, and, God-willing, our own church’s
attitude as well, is very different from the modern world’s attitude. The
modern world thinks that spiritual matters are outdated and have no real effect.
Don’t get too upset about whatever anybody might teach in that realm. None of
that stuff really matters. What matters is STEM education, finance, making and
saving money. This, of course, is a spiritual teaching all its own, but most
people don’t see it that way. What is spiritual to most people is that that kind
of thing is like a hobby. Some people believe in crystals. Other people believe
in Christ the crucified. For the modern mind this is all gobbledy-gook anyway,
so who cares what anybody believes or teaches. What really matters instead of
any spiritual nonsense is whatever is going on at the universities, or in
Washington, or on Wall Street. If the Catholic church was what ruled over
people’s minds and souls at Luther’s time, this modern mentality is what rules
over the minds and souls of our own time.

This does not mean, however, that anybody who is against the
materialist, corporatist, unbelieving, pleasure and power seeking of our own
times is somebody who should be trusted. This, too, is very similar to
Reformation times. When the lid came off the pot and the spiritual teachers
were coming out of the woodwork, you can be sure that these teachers were very
anti-Catholic. They had to be! If they were under the Catholic church they
would have been burned at the stake as heretics. But this doesn’t mean that
just because they were against the Catholic church that they were good
spiritual guides.

So it is also today. It appears that we are living in a time
of upheaval. Some people are learning that life is more than food, more than
clothing, more than mere scientific or economic advancement. These days there
are lots of ways people can learn with the internet. We aren’t all watching the
same advertisements on the same three TV networks anymore. So what can a person
do in the midst of so many different voices?

What Luther advised still holds true. Not every spirit is
the Holy Spirit. In fact, there is only one spirit who is the Holy Spirit, and
that Holy Spirit is always going to be leading us to Christ the crucified, as
Paul says in our epistle reading today. Be very careful with visions or dreams.
Visions and dreams can come from evil spirits. Be even more careful about people
who brag not in the Lord, not in their weakness, but in themselves. It’s not
hard to say you have the Holy Spirit,
and therefore are empowered to lead others to supposedly higher and better
things. Don’t take drugs, psychedelic or otherwise. Don’t engage in spiritual
exercises. Be very skeptical about energies, crystals, modern versions of clean
and unclean foods, and so on.

If you’re bored, if you want to get busy with something, try
getting busy with the Ten Commandments. There you have an inexhaustible guide
for good works. Or turn to Jesus’s words, for example, in the Sermon on the
Mount. And learn about Jesus’s saving work from Jesus’s own words in John’s
Gospel, or from Romans, or from Galatians. Or you can go to the first two chief
parts of our catechism, the Ten Commandment and the Creed, which summarize
these things.

This, I would argue, is very much akin to what Paul has been
saying in our epistle readings these past few weeks. He tells these
Corinthians—who, by the way, are very much like us, very much itching for
power, for enlightenment, for excellence—Paul tells these Corinthians: “We
preach Christ and him crucified.” Or, as he says in today’s reading, “When
I came among you I didn’t come with high-powered, secret teachings. I came with
the ABCs of Christ crucified for you. In fact, I didn’t want to know anything
else among you except these ABCs, that you are a sinner for whom Christ died to
save.” And where can you learn that you are a sinner? You learn that from
the Ten Commandments. And where do you learn that God is the justifier of
sinners in Christ the crucified? You learn that from the Creed.

A trait that seems to be common among false spiritual guides
is that they are dissatisfied with these ABCs. The ABCs aren’t good enough.
That’s baby stuff. They want to move on to secret teachings, secret political
conspiracies. They like the book of Revelation. They often have peculiar
notions about food. They hate the idea of just being common and run of the
mill. They don’t want to be just sinners who are saved by Christ the crucified.
They want to be powerful and great, saving this current generation and the
generations to come by their ever-so-important discoveries and abilities.

I hope that you can see from the readings we’ve had from 1
Corinthians that Paul is not like that: “Who is Paul?” “Who is
Apollos?” They are nothing—and worse than nothing—if they are not leading
poor, miserable sinners to the forgiveness of sins in Christ the crucified.
This is no extraordinary, secret teaching. It is common teaching. There are, in
fact, no secret teachings in Christianity. Anybody and everybody can know
absolutely everything that Christians believe and teach in the perfectly public
Bible.

This is why we must immediately be suspicious or perhaps
even immediately flat-out reject any teachings that come from visions or drugs
or so-called Holy Spirit filled people. Such things are not out in the open and
common. Who can see the Holy Spirit in another person? Whatever is not out in the
open and common—openly taught in the Scriptures—seems to contradict Paul’s
statement: “I had no intention of knowing anything among you except Jesus
Christ, and him crucified.”

Knowing your spiritual ABCs, never ceasing to learn them,
never graduating from them, that is, repenting and believing, seems to me to be
the main thrust of what Paul has been saying in these first two chapters of 1
Corinthians. Why is this so important? Because the devil’s favorite activity is
to dress up like an angel of light and start teaching religion. And he is one
tricky shyster. As soon as you think you’ve avoided his errors on the left, you
will find that he has already been at work with errors on the right. It is not
grand and sophisticated campaigns that prove to be the devil’s undoing, but, as
Luther’s hymn famously puts it: “One little word can fell him.”

“Though devils all the world should fill, all eager to
devour us. We tremble not, we fear no ill. They shall not overpower us. This
world’s prince may still scowl fierce as he will. He can harm us none. He’s
judged; the deed is done. One little word can fell him.” Maybe that one little
word is “Jesus crucified for me.”

We modern people might not believe that the world is filled
with devils, but even those who have a hard time believing in demons should be
able to recognize that the world is filled to the brim with teachers. All these
different teachers teach us different things about what is good, what is
important, what is useful. They all want your allegiance for their program. Our
times are exceedingly dangerous spiritually speaking. There are million ways to
go wrong. There is only one way to be saved.

It is as Paul says in Ephesians chapter 4: “There is one
body and one Spirit, just as also you were called in the one hope of your
calling. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all,
who is over all, and through all, and in us all.”

So when you are dealing with spiritual things, make sure you
are only dealing with the one Holy Spirit, who makes known to us in the
Scriptures the mind of God. What is in the mind of God? His saving will towards
us in Christ Jesus. There are many other spirits and these other spirits will
even and especially show up in the churches—including our own churches, seeking
to lead people astray. Don’t be led astray, but rather follow the voice of the
Good Shepherd, Jesus, who lays down his life for the sheep. Don’t despise such
simple teachings, but have the faith of a child. It is this faith, and this
faith alone, which overcomes the world.