Loving God, we come into your presence with Jesus by our side, knowing that in him we are loved and saved and forgiven.  Thank you for this gift of reconciliation and for your Holy Spirit who helps us to live it out; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

    The second reading that we heard today from Romans has a lot of big words in it: justification, righteousness, redemption, atonement, forbearance.  So now that you’ve been to confirmation classes are you able to explain all that? [responses] Actually, if you can’t explain all that, it’s quite all right, because a lot of adults can’t explain all that either.  However, I’m going to try to give a bit of a translation, so that at least we can understand what Paul is trying to say in this passage.

    One of the things that you might remember from confirmation is that there are a lot of laws in the Old Testament.  Do any of you remember how many? [613] There are actually 613 laws in the first five books of the Bible, and that’s what Paul means when he talks about “the law.”  However, Paul also says that no matter how hard anybody tries, they won’t be able to make things right between them and God by keeping those laws.  How come? [we’re all sinful and self-absorbed and won’t be able to keep the whole law]

    Paul is saying that no matter how good we think we are, all of us sin, and so things are not right between us and God.  And so how did God make things right?  What did God do in order that we could be reconciled with God? [sent Jesus] Jesus came and shared our humanity so that through him, we might share his divinity.  Jesus came and lived the perfect life that we are not able to live, in order to break the power of sin.

    I have this image that keeps coming back of two people who have maybe had an argument or a fight, and one person is saying to the other, “Are we good?”  And if things have been resolved, the other person will say, “Yeah.  We’re good.”  Well, imagine that you are standing there talking to God, and Jesus is standing beside you.  And you say to God, “God?  Are we good?”  And God says, “Yeah.  Because of him, we’re good.”  That is justification and righteousness.  That is also why we talk about putting our faith in Jesus Christ.

    To believe in Jesus is to know that God has forgiven us and has made us his own in baptism and has set us free from the kind of self-centered life that leads to death.  To believe in Jesus is to know that God accepts us because of the life that Jesus lived, and then to continue to grow into the people that God has created us to be – people who live in love for God and for one another – and we do this by the power of the Holy Spirit, for which we will be praying today.

    It is this question of what it means to believe in Jesus that each of the confirmands has been asked to speak about today, for having this faith in our lives does make a difference.  I’m going to ask each of them now to come and share what they have written. [speeches]

Thanks be to God!  Amen.

Reformation Sunday / Confirmation                    Romans 3:19-28
October 27, 2013
St. Luke’s Zion Lutheran Church
Pastor Lynne Hutchison

© 2013 Lynne Hutchison  All Rights Reserved