LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 1979, Page 75

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CONVENTION SERMON

Text: Revelation 3:7-8

How easy it is to forget that we are church, the
church of the risen Lord who proclaims to us, “I am He
that liveth and was dead; and behold, I am alive
forevermore, amen; and have the keys of hell and
death” (Rev. 1:18)! It is the peculiar temptation of the
church assembled in convention to forget this word of
our Lord and, instead of singing the songs of victory, to
belabor one another for the problems which beset our
church. Instead of confidently trusting this promise and
relying upon His Word and the power of His Spirit, we
try to solve our problems with new schemes and addi-
tional resolutions, which are often no more potent than
the paper on which they are written. It is likewise a
temptation to allow the statistics of evil, death, and
terror to fill us with a sort of hopeless resignation, or to
believe that we can solve the problems of the church by
worshiping at the shrines of success and competing
with the power brokers in the marketplaces of the world.
It is easy to forget that our Lord once heard the tempter
say: “To you I will give all this authority and their glory;
“for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I
will” (Luke 4:6). How easy it is to live under the delusion
that a long recital of the statistics of success is the
evidence of the Spirit’s power, or to believe that we can
open the doors that seem to keep us from unity and
success as a church by passing a few more rules and
more stringent Bylaws, with the assumption that if we
can coerce or manipulate the people of God in our
congregations to accept and achieve the goals we set,

_ the kingdom of God will come. The theme ““God Opens

Doors,” chosen for this convention, is no Madison
Avenue adman’s slogan to be glibly repeated. Instead
this theme calls us to remember “the words of the Holy
One, the True One, who has the key of David, who opens
and on one shall shut, who shuts and on one opens”
(Rev. 3:7). This theme proclaims to us that we are
church, the church of the risen Lord, who has sent us to
those who are still captive to the powers of sin, Satan,
hell, and death, to open the doors of the prison house for
all who are still captive to the powers of evil.

As we begin this 53rd convention of The Lutheran
Church—Missouri Synod, let us hear from the risen
Lord:

“T Have Set Before You an Open Door”

I. Unless He Opens the Door,
All Doors Remain Locked

Life Without Christ Is a Hopeless Captivity

For countless millions in our world today there is no
open door. They are held captive by their past and live
their lives under an oppressive burden of guilt. One of
the most articulate descriptions of this is given by Franz
Kafka in his play The Trial. In this play the principal
character, a man by the name of Joseph K., is arrested
one morning. In spite of all his efforts to get his day in
court, he is never faced with his accusers or the charges

75

Or. George Wollenburg, preacher, opening service

against him. Contrary to the normal fear that accused
people have of being brought before the court, he eagerly
seeks his day in court. He anxiously wants to prove his
innocence, but the court seems to be impervious to any
evidence. He is caught in a vise of guilt from which he
cannot escape. In spite of his protests, “I am not guilty,
it’s all a mistake,” he nevertheless has a painful sense of
having somehow sinned against someone or something.
Every effort to find an open door through which he
might find acquittal before the court is doomed to
failure. There is no advocate to plead his case. At last he
submits to the execution ordered by the court. He dies
like a dog in a ditch. This vague and undefined sense of
“having sinned against something or someone” plagues
modern 20th-century man no less than it troubled
ancient people.

All Efforts to Free Men Lead to a Dead End

The efforts of men to find an open door have all been
failures. Although religious movements and cults, super-
stition and magic attract people throughout the world,
the door remains closed. The tools of psychiatry have
only produced further enslavement of men by those who
have acquired the means to use such tools for the control
of others. Liberation movements and liberation theol-
ogies within the church have produced nothing but new
forms of tyranny. Psychology and sociology have de-
clared all moral standards to be relative. So 20th-
century man has set himself free—free from morality,
free from all rules, free from reason, free from logic, free
to create the brave new world. But all such efforts have
opened no door to freedom. Each key forged has merely
brought people into another corridor of the prison house
and filled our world with hopeless despair, with the