Dear friends of the Lutheran Church: God willing we will celebrate the 6th Sunday after Easter tomorrow. This Sunday is very much characterized by the surrounding holidays of Ascension and Pentecost. We are very much encouraged to put all our hope in our risen Lord Jesus Christ, who sits at the right hand of God the Father and reigns over all with almighty power, but especially rules his Church with grace and forgiveness through his Holy Spirit, whom he and the Father sent to enliven the Church in true and saving faith – and still rules our hearts and minds in and through his means of grace: Word and Sacrament +

The gracious rule of our Lord in the realm of his Church is part of his ongoing mission as depicted by him in the gospel of St.John in the 12th chapter verse 32: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” (Watchword for Exaudi) This drawing to himself is Christ’s doing through the Holy Spirit in the pure preaching of the gospel and the proper administration of the sacraments as taught and instituted by him as ongoing order of these holy matters to create the saving faith when and where it pleases God.  By sending his Holy Spirit he has fulfilled his promise made to his people in the Old Testament, but then also finally to his disciples and apostles during his last days before his crucifixion and shortly after his resurrection and before his ascension.

One of the promises we read in the book by the holy prophet Jeremiah in the 31st chapter:      “Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the LORD. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” (31-34)

This promise of the Holy Spirit, who will remind us and the Church of all Jesus himself had said and taught, is also given by the Lord to his disciples on the night when he was betrayed as we read in tomorrow’s gospel from St. John in the 15th and 16th chapters: “But when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me. And you also will bear witness, because you have been with me from the beginning. I have said all these things to you to keep you from falling away. They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God. And they will do these things because they have not known the Father, nor me. But I have said these things to you, that when their hour comes you may remember that I told them to you. “I did not say these things to you from the beginning, because I was with you.” (15:26-16,4 ESV)

Tomorrow’s epistle focusses on the special gift of the Holy Spirit that “we know Christ aright” and we find this reading in the letter to the Ephesians in the 3rd chapter: “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith–that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.”(14-21)

The sermon for tomorrow is based on the Old Testament reading for this Sunday and is posted here in both isiZulu (wz1228120520 Eksawudi) and seTswana (wt1228120520 Eksaudi). It was written by my father Rev. E.A.W.Weber DD.

The theme song for tomorrow is the wonderful Luther composition “Now pray we all God, the Comforter…” (Nun bitten wir den heiligen Geist). You can listen to that composition as sung by the Dresdener Kreuzchor here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU5-Pm7mRfo