In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, this has a been a very sad week in country’s history to say the least. The ugliness of sin was laid bare before our eyes, reminding us yet again of our desperate need for a Savior. A young Christian man with a wife and two little children was murdered in cold blood simply for trying to reason with America’s youth on our college campuses and rescue them from the poison of woke indoctrination. You might not have agreed with every little thing that Charlie Kirk ever said, which is true for just about every one that there is, but there are a lot of things that he said that you should agree with. He sounded the alarm on the transgender movement and tried to convince people that God never lets anyone get born in the wrong body. He defended marriage between one man and one woman, and encouraged those who had been brainwashed by the porn industry that God has a better plan for their life. He was a strong advocate for the value of all life, even life in the womb. And on many occasions, he appealed to the authority of the Scriptures and spoke boldly about the forgiveness of sins in Jesus, and how through faith in His sacrifice a person could be saved from eternal damnation. No, Charlie wasn’t a Lutheran. But he was a Christian. And that means he was one of our own.

What should we make of the unspeakable atrocity that took place a few days ago? How should we respond to the martyrdom of one of God’s beloved children?  When we listen to the world around us, we hear all kinds of different answers. Some people call for violence. Some people call for political and social reform. And some people are completely silent. But when we listen to God’s Word, we hear the only answer that matters. As Saint Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians chapter 1, our Epistle lesson for today, “We preach Christ crucified.” So, permit me to explain to you all this morning for a few moments what it means to preach Christ crucified and why this is the message that we need to hear now more than ever.

In the first place, preaching Christ crucified means preaching God’s wrath against sin. If it wasn’t clear to you by now, this world is a messed-up place filled with all kinds of evil. Even though God didn’t make it that way the begin with, that’s how it is now, and it’s not just some else’s fault. It’s our fault too. The Lord has given us all very clear Commandments for how He wants us to live our lives, and every single one of us has fallen short of His glory. It isn’t just that we sometimes make mistakes or mess up, like spilling a glass of water or burning a piece of bread in the toaster. We sin. And God hates our sin.

If you don’t think that God hates sin, and that it actually makes Him angry when we do things against His holy law, then look again at the cross of Jesus. The Bible tells us that when Jesus died on the cross, He wasn’t suffering for His sins, but for ours. What that means is that when we look at His suffering, it shows us exactly what our sins deserve. Remember what Jesus once said to the women who were following after Him and crying while He was on His way to being crucified. He said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.” That’s the attitude that we are supposed to have when it comes to the cross. We aren’t simply supposed to think, “O poor, Jesus, He didn’t deserve any of that,” but “Woe is me; I deserve that. And if God were fair, that’s what I should have gotten from Him instead of Jesus.”

The death of Jesus on the cross is God’s call to repentance for the whole world. Here’s what the Lord thinks about false worship and false teaching. Here’s what He thinks about skipping Church and being disobedient and disrespectful to your parents. This is price that had to be paid for getting divorced, fooling around with your boyfriend or girlfriend, and hurting people with your words and actions. This is the just punishment for talking behind peoples’ backs and wanting things that don’t belong to you.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that Christianity is all about God accepting you just the way that you are. Don’t ever believe the lie that preaching Christ crucified doesn’t have anything to do with preaching against sin and calling out things by name. Just look at Saint Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. Actually read the rest of the book where he tells us that we should preach nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified. In that same letter, Paul goes on to talk about all kinds of different sins and why we Christians can’t embrace any one of them. In chapter 4, he talks about lawsuits among believers and why it’s wrong to sue a brother or sister in Christ in court. In chapter 7, he talks about not leaving your spouse except on Biblical grounds. In chapter 3, he talks about why it’s wrong to hurt your body or the body of another. And in chapter 6, he talks about why you shouldn’t get drunk and why you can’t live like a homosexual. Remember how Saint Paul defends the reason why it’s not okay to go around sleeping with prostitutes, which is apparently something that was actually happening in the church of Corinth? He says it’s because “You were bought with a price.” Paul frames the entire argument in the context of Jesus’ atoning death on the cross. He does that because that is part of what it means to preach Christ crucified. It means preaching why He had to be crucified and calling people to repentance for their sins.

But that, of course, is not all that it means to preach Christ crucified. It doesn’t just mean preaching the wrath of God against sin and calling people to repentance, though that’s certainly part of it. It also means, preaching the forgiveness of sins too and showing those who are sorry for the things that they have done that there is still hope for their salvation. The death of Jesus doesn’t just show us how much God hates sin, and what He had to do to His own Son because of it, it shows us how much God loves sinners, and what great lengths He has gone in order to save them.

The most famous passage in the whole Bible is John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” Everybody knows that verse. But do you remember what comes right before that verse? Before that verse Jesus says, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him may have eternal life.” It was on the cross that God showed us His love. It was in Jesus being lifted up and suffering and dying in our place that God actually gave us the answer to how we can go to heaven someday even though we don’t deserve to. As Saint Paul tells us in Romans chapter 8, “But God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.” And as we read in 1 John 4, “And this is love, not that we have loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.”

There is no sin that Jesus didn’t die for. There is no sin that our Lord did not make up for, and atone for, when He laid down His life for us on the cross. And there is no sin that God will not forgive when we ask Him for it.

Why do we preach against things like transgenderism, homosexuality, abortion, and every sin that there is for that matter? We don’t do it because we hate people, we do it because we love people. We do it because we want people to know the love of God in Christ. We want them to stop hurting themselves and their souls, and instead receive the healing forgiveness that comes from Jesus. It’s wrong to reject the body that gave God you and try and make it look like the body of another. It’s wrong to have sex outside of marriage and use someone else for pleasure when even common sense itself tells you that it’s unnatural. It’s wrong to take the innocent life of child in the womb just so it makes your life a little bit easier in the present. None of those things can take away someone’s pain, and none of them can give us a clean conscience before God in heaven. But the blood of Jesus can. Will people who trusted in Jesus for forgiveness think that they were born in the wrong body in heaven? Will people who struggled against their sinful and unnatural desires, and relied on Christ in the process, have any of those desires in heaven? Will women who followed God’s Word and protected the fruit of their womb even though it made their life harder, still have a hard life in heaven? No, they won’t. God will take care of it all. The sin that He has forgiven, He will finally remove completely. All of its effects. All of its pain. All of its sorrow. All of it will be gone for those who put their trust in Christ.

And that’s why we preach Christ crucified. That’s why we call the whole world to repentance, including ourselves, and proclaim to everyone that there is forgiveness to be found only in Jesus. The reason why we do that, and why this is the exact message that we need to hear now more than ever, is because there is no other message on earth that has the power to save a person’s soul. As Saint Paul writes in our Epistle lesson, “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

Telling people that their sins aren’t sins, won’t save them. Telling people that God accepts them exactly the way that they are and that they don’t need the forgiveness that comes from Christ won’t save them. And telling people that in order to have God’s forgiveness they have to do something more than repent and believe the Gospel won’t save them either.

It’s true that not everyone wants to hear the preaching of Christ crucified. We saw that very clearly last week. As Saint Paul reminds us in our text, “Jews seeks signs and Greeks seek wisdom.” Some people don’t want to listen to the preaching of Christ crucified because they don’t think it’s that important. Hearing about things like sin and grace, repentance and forgiveness, doesn’t interest them as much as other things do, and they can’t see how it does them any good here and now. If they want anything from God at all, they want a miracle, but they don’t realize the miracle that they already have in Jesus. Others don’t want to listen to the preaching of Christ crucified because there are things that go along with it that they don’t like or that they don’t understand. They want everything in their life to make sense to them, and nothing in their religion to conflict with how they view the world already. They want wisdom, but they don’t realize that the wisdom of God is wiser than men.

Regardless of what keeps people from listening to the preaching of Christ crucified, the only thing that will change their mind is the preaching of Christ crucified itself. We didn’t want to hear it either. Every single one of us from the moment of our conception was blinded by sin and hostile to the Gospel. And yet, through the preaching of the cross, the Holy Spirit called us to faith and enlightened us with His gifts. Through the preaching of the cross, the power of the cross was applied to us, and salvation itself was given to us. And so, we keep preaching the cross. We preach it even if it means that we suffer for and die it. We show other people their sins and we show them their Savior. We don’t budge on anything that the Bible teaches and we put our confidence in everything that the Bible says. We call the world to repentance and we teach them how Jesus died for the sins of the whole world too. We preach Jesus Christ and Him crucified. And we listen to the sermon that we preach while we do it. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.