For many religious people in the United States the last 12 months have not been full of good news.

In an effort to better control the hiring and firing of employees in religious institutions, in 2011, the Department of Justice filed suit in the Supreme Court for the right of the US Government to determine who is and who is not a minister of religion in the United States. If the Government had won the suit, then religious organizations might have had to submit to the government for approval every position of ministry in their organization. Fortunately, the Supreme Court in an amazingly unanimous decision rejected the Department of Justice's position as outrageous and a direct attack on freedom of religion in our nation.

And then last month it was announced that the Department of Health and Human Services would not grant any additional exemptions to religious institutions regarding the implementation of mandatory health insurance that must cover contraceptive drugs – including drugs that are able to kill an embryo in the womb either by design or unintentionally. Even organizations that are part of a religious organization such as the Roman Catholic Church – will still forbids the use of any artificial means of birth control, not just abortifacient means – must offer these very things that they decry as an affront to God to their employees, and in doing so, effectively pay for people in other organizations who choose to avail themselves of these drugs. The government has decided to apply a very narrow definition in terms of determining which religious organizations are exempted, effectively forcing hundreds of thousands of people and hundreds or even thousands of organizations that oppose such practices to choose between their conscience and either the viability of their institutions or their personal freedom.

As the United States becomes more and more a post-Christian nation, despite the vast majority of American's identifying themselves as more or less Christian, challenges to the Constitutional protection of religious liberty will likely continue to arise. More and more efforts to curtail religious freedom in the promise of achieving some vaguer, greater good will be pushed. Religious individuals as well as the churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, and other houses of worship they associate with will find themselves facing hard choices.

I don't mean to sound alarmist but just because it is possible to be unnecessarily alarmist doesn't mean that it is never appropriate to sound an alarm. More and more, religious liberty is being assailed while it is simultaneously bludgeoned in the media for objecting to being assailed. If we don't begin sounding alarms now, there may come a time in the near future when the alarms have been removed, or when we are no longer free to sound them or respond to them. I know these statements sound ominous, but there are some in this room who know firsthand how ominous things grow out of collections of less ominous actions. I'm also guessing that many of us in this room at one point or another read books like George Orwell's classics 1984 and Animal Farm as warnings against heavy-handed government intrusion in the guise of public good. Having survived the Cold War, it may sound silly to continue worrying about the themes in those books, of how good ideas get turned badly, and how freedom can quickly be forged into chains. Then again, maybe it isn't so silly after all.

I stand in a long tradition of men who raised the alarm to God's people. Who warned and called out about trouble coming down the line. I anticipate that I will continue to stand in a long tradition of men who were largely misunderstood and ignored.

Consider Isaiah. He strove to warn the people of God in the country of Judah and the capital city of Jerusalem of the wrath of God coming against them for their disobedience and their apathatetic spiritual lives. There came a time when it was too late to avert that coming wrath, yet it was still necessary to assure the people of God that just because their God was bringing catastrophe upon them, didn't mean that He didn't love them and have great plans for them collectively. While a great many of God's people suffered and died at the hands of the Babylonians, God had a larger plan He was working out. Many died. Some were spared. None were unaffected. Some of those who were spared returned to see Jerusalem and the Temple rebuilt, and through their offspring came the promised Messiah, Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world. But whether dead of surviving, not a single one of those people was forgotten or unloved by God. The God who calls out the hosts of heaven and leads them out one by one by name is fully strong enough to never lose sight of any one of his people, whether they are blessed with a peaceful and uninterrupted life or not.

Or consider Jesus in the Gospel reading for today. He was sought out by hundreds of people who wanted him to heal their sick and cast out their demons, who were seeking for him to improve their daily lives, their situations. Parents who would give anything to have their child cured or made to walk again. Husbands and fathers who would give anything to receive their sight back so they could provide for their wives and children. Regardless of who Jesus was or wasn't, he was able to give them what they wanted and for that they were willing to throng him with no questions asked. Many were healed. Many undoubtedly didn't get to Jesus before he left, and remained sick and oppressed. None were unaffected by all of this. But Jesus made it clear to his disciples that his plan and calling were far bigger than improving the individual lives of any one area or people group. He had a message to proclaim and everyone needed to hear it because it was the true source of hope and joy for all people, far beyond their physical illnesses and needs. Yet whether people were healed or cured or not, the very nature of Jesus' message – that the Kingdom of God was coming near – indicated that they were loved, known, and not at all forgotten, despite the fact that Jesus left town.

These are important things to bear in mind as the people of God today try to make sense of what has been and is and will be going on in our nation. And while there are plenty of differences between American Christians and God's chosen people Israel in the Old Testament, there are a lot of similarities as well.

The people of God continue to have the Word of God made available to them. You and I benefit today from the prophecies and promises of Isaiah over 2500 years ago. We must learn from them and prepare ourselves, not with the goal of avoiding catastrophe, but with the goal of understanding how to endure it. In studying the Word of God, we can be assured that whatever does or doesn't happen to the United States of America and our religious or other liberties as citizens, God's love for us never changes. The fact that we may be suffering more and more in the future is not an indication that God has forgotten us, that he has grown too weak to destroy the changes pressed upon his people, or that any one of us isn't a dearly beloved creation whom he not only knows by name, he knows more intimately than we know ourselves.

Our God is working out a plan to reconcile his creation, to undo the sin of the Garden of Eden and return creation to it's perfect and good state. It's a plan He has been working to completion since before creation itself. It is not God's Plan B when we surprised him by eating the forbidden fruit in the garden. It is not the next-best-idea that He had to throw together after Noah and his family turned out to be every bit as sinful and human as all the people who had died in the rains of the flood. God is not surprised or caught off guard. He is not weak and tired and needing of rest, waking up to find creation in calamity. This is the God who gives us strength when we are weak and tired and afraid. The God who never sleeps and will never rest until every possible person is reconciled with him through Jesus Christ. This is the God and the plan that brought the Son of God to earth as a baby and saw him nailed to a tree as an adult. This is the God and the plan that brought the the Son of God not just to a crowded manger, but out of an empty tomb.

And this God and this plan is so vast and huge that as a source of perspective, it's like us looking down on a bunch of ants or grasshoppers. Seeing in the single sweep of our eye vast complexes of industry and effort. Able to take in at a glance the efforts of multiple multiple lifetimes. It doesn't mean that we aren't important, it simply demonstrates the majesty and power and glory of our God. If there's anything we need in our current uncertain times, it's a sense of perspective. Not just of the possible problems and challenges we need to be aware of and respond to, but of the immense grandeur and power and holiness and competence of the God we gather here to worship this morning. The same God who toppled the Pharaoh to set his people free 4000 years ago. The same God who raised up Assyria and Babylon and Persia to teach his people a lesson and then restore them to their homeland. He brings princes to naught, and reduces the rulers of the world to nothing.

From our perspective, our individual lives and our individual challenges and fears are so immense we assume that if God is not immediately and directly remedying them to our satisfaction, he must not be there. Must not be working. Must be asleep. Must not care. Isaiah reminds us otherwise. Mark reminds us otherwise. Paul reminds us otherwise. It's not about us and what we want. We have a job to do. We each have particular vocations as individuals and families. But as the Church, as the Body of Christ we have a vocation as well, one that calls on us constantly to set our preferences and desires aside in order to engage those around us in meaningful ways, so that we might share the Gospel.

This is what we as the people of God at this point in our country's history need to keep clear. Our job is to share the Gospel. That is at least half of why the Church exists, and why Emanuel as a congregation exists. We can be aided in this effort by a government that appreciates our efforts and underscores the benefits that the Gospel brings to our community, or not. We can be actively worked against by a government that no longer finds convenient the truths that we are saved by, or not. We can have our independence attacked or enforced, our beliefs mocked or revered, but our goal remains the same – sharing the Gospel with the community around us. Bearing continued witness in good times and in hard times, in freedom and in chains that our God is an awesome God who is continuing to work out his plan for the reconciliation of all creation. And there is no nation on earth, no legislator or president or judge or pope or any earthly authority that can thwart it. The particular benefits or challenges under which we labor at any particular point in history may vary deeply. Millions suffer and die daily. Millions of others are blessed with apparent peace and prosperity. Nobody is unaffected. All are upheld by the God who calls the stars out by name, and who bids his children to come and dine at His table and receive his Son as assurance that we are not forgotten or abandoned, even if we are forgotten and abandoned by everyone around us in our nation.

We are called as Americans to be attentive and alert to any infringement on our Constitutional protections, knowing from history that encroachment in one area can eventually lead to overrunning all of them. Hopefully each family received this morning a copy of a letter from the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod's President, stating the position of the LCMS on the healthcare decision.

The LCMS is not an overly or publicly political church body. Unlike other denominations that issue political statements and mobilize their people on behalf of a myriad of social and political issues, the LCMS is often criticized for being silent overall. With the exception of abortion there are few things we could be called strident about in the political and social realm. But as an organization in this nation and the world, we must be discerning and vigilant on key issues that might directly impact the ability to share the Gospel, to be the Church of Jesus Christ. Our State has given us this right, it is ours to use. Or lose. Or perhaps both. The issue is not reproductive rights or abortion or socialized medicine or any of the other red herrings that have been and will continue to be trumpeted from various quarters. The issue is a threat to our Constitutionally protected but not exhasutively defined rights to enjoy religious liberty. Not just freedom of worship, but freedom to live out our faith in every aspect of our lives, including whether or not to directly provide, or indirectly support and make available to others treatments, drugs, and medical services that impinge upon the sanctity of God-created human life and God-given human sexuality. As Americans, both privately and collectively, we must be vigilant and speak out, or there may be a time when we are unable to.

At the same time we are called as Christians to recognize that even as we are alert and vigilant, as we petition and lobby and vote, encroachments are not evidence of a God who is not there, or who sleeps, or who is weak, or who has forgotten us. Encroachments are always the result of being broken and flawed people, marred by sin so that even our best efforts and intentions can be misguided or misused and abused. As such, we place our faith and hope ultimately not in the state of our personal lives, the state of our congregation, or the state of the union. Our hope is in the Incarnate Son of God, the crucified, died and was buried and on the third day rose again Jesus the Christ. And in nothing and no one else. We trust that our God watches over us even in the midst of suffering and setbacks, and that one day, we will stand together in glory to look back over the vast tapestry of human history. We'll be able to pick out the thread of our lives, in all their glory and beauty and frustration and futility and painfulness, and see how they were woven together into an immense masterpiece that gives all honor and praise and glory to the God who created us, redeemed us, and reclaimed us.

It is toward this end that we press eagerly and intentionally. To be the Church of Jesus Christ, here we must stand, and we can do no other. Amen.

And may the peace of God, which passes all human understanding, keep our hearts and minds through faith in Christ Jesus until life everlasting, Amen.