Sermons

And so, St. Paul, and today’s entire service, drags us kicking and screaming through this truth. It must drag us through the beautiful and tragic reality of our Creator’s mission to save us from ourselves because we will not face the reality of what it means to be a fallen human unless we are forced; we will not face the reality of who we truly are except by the miracle which occurs in Christ’s church every Sunday before Easter. We can only be convinced by Evil’s command to ‘first love thyself’ if we don’t truly know ourselves, but when we do understand who we truly are through the mirror created by humanity’s rejection and execution of God then that mirror becomes a looking glass through which we can begin to see the massive tidal wave of true love and grace flowing from the Cross to the world.

In the Old Testament, Job—beaten and bloodied by the Evil One’s unfeeling assault on everything he loved—was given the momentous opportunity to ask this very question of God: ‘What is man, that you make so much of him, and that you set your heart on him, visit him every morning and test him every moment?...Why have you made me your mark? Why have I become a burden to you? Why do you not pardon my transgression and take away my iniquity? For now I shall lie in the earth; you will seek me, but I shall not be’ (Job 7:17-18,20-21). Job is in such agony after the loss of his family and home and health that he assumes death is imminent; perhaps, he even welcomes it. Dozens of chapters later, God responds to Job’s desperate plea for answers with a long series of questions, famously beginning with: ‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?’ (Job 38:4). It is a haunting question, for it reveals both Job and all of humanity’s complete lack of qualifications for interrogating the Creator of all things. How can we who were not at the beginning ever perfectly understand what is happening in the present? It would be like screaming at the author of a novel after only reading one random page: our confusion could be real and painful, but our anger would be tragically misplaced.

The first step to salvation, the first step to being among the true sons of promise is to know we are all barren, but blessedly, God gives life to the barren. God looked upon the barren, childless Sarah: guilty of unbelief, pride, jealousy, and attempted murder; He looked upon her, and He united her to the Trinity’s world saving mission by giving her the son of promise. He gave her a life she didn’t deserve because God keeps His promises. The salvation of the world took its first step forward through a tiny heartbeat inside the womb of an old woman given up for dead. That heartbeat would grow up to be the man Isaac and from him would come generations of men and women, each in their own way a living testimony to the throbbing, human need for salvation. Until another woman, clothed in her virginity, was blessed with the new life which would take away all barrenness—the son of promise who came to reverse the fall of man, to restore the garden of creation, to create new life in us where men see only death. It is Jesus Christ’s resurrected glory which changed St. Paul from persecutor to martyr, and it is Christ’s resurrected glory which should lead all of us barren, unfruitful, human deserts to join in with prophets and apostles, saying, ‘Rejoice, thou barren that bearest not; break forth and cry, thou that travailest not: for the desolate hath many more children than she which hath an husband’ (Galatians 4:27). God’s grace is for the barren, and so the barren can now rejoice. We can rejoice instead of worrying, we can rejoice instead of complicating our lives with all the fruitless pursuits of our neighbors, we can rejoice and know that Christ has promised life to those who believe; He has promised everything to those who are free. By God’s grace, we are the sons and daughters of promise, and by God’s grace we are free.

This Son of God, who has already proven in Exodus and in the wilderness, that He is stronger than Satan and all his demons, willingly disarms himself in the incarnation and walks into the arms of His rebellious creatures, so they can murder Him and mock His pain. Why? Why not just destroy all these evil mockers? Why not just pulverize the men and women who would spit on the God who gave them all they have and know? Honestly, I don’t know; or I should say, I cannot comprehend the strength it must have taken to be the living and dying sacrifice for a people who simply do not deserve another minute of existence, much less this titanic display of sacrificial love. What I do know is if I am to make it through this life of temptation and the valley of death through which we all must pass, then I need to be saved by the Man who wields this strength I cannot begin to comprehend. The strength to cast out devils, the strength to pillage Hell, the strength to obediently give Himself for the love of His Father, His disciples, and the new world which began at His resurrection from the dead. This kind of strength is completely foreign to us—only partially visible in those moments of heroic self-sacrifice which defy our selfish world’s cruel logic.

If it is the cry of the desolated Canaanites which reaches through time and warns us of God’s real and imminent judgment; it is the cry of another Canaanite which alerts us to our only logical response to the awesome and mysterious majesty of the God who allows us even one more day of undeserved mercy. There is so much to see and admire in the faithful, penitent woman who throws herself on the mercy of Jesus. Her suffering and the suffering of her daughter have broken the illusion that she can do this on her own or that her false gods will save her. The world, with its false faith in strength and power, looks at this woman—on her face before Christ—and calls her weak or pathetic. She is both; I have no interest in convincing you otherwise. Our Lord tests her by calling her a dog, the normal Jewish, derogatory term for a Gentile, and she humbly says, ‘Yes, I will gladly be your dog, if you will only be my master.’ Our pride cannot take this kind of abasement; we are taught to have self-esteem, to love ourselves first, to be no man’s dog. We all carry some form of the revolutionary and butcher Che Guevara’s stolen battle cry, ‘It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees!’ Which is all well and good until someone shoots you in the back, and your legacy becomes t-shirt sales to unserious undergrads. The faithful Canaanite woman is weak and pathetic, but so is every person the world teaches us is strong. The great difference between she and those who think they are mighty is not muscles or technology or money; no, it is simply the realization that none of those things matter when we stand before the Holy God who created us. We cannot bribe Him; we cannot dazzle Him with our toys, and our strength or our sad story will mean nothing to the God who created a good world from nothing and watched us try to destroy it for nothing.

It is, however, the final temptation which should really rock us to our core, for Satan—having failed to tempt Jesus through weakness or strength—now rests His rebellious tongue on Christ’s heart. Satan says to Jesus, ‘All these [people] I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me’ (St. Matthew 4:9). St. John tells us Jesus came to save the world because He loved the world. Here, the Devil is offering Jesus the chance to save the world without the Cross; Satan is offering Jesus the chance to save all the men and women under evil’s curse without the terrible suffering of Good Friday. All Jesus has to do is worship the fallen angel who smiles when babies die, laughs when women are raped, and glories in all the broken dreams of the damned. That’s it. All one needs to have glory without suffering in this evil world is to worship the Devil, and it should be no surprise to us that most humans sign up for this plan; it should be no surprise that all humans would sign up for this plan without the Holy Spirit remaking us through Word and Sacrament. Whenever we say, ‘The ends justify the means,’ all we are saying is we really don’t believe we need the Cross; all we are saying is we really don’t believe God when He says, ‘Follow me, and I will save you.’ When for whatever reason we choose to be practical and sensible rather than trust in the promises of God, we are simply bending the knee to the Prince of the World rather than its King.

Now, human beings are masters of missing the point, but here the fault is not entirely our own. Paul’s imagery-filled poem devoted to love’s enduring power has been copied by countless authors, so much so, that we actually hear their voices rather than Paul’s. We trade the insights into the human soul provided by the Holy Spirit and dispatched through the genius of the Apostle Paul for the philosophical musings of much less inspired men. 1 Corinthians 13 becomes something like ‘Can you feel the Love Tonight.’ Now, I like The Lion King as much as the next guy, after all it’s basically Hamlet with fur, but we must see that the all-powerful God of the universe has more to say to us than can be contained in a Disney movie too afraid to preserve Shakespeare’s beautiful Christian imagery of a kingdom saved by a young prince’s death. We may see shadows of God’s love for the world in the final scene of our favorite film or in the eyes of our loved ones, but we cannot confuse the shadows for the light: real love, true love, is bigger and more glorious than all of these, for it is a love bigger than death itself, and it is the love in which all Christians are called to live and speak and dream.

This feeling of God’s absence has a long history in the Israelite experience, much less the human experience. All of us are united with King David’s cry, ‘How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord; for ever? How long wilt thou hide thy face from me? How long shall I seek counsel in my soul, and be so vexed in my heart? How long shall mine enemy triumph over me?’ (Psalm 13:1-2). Finally, in the healed lepers and repentant prostitutes, the changed men and broken hypocrites, the power of God was moving across the ancient land of promise with undeniable authority—revealing this carpenter from Nazareth as the unique representative of God in the world. Hope is building around Jesus—hope for deliverance from the brutal Romans, hope for a cleansed and restored priesthood, hope for the advent of king greater than David and a prophet greater than Moses. Jesus is all this and more, but His self-revelation is also the final and great answer to David’s woe, the final answer to any who have ever felt alone, and in that isolation, despaired.

To complain at all to the Master when He has given us everything, even after we buried Him alive with the wages of our sins, is to see just how deeply sin has corrupted our hearts. That feeling we get when we hear this parable and think to ourselves, ‘Maybe the workers who worked harder should get paid more,’ that feeling is the world’s values—values that have been made irrelevant by Christ. Jesus Christ did more for our salvation while taking a nap than you or I will ever do with our labor, for His entire 33 year existence amidst our man-made squalor was the greatest act of self-denial and humiliation imaginable, and He took it all because God keeps His promises; He keeps his covenants no matter how much we ungrateful workers don’t deserve it. This new justice made real thorough the loving sacrifice of Christ is the greatest possible news, but it shouldn’t flatter us. It shouldn’t drive us to think ourselves better than our neighbors; it should drive us to greater and greater acts of loving sacrifice for God and others. It should be the core of our new beating heart as we run our race behind St. Paul—immune to death and peril, laughing at the now powerless threats of men and devils. When God asks, ‘Am I allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?’ Our only answer is, ‘Yes, do with me as you will, for I belong to Him who has saved me from the utter darkness of my own sinful heart. I am yours, and I will work in your vineyard for as long as you will have me.’

A good human law, consistent with the law of God, does not become a bad law because we dislike the man who enforces it or because we believe him to be a bad man himself. God’s authority, shining through that law, is all that matters. And just the opposite is true. If the most beloved country or ruler in the world presents us with a human law that is contrary to the law of God, we are obligated to change it, or if need be to break it and boldly face the consequences. After all, the matter was settled a long time ago: we ought to obey God rather than men.