Sermons

Again, St. Paul writes, ‘For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account’ (Hebrews 4:12-13). What do we learn from these two passages on our Holy Spirit inspired Scriptures? Well, we learn the Bible is not a source for carefully selected motivational material or an echo chamber for any earthly tribe or political party’s ideology; no, it is a weapon designed by God to cut through the lies and deceptions we pile on ourselves. Reading or hearing the Word of God should be a painful experience because we will again and again come into contact with the Holy God who is calling us to amputate from our hearts those idols our neighbors and families and enemies tell us we must love. Every time we come to God’s Word, we meet the same Lord who looks at prostitutes and tax collectors and fishermen and apostles and doctors and priests and says, ‘Leave everything and follow me.’ It should be terrifying when our Creator looks at us, naked and exposed, and says those words, and so, I don’t blame anyone who attacks or hides from the Word of God; I pity them, and I pray for them, but I understand how ignorance of God’s Will might bring a certain kind of cheap and comfortable bliss. Human history is the story of fallen men trying to find and keep this false heaven until it is inevitably smashed by confusion and fear, but the preservation of ignorant bliss can be a powerful motivation for closing our eyes to the Lord who says we must feel pain to understand hope.

This love we are called to then makes absolutely no sense outside of the law. There is simply no way to ‘just love’ because without the law and without the God/Man who fulfilled it, the word ‘love’ will always be a cruel shadow of the reality all lesser loves point us toward. Any supposed Christian teacher who tells you we are no longer called to follow the moral law, but rather, instructs you to “just love,” worships a different God than He who says, ‘If you love me keep my commandments’ (St. John 14:15). Anyone who says we can abandon the new way to be human revealed by Jesus and the apostles He chose is an anti-Christ who seeks nothing less than to build their little earthly kingdom with the pain and misery of human failure Christ suffered and died to eradicate forever. The debt of love we owe God and our fellow man is honored through the obedience and trust we give to God before the eyes of the world, and this purpose for our lives is but an humble imitation of the loving obedience and trust our Lord carried to the Cross. This loving obedience and trust between God and Man is more important to the salvation of the world than any nation or war, king or president, and God has blessed us all with the call to participate no matter our strength or weakness, intelligence or beauty. All men can daily kneel and ask God to use them as part of the world’s salvation. All men can love as Christ loved.

Which brings us, of course, to the 3rd Passover of Christ’s earthly ministry: the upper room where Jesus was surrounded by that same 12. And here at the Last Supper, once again, God feeds His people. It is in this feeding, that all the hopes of the world rest. For it is here that the people of God’s new covenant, reborn in baptism—escorted safely through the second Red Sea—are given the food we need to make it through our own wilderness wandering, to stand firm against the Serpent’s temptations and lies. God feeds us from Himself, from His own perfect holiness and love, and we are finally made whole. Through the Holy Communion, we are made partakers of the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross so that we may never again say, ‘Where is God?’ The only haunting question which remains for us, and our family and neighbors and enemies, is this: ‘Where are we?’ Are we the allies of God? Are we the holy family of the new Adam once again feasting with the true God in the little Eden of our church? Or, are we on the outside looking in—hoping the gluttonous extravagances of the dying world will fill us, hoping one more betrayal of the God who feeds us will bring happiness rather than the same desperation which carried Judas to the tree of his suicide. Let it never be so. God has taken our meager offerings of cheap bread and wine, He has looked into our bread plate and chalice, and He has promised to use these gifts to fill us with love and hope. For the first time since Adam voluntarily gave his crown to Satan, humanity has a perfect king truly worth dying for. Christ is the LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS, and He is calling us to the feast. Let us eat at His table and be filled forever.

And then we are faced with the dying little girl; we are faced with the greatest condemnation of our empires of sin and filth and folly; the greatest sign of our powerlessness in the face of death’s crushing totality. Humanity doesn’t deserve children; we deserve ash and pain, but through children, God blesses our cruel world with little, living glimpses of a perfect humanity to come. Children are not innocent of sin, but they are less scarred from the great war which is slowly killing us all. Children make our world immeasurably better because they seek out and share joy, pure joy, joy even in the smallest gifts their heavenly Father gives them. So, it is right and good that we mourn when children are taken home to be with that same Father, but the mourning is only for our incalculable loss, not for what they have lost, for they have lost nothing but pain and gained everything in return.

Blessedly, none of these broken ways of life is how reality actually works. God is not a concept or a program or a method of fulfillment; He has not given us some new method for self-improvement; no, instead, God has definitively answered the great question of human existence: who will save Man from himself? The beautiful answer to this question comes in the first advent of Jesus Christ. It is here that a human first transcends His own sinful temptations to live a life of love and justice; it is here that a human first transcends the lies of this world to live in truth; it is here that a human first transcends the terrors of death to save the new race of Mankind and rise as its glorious first citizen. This king of the new creation, whose public resurrection vindicated Him for all time, is the only real, concrete hope for a transcendent humanity, and that is why we await His return. We wait because we acknowledge two key realities: we need a Savior and Jesus Christ has established Himself as the conqueror of death—the master of mortality and thus the master of time itself. We can trust that Jesus Christ will transform our bodies of humiliation into bodies of glory because, if we are His people, then He suffered and died and rose again to make us members of Humanity 2.0—citizens of a new world saved from us and for us forever.

What is Jesus’ answer to St. Peter’s system, and, of course, our little systems too? Well, He takes the Hebrew number for completeness (seven) and puts it with another seven as a poetic way of saying ‘infinity.’ Jesus looks at St. Peter, He looks at us, and sees whatever amount of forgiveness we think is appropriate and raises us to infinity. It is a shocking pronouncement. But why speak in this poetic manner? Why not just say, ‘You must always forgive?’ Well, just as the Gospel is not our story, the forgiveness we offer in the name of Jesus Christ is not about us. By forgiving all those who have hurt us, we are connecting ourselves into the God/Man’s reclamation of human nature from the dark rebellion of our forefathers. As we hear on the lips of the evil and terrible Lamech all the way back in Genesis 4, ‘…hear my voice; you wives of Lamech, listen to what I say: I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain's revenge is sevenfold, then Lamech's is seventy-sevenfold’ (Genesis 4:23-24). Here is the battle cry of fallen man: ‘I am the one who determines what is the just punishment for wronging me; I will judge and punish because that is the only way in which my pain can be healed.’ Christ’s command today is the courageous and terrible antidote to Lamech’s poisonous revenge. It is the reversal of the pain he wanted to cause; it is the taking of that pain upon ourselves: the offering up of that pain to the God who knows what it means to be a sacrifice for the forgiveness of the world. Despite all his murderous posturing, Lamech was a coward because he couldn’t take the pain which inevitably follows true, sacrificial forgiveness; Jesus is our Savior because He can.

In today’s second lesson, a powerful man learns the limits of his power when his son begins to die. The illness murdering the nobleman’s son doesn’t care about his money or status because it answers to a higher power than him or the governor or the emperor. This young man on his deathbed is feeling the sharp edge of mankind’s rebellion against his Creator; he is experiencing the grim penalty for a human people living in suicidal conflict with the natural order and its author. We can still hear a faint echo of this truth when both theist and atheist alike refer to sickness as a ‘disorder.’ The poisoned fruit of living in a chaotic, fallen world is that our very bodies are coming apart at the seams—rebelling against our wills just as we have rebelled against the perfect will of our Creator. This real decay and death besieging us are the daily reminders that a creature who doesn’t have full control of when he uses the bathroom can’t possibly be in a position to rule himself. Or, more relevant to today’s reading, a creature who can’t save his son from death can’t possibly be able to save himself. This truth hits our faithful nobleman in the face, and so he humbles himself before a man who has none of the power people hoard and kill for, but who possesses all of the power which actually matters when the lies and distractions of this world are pulled away, and we see how naked and disarmed we truly are.

This wedding garment then, this sign that we are ready to enter the feast today, and at the beginning of the new world, is not something for which we can buy or barter; no guru or life coach has it; no pretty face or wise heart can whisper it into our ears. There is no earning it; there is no selling it; there is only the gracious gift of the Lord who was bound for our sake and cast into the outer darkness for our sins only to shine His light even in the pit of hell and break the chains of death forever. We are either in the darkness, or we are with the king who defeated it. Just as God covered the nakedness of Adam and Eve with a sacrifice after the first sin of man, God covers our nakedness in the righteousness of the victorious victim, Our King and Savior Jesus Christ. As St. Paul tells us, again and again, we must cast aside the old garment of our wickedness and clasp tightly the garment of Christ. The internal rebirth of our heart, soul, and mind cannot but be seen by the fruit we bear for the Kingdom of God. Our outward life, seen by God and man, is the outward sign of the new heart death cannot silence. It is not our riveting testimony or emotional conversion or whatever other markers we use to designate ourselves as saved that reveals what garment we wear; it isn’t our identification on a form as Christian or even the number of years we have attended church that shows our true colors; no, it is the lively faith which cannot but express itself in faithful prayer and sacrificial love.

This humble focus we are called to bear explains the commands St. Paul lays upon us today. If we are not the ones who will save the world, we must become the pure instruments of Him who has and is and will. When we, through Word and Sacrament, become more and more united with the true Savior of the world we can actually experience the righteous anger He feels towards sin but stop that anger from causing us to fall into the sin we hate. As the pure instruments of God, we can flee from sloth and greed so that our work is transformed from soulless drudgery or gluttonous hoarding into the means by which God helps those in need. As the pure instruments of God, our very words move from gossip and useless small talk into a conversational pathway by which the grace of God unlocks the hardened heart of another. Every day the Holy Spirit is moving us farther and farther from the purposeless waiting the heathens call ‘life’ into the mighty, rushing currents of the glorious purposes of God. Each moment, including the moments of our greatest pain and sadness, is another blessed opportunity to further and further align ourselves with God’s saving activity in the world. When we walk in this manner, when we walk as Christian men and women, we become the living ambassadors of God’s forgiveness and love to a lonely and desperate world; we live in the forgiveness that costs and changes and saves.

But thankfully, we are not saved by our ability to keep this law. No, that is why we beg for mercy every Sunday when we repeat along with the justified publican, ‘Lord have mercy upon us; Christ have mercy upon us; Lord have mercy upon us.’ We are saved by the only man who ever actually lived out these commandments in their beauty and rigor. The life, ministry, trial, and death of Jesus Christ are the great moments in the history of human love; it is the only time that these commandments were ever perfectly lived out on the stage of human experience. All other attempts to love God and Man must be measured against the innocent Lamb of God allowing His creation to murder Him in our greatest act of self-loving idolatry. Again, there was plenty of tragic love in the hearts of the callous men and women yelling, ‘Crucify him, Crucify him,’ but it was the constricting self-love which makes men proud and cheerful sinners. When we recognize that this same self-love still resides in the darkened chambers of our hearts, we begin to realize the enormity of the Trinity’s salvation project; we begin to realize just how much we need the sacrificial love of Jesus to be our only template for true love; we begin to realize that we don’t just need something called ‘love’ in our lives; no, we need God to reach into our chests and pump our dead hearts back to life, so we can be even the faintest echoes of the reverberating triumph love won forever on the cross. And when those faint echoes come together to worship in this building and live every moment for Christ, our combined voices resound in the court of heaven and terrorize the pit of hell; our love makes the Evil One tremble and know that he has but a short time. So let us then love God and neighbor, and thank Christ every day for showing us that true love is always in the shape of the cross.