Advent 1

Romans 13:8-14 - Advent 1 - November 30, 2014
The Dignity of Man

Owe no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law.  For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not bear false witness,” “You shall not covet,” and if there is any other commandment, are all summed up in this saying, namely, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  Love does no harm to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law. 

And do this, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep; for now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed.  The night is far spent, the day is at hand. Therefore let us cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light.  Let us walk properly, as in the day, not in revelry and drunkenness, not in lewdness and lust, not in strife and envy.  But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts.

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

To have dignity is to have value.  These days there are all sorts of ethical issues that people talk about that deal with the question of human dignity – – ranging from abortion and euthanasia to homosexuality and so-called gender identity.  All of these debates seek to say something definitive about human dignity.   But with what authority can anyone really say anything?  What really is the value of man?  In order to answer this question, we need first to know something about God who created man.

God determines the value of human life because he is the One who created us and takes care of us.  God made all things for his own enjoyment.  And then in order that we might enjoy it with him, he created man as the crown of his creation.  He created them male and female, in his own image.  God created man to be righteous and holy, to have perfect communion with him, to rejoice with him in the things that he made, and to see his wisdom in the things that are seen.  Only human beings can do this.  Animals can’t.  God created man very special, to know him in a unique way.  He created us to love him in a way that he created nothing else on earth to do.  No animal, therefore, has the same value or dignity as man.  Of all God’s creatures, only the angels in heaven are able to reflect on God’s creation the way we were created to do.  

Of course, sin ruined this.  Perfect communion with God has been tragically destroyed ever since the devil, a fallen angel, led our first parents to hate God’s word.  All of us are now born spiritually corrupt and without fear of God.  But that doesn’t mean that sinful man can know nothing about God.

Absolutely not!  Even since the fall, our natural knowledge of God has, to some degree, remained.  St. Paul writes in Romans 1, “For since the creation of the world [God’s] invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse …”  The fact that God created the heavens and the earth is obvious.  It is clearly seeable.  Those who deny it are without excuse.  The reason people deny creation and insist on billions of years of evolution is not because there is no evidence for creation.  They will insist that this is why, but they are deceiving themselves.  God has left plenty of proof that he is the one who made it.  But no, the reason people deny that an intelligent and wise God created all we see is rather because people want to seek their own glory and pleasure without being accountable to God’s judgment. 

But they are only fooling themselves.  As St. Paul continues, “... although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools …” 

We especially see how terrible this willful ignorance is when we see what affect the doctrine of evolution has on how people regard the dignity of man.  With some slight variation on the words of St. Paul, “[They replace] the glory of the incorruptible God [with the evolution of] corruptible man [from] birds and four-footed animals and creeping things.” 

In other words, according to the false religion of elvolutionism, man is no longer created in the image of God.  Rather he is nothing but an advanced animal.  There goes the glory of God, and there goes also the dignity of my neighbor.  As animals, the only moral imperative for anyone is to survive.  Out the window go all objective standards of right and wrong that teach us to find intrinsic value in others.  My neighbor has no more dignity that a barking dog.  And so an inconvenient life is as dispensable as a parasite – whether living in the womb or ailing in the hospital.  And human relationships are cheapened too.  Marriage, designed by God as an opportunity for man and woman to love and serve each other as they were created in his image to do, is perverted and redefined to become just a consensual contract that people enter into for mutual gratification.   This is what evolution offers.  It reduces other people’s dignity to how useful they might be in pleasing the almighty “me.”  

But what about loving your neighbor?  What about pleasing the almighty God?  When one suppresses the natural knowledge of God as creator, it follows that he suppresses the natural knowledge of the law as well – so that God’s standards of right and wrong are denied as quickly as they deny God himself.  As St. Paul concludes in Romans 1, “And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting; being filled with all unrighteousness, sexual immorality, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil-mindedness; they are whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, violent, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, undiscerning, untrustworthy, unloving, unforgiving, unmerciful; who, knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things are deserving of death, not only do the same but also approve of those who practice them.” 

Boy, if this isn’t a picture of our culture!  And yet to compensate for the total immorality that evolution necessarily leads to, the priests of this false religion promote all sorts of invented rights that pretend to uphold the dignity of man.  They speak of the right to an education or the right to free birth control or the right to equal wages or health care.  But where do these rights come from if we are all just animals operating under the Darwinian principle of survival of the fittest?  Well, they’re totally made up.  Since man’s dignity no longer comes from God, people feel compelled to endow man with dignity according to their own ideas.  But they don’t even know where to begin. 

They confuse the value of life with the quality of life.  And so they demand that everyone has a right to have what he thinks will make him happy.  But a culture that does not even defend human life at its most vulnerable, in the mother’s womb, is supremely unqualified to invent other rights that God knows nothing about. 

When we speak of human rights, we don’t speak of the things that we feel everyone ought to have.  When we speak of human rights, we are speaking rather of things that God himself gives to all men alike, because he still loves them.  He gives life.  If we want to know what inalienable human rights look like, we look to what God says in his holy law.  We look to what God aims to defend and protect.  As the almighty creator and provider, God gives us what we have.  And as the supreme lawgiver, God defends what he has graciously given us:

“Do not murder.”  God defends your neighbor’s life.  “Do not commit adultery.”  God defends your neighbor’s home.  “Do not steal.”  God defends the labor of your neighbor’s hands. “Do not bear false witness.”  God defends your neighbor’s reputation.  And whatever other law God gives, he is defending your neighbor.  These are our natural rights – adequately summarized as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Your rights are what God tells your neighbor not to violate.  If God doesn’t tell your neighbor not to take it from you, then it isn’t your right to have it.  A privilege maybe, an honor perhaps, but not a right.  Your neighbor’s rights are the things that God says you owe him. 

Well then, what do you owe your neighbor?  Healthcare?  Birth control?  Education?  The right to live and let live, or to be perverted and then call it marriage?  Is that what you owe your neighbor?  No.  It is not.  “Owe no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law.”  And this is the summary of the law: to love. 

You love your neighbor when you recognize that what he has is given to him by God.  You love your neighbor when you seek to defend and protect what God gave him, and when you treat it as no less valuable than what God has given you.  This is how you love your neighbor as yourself.  If you want to respect someone’s rights, you need to do what the 10 Commandments tell you.  No more; no less.  To invent human rights is to invent feigned love.  You must first acknowledge that God made your neighbor and cares for his needs – just as he cares for your own – poor, wretched, undeserving sinners though we all be. 

My neighbor has the right to be loved by me.  What a concept.  It is an unpopular idea.  But it is what God says.  People would prefer to speak of their right to pursue whatever makes them most happy.  But they see no need to seek their neighbor’s benefit in this self-centered quest of theirs.  They fornicate with no concern for the emotional hurt it causes, or the blight of illegitimacy they inflict upon their inconvenient offspring.  Instead of being helpful toward others and using their energy to love and serve those closest to them, they seek escape through drugs and alcohol, forsaking those who need them alert and willing.  Instead of bringing honor to their fathers’ names, they make a name for themselves and forsake what their parents taught them to fear, love, and trust.  All because they think they have some right to be happy.  But it is a lie.  

The dignity of man is not to be found in our potential to live happy and fulfilling lives.  Our dignity is found first in the fact that God made us, and second that God protects us all by giving us the law.  The law tells us what we owe each other.  The law tells us what we have the right to expect from our neighbor. 

There was a popular song a few years ago by a young man around my age that serves as a sort of mantra of my generation.  “Our time is short,” he says.  The whole idea is that we shouldn’t let anything prevent us from doing what feels good.  I’d like to quote it and then critique it, because it represents exactly what’s wrong with how love is so often viewed today: 

Well, open up your mind and see like me,
Open up your plans and [then] you’re free.
Look into your heart and you’ll find love, love, love, love.
Listen to the music of the moment, people dance and sing, we’re just one big family
And it’s our God-forsaken right to be loved, loved, loved, loved, loved.

Ok, so here’s the problem.  We do not find freedom by opening up our minds.  We find slavery to our own darkened thoughts.  All our plans are fueled by selfish ambitions.  And looking into our hearts, we do not find love.  We find envy and greed and lust — sin.  The music of the moment teaches us to seek our own pleasure.  It divides family, and sets people against each other in the rat race to get the next best thing.  And if it is bad enough that these words neglect what we owe our neighbor, look at what he says God owes us: “It’s our God-forsaken right to be loved, loved, loved.” 

No, it is we who have forsaken our neighbor’s right to be loved.  The problem of the world is not that we are not loved.  It is that we do not love.  And in this way, as much as we criticize our godless culture, this is where all of us our implicated.  We do not love as we ought.  Open up your heart, and what do you find?  Do you find that God owes you something?  Or do you find that you have not paid your debts? 

We have no right to be loved by God.  And that is why God became man.  He joined his creation to redeem it.  He did not come to pay a debt to us.  He came to pay our debt to God.  And he paid our debt to God by paying our debt to our neighbor – to all families of the earth.  He loved with a pure heart, and gave his heart to be broken in order to reveal God’s loving heart to us.  He did not come to defend his own dignity even though he was a King.  No, he came lowly, riding into his holy city on a beast of burden.  He came to bear our burden by humbly dying for our sins.  And in this he claimed his Kingdom – by crowing mankind with a glory that we could not earn. 

And this is where we see most clearly the dignity of man.  It is where God is denied his dignity – where God is willingly treated like a worm and no man.  It is where Jesus reconciles sinners to his Father by taking their sin upon himself.  The dignity of man is faintly seen in the things that are made.  The value of your neighbor is defended in the law.  But the overarching worth of mankind is seen in what God has given to pay our debts.  It is seen where he who made all things fulfills the law in our place in order to reconcile all things to himself.  By forgiving us our sins, he clothes us with a beauty that no creation can boast of – the robe of righteousness that was earned by God who joined us in our misery to honor us with everlasting joy. 

Our salvation is nearer today than when we first believed.  This means that every day that passes, the earth and all its works are that much closer to being exposed by the Day and dissolved by fire.  That which is worthless shall perish. But that which has value will last and shine forever.  It is therefore high time to awake.  For our time is short.  And so we spend our time with what has value.  We come to where our King comes to us to endow us with true dignity.  He defines our value according to the eternal value of his own blood.  He cleanses us of all our sin and renders us fit to enjoy true fellowship again.  We have this fellowship – this perfect communion with God – not because we see traces of God in creation – not this alone – but because we have the clear word of God that tells us what we are worth to him.  He has the right to love us.  And he has not forsaken this right.  He has revealed it. 

Our salvation stands in the light of day.  And it is this light that serves as our armor against the devil without, and the sin within.  It is the righteousness of our Lord Jesus Christ.  It is the pledge of his favor and the fact that he cherishes us more than anything in all creation by giving to us what cannot be priced – the very body and blood that bought us, and that now feeds us. 

What is your value?  Evaluate Christ.  Consider who he is from eternity.  Consider what he became to redeem you.  Consider what God demanded of you ... of him.  Consider what he accomplished.  Consider what he gives you.  Do so while examining yourself.  Do so while evaluating the truth of what he says to you: "This is my body given for you; this is my blood shed for you for the forgiveness of all your sins."  Believe it.  Receive it in faith.  And you have judged your value rightly.  You are precious to God.  
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