Trinity 16

Luke 7:11-17- Trinity 16- October 9, 2011 

  God's Word Has Power to Give Life

Our Gospel lesson begins this morning with a marvelous clash of moods.  There are two groups.  One crowd is following Jesus who heals the sick and makes the lame to walk.  The other is following a dead body in procession to bury it in the ground.  The one group exhibits excitement and wonder and hope. The other exhibits the sadness and despair that accompany the cold reality of death.  All of us here have experienced both of these moods.  We have all found ourselves at various times in one or the other of these two groups. 

Death comes and loved ones go.  We miss them.  We gather together in church in order to celebrate the eternal life and hope that God had given to those we lose, and we commend our grief to God.  We hear the Gospel preached.  We hear words of comfort.  We learn to grieve as those who have hope in Christ.  It is not as though we doubt any of this.  But the bitter reality remains.  No words can change the fact that the body of the one we love must be laid in the earth from whence it came. 

Death is real.  No one denies this.  The pious Christian, as much as the unregenerate heathen, acknowledges this with bitter resignation.  What people do deny is the cause of death.  Theories abound that attempt to exonerate man from any real guilt and due punishment as though death were just a part of life.  But we turn to God’s word to learn the truth.  “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat;” God said to our first parents, “but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”  This was no idle threat.  GOD’S WORD HAS POWER.

The physical death that Adam and Eve brought upon themselves and their children is the result of the spiritual death that they died the moment they ignored God’s word and believed a lie.  This spiritual death has been passed down in the natural way throughout history.  We call this original sin.  Luther called it inherited sin, because the death we see our fathers die is the result of the spiritual corruption that we inherit from them.  And our children have inherited ours.  The wages of sin is death. 

The doctrine of original sin is not simply the general acknowledgment that we all make mistakes.  No.  Our spiritual depravity is much deeper than that.  It is at its root unbelief in God’s word.  It’s not just a genetic defect beyond our control rendering us morally weak.  No, it’s our own unwillingness to do what God says.  It is a corruption of our will that manifests itself in our daily failure and refusal to love God above all things, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. 

But misery loves company.  And so sinners like to minimize their sinful condition by painting a broad brush.  “We are all equally sinful,” they say, “Everyone has to die.”  OK.  But what does that really help when each one of us must personally face God our Maker and Judge.  Death is not a part of life.  Such pithy reassurance offers no real comfort at all.  Death is the end of life, and we know it.  And death does not discriminate between old and young, kind and cruel, healthy and sick.  We all die. 

Death doth pursue me all the way
Nowhere I rest securely.
He comes by night, he comes by day,
And takes his prey most surely.
A failing breath and I
In death’s strong grasp may lie
To face eternity for aye.
Death doth pursue me all the way.

It is God Himself who sends death on its hounding pursuit.  God is righteous.  The reason death pursues you is because you are a sinner.  Not just in the sense of “no one’s perfect” but because of what you have done and said and thought that has earned for you individually what God in His holy law warned you it would.  Just as we cannot pry our loved-ones from the clutches of the grave, so we cannot wiggle ourselves free from the clutches of our own personal accountability.  We need to be rescued by God.  That is why He sent His Son. 

Consider how He sent His Son in our Gospel lesson this morning: 

The caravan of excitement and hope encountered the train of sadness and despair.  The Lord of Life encountered a poor mother who had seen death before.  She was a widow.  Her husband had died.   And now her only begotten son, her only source of a livelihood – to put it in economic terms – or – to put it in terms that surely must move all of our hearts – her little boy was dead.  Few of us –– can even begin to imagine the grief that this woman felt.  Who could fail to be moved with compassion?  Jesus was.  He saw what made her sad – He saw her suffering – and He suffered with her.  That’s what compassion means.  But unlike the feelings of our hearts and the thoughts of our minds, the compassion that moved Jesus was pure.  It was not tainted by any self-pity.  No, it was boundless and self-giving.  And it was not helpless.  No, Jesus suffered her grief and became even more acquainted with her sorrow than she was herself.  Only Jesus’ love is so powerful, because only Jesus is God. 

Jesus proved how much He loved and cared for this woman by proving that He was the only begotten Son of God who had come to her in human flesh and blood to save her and her son from death.  He did this not by telling her how sorry He was, but by taking her sorrow away.  He did this by speaking to her … words.  So simple; yet GOD’S WORD HAS POWER; it has power to comfort.  Jesus spoke first to the bereaved: “Do not weep.” 

“Do not weep.”  What empty words these must have sounded at first.  “I see my son in the cold arms of death, and now I must starve alone.  And you tell me not to weep?”  The crying may have stopped, but certainly she didn’t stop being sad.  How could she when the helplessness in her heart remained, and her son stayed dead? 

 “Do not weep.”  This is certainly no way for us to comfort the bereaved!  But this is how God does it, because what would be empty words coming from our mouths are powerful coming from God’s.  God’s compassion is always connected to His power to save.  His words are effective whether we always notice it or not.  Jesus spoke again and showed her why she shouldn’t weep.  This time He spoke not to the one who felt helpless, but to the one who was helpless.  Touching the open casket, He spoke to the dead boy saying, “‘Young man, I say to you arise.’  And the dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him back to his mother.”  GOD’S WORD HAS POWER; it has power to make alive. 

The law and the Gospel are both the powerful word of God, and, as we know, they are different in many important ways.  Where the law threatens, the Gospel makes promises.  Where the law kills, the Gospel gives life.  Where the law shows us the due reward for having transgressed its commands, the Gospel shows us Him who fulfilled the law on our behalf and suffered its judgment in our place.  Yes, the law and the Gospel are very different words.  And we know which is the greater of the two: the one that overcomes our sin and death: the Gospel!  But the preaching of the law has one benefit for itself that the Gospel does not have.  When people doubt the severity of the threats of the law, there is the visible and empirical evidence that our sin has indeed earned what God said it would.  You can see death.  But you can’t see eternal life. 

The widow from Nain in our Gospel reading saw death. That’s why she grieved.  But what her eyes could not see in Jesus’ words of comfort, “Do not weep,” Jesus showed her by raising her son from the dead.  He spoke again: “I say to you, arise.”  Jesus took her son from the arms of death and returned him to her.  That’s what our text says; He gave him back; He redeemed him.  She was helpless.  And so was he.  But GOD’S WORD HAS POWER; it has power to help. 

But how does it help us?  – Us who see our many sins?  – who see them better than anyone else can see them?  And you know what sins I’m talking about.  They are the ones hidden from the world and from our most respected friends deep in our hearts.  But we know God sees them.  And so we come here to hear the words of the Gospel Sunday after Sunday.  But in our hearts we see no change.  We come and grieve our sins, and we hear again that they are forgiven.  But then we still see that our hearts are sinful.  We hear the Gospel.  But much like this grieving widow who could still see her son’s lifeless body, the words of Jesus that promise comfort and life and that bid us not to weep don’t seem to change any of the things that we can see.  What we see contradicts what we hear.  “Do not weep. Your sin is forgiven.”  How can we not weep, when our hearts remain sinful, and we are helpless to do a thing about it? 

But we do not judge the promises of God with our eyes, because faith does not come by seeing; faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.  GOD’S WORD HAS POWER; it has power to save.  And so that is where we turn.  We ignore what our eyes see and trust wholly in the WORD which we hear.  With our eyes we will continue to see sin in our lives (you can count on that), and the wages of sin claiming the lives of those whom we love (it will break our hearts).  And we will feel helpless.  But the message of the Gospel is intended for those who are helpless.  It does not promise that we will see ourselves become progressively fit for heaven (we won’t), or that we will stop needing God to help us (we won’t).  The message of the Gospel which we hear is that God has helped us and that He continues to help us even today by giving to us what He has accomplished on the cross for our salvation. 

Jesus came down from heaven in order to live a life of perfect obedience as our Brother to the very law that required us to die.   But the law could not require Jesus to die.  Because the most scrutinizing eye of the law, the very eye of God the Father in heaven could see no sin in the heart or behavior of His Son Jesus Christ.  There was no sin to see.  And yet Jesus willingly went to the cross in order to suffer and die for the sin that we see in ourselves – all of it – even the sin we can’t see.  It is as we pray in Psalm 19, “Who can understand his errors? Cleanse me from secret faults.”  And He does.  He does by reckoning to us by faith in the words you are hearing right now the perfect life of Jesus that we receive by hearing the promise of the Gospel. 

We do not look to what our eyes can see in order to know the life that God gives to us in Christ.  Instead, by faith we look to where Christ has conquered death by taking our own death into Himself.  Jesus did not conquer death as some distant dragon in a faraway land.  No.  He conquered the very death that we see our fathers and our mothers suffer, and that has taken from us old friends.   He conquered the death that once reigned in our own mortal bodies and that still incites all kinds of sin.  He conquered the death that will someday take from us our final breath.  He conquered this death by dying this death.  And by rising from it three days later, Jesus took away its sting and power forever. 

Misery loves company.  It is true.  But even more than this, God loves sinners.  That is why even today Jesus joins us in our misery.  He does this by speaking the words of eternal life that nothing we see in our hearts or feel in our failing bodies can ever undo.   GOD’S WORD HAS POWER.  And so we return to Jesus’ words in the Gospel we hear, and especially when death draws near, to the Baptism that joined each one of us to the death of Christ that swallowed our own in victory – as we sing:

Now in Christ, death cannot slay me, 
Though it might, 
Day and night, 
Trouble and dismay me. 
Christ has made my death a portal
From the strife
Of this life
To His joy immortal!

Right now we live by faith.  But sight will come.  The power of God on that day outside the village of Nain is the power of God on Easter; it is the same power of God right here to forgive us our sins; and it is the same power of God to raise our bodies in glory on the last day when we shall appear before the Lamb of God with all our Christian loved-ones to live in heaven forever. 

Today is LWML Sunday when we honor those among us who work so diligently to promote the mission of the Church.  And so I would like to say some closing words concerning where the mission of the Church begins.  They say there is nothing harder than to live to see the death of your child – that’s what they say, and I pray that I may always only imagine.  But if this is true, then surely there is no greater joy than seeing the life of your child restored – born in sin – living as a sinner – disappointing you.  And so we teach our children the Gospel; we bring them to be baptized into the death of Christ through water and the word; we teach them to know Jesus; we teach them what it means to repent and what it means to hear and rely on His word of forgiveness – GOD’S WORD HAS POWER; it has power to fill our greatest joy.  And that is why we share this greatest joy with others.  The victory that Christ has won over our death and the death of the dying world around us is the soul and center of our mission as the Church. 

Let us pray:

My end to ponder teach me ever
And, ere the hour of death appears,
To cast my soul on Christ, my Savior,
Nor spare repentant sighs and tears.

My many sins blot out forever
Since Jesus has my pardon won;
In mercy robed I then shall never
Fear death, but trust in Thee alone.

Once in the blest baptismal waters
I put on Christ and made Him mine;
Now numbered with God's sons and daughters,
I share His peace and love divine.

Then may death come today, tomorrow,
I know in Christ I perish not;
He grants the peace that stills all sorrow,
Gives me a robe without a spot.
My God, for Jesus' sake I pray
Thy peace may bless my dying day.  

In Jesus’ name, Amen.