Trinity 16

1 Kings 17:17-24 - Trinity XVI - September 15, 2013

Jesus’ Words Give Life

Let us pray: “In the midst of life we are in death. Of whom may we seek comfort but of Thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased?  Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Savior, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.”  Amen. 

These words from the rite of Christian burial we pray at the gravesite of our loved ones who confessed the faith as we commit their bodily remains to the earth whence they were taken in the certain hope of the resurrection to life.  In this prayer, we speak of three different deaths that are of course each related to the other.  The most obvious death is the bodily death.  It’s what we see, and it saddens all people alike.  We are in the midst of it.  The second is the actually cause of the first.  It is spiritual death.  It is the sin that justly displeases God.  We are in the midst of it.  The third is eternal death.  It is God’s final judgment.  It is damnation.  It is hell.  We are not in the midst of this.  We pray to be delivered from it on the last day.  Right now is the time of grace when God does just that.  He does so through his word. 

Christ Jesus our Lord, who is himself the Word of God made flesh, delivers us from eternal death by delivering us from our spiritual death.  He does this by forgiving us our sins on account of the fact that he took them away on the cross.  Through this forgiveness, we have the certain hope that he will deliver us from our physical death as well when he raises our bodies to eternal glory.   God delivers us from all three deaths by one and the same word, because all three deaths are really the same. 

Consider: Death separates.  Spiritual death is the separation of man from hearing God’s word.  This is the essence of sin.  Physical death is the separation of man’s soul from his body.  This is the result of sin.  Eternal death is the separation of man’s body and soul from God.   This is the punishment of sin.  The three go together.  

Sin separates us from God by separating us from God’s word.  God gives life by speaking his word.  And so it follows that sin, which ignores God’s word, produces death.  Physical death is not simply a penalty that God invented in order to punish sinners.  No, physical death is the natural and necessary consequence of spiritual death.  They are essentially the same thing. 

God first joined man’s soul and body together by breathing his word of life into the flesh he formed from the earth.  So for man to separate himself from this breath of God, it can only follow that his soul must also separate from his earthen body.  To sin is to reject life.  The reason we die is because we sin.  This is important to know.  It might seem obvious to you.  But the devil has been trying from the very beginning to blur this connection between sin and death. 

In the Garden of Eden, God told Adam: “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; 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.”  God was telling the truth.  The devil called God a liar. “You won’t die,” he assured Eve.  “God knows something that he’s not telling you.  He knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”  The devil lied.  Adam and Eve believed the lie.  They discarded God’s word and held to another.  They died then and there. 

Their spiritual death occurred the moment they dismissed the life-giving word and embraced the murderous lie.   Their physical death would not come until a considerable time later.  But it was of course the same death.  The one necessarily follows the other. 

But it takes a while.  We are born sinners because we are sons and daughters of this first man.  This means that we are born with no spiritual life.  We are born spiritually dead – spiritually stillborn as it were.  We don’t by nature heed God’s word.  The reason Adam and Eve’s physical death, and the reason that our own physical death, does not immediately follow is not because sin is not serious.  On the contrary, it is because God wants to save us from the serious predicament we’re in.  He gives us time to receive God’s gracious pardon and so escape from the final death that lasts forever.  In this time of grace, God graciously speaks.  He speaks the word that sinners reject.  He speaks the word that we need to hear. 

I remember when I was first studying to become a pastor, a pastor told me what he thought was good homiletical advice.  He said that when you preach a funeral sermon, you have no need to preach the law, because the law, with all its force and fierceness, is lying right there in the coffin.  The law is evident, he said.  You need only preach the gospel.  That’s what they need to hear. 

Well, although this sounds kind and no doubt came from a heart eager to comfort those who mourn, it is baloney.  Like with everything false, there is of course a bit of truth mixed in.  Folks do need to hear the gospel at funerals.  Woe to the servant of Christ who fails to preach the gospel of Christ.  But the gospel has context.  And the devil’s first and strongest lie has been to blind us from seeing this context.  But we must see it.  It is the context that I have just described.  The wages of sin is death.  The wages of your sin is your death.  The wages of grandma’s sin is grandma’s death.  And what has earned the death of the spouse, the death of the young man who had such potential, the death of the child cut off in her youth, or the stillborn birth that grieves the mother so?  You know the context of death.  You might not know how to answer the questions of “why him?” and “why now?” but you know the cause.  It is sin.  Our spiritual death must be confronted if in the face of physical death we seek to be comforted. 

We don’t make the connection on our own – that is, between physical death and spiritual death.  People make up all sorts of other reasons for death that don’t take into account the sin against God that brought it.  They seek false comfort.  This is how false religions and every sort of false hope are invented.  The devil says that our sin has no relation to death and that death has no connection to sin.  But the devil is a liar.  He seeks to rob you of life by robbing you of God’s word. 

We need to be told the truth.  We need to listen to what God says.  I suppose this is why God sent Elijah the prophet to the widow in Zarephath.  He wanted her to know the truth.  In our Old Testament lesson from last week, we heard how she was about to run out of flour and oil in the midst of a great famine.  Once these were gone, she had nothing left but for her and her son to die.  That’s what she said.  But God preserved her.  Her flour and oil did not run out so long as God’s prophet remained in her home.  God kept his promise.  But something did run out: the life of her son.  He became ill and died.  Consider then what she said to Elijah, and how she rightly learned to make the connection between sin and death: “What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance and to cause the death of my son!” 

Sin and death go together.  The sting of death is sin.  That is, sin stings us and death ensues.  And the strength of sin is the law.  That is, the law reveals the venom that kills.  And so it must be preached.  We need to know the correlation between sin and death.  Only then can we learn what God taught the widow of Zarephath. 

It was God who caused the death of her child.  God is just.  He cannot be blamed or called cruel because of it.  Elijah went upstairs to where the boy lay dead.  He stretched himself over the boy three times.  He appealed not to God’s justice, but to God’s tender compassion by appealing to the triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  “O Lord my God, let this child’s life come into him again.”  The Lord listened to his voice.  God gave the child’s life back.  And Elijah gave the child back to his mother.  And what did she learn?  She learned that God has compassion on sinners.  She learned that in God’s mercy is the power to give life.  And she learned also where to find this life-giving mercy: “Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.”

She listened to the prophet.  So do we.  She whom the Lord had helped, whose life he restored when she and her son were starving, is the very God who is offended by her sin and who requires her life.  So also, the Lord helps us.  He feeds us.  He restores us to health again and again.  He gives us plenty and more. He is kind beyond measure, and we who hear his word know this better than anyone.  But in his word we also learn that he requires from us what we cannot offer.  He requires a righteousness and perfection that our sinful hearts have failed to produce and that our selfish lives have not shown forth.  He brings our sin to remembrance and requires from us what we are loath to give up.  He requires our lives. 

This is what the law teaches us.  It teaches us our sin and the cause of death.  But this is not what teaches us to trust in the word of God.  This is not what compels us to declare what the widow declared, that the word of the preacher is true.  No, for that we need what God’s compassion shows. 

We need what God promised to Adam and Eve.  We need to see God’s Son take on the very flesh he cursed, yet without any stain of sin.  We need to see him who lived in perfect obedience to God’s word crush the lying serpent’s head.  We need to see his heal bruised as the Lord of Life hangs dead on the cross, having become a curse in our place.  On the cross we see our death – not simply as a heroic act to inspire us – but we see the full penalty of our sin paid.  We see the end of our sin.  What more can our sin do to us if the eternal Word made flesh has endured the venomous sting that sin injected into all men?  What more can the law accuse us of, if he who bore all sin has snapped all the chords of death by his victorious resurrection?  “The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 15:56-57). 

The woman saw death, and was afraid of God.  We see death, and we should ponder with her what God might have against us.  But with this woman also, we see that God’s promise is true, because we see that what he offers is more than flour and oil and other earthly necessities.  He gives us and our children eternal life from the dead.  He sees us in our helplessness and pleads our cause.  He makes our cause his.  He is more moved by our death and sadness than we are ourselves, because he took the very cause of it all into himself. 

Elijah ascended to the upper room and pleaded to God for a compassion yet to be revealed.  Three times he begged for mercy.  God heard him.  In our Gospel lesson, Jesus did not plead to anyone.  He did not seek God’s compassion by ascending to the heavens.  But by descending to our situation here on earth, he found compassion right there within his breast.  What he felt for the widow in Nain and for her son was none other than the compassion of the true God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  And having had compassion, he confronted the death that made the woman so sad — he confronted death by speaking. 

Jesus’ word is truth, because he is the truth.  Our sin closes our ears to God.  It renders us dead in the worst way.  But Jesus has no trouble confronting death.  He speaks to death.  “Young man, I say to you, arise.”  Jesus’ word required nothing of the boy who was dead.  And his word requires nothing of you.  He speaks to you.  He has compassion on you.  He gives to you what he gave his life to earn for you: the forgiveness of all your sins and the guarantee that you will rise as well. 

Like in the beginning of creation, life comes from the breath of God.  And so we listen to what the God-breathed Scriptures have to say.  Here God creates faith in us who need life.  We hold to our Baptism where through water and the Spirit God gave to us what he said he gives.  He gives life in the midst of death by joining us to Christ’s death in our place and to Christ’s resurrection that guarantees eternal life in heaven to all who believe and are baptized—in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.