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. 

Trinity 14

Luke 17:11-19 - Trinity XIV - September 1, 2013 

Saving Faith is Thanking Faith

It is often unsettling for folks to witness in Lutheran church services our persistent focus on crying out to God for mercy.  Now, rarely will a self-avowed Christian deny his need for divine mercy – oh no – at least he won’t intend to deny it.  It’s not that we don’t need mercy, the argument goes, but don’t we already have mercy?  Why can’t we move beyond this constant plea for what we already have and begin to focus instead on the life of thanking and praising God?  Don’t we have a lot to be thankful for?  

So it goes.  And some of us might feel a bit of sympathy toward this concern.  After all, we do cry out for mercy an awful lot in our liturgy.  But if we are serious about wanting to give thanks to God, we’ve got to go at it a little differently.  The reason we can’t move beyond our cry for mercy is twofold: 1) we are unable to move beyond our sin; we keep needing mercy, and 2), it is precisely when our dear Lord answers this constant cry of ours that we learn again and again what it means to be thankful. 

Trinity 13

Galatians 3:15-22 - Trinity XIII - August 25, 2013

What the Law Can Do for You

Our salvation is extra nos.  That’s Latin for ‘outside of us.’  They don’t require that we learn Latin at the seminary, but there are a number of Latin phrases that any Lutheran pastor worth his salt cannot help but have had drilled into his head.  Now, you don’t have to learn the terminology like I did, but you had better learn the concept.  Extra nos.  Outside of us.  The moment that one begins to require that certain conditions be met within the sinner by the sinner in order for him to be saved is the moment that the gospel is completely denied and turned into something that it’s not, namely, the law.  Our salvation is outside of us.  Because it begins and ends with God’s pure love toward sinners.  Period.  What God planned for us from eternity to rescue us from our sin and from his wrath God accomplishes outside of our control. 

And thank God.  We’re not as reliable as he is.  The fact that he is in control of the most important need in our life is of great comfort to the Christian.  That is, of course, if we know the character of this great God in control.  And we do.  He loves.  He speaks kindly to those who have wronged him.  He forgives.  He keeps his promises.  We see his character clearly revealed toward us in the vicarious death of his Son Jesus Christ who on the cross atoned for all our sins.  The same thing that teaches us that God is good and loving also teaches us what God has accomplished.  It is where our Savior said, “It is finished.”  

Trinity 12

Mark 7:31-37 - Trinity XII - August 18, 2013 

Sharing Our Faith

Jesus was walking through a region of Judea where the population consisted mostly of Gentiles.  This means that they didn’t have the word of God.  That’s what made them Gentiles.  They had notions of God, of course.  But their notions were false, because the gods they invented were crafted in their own hearts.  They learned what they thought they knew about God by consulting their feelings and experiences rather than by listening to what God actually said.  Needless to say, their source of information was flawed.  And since they had a flawed understanding of who God was, naturally they also had a flawed understanding of what to expect God to do. 

Of course, they knew God was powerful.  This much they knew – what he could do.  But who doesn’t know this much?  You don’t need Scripture to tell you this.  Look at the earth and sky.  Notice the intricate design of the plant and animal world around us.  Look at how fearfully and wonderfully made everything is.  Seeing God’s handiwork certainly tells you a lot about God.  But it won’t tell you his will for your life.  The most important thing you need to learn about God can only be learned by listening to what he says to you. 

Trinity 4

Luke 6:36-42 - Trinity IV - June 23, 2013 

Be Ye Merciful

Almighty God, merciful Father.  That’s what we call God when we bow down to confess our sins.  We don’t appeal to justice.  We appeal to His boundless mercy.  We ask that He would mercifully spare us from our punishment, which His Son endured in our place, and that He would graciously give us that good, which Jesus has earned in our place.  Grace and mercy go hand in hand. But we see here in the relationship between the two that there is also a distinction worth noting. 

When we say that God is gracious, we are saying that He gives us what we don’t deserve to have.  Take, for instance, everything that we need to support our body and life.  All this God gives to us by grace alone without any merit or worthiness in us.  We don’t deserve what good things we have.  What do we deserve?  Well, this is where mercy comes in.  We deserve God’s temporal and eternal punishment for how we have lived.  We have treated our bodies as though we own them, and everything God gives us as though it were here to serve our own desires.   We act as though we deserved the things God so graciously bestows.  But we don’t.  We deserve wrath.  And yet it is in mercy that God declines to be wrathful.  In mercy, God chooses not to condemn us, but to forgive and acquit us. 

Trinity 3

Luke 15:11-32 - Trinity III - June 16, 2013 

The Father’s Love for His Son 

Fathers’ Day 2013

Jesus receives sinners.  He seeks the lost sheep who has soiled his life with sin, and fallen prey to the roaring lion who seeks to devour him.  Jesus seeks and finds him here in church by calling us all to repentance.  Jesus sweeps clean this house, like an old lady searching for a coin she lost.  He sweeps away all pride and delusion in our hearts and makes sinners out of each one of us.  Only then are we found.  Here in God’s house, Jesus seeks us and finds us though the preaching of His word.  And when He finds us here, when we are found to be in dear need of His mercy, Jesus gives us His mercy.  He absolves penitent sinners of their sin, because that’s what His Father sent Him to do.  When Jesus receives sinners, God receives His children, and heaven swells with unspeakable joy. 

The parable of the forgiving father follows the same theme as these first two parables.  It’s usually known as the parable of the prodigal son.  And I suppose that makes sense, since the theme is repentance.  The son repented, not the father.  But what’s great about these stories is that, although the theme is on repentance, the main character is not the son who turns back, but the father who waits for and receives with joy his wayward child.  Repentance seems like something that we do.  And yet true repentance doesn’t begin with us at all — no more than a coin initiates the task of being found under the rug.  No, repentance always begins with the work and will of the Father.  As Jesus says in John 6, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him” (John 6:44).

Trinity 2

Luke 14:16-24 - Trinity II - June 2, 2013 

Come Lord Jesus, Be Our Guest

“Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest, and let these gifts to us be blessed.  Amen.” 

That’s what we pray before we eat.  It’s known as the common table prayer.  We invite Jesus to join us as we sit down to enjoy what He Himself has given us.  We usually don’t think of such things as coming from Jesus.  Of course, we know that there is one God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three Persons in one divine Essence, and that Jesus is God.  And all good things come from God.  But we tend to talk about the Father, not the Son, as being the One who blesses us with our material things, don’t we?  Well, it’s true.  It’s proper to speak this way since that’s how Scripture speaks.  The Father is the source of all things.  That’s why we call Him our Maker.  It is God the Father almighty who daily and richly provides us with all that we need to support this body and life.  This is what we confess in the Creed.  And all this He does only out of fatherly divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness in us.