An unlikely model of persistent prayer and unshakable faith

Posted on February 25, 2024 by Rev. Paul Rydecki
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Sermon for Reminiscere – Lent 2

1 Thessalonians 4:1-7  +  Matthew 15:21-28

In case you haven’t heard, Franklin Graham’s “God loves you” tour is coming to El Paso next week. I’ve only heard snippets of his message, but it’s basically, you guessed it, “God loves you!” Somehow I don’t think he’ll be bringing up the exchange between Jesus and the Canaanite woman from today’s Gospel. It doesn’t exactly shout out to the world, “God loves you!” But then, every time someone tries to reduce Christianity to a catchy, feel-good sound bite, they fail to represent Christianity adequately. When we oversimplify the message, we end up undermining the message, no matter how good our intentions may be.

“God loves you” is certainly part of the Bible’s message. But so is this: “God hates sin. And you’ve sinned against God. You’re born under the devil’s influence and under God’s curse. You must repent and become entirely different from who you are by nature. God loves you, and that means that He has provided a way of salvation for you, in your wretchedness, through the blood of His Son, Jesus Christ, so that you don’t receive the judgment and condemnation you deserve. Acknowledge your wretchedness before God, and have faith in the Lord Jesus! Only then will you be safe from the devil!”

That’s bigger than a sound bite and not quite as appealing to the crowds, is it? “Acknowledge your wretchedness before God” doesn’t fill the stadiums and the concert halls. Who wants to hear such a thing? Only those who are willing to acknowledge their wretchedness before God. Because those who don’t get tripped up on that first part make it to the second part. “Have faith in the Lord Jesus! Then you will be safe from the devil!” The woman in our Gospel was just such a person. And she teaches us—or rather, the Lord teaches us, through her unlikely example—to acknowledge our own wretchedness, and then to trust in Jesus with an unshakable faith, and to approach Him with persistent prayer, knowing that, in the end, He will help you, because He is the merciful God who loves you.

The Canaanite woman whom we encounter in today’s Gospel was wretched, and knew that she was wretched, largely, because of her race. That’s a hard thing for people today to hear. The devil is filling the world today with this terrible lie: “Your race is special! Your race is good! Your race is something to be proud of, something to be celebrated and honored—unless you’re white. Only then should you be ashamed of your race.” Of course, he spent plenty of time filling the world with the alternate lie: “Your race is bad—unless you’re white! Then it’s good!” Oh, everybody, just stop it! The devil loves to make people feel, either superior to others, or victimized by others, or both. Because in both cases, he keeps your attention off the real problem: the problem of all mankind’s badness before God, the problem of God’s already-spoken judgment against the human race: “There is no one who is good but One, that is, God.”

But, for a time, there was one race among men that was favored by God. Not because they were genetically superior or naturally better than anyone else, but because of God’s gracious, undeserved choice of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God made a covenant with them and crafted a nation out of their descendants. He sent prophets to that nation and gave His word to that nation. He showed fatherly care for that nation for 2,000 years, while He let the other races of men go their own, sinful way, just as they wanted. So the Jewish race was divinely privileged.

But there was one great disadvantage of being the privileged race: It was so easy for pride to take root in their hearts. We see it throughout the Gospels, especially among the Pharisees, but not only among the Pharisees, the Jews’ reliance on their descent from Abraham, an arrogance in what they regarded to be their cultural and moral superiority over every other race, the assumption that God had chosen them because they were so good, and that He didn’t care about the rest of mankind.

Even Jesus’ own disciples seem to have been affected by this superiority complex to some degree, and it was a problem that plagued the early Christian Church for several years even after Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.

So how would the Jews who became Christians overcome this superiority complex? How would God get through to them? How would He show the Gentiles that, in spite of the bad behavior of many of the Jews and the wrong message they had been sending about God’s attitude toward the Gentiles, God did care about the Gentiles, He did love them and did have a prominent place for them in His plan of salvation and in His Church? By showing them a striking example, a model of persistent prayer and unshakable faith in a woman who was not an Israelite, who was not a Jew, who was not descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but who had, nevertheless, placed her faith and trust in the God of Israel and, specifically, in Jesus as the Christ, the “Son of David,” as she herself addressed Him in today’s Gospel.

Now, in order for this lesson to have the impact God intended, the Canaanite woman needed to be put through a test. Several tests, in fact, in order for her faith to become clear to all. God knew what she needed, what Jesus’ disciples needed, what the Jews needed, and what all people throughout history needed—all those who would read this account in Matthew’s Gospel. He also knew how well the woman would do with these tests. And so He proceeded to test her.

First, she’s forced to go searching for Jesus. He’s come to her territory. He’s left the territory of Israel and come here to the region of Tyre and Sidon, close to her. But Mark’s Gospel reveals that He wasn’t making some big evangelistic tour of the city. He went to a house and tried not to have His presence become known. But somehow this woman heard that Jesus was near, so she searched for Him and found Him. That was test #1.

Then she called out to Him and begged Him to have mercy on her and her daughter, who was severely tormented by demons. We don’t know what that torment looked like, but we can imagine how terrifying and how heart-wrenching it was for this mother to watch. So she called out to Jesus, O Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! But He did not say a word in reply. What was she supposed to think about that? If she had the mentality of most Americans today, she would yell at Him, “Hey, what’s the matter with you, Jesus? I’m talking to You, Dude! I deserve an answer!” But that wasn’t her response. Her response was very simple. “He isn’t answering, so I’ll just keep crying out to Him! I’ll just keep praying!”

That was exactly the right thing to do! But it wasn’t, in the eyes of Jesus’ disciples. Notice, Jesus didn’t send her away, but they wanted to. Then his disciples came and begged him, “Send her away! She is crying out after us!” You know, giving Jesus advice about how to handle things really isn’t a good idea. Ever. It shows a kind of arrogance, doesn’t it? As if you knew better than He did. As if you had some great bit of wisdom that Jesus lacked, and you think you should teach Him how to behave—like how some people react to this account. They don’t like how Jesus talked to that woman, and they want to tell Him He should’ve been nicer to her. Stop it! Put your pride away. Jesus has nothing to learn from you, but you have much to learn from Him. It wasn’t wise for the disciples to try to guide Jesus, nor was it kind toward the woman, and if she was able to hear them asking Jesus to send her away, that was another test of her faith. When you see people who are supposed to be Christians acting rudely, acting inconsiderately, trying to turn certain people away from Jesus, what are they supposed to think about Christ? We need to be very careful that God’s condemnation can never be directed toward us that was directed toward the people of Israel, “God’s name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.”

But Jesus didn’t listen to His disciples. Instead, He gave this strange reply: He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” God the Father did not have Jesus traveling the world to preach the Gospel. In fact, as far as we’re told, this is the one and only time Jesus ever left the borders of Israel during His entire earthly ministry. But Isaiah, among other prophets, had prophesied about the enlarging of Israel—the enlarging of it to include Gentiles from the farthest reaches of the earth. The Son of David, the Christ, was coming for everyone, to be everyone’s King and Savior!

She passed that test, too. She came even closer to Jesus, fell down before him, saying, “Lord, help me!” But he answered, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” This is the greatest test of all. Will the woman go away in despair at having her race referred to as being one of the dogs? Will she get angry? Will she start bad-mouthing Jesus or the Jews? No, none of those things. She agrees with Jesus and finds hope in His words. “Yes, Lord. But the dogs do eat from the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Then Jesus answered her, “Oh, woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly.

Such persistent prayer! Such unshakable faith in the Lord Jesus and in His mercy and willingness to help, in spite of what looked, at first, like rejection. It’s worth noting again that this is only one of two instances in the Gospels where Jesus praises someone’s great faith. And it came from such an unlikely place, from a non-Jewish woman, with a demon-afflicted daughter, living outside of Israel, who was content to be compared to a wretched dog, because by acknowledging her wretchedness before God as a Gentile and, more importantly, as a sinner, it meant that, instead of being offended by the apparent rejection coming from her God, she was still able to see Jesus for who He was: the merciful, caring, self-sacrificing Son of God who loved her and would help her.

It’s impossible to say what impact this event had on Jesus’ disciples immediately. But it surely helped the Jews who became Christians to start seeing the Gentiles who became Christians as their equals in the kingdom of God, as their brothers and sisters in Christ, capable of the same faith that the Jewish Christians had, and recipients of the same grace and salvation that the Jewish Christians received.

This is what God would have you see in this Gospel, too, what He would have you learn from this wretched yet wonderful Canaanite woman, that there’s no point trying to deny your wretchedness before God. Swallow your pride and acknowledge it. Then, when you hear God’s holy Law condemning sinners for unholy thoughts and words and deeds, you can say, “Yes, I’m one of those, too, and I’m sorry for the wrong I’ve done. But I know that Jesus came to save sinners and to rescue them from sin and death and the devil’s grasp. And since I’m a wretched sinner, that means He came to save me, too.”

He did. And, through faith in Christ Jesus, God has saved you. And just as Christ flung the demon away from the woman’s daughter with a word, so He will also save you from the devil and from every evil. Keep trusting in Him! Keep praying to Him, and don’t give up! Because…God loves you. Amen.

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The Servant sent to save the servant

Posted on February 21, 2024 by Rev. Paul Rydecki
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Sermon for Midweek of Lent 1

Isaiah 42:14-25

This past Sunday, we heard how Christ was the true Israel, the true Son of God who came to get it right where the nation of Israel, also called God’s son in Scripture, got it wrong. That ties in beautifully with Isaiah 42. In the first half of Isaiah 42, which we considered on the festival of Jesus’ Baptism, we heard the Lord’s commissioning of His Servant, the Christ, to be a covenant to the people, a light to the Gentiles, to open blind eyes, to bring out prisoners from the prison, those who sit in darkness from the prison house. In this second half of the chapter before us this evening, we’re given a glimpse of the nation of Israel, also called the Lord’s “servant,” that needed their blind eyes to be opened by the Christ—Israel, the servant of the Lord, who needed to be saved by Christ, the true Servant of the Lord. And remember, while these things are being said originally to Old Testament Israel, you and I and all Christians have been brought into the spiritual Church of Israel by the New Testament in Jesus’ blood, so our God has something to say to us here, too.

14 “I have held My peace a long time, I have been still and restrained Myself. Now I will cry like a woman in labor, I will pant and gasp at once. 15 I will lay waste the mountains and hills, And dry up all their vegetation; I will make the rivers coastlands, And I will dry up the pools.

Seventy years was a long time for God to “hold His peace,” to watch His beloved people of Israel sitting in exile in a foreign land. He had “restrained Himself” from stepping in to save them from captivity, because they needed this punishment. And not only they. You and I and the rest of the nations throughout history needed to see what happens to God’s people when those very people turn to false gods, to those who refuse to repent of their sins, to those who live for themselves and reject God’s covenant of peace, as Israel had stubbornly done. So God let the punishment sink in and do its job, to bring them to repentance and to teach all men that judgment is coming, even against those who were once called the people of God. But now, toward the end of the Babylonian captivity, God was ready to deliver His people from their bondage. And He would remove all the obstacles that stood in the way of that deliverance.

But these verses refer to a much greater deliverance, too. Four thousand years was a much longer time for God to “hold His peace,” since the creation of the world, to watch mankind plunge deeper and deeper into sin and rebellion, to watch men die, one after the other after the other, with no savior to make atonement for their sins, to show them just how much God truly desires to deliver us from sin, death, and the devil. But finally it was time for God to step in, to send His Christ into the world, to show us exactly who God is, to suffer and die for the sins of the world, and to send His Gospel out into all the nations of the world.

16 I will bring the blind by a way they did not know; I will lead them in paths they have not known. I will make darkness light before them, And crooked places straight. These things I will do for them, And not forsake them.

What is this blindness that God is promising to cure for the people of Israel? It’s obviously not physical blindness, as He makes clear in the next few verses:

18 “Hear, you deaf; And look, you blind, that you may see. 19 Who is blind but My servant, Or deaf as My messenger whom I send? Who is blind…as the Lord’s servant? 20 Seeing many things, but you do not observe; Opening the ears, but he does not hear.”

See how God refers here to His people Israel as His “servant,” His “messenger.” They were supposed to be that, but they were blinded by their stubbornness, rebellion, and idolatry. This is a spiritual blindness and deafness that the Lord is promising to heal—the blindness of missing the obvious, that the God of the Bible is the true God, that He is our Creator, that we owe Him our service, our obedience, that He is good and generous, and that His ways are always right. There was much blindness and deafness in Israel, and there is much blindness and deafness in those who call themselves Christians, too. But God sent His Christ into the world, and He has sent the Gospel of Christ out into the world, to bring us into the light of understanding, understanding our need to repent and God’s merciful promise to forgive us through faith in Christ Jesus.

21 The Lord is well pleased for His righteousness’ sake; He will exalt the law and make it honorable. 22 But this is a people robbed and plundered; All of them are snared in holes, And they are hidden in prison houses; They are for prey, and no one delivers; For plunder, and no one says, “Restore!”

Again, the Lord is describing His wayward people of Israel: spiritually blind, spiritually deaf, spiritually hidden in prison houses of the devil’s making, even as they were literally being held in captivity in Babylon (though not behind bars). They went from being a great nation to a pathetic people. But how? Why? Isaiah asks them those very questions for them to ponder and consider.

23 Who among you will give ear to this? Who will listen and hear for the time to come? 24 Who gave Jacob for plunder, and Israel to the robbers? Was it not the Lord, He against whom we have sinned? For they would not walk in His ways, Nor were they obedient to His law. 25 Therefore He has poured on him the fury of His anger And the strength of battle; It has set him on fire all around, Yet he did not know; And it burned him, Yet he did not take it to heart.

Israel was robbed and plundered and turned into a pathetic people by the Lord’s doing. It was His punishment for some, discipline for others, because “they would not walk in His ways,” nor would they repent. God gave them over to punishment after punishment prior to their exile in Babylon, and still they refused to acknowledge that their suffering was the result of their own sins and rebellion. Still they refused to turn back to the Lord in humility, in sorrow over their sins.

What a good reminder this is for Christians! We wonder how the Christian Church fell into the sad state it’s in today, hopelessly fractured, scattered, filled with false doctrine and with every form of hypocrisy, and openly defending sinful practices, as if one could live in willful sin against God and still be a “good Christian.” Yes, the devil and the world have been out to get the Church from the beginning. But we have to acknowledge the failures within the Church, and the resulting suffering that the Lord has allowed to come upon His Church. And I’m not talking about failures to rise up in some political movement or failures to speak out against the sins of society. I’m talking about the failure of Christians to repent of their own sins against God’s commandments. I’m talking about the Church’s failure to practice discipline within the Church, to call on sinners to repent, and to excommunicate the stubbornly impenitent. I’m also talking about the Church’s failure to guard its doctrine carefully, to insist on the pure teaching of the Gospel and the right administration of the Sacraments, and the failure to love as Jesus called on us to love.

Now, I say these things about the outward, visible Christian Church throughout the world, which is similar in many ways to the nation of Israel in the Old Testament, and we should always evaluate to what extent those charges apply to each of us. But God always preserves a remnant of faithful, penitent Christians, just as He did at the time of Isaiah and afterward in Israel. And He uses the words of His prophets and ministers to keep the faithful living in repentance, to give us hope, even as we see how dire things look all around us. In a spiritual sense, the blindness of the whole nation of Israel was never removed. Think of how many people at the time of Jesus remained blind and deaf and unbelieving! But every time the word of God is preached, the Holy Spirit is holding out the light of Jesus, the true Servant of God, so that those who hear may be led to see things clearly, to evaluate their hearts and lives, to repent where they need to repent, and to turn in faith to the Lord Christ, who promises to open our eyes and lead us out of the prison house, who promises grace and mercy and the forgiveness of sins and deliverance from the pathetic state of things in this world, to give us eternal life and lasting peace with Him after this life. May the light of Christ, God’s true Servant, continue to enlighten our hearts and minds! Amen.

 

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The Son who gets it right

Posted on February 18, 2024 by Rev. Paul Rydecki
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Sermon for Lent 1 – Invocavit

2 Corinthians 6:1-10  +  Matthew 4:1-11

This is My beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased. God the Father’s words spoken straight from heaven at Jesus’ baptism were still ringing in the air as the Father’s Holy Spirit led Jesus from the Jordan River out into the desert, where He fasted for forty days and forty nights. You know who else is called a “son of God” in the Bible? Adam, for one. In Luke’s genealogy of Jesus’ ancestry, Adam is called the “son of God.” And he was, in one sense: by direct act of creation. You know who else is called a “son of God” in the Bible? The people of Israel. God says of Israel in the book of Hosea, When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called My son. Israel was God’s “son” by God’s act of creating them and nurturing them as a nation—as His chosen people. Adam and Eve were tempted by the devil, and they fell into sin. Israel was tempted by the devil, too (though less directly than Adam and Eve were), especially during the time they spend wandering around in the desert on their extended journey from Egypt to the Promised Land. And Israel fell into sin over and over out there in the wilderness. About Adam, about Israel, the heavenly Father could not say, “With this son of mine I am well-pleased.” But about Jesus He could and did say it.

But that doesn’t mean that Jesus got to live a life of luxury and comfort and ease. He didn’t come into the world to enjoy the blessed, glorious reward that a well-pleasing Son of God deserves. He came into the world to step into our place as our Substitute: to be tempted as we are tempted, to suffer as we suffer, and to die as we die, so that His victory over sin and temptation might be counted to us as our victory, so that His suffering and death might be counted as our suffering and death and open the way for us sinners to become sons of God. But that only happens if this Son of God—who is God’s Son by birth in eternity, by miraculous conception in the Virgin Mary, and by choice as His chosen Servant, as Israel was supposed to be—it only happens if this Son of God gets it right, where Adam and Israel, the previous sons of God, and we, the wayward sons of Adam, have gotten it so, so wrong.

And so we find the Son of God, not living it up in a palace, but fasting alone in the desert for “forty days and forty nights.” It isn’t a mere coincidence that the very same phrase is used for Moses at Mount Sinai, who went without eating and without drinking for forty days and forty nights, shortly after leading the people of Israel through the Red Sea, where St. Paul writes that the Israelites were “baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the Sea.” You see the connections God is making, between His son Israel passing through the Red Sea in a sort of “baptism,” and then taking Moses, the leader of Israel, up onto the mountain where he fasted for forty days and forty nights? Connections, so that we understand what Jesus has come to do: to take Israel’s place and get it right where Israel got it wrong.

We see more connections in each of the three individual temptations, which are all, really, just variations on a theme: “God is not good. He doesn’t deserve your obedience. You deserve to be happy.”

First, at the end of the forty days of fasting, Jesus is hungry. So the devil comes and tries to take advantage of Jesus, tries to get him to turn away from God, just as he tried (and succeeded at) getting Adam and Eve to turn away from God in the Garden of Eden, just as he tried (and succeeded at) getting Israel to turn away from God in the wilderness—just as he has succeeded so many times with us.

What was the gist of the devil’s temptation of Adam and Eve? (He only spoke to Eve, of course, but I think this is an accurate summary of his temptation.) “You’re God’s children, right? Why would a good Father put this beautiful tree right here in the middle of this garden and deprive His children of its fruit? You don’t have to listen to Him. You have the right to be happy. Take the fruit!” What was his temptation of Israel? “If you are sons of God, and He’s such a good and loving Father, why would He lead you out into the wilderness to die of starvation and thirst? He’s let you get a little bit thirsty? You deserve better than that! But it doesn’t look like God is providing it, does it? What, He’s given you bread from heaven now, but told you not to gather it up on the Sabbath Day? You go ahead and gather it up. Don’t you worry about God’s commandment. You’re sons of God. You have every right to do what you need to do to be happy.”

That’s basically the gist of the temptation the devil put to Jesus, too. If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread!” But he answered, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’” If only Adam and Eve had replied to the devil like that! If only the people of Israel had trusted in the word of the God who had just rescued them from slavery in Egypt! But instead Adam and Eve looked at all the bounty of the Garden around them and said, “No, it’s not enough. God isn’t good. We’re going to do things our way.” And Israel looked at the great deliverance God had just accomplished for them and said, “What a terrible God! He’s led us out into the wilderness to kill us.” But Jesus is the Son who gets it right. “So what if I’m hungry? So what if My Father has kept Me here in the desert for six weeks? I live by His Word and I serve at His command. I will not serve Myself. I will not depart from His word to do things My own way, for any reason.”

There was another angle to the devil’s temptation of Adam and Eve. “God has just recently created you. You’re the crown of His creation. You’re His son, Adam. Do you really think He would let you die just because you took a bite of fruit? You will not surely die. Try it! Test Him and see!” The devil used the same angle with Israel, even though he didn’t speak to them audibly in the form of a serpent. “God has brought you out of Egypt and has promised to lead you to the promised land. So clearly He will put up with it if you speak your mind to Him. You don’t see any water at the moment? You’d better let God hear about how unfair that is! Go ahead! Order Moses to give you what you want! God will understand. Test Him and see!”

That’s basically the gist of the temptation the devil put to Jesus. If you are the Son of God, cast yourself down! For it is written, ‘He will put his angels in charge of you,’ and, ‘In their hands they will lift you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone.’” Jesus said to him, “It is written again, ‘You shall not test the Lord your God.’” If only Adam and Eve had replied to the devil like that! If only the people of Israel had trusted in the word of the God who had just rescued them from slavery in Egypt! But they grew impatient with God. They thought they had the right to make Him prove His goodness, to make Him fulfill His promises on their timetable, in their way. They thought they could get away with testing God. They were wrong. But Jesus is the Son of God who gets it right. “I don’t need to test the word and promises of God. I don’t need to see His deliverance. I trust in His plan. I trust in His will. And you, devil, will never shake me from that trust!”

There was yet a third angle to the devil’s temptation to Adam and Eve, related to the others. “What do you want? Knowledge? Pleasure? Power? Godhood? You can have it all if you just ignore God and listen to me!” His temptation to Israel was similar. “If you want to make it safely through this wilderness, if you want to be provided for, if you want victory over your enemies, and prosperity, and safety, and comfort, what you really need is a god to go with you, a god whom you can see, a god who doesn’t make demands of you. So make that golden calf and bow down to it! It’s much less terrifying and demanding than that judgmental, invisible God who thundered down His Ten Commandments to you!”

And likewise, the devil held up to Jesus the world for a prize. He showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to Him, All these things I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Then Jesus said to him, “Get away from me, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.’” If only Adam and Eve had given the devil such a reply! If only Israel, had said such a thing!

If only you and I had replied like that to the devil every time he came around with his temptations. And whether it’s the devil himself, or the unbelieving world, or our own sinful flesh doing the tempting, it doesn’t matter much in the end. They’re all on the same side. There are different angles of temptation, different twists. But in the end, they all come back to the First Commandment: You shall have no other gods. But every time we dare to disagree with God’s handling of the world, or with something He says in His word, every time we covet something God hasn’t given us or stew in anger at Him over something He has given us, every time we fail to trust Him and His goodness and love, every time we ignore God’s word and take matters into our own hands, doing what we want to do because we think we have some divine right to be “happy.” It’s that attitude, and the sinful actions that flow from it, that plunged our race into sin and death and into the devil’s kingdom in the first place. It’s that attitude, and the actions that flow from it, for which you all, we all, need to repent.

Then look at the beloved Son of God, how He responds to the devil’s temptations. He suffers as He’s tempted, but He doesn’t budge from His devotion to His Father’s word, from obeying His Father, from trusting in His Father, from His willingness to suffer anything, even death, rather than disobey or displease His Father in heaven. He was the Son of God who got it right.

And He got it right for you, so that He might qualify as the sinless Savior and Substitute that you needed, so that, by being the perfect Son of God—and Son of Man!—He might one day offer His life on the cross in your place, giving His perfect life up to His Father in heaven as the price of your admission into God’s family.

Yes, Jesus, the true Son of God, was the Son who got it right. And He shares His sonship with all who repent and believe in Him. As Paul writes to the Galatians, For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. And as Paul writes to the Colossians, God the Father has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love, in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins.

Cling to Christ Jesus, the sinless Son of God, and the Seed of the woman, whom the Father sent to crush the serpent’s head. And then, as sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, learn from Him to trust in God at all times, to take up the shield of faith with which you will be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one. Learn from Him to rely on God’s goodness and grace, even if He tests you in the wilderness for a time. Learn from Him to use the word of God as a mighty weapon against all the devil’s temptations. And, through faith in Christ Jesus, you will one day hear with your own ears the same words that Jesus heard from His Father: This is My beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased. Amen.

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First confession, then deliverance

Posted on February 14, 2024 by Rev. Paul Rydecki
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Sermon for the First Day of Lent

Isaiah 59:12-21

As he has done for us already since the beginning of this Church Year, the Lord’s servant, the prophet Isaiah, will guide us through this Lenten season as well. We often hear this reading from Isaiah 59 on the First Day of Lent—either this reading or a reading from Jonah chapter 3, where Jonah preached repentance to the people of Nineveh, and they did repent, and God spared them from the destruction He had threatened.

Isaiah preaches repentance, too. That’s the theme, the focus of the traditional Lenten season, and why we continue to observe the season, as we observe all the traditional seasons of the traditional Church Year. People think Lent is about fasting or giving up something or some other external human practice or invention. But it’s really about repentance—taking our sins seriously, so that we also learn to take our Savior seriously, so that we then learn to take our sanctification seriously, so that we may live each day intentionally, in willing and purposeful service to God and to our neighbor—all of which starts with devotion to God’s Word and to the preaching of it.

And so the prophet Isaiah leads us in making confession of ours sins before God on this First Day of Lent, even as he led the captive Israelites to make confession. That was a necessary step before they would be ready for the deliverance that the Lord had promised from their captivity. Before they could be delivered from captivity, they had to own the sins that had led to their captivity in the first place.

For our transgressions are multiplied before You, And our sins testify against us;

This is how you make confession before God. With honesty. With humility. Not offering up any excuses. Not trying to justify yourself before God and explain why you had good reasons to rebel against His commandments. Not holding up all the good things you’ve done, as if they somehow outweighed the sins you’ve committed. Not holding yourself up next to someone else and saying, “I know I’m not perfect, but You know, Lord, I’m better than this guy.” No. Our transgressions are multiplied before You, and our sins testify against us.

For our transgressions are with us, and as for our iniquities, we know them: In transgressing and lying against the LORD, and departing from our God, speaking oppression and revolt, conceiving and uttering from the heart words of falsehood.

“Transgressing” means intentionally stepping over the line. God says, “Do this!”, and I say, “No, I don’t think I will.” God says, “Don’t do that!”, and I say, “Yeah, I’m gonna do that, no matter what You say.” “Iniquities” are perversions of God’s commandments, turning away from what God has commanded to what I want to do instead. The Israelites often did this with all Ten Commandments and with the civil and ceremonial laws as well. They often ignored God’s commandments and did what they wanted. Their society was supposed to be governed by God’s laws, but instead they became just as corrupt and godless as any secular society. “Lying against the Lord,” Isaiah says. Claiming to be servants of the true God while living contrary to the word and commandments of that God—and refusing to repent!

Justice is turned back, And righteousness stands afar off; For truth is fallen in the street, And equity cannot enter. So truth fails, And he who departs from evil makes himself a prey. (a target)

Justice, righteousness, truth—those were supposed to be the defining characteristics of the nation whose God was the LORD, as a nation and as individuals within the nation. But justice, righteousness, and truth never fully described Israelite society, and even less so by the time of the end, when God’s patience had run out and He sent the Babylonian armies against them.

Now, this condemnation certainly applies to our society as well. Justice is turned back, And righteousness stands afar off; For truth is fallen in the street, And equity cannot enter. So truth fails. It’s true. There is much injustice in our society and our world. Who can really trust the justice system in any country anymore? There is much unrighteousness in our society, where we have even come to disagree with God about what things are righteous and what things are unrighteous, promoting unrighteousness with practically every TV show, every movie, every ad, and most public policies. As for truth? People are perfectly content to pick and choose which parts of the Bible they accept as true and which parts they don’t. Hardly anyone believes anymore that God’s whole Word is truth, even in the most basic things like gender and marriage, or the murder of little children, much less the truth of salvation through faith alone in Jesus, the Christ, the Son of the living God. Even most who claim to be Christians don’t live or believe in line with the Bible anymore. And he who departs from evil, in today’s world, makes himself a target.

But Isaiah isn’t preaching to the society out there. No, the ones being led by the prophet Isaiah to confess are, first, the Israelites as the Church of God on earth at that time. And now, it’s all who claim to be part of the Church of God on earth at this time, that is, you and I and all who would call themselves Christians.

This is where it’s helpful to take out your Small Catechism and read through the Ten Commandments, with their little explanations, slowly, thoughtfully. Instead of a Lenten fast, I’m going to suggest to you that, during this Lenten season, in addition to making every effort to attend all our services together, you actually take out your Catechism, at home, and read through one of the six chief parts at least once, each week, for these six weeks of Lent, starting with the Ten Commandments. If you do that honestly and humbly, then you will surely be able to confess with Isaiah, our transgressions are multiplied before You, and our sins testify against us; For our transgressions are with us, and as for our iniquities, we know them. Maybe you’re guilty of willful transgressions against God’s Law which separate you from God’s grace and salvation, in which case, Repent! Confess your sins, before it’s too late! Or maybe you’ve been living in humble repentance and your sins are not willful and stubborn, but the every-day sins of weakness and unintentional offenses that all Christians commit. As St. John writes in his first Epistle, If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

It’s that forgiveness and cleansing that we seek. We don’t confess our sins just to get things off our chest, or to have a little cathartic exercise in feeling bad about ourselves for a while. We confess our sins so that God may forgive them, remove them from our account, and so that we may mend our ways and strive not to offend God and our neighbor.

In the rest of chapter 59, Isaiah holds out a sure hope for all the penitent. Then the LORD saw it, and it displeased Him That there was no justice. He saw that there was no man, And wondered that there was no intercessor; Therefore His own arm brought salvation for Him; And His own righteousness, it sustained Him.

For He put on righteousness as a breastplate, And a helmet of salvation on His head; He put on the garments of vengeance for clothing, And was clad with zeal as a cloak.

The Lord’s solution to Israel’s transgressions was to come and save them. There was no one else who could do it. They couldn’t save themselves. They couldn’t atone for their own sins, or make intercession for themselves. Because they were all guilty of sin. How can a guilty person make intercession for other guilty people? How can the unrighteous make intercession for the unrighteous? No, God devised His own solution. He would send His Son into human flesh. He would make atonement for our sins and transgressions and iniquities by suffering and dying on the cross, the Righteous for the unrighteous. He would make intercession for us, on the basis of His sacrifice, a holy Man, pleading for unholy men, “Father, forgive them!” It’s this zeal of the Lord Jesus for our salvation that we focus on during the Lenten season, our Lord and Savior, going into battle to save us from sin, death, and the devil.

According to their deeds, accordingly He will repay, Fury to His adversaries, Recompense to His enemies; The coastlands He will fully repay.

Anyone who has opposed or oppressed God’s people—and has refused to repent—will receive from the Lord Jesus, not love, not acceptance, not salvation, but judgment. Fiery judgment. The enemies and adversaries of God who refuse to repent of their sins will be repaid according to their deeds, with eternal condemnation. But God offers His enemies reconciliation through the blood of His Son. Repent and believe in Him, God says, and I will no longer count your sins against you, since I’ve already counted them against My beloved Son.

So shall they fear the name of the LORD from the west, And His glory from the rising of the sun; When the enemy comes in like a flood, The Spirit of the LORD will lift up a standard against him.

Why will people fear the name of the Lord? Both because of His just punishment against His enemies and because of His mercy and goodness in providing salvation for all who believe. Now penitent believers have no need to fear any enemy, especially the enemies of sin, death, and the devil, because the Spirit of Lord lifts up a standard against every enemy of God’s people: the preaching of Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

“The Redeemer will come to Zion, And to those who turn from transgression in Jacob,” Says the LORD.

There is God’s promise, to send Christ the Redeemer to Zion, that is, to His Church. But, again, He’s not coming to rescue those who wish to remain in their sins and transgressions, He’s coming to those who turn from them, first in their hearts, through repentance, and then in their lives, by putting to death the deeds of the flesh and by walking according to the new man, in righteousness and holiness.

“As for Me,” says the LORD, “this is My covenant with them: My Spirit who is upon you, and My words which I have put in your mouth, shall not depart from your mouth, nor from the mouth of your descendants, nor from the mouth of your descendants’ descendants,” says the LORD, “from this time and forevermore.”

God has kept this unlikely promise. He preserved Isaiah’s words of warning and comfort for the Jews held captive in Babylon. And He has preserved them for thousands of years more, so that they might reach even us in these last days. And He’ll continue to preserve His Word all the way up to the end of the world, when He brings about our final deliverance from every enemy and from every evil. God, for His part, will continue to provide His word and everything necessary for your salvation. As for you, continue to use His word and to put it into practice. May this Lenten season provide you with just such an opportunity: to hear and to ponder, to repent of your sins and be comforted by the length to which your God has gone to save you from them, to turn away from transgression, and to live a life devoted to keeping God’s commandments. Amen.

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A light for those sitting in darkness

Posted on February 11, 2024 by Rev. Paul Rydecki

Notice: The audio for the sermon, the video for the service, and the streaming for the service are not available today due to technical problems. You can access last year’s service for Quinquagesima by clicking this link.

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Sermon for Quinquagesima

1 Corinthians 13:1-13  +  Luke 18:31-43

All of you here today, I think, are able to see. Some better than others, surely. But none here have gone completely blind yet. It’s not as though we were guaranteed by God the ability to see in this world that’s plagued by sin’s consequences, but we should give thanks to Him for that often-taken-for-granted gift, if we still have it. The opposite of sight is, of course, blindness. And we often speak of two kinds of blindness: literal and figurative. Literal blindness is a problem with your two eyes. Figurative blindness is a problem of the mind or of the heart. If you can’t understand something at all, if you can’t see the path forward in your life, or if you can’t see the solution to a problem, even when it’s staring you in the face, it’s like a kind of blindness.

We encounter both kinds of blindness in today’s Gospel, figurative and literal, and, more importantly, we see how God provides the necessary light to those who sit in darkness.

First, there’s a figurative blindness in Jesus’ disciples. For months, Jesus has been telling them plainly that He is going to die. And it’s not going to be a natural death. Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and all the things that were written through the prophets concerning the Son of Man will be finished. For he will be delivered to the Gentiles, and he will be mocked and mistreated and spit upon. And they will scourge him and put him to death. And on the third day he will rise again.

There it is. A very simple, straightforward explanation, given by Jesus, of exactly what was going to happen to Him in Jerusalem. He’s been saying it just that clearly for at least six months. He is going to be handed over, by the Jews, to the Gentiles. He’ll be mocked and mistreated and spit upon. They will scourge Him and kill Him. And then He’ll rise from the dead. It’s like Jesus is shining a bright light on the path ahead.

And that wasn’t the only light shining on the path ahead. As He says, all the things that were written through the prophets concerning the Son of Man will be finished. The Old Testament Scriptures were a light shining on Him and on the path ahead of Him: the path of suffering and death, resurrection and glory. Between the Old Testament prophecies and the clear words of Jesus, the disciples should have been able to see it all clearly.

But they couldn’t. They understood none of these things; this saying was hidden from them, and they did not understand the things that were said. Even if the prophecies were a little obscure, the words of Jesus were crystal clear. But it clashed with the disciples’ own thoughts of what the Christ had come to do. They believed Jesus was the Christ. But they were so convinced that the Christ was coming to reign over Jerusalem that they couldn’t make any sense of this prediction of rejection, suffering, and death. It was the “glory” part that they were fixated on. What’s more, “it was hidden from them,” St. Luke writes. The Holy Spirit wasn’t ready for them to understand everything yet, so He kept them in the dark—not about who Jesus was, but about how exactly He would carry out His mission of bringing salvation to His people. In that way, Jesus’ disciples suffered from a sort of figurative blindness.

Then we encounter a man who was suffering, not from figurative blindness, but from literal blindness. His eyes didn’t work. He couldn’t see. And that left him with another problem. He couldn’t work. He was poor. He was a beggar.

But when that beggar heard the commotion of Jesus and the crowds passing by, he demonstrated that, though his physical eyes didn’t work, he was actually able to see better than most. Hearing the multitude passing by, he asked what it meant. And they told him that Jesus of Nazareth was passing by. And he cried out, saying, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” And those who were at the front warned him to be quiet, but he cried out all the more, “Son of David, have mercy on me! This blind beggar, a son of Israel, knew who Jesus of Nazareth was. Not just that He was a Rabbi who had been traveling around the land of Israel for the past three years. But that Jesus was “the Son of David,” the promised Christ. And not only that, but that, as the promised Christ, Jesus had come for people like him, to have mercy on those who needed mercy.

The crowds displayed a bit of their own figurative blindness here. They warned the blind man to be quiet, to leave Jesus alone, to respect their triumphal parade toward Jerusalem. They had lost sight of who Jesus was and why He had come. He was the good and kind Master, always generous with His time, always concerned for anyone in need, always ready to help. If they had started to see Him any differently than that, then they were blind—blinded by their own aspirations of glory and victory through their association with this King of the Jews. Oh, they saw Him as their King. But they obviously had no idea—even less understanding than Jesus’ disciples—of what the King of the Jews was actually going to Jerusalem to do. “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews” was written on the sign posted on the cross where Jesus died. And when the Jews saw it, most of them saw their “king” as a failure.

But Jesus wasn’t listening to the crowds telling the blind man to be quiet. He was listening to the blind man who was calling out to Him for mercy. And He stopped, and He asked the blind man, What do you want me to do for you? It’s not as obvious a question as you might think. This blind man had sat there at the entrance to Jericho every day for who knows how long, asking people for mercy, and by mercy, he normally meant, money. Charity. Alms for the poor. But not today. He doesn’t want money from Jesus. He wants what only the Son of David can provide: healing from his blindness. “Lord, that I may receive my sight!” And Jesus said to him, “Receive your sight! Your faith has saved you.” And as soon as the man was healed of his blindness, he followed Jesus, glorifying God. And all the people saw it and gave praise to God.

There are two kinds of blindness in this Gospel, one figurative and the other literal. But the solution to both was the same. Trust in Jesus. Keep trusting in Jesus, no matter how much you can see or not see. Recognize Him for who He is: the Son of God who came into this world to save sinners, and to do it by willingly allowing Himself to be delivered to the Gentiles, to be mocked and mistreated and spit upon, scourged and put to death, all so that you might see that God is good, that He loves you and has done everything necessary—everything imaginable—for you to be rescued from sin, from death, and from the devil.

So trust in Jesus and seek mercy from Jesus. Keep seeking it; don’t give up seeking it until you receive it. And you will! Follow Jesus. Keep following Jesus, even if the path leads to the cross. And it will! But it will also lead to the resurrection from the dead and eternal life. Eventually, when the time is right, if you’ve kept trusting in Him, seeking mercy from Him, and following Him, He will take care of whatever blindness you’re suffering from. You aren’t meant to see everything just yet. But blindness won’t be your downfall, if you keep hearing and believing the Word of God.

As for following Jesus, you can’t follow Him to Jerusalem literally. But you can figuratively as you hear His Word during the coming Lenten season, and especially during Holy Week when we will follow Jesus through all His suffering and “watch” Him die for our sins.

You can also follow Him by living like Him, following in His footsteps. And the Apostle Paul gave you a wonderful roadmap for that in today’s Epistle. The “love chapter” of the Bible. Love is patient. It is kind. Love does not envy. Love does not boast. It is not conceited. It does not behave indecently. It does not seek its own. It does not become angry. It does not dwell on evil. It does not rejoice in iniquity but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

What Paul describes there is, in a word, Jesus. If you would follow Him, then let it also describe you. Make every effort to walk in love, as Jesus walked in love, even though you don’t understand everything the Scriptures say, even though you don’t understand all that happens in the world, even though you don’t clearly see the path ahead. Because, as Paul also says in the Epistle, all of us have a degree of “blindness,” the inability to see things clearly this side of heaven. Now we see through a mirror, indistinctly; but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part; but then I will know fully, even as I am also fully known. And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Faith, hope, and love remain as the virtues God would have us pursue in this life, until all things become clear in the next life. So pursue them as you follow Christ. Follow Him blindly, if necessary, because, although you can’t see, He can see perfectly. So let Him take you by the hand and lead you. Let Him take you by the ear and lead you by His Word, which is, as St. Peter wrote, like a lamp shining in a dark place. Amen.

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