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Sermon for Trinity 17
Ephesians 4:1-6 + Luke 14:1-11
You heard in today’s Epistle a powerful encouragement from the Apostle Paul. He said, I, the prisoner in the Lord, implore you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you were called, with all humility and meekness, with patience, bearing with one another in love. According to St. Paul, you Christians, you baptized believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, have a “calling.” You have been “called,” called by the Holy Spirit, through the Gospel. In fact, the very word “Church” in the Greek New Testament comes from a word that means “called out.” The Church is the little congregation of baptized believers, scattered around the world, that has been “called out.” And yet, not only “called out,” but also “called to.” St. Peter, in his first Epistle, puts it just that way: You have been called out of darkness, he says, to God’s marvelous light, called out of ignorance to knowledge, called out of the devil’s kingdom into God’s kingdom, called out of the slavery to sin into the service of righteousness, called out of unbelief to repentance and faith.
Today’s Gospel also highlights the Christian’s calling “out of” or “away from” a certain place and our calling “to” another place. Through the Gospel, the Holy Spirit calls us away from a place of indifference to a place of love. He calls us away from a place of pride to a place of humility.
Away from a place of indifference to a place of love. We see that in the first part of today’s Gospel. Jesus had been invited to a Sabbath-Day dinner at the home of one of the rulers of the Pharisees. And there was a man there at the supper who suffered from dropsy, a painful swelling in the arms or legs—often a sign of heart failure. Jesus had miraculously healed many diseases before this. And some of those healings had taken place on the Sabbath Day, the day of rest, according to the Third Commandment under the Law of Moses. And each time Jesus had healed on the Sabbath Day, the Pharisees and other Jews had gotten very angry, both at Him and at those who dared to be healed by Him on the day when they were all supposed to be resting.
So Jesus knew that the Pharisees would be watching Him at this supper. But He also knew that the man in front of Him, the man with dropsy, needed help—the kind of healing help only Jesus was able to offer. But before performing the healing, He had a lesson to teach the Pharisees. He asked them, Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath? According to God’s Law, in context, it was. The commandment prohibited doing “work” on the Sabbath day for a person’s own benefit, working your job, your farm, your kitchen, your yard, etc. But works of love, good works to help a person’s neighbor in an emergency—even good works to help a needy animal!—were not forbidden. Not by God, at least.
But these experts in the Law remained silent. They weren’t there to discuss God’s Word with Jesus. And they certainly weren’t there to seek help for this sickly man. They didn’t care about either; they had become indifferent to both—to both God and their neighbor—and, instead, were only there to carry out their own agenda to watch Jesus and to catch Him in a trap.
But Jesus cared, both about God’s Word and about His neighbor. He healed the man and let him go. And then He still wanted these men to confront their own lovelessness, to admit it, to repent of it. So He asked again, Which of you, if your ox or donkey fell into a pit, would not immediately pull it out on the Sabbath day? They all would, and they knew it. They wouldn’t sit back and “rest on the Sabbath” while their pack animal needed their help. But when it came to their own flesh and blood, their neighbor, their brother, their friend, their fellow church member—no, they didn’t care enough about him to intervene. They cared more about their agenda than they cared about their neighbor, so they still refused to answer Jesus.
Today, God would call you away from the indifference that still dwells in your sinful flesh to a place of love—love for God’s Word, so that you actually care what He says, so that you know His commandments, in context, and don’t try to twist His Word for your comfort, for your convenience, or for your own selfish purposes; and love for your neighbor, so that you actually care about your neighbor, being ready to go out of your way to help him, no matter what day of the week it may be. And sometimes, “love” means speaking hard truths to your neighbor, even as Jesus spoke hard truth to the Pharisees in today’s Gospel, exposing their indifference. Here, in this Gospel, God calls all people away from indifference, to repentance, to faith, and to love. And if you’re a baptized Christian, you have not only received but accepted that calling. Now walk in a manner worthy of it.
In a similar way, Christians have been called away from a place of pride to a place of humility.
Jesus witnessed this all-too-familiar pride at that same Sabbath dinner. He watched the guests arrive, and He saw how each one made a beeline for the place of highest honor at the dinner table, for the seats reserved for the most important guests, each one assuming that the host favored him the most, each one thinking, “Surely the host wants me to have the place of honor. So I’ll go ahead and seize it for myself.”
That provided Jesus with an opportunity to tell a parable about choosing one’s place at someone else’s dinner. He uses the example of a wedding banquet, but it’s a parable, so He isn’t really giving them advice for the proper etiquette at a banquet. He’s comparing the kingdom of heaven, the Church of God, to a wedding banquet. When you are invited by someone to a wedding, do not sit down in the place of highest honor. Otherwise, if someone more honorable than you has been invited by him, the one who invited you both may come and say to you, ‘Give this man your place.’ Then, with shame, you will proceed to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down in the lowest place, so that, when the one who invited you comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher!’ Then you will have honor in front of all those who are sitting at the table with you.
As I said, Jesus isn’t interested in earthly wedding banquet behavior. He’s interested in saving people from sin, death, and the devil, and He knows the danger of thinking highly of oneself when it comes to God.
God is the Host of the banquet. He is the One who invites everyone to come into His kingdom. But how you come in is incredibly important. If you want to approach God with pride, as someone who thinks he deserves recognition, who has worked hard and earned a place in heaven and whom God is lucky to have by His side, if you approach God on your own terms, with your own beliefs, doing what you think is right (regardless of what He has to say about it in His Word), that’s like making a beeline for that place of highest honor and seizing it for yourself. But if you do that, you’re going to be in big trouble, because the Host of the heavenly feast will come in and see you sitting there, all proud of yourself, assuming you’re more deserving than the rest. If He finds you sitting there, He will tell you to get up and give your place to someone else. You’ll be disgraced before God and men. And when Jesus says in His parable that you’ll have to go down to the lowest place, what He means is, you won’t have a place in God’s presence at all. You’ll be ushered out of His kingdom into eternal darkness.
On the other hand, if you approach God, as He has invited you to do, in humility, as someone who acknowledges he deserves nothing from God, who recognizes that he has no righteousness of his own to offer God, who has earned only wrath and punishment from the just and holy God, who only looks to God for the mercy and favor He has promised to poor sinners for the sake of Jesus Christ, who died for you so that you might be acceptable to His heavenly Father, if you approach God on His terms, listening to His Word and believing in His Son Jesus Christ, leaving your life, your future, and your honor in God’s hands, to do with you as He pleases, that’s like choosing the lowest place at the banquet. And if God finds you sitting there, you’re safe, because the Host of the heavenly feast has already told you what He will do. He will come in and see you sitting there, where Jesus told you sit, and He will tell you to get up and go to a higher place, to a place of glory, to the place of a son or a daughter of God, to a place of eternal life.
Jesus summarizes it this way: For whoever exalts himself will be humbled; and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. To exalt yourself is to lift yourself up, to look at yourself and take pride in yourself, and, in so doing, to place yourself above God and man. But the Holy Spirit, through the Gospel, has called you away from that. He has called you to recognize pride as the devil’s own attitude, to turn away from it, and to turn, instead, to a place of humility. To humble yourself means to lower yourself, with the sure hope that God won’t leave you in the dust.
Called away from indifference to love. Called away from pride to humility. In the end, the calling you have received is nothing other than the call to be imitators of God, the call to be like Jesus. When you read this Gospel, you can’t help but think of what Paul wrote to the Philippians in chapter 2: Let this mind be in you all, which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped. But He emptied Himself, taking upon Himself the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men. And being found in the form of a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross. For love of you, for love of everyone, Jesus humbled Himself, lowered Himself all the way down to death on a cross. But God the Father didn’t leave Him in the dust. Paul goes on: Therefore God highly exalted Him and gave Him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. See how highly the Father has exalted Jesus, after He humbled Himself. You have His promise that the same will be done for you, if you humble yourself before Him.
Here, in this Gospel, God calls all people away from indifference to love, from pride to humility. He calls all people to know and to believe in His Son, Jesus Christ, and then to imitate Him, to walk in His footsteps. If you’re a baptized Christian, you have not only received but accepted that calling. Now walk in a manner worthy of it, with all humility and meekness, with patience, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace: one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above you all, and through you all, and in you all. Amen.
