Jesus approaches death with compassion and a solution

Posted on September 20, 2026 by Rev. Paul Rydecki
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Sermon for Trinity 16

Ephesians 3:13-21 + Luke 7:11-17

Once every year, the Church Year urges us to deal, directly, with the topic of death. Not in a somber way, but in a sober way. Not in a mournful way, but in a serious way. Not in a hopeless way, but in a hopeful way. And, by the way, we can do that here, in a reverent, traditional worship setting, where people come to worship God in joyful humility, to hear the Word of God, and learn it, and meditate on it, in a way that the entertainment-driven churches simply can’t do. Imagine having a serious discussion about death, and grief, with a big screen and a band up here in the background, with its drum sets and guitars and speakers, revving up the audience with their so-called “worship music.” It just wouldn’t fit; it wouldn’t make any sense. But with a simple baptismal font, that reminds us of the death we died with Christ when we were baptized into His death, with an altar and a crucifix that remind us of Christ’s death on the altar of the cross as the sacrifice for our sins, with a pulpit that’s designed to communicate the message, “We preach Christ and Him crucified,” this is the perfect setting to talk about death.

We talk about it every Sunday to some degree, if you’re paying attention, because it’s the wages of sin that all people share in common. We all die, because we have all sinned. Without sin there would be no death. Sin is the reason why death exists. We talk about death every Sunday, because the Scriptures have been talking about it since the Garden of Eden in the second chapter of the Bible, as a warning in Genesis 2, since the Fall into sin in Genesis 3, since Cain’s killing of Abel in Genesis 4, and since the long litany of death in Genesis 5, “and he died, and he died, and he died, and he died.” Death is the problem that has plagued all mankind for our entire existence, and we would be foolish to gather here in God’s house to try to forget about that truth for a while, as if it didn’t exist.

On the other hand, we also talk about death every Sunday because it’s the very thing from which Christ, the Son of God, came to save us, the thing that He came to destroy for all who believe in Him, which is the hope of the Christian. Again, we preach Christ and Him crucified—crucified, which means put to death on a cross. But we also preach Christ risen from the dead, the firstfruits of all who believe. To ignore death would be to ignore the resurrection from the dead.

In today’s Gospel we see Jesus taking on death, and, as always, winning. Jesus solves the problem of death for the young man of Nain—just a little foretaste of what He will do for all believers on the Last Day.

Let’s hear again how Jesus tackled the problem. He was approaching a little city called Nain, the only time this city is mentioned in the Bible, making it all the more famous for the one big miracle that happened there on that day—the very first time, out of three, that Jesus raised someone from the dead (as far as the Gospels tells us). As Jesus approached, they were carrying a dead man out of the city, for burial. Luke tells us that he was a young man, and the only son of his mother, who was a widow. It’s hard to imagine a sadder situation. Death is always sad, but here, it’s a young man who dies young, leaving behind a grieving mother who had already lost her husband, and was now entirely alone, and would soon become destitute, as she had no one to provide for her any longer.

Now, as we said a moment ago, death is a reality of human existence, common to us all. You’d think that God, who has watched every human being die since Abel died at the hands of Cain would be unaffected by one more death. But that wasn’t the case. It wasn’t the case in any of the accounts where Jesus confronted death. Each time, He confronted it both with compassion, and with a solution.

Luke tells us that, When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her. Remember, Jesus’ compassion is God’s compassion. And His compassion for this one grieving mother is His compassion for every grieving mother, or father, or child. When death comes, God is not distant. He is very near. He is not uncaring. His heart goes out to the grieving. Even though, because of our sins, we all rightfully deserve the death penalty from God, He is not joyful about it when the penalty is imposed. He has compassion, the very compassion reflected in the face and demeanor of Jesus with the grieving widow of Nain.

And He said to her, Weep no more. Then he came and touched the coffin, and those who were carrying it stood still. And he said, “Young man, I say to you, arise!” And the dead man sat up and began to talk, and he gave him to his mother. Compassion, with a solution. In this case, the solution was immediate. By the power of the life-giving Spirit of God—power which God the Father had authorized His Son to exercise whenever and however He wished—Jesus brought the dead man back to life with a word. Death was no obstacle to the Son of God. On the contrary, He is the obstacle that death faces. And death doesn’t stand a chance.

Death is coming for each of us here, sooner or later, as it comes for every son and daughter of Adam and Eve. It comes for the violent criminal. It comes for the young who are entirely innocent, by human standards. It comes for the elderly, for men, women, and children, for widows and for the children of widows. It comes quickly and painlessly. It comes slowly and painfully. It is the enemy of the human race, unleashed against us all, because our first parents sided with the devil, chose the death penalty over obedience to God, and set us all on this path that leads from the cradle to the grave.

You all know what a terrible enemy death is. It causes pain. It causes grief. It results in separation and loss of companionship. It may involve financial hardship. But there is an even bigger problem than physical death and its consequences. We are body and soul creatures. And when the body gives out and dies, the soul doesn’t cease to exist. It goes somewhere, either to the everlasting death that is hell or to the everlasting life that is Paradise. And then it waits in its appointed place until the Last Day, to be reunited with a body that will be raised from the dead, to spend eternity in that same state, either of eternal blessedness in God’s presence or of eternal death, where, as Isaiah writes, their worm does not die, and their fire is not quenched.

Fools blame mindless evolution for death. (As the Psalm says, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God!’”) The rebellious and wicked want to blame God for death. “He could get rid of it, if He wanted to, but He doesn’t! He never had to impose it in the first place!” What is that, but just another way of saying, “People should be able to do whatever they want without consequences,” or, to put it even more bluntly, “We want to be God!” Which is exactly the temptation by which the devil convinced Eve to turn away from God, leaving us all, now, with the inborn sinful desire to be God, just as she did, to make the rules, and to answer to no one.

The truth is, God does have a plan to get rid of death. Yes, He justly imposed it on our race, and He didn’t have to make any plan to get rid of it. But He chose to. And that plan is unfolded before our eyes in the Christian Gospel. The Father would send His Son into human flesh, to provide the human righteousness that the rest of us lack, including the humbling of Himself before His heavenly Father, to do, not His own will, but the Father’s will. And the Father’s will was for His Son to die, to die a violent and painful death, accompanied by injustice and insults and shame, to die, on a cross, the human death that the rest of us deserve. We preach Christ and Him crucified.

But the Father’s plan didn’t end in death for His Son, as you know. It included a literal resurrection from the dead. It included the ministry of the Word that now preaches Christ crucified in the world, calling all men to repent of their sins and believe in the Lord Jesus, and promising the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation to all who believe. And, for as much as we may wish that God’s plan, God’s solution, included an immediate end of death in all its forms, that is not His solution. What He offers is a life, in this dying world, that is still subject to suffering, death, and decay. But with that life, He also offers a permanent home for your soul in His own house, starting now, a home that cannot be disturbed by death even a little bit. He offers the indwelling of His Holy Spirit now, as a downpayment in your mortal body, so that God is ever present with you, with His divine compassion, through every moment of pain and grief. And he offers an expiration date, not to your life, but to your death, so that, in the end, even your physical death is erased, defeated, and destroyed, becoming nothing more than a sleep from which you will awake into a new and far better life, where death no longer exists. This offer is sealed to you in Holy Baptism, repeated in every preaching of the Gospel, and renewed with you regularly through Holy Communion. And you have God’s promise that He will walk with you even through the valley of the shadow of death itself, until His solution reaches its fulfillment, for you and for all who believe.

Cling to that promise—now, and when death draws near. Your God is merciful, and full of compassion. And, as Paul assured us in today’s Epistle, He is able to do far, far more than we can ask or imagine. He has come up with the only possible solution to the problem of death: the life, death, and resurrection of His only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ, and the promise that all who are united to Christ will share in His life, will share in His death, and will share in His resurrection. May the Holy Spirit increase your determination to remain united to Christ, in life, death, and resurrection, and may He grant you divine comfort as you await, with hope, death’s ultimate demise. Amen.

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In God let us trust for our spiritual needs

Posted on September 16, 2026 by Rev. Paul Rydecki
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Sermon for the week of Trinity 15

Deuteronomy 6:4-7 + Acts 8:26-39

In God let us trust. Jesus urged His disciples, in Sunday’s Gospel, to turn away from our trust in Mammon, and to turn away from the worry that comes with trusting in Mammon, and to put our trust in God, our heavenly Father, who cares for us more than we can fathom, and who has promised to provide all that we need for this body and life, so that we don’t have to worry about it. We can give it to God to worry about it for us. Jesus’ words in Matthew 6 focused on our bodily needs. But what He said applies just as much to our spiritual needs, as we heard in our two Scripture Lessons this evening.

First, we heard about God’s usual way of providing for the spiritual needs of children. It’s through godly parents who have received His word, and who are now instructed to pass on that word to their children, to make it an integral part of their upbringing. These words which I command you today, said Moses, shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. Just as our heavenly Father sometimes provides food and clothing through the kindness of others, so He has set it up within His Church to provide spiritual teaching to Christian children through the diligence of Christian parents who love Him.

In addition to that—not in place of, but in addition—He provides pastors to teach the children of the congregation. “Feed My Lambs,” Jesus said to Peter, as the representative of the apostles. Pastors are part of God’s plan of providing for children spiritually.

Then, in our second Lesson, we heard how God provided for the spiritual needs of a grown man, a non-Jew, by ethnicity, an Ethiopian eunuch from the court of Queen Candace. Now, just to be accurate, the Ethiopia referred to in the book of Acts was not the modern country of Ethiopia. It was farther north, along the Nile River, the kingdom of Kush, or Nubia, in the northern part of what we now call the Sudan.

So we know roughly where the Ethiopian was from. We know he was a high court official, a “eunuch of great authority.” What else do we know about him? Well, we’re told that he had made the long journey to Jerusalem “to worship.” He was what was known as a proselyte, a Gentile who had adopted the religion of the Jews—adopted it so deeply that he made the long journey to Jerusalem to seek God in His temple, so deeply that, as he rode in his chariot—maybe more like a covered wagon, where he sat in the back—he was reading from the prophet Isaiah, which means he had spent the money to get a copy of it, which was no small feat in those days.

So here was a man who had come to know the true God, was devoted to worshiping Him and learning His word, but who had no teacher. He had not yet heard what the Old Testament prophecies were all about, or how Jesus of Nazareth had fulfilled them, how Jesus was the promised Christ, the Son of God, and the Savior in whom all men must believe if they are to be saved.

God didn’t allow this faithful man to return home still ignorant of the Gospel, to return home without a teacher. No, God provided exactly what he needed, and He did it miraculously, through a man named Philip.

Now Philip, later called an Evangelist, is first introduced to us in Acts chapter 6. He was one of seven men chosen and ordained by the Church in Jerusalem to help the apostles, specifically to serve the needy among the Gentiles in Jerusalem who had become Christians. Stephen, the first martyr, was one of those seven. But what do we find both Philip and Stephen doing? They’re not just waiting tables. They’re both out there preaching the Gospel, Stephen among the Jews in Jerusalem, and Philip here with the Ethiopian, where the Holy Spirit had personally sent him.

Go near and overtake this chariot, the Spirit somehow communicated to Philip. Now, either the chariot was going very slowly, or Philip was miraculously enabled to run and catch up to it. He heard the man reading aloud from the book of Isaiah, chapter 53, and asked, Do you understand what you’re reading? How can I, he replied, unless someone guides me?

Philip became that guide, provided directly by God. He explained how Jesus was the fulfillment of that very passage, led as a sheep to the slaughter and put to death, just as Isaiah had prophesied. But He was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities. And then He was raised from the dead, as Isaiah also prophesied in that same chapter, to give repentance, and forgiveness of sins, and eternal life to Israel and to all who believe in Him. Philip ministered to the spiritual needs of the Ethiopian man. And his teaching obviously included the teaching about Holy Baptism, too, because, as soon as they came to a little water there in the desert, the Ethiopian asked to be baptized. And Philip baptized him, and then miraculously disappeared. What became of that Ethiopian man after that, we don’t know. Scripture is silent. But we have this important testimony to the fact that God provides for the spiritual needs of those who seek sincerely seek Him, as the Ethiopian man did.

We’ve seen God’s extraordinary spiritual providence among us in a similar way. He’s provided a faithful congregation with a pastor, and a pastor with a congregation, both absolutely devoted to the Word of God and to confessing the truth of the Gospel. Neither can function without the other. And when Christians in other parts of the country sought the ministry of the Word, God provided for them, too, bringing them into our little church from afar. And there are other faithful ministers and congregations out there, too, some of which we know and are in fellowship with, others of which we don’t, yet. There is a tragic scarcity in the world, both of faithful pastors and of faithful Christians who are willing to make the sacrifices required to remain outside of the larger but less faithful churches. There are many Christians in the world who wonder, who maybe even worry, how can the ministry survive in such a hostile environment? Where will the pastors come from who aren’t false teachers, who have bound themselves to heterodox church bodies? Where will the congregations come from who don’t want programs or gimmicks or entertainment, but just the genuine ministry of Word and Sacrament?

In God let us trust. He knows those who are His. He hears the prayers of His children, begging Him to put them in contact with other Christians and with the ministry of His Word that’s untainted by falsehood. And you can trust in Him to provide.

But remember: Do not worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow’s church, tomorrow’s ministry is beyond what we can see, beyond what we can plan for, and certainly beyond what we should worry about. Use the ministry you’ve been given today, and give thanks for it today. Keep studying God’s Word, as the Ethiopian did, and place the spiritual needs of tomorrow into your heavenly Father’s wise, loving, and capable hands. Amen.

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In God let us trust

Posted on September 13, 2026 by Rev. Paul Rydecki
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Sermon for Trinity 15

Galatians 5:25-6:10 + Matthew 6:24-34

“In God we trust.” That phrase has been printed on U.S. coins since long before any of us here were born, printed on U.S. paper currency before many of us were born. In God we trust. Is it true of everyone who uses U.S. currency? Of course not. In fact, it’s ironic that the money that bears the phrase, “In God we trust” is often the very thing that people replace God with, and trust in it instead. See how the word “money” replaces “God” in the following statements: “Money will protect me. Money will keep me fed and warm. Money will ensure that I have what I need for this life. I live to serve money, to gain money, because where money is, there is true happiness.” If that’s our attitude, then it’s not, “In God we trust.” It’s, “In money we trust.”

But money is a tough god to please. You work for it, get it, spend it, and then it’s gone. Where did it go? It abandoned you! So you keep working for it, and you keep using it up. You spend it, but your needs never go away. And so the path of serving money is a lifelong path paved with worry. I need to get more, and more! It all comes down to me. Me, and my labor. Me, and my plans. Me, and my skill. I need to provide for myself and my family, with the help of my god, money.

That’s a pagan attitude, one that’s fitting for unbelievers. But Christians aren’t immune to it, this idolatry of money, this idolatry of self, and the worry that is one of the chief symptoms of serving such paltry gods. And so Jesus, in His Sermon on the Mount, works ever so gently to correct this dangerous attitude that can infect even His own disciples. He calls on us to do a 180 in our hearts, to turn away completely from trusting in and serving the god of money called Mammon, and from the worry that accompanies such service, and to turn instead toward trusting in and serving our heavenly Father, with the peace of mind that accompanies such service.

Our Gospel begins, “No one can serve two lords. For either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Mammon.” The notion that you can serve, or pursue, both earthly wealth and God is simply false, Jesus says. A lot of people think they can do both, but, Jesus says, they’re wrong. You can either live for God or live for earthly success. You can’t live for both. You may end up having both—having God and wealth, having God and earthly success, if God permits it. But you can’t live for both, pursue both, trust in both. It’s one or the other, Jesus says. In God we trust, or, in Mammon we trust.

 “Therefore I say to you, stop worrying about your life, what you will eat, or what you will drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? This sermon was originally preached mainly toward the poor in Israel. Not necessarily the poorest of the poor, or the homeless on the streets, but toward those who struggled to make ends meet, who didn’t have huge bank accounts or retirement accounts, who weren’t set for life, who didn’t have guaranteed job security, and who didn’t have any sort of welfare system to bail them out. Jesus was speaking mainly to people who were worried about basic necessities, people who weren’t wealthy enough to have the luxury of choosing which brand of food or which brand of clothing they wanted from the store, but who were used to having little more than daily bread and one or two sets of clothing. And so they were worried about their life, worried about basic survival.

Jesus says, Stop! Stop worrying about your life, that is, about how you’ll get the things you need in order to survive, like food and clothing. Life is more than food. The body is more than clothing. That’s the first reason not to worry about your life. When you treat this life like nothing more than running after the things you need to survive, you miss out on what life is really about, what life is really for, which He’ll get to in a moment.

Then He gives a second reason why it’s foolish to worry about your life. “Look at the birds of the air! They do not sow, nor do they reap, nor do they gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” God teaches us certain truths through His creation, and Jesus points to one of them here and spells it out for us. The birds don’t waste a moment of their short lives toiling to produce food for themselves. But the One who has created you and has adopted you back into His family through faith in Christ—your heavenly Father—sees to it that there is food there, in nature, for the birds to find. And you, as human beings, made in the image of God, redeemed by the blood of Christ, and sanctified by the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit—you are much more valuable in God’s sight than the birds. If He cares for them, He cares much more for you! If he provides for them, He will provide much more for you!

Then there’s a third reason why it’s foolish to worry about your life. “Which of you by worrying can add one foot to his stature?” Well, can you? Of course not. Worrying about something has exactly zero effect on the outcome. Allowing yourself to be consumed by anxiety doesn’t move you closer to what you want or further away from what you dread. It only causes harm for the worrier and for those in the worrier’s vicinity.

Jesus adds a fourth reason why it’s foolish to worry about your life. “And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they do not toil, nor do they spin. And yet I tell you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not dressed like one of these. Therefore, if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today stands and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? This is similar to the second reason Jesus gave. Look around at God’s providence in nature, even for inanimate things like flowers or plants. When He talked about the birds, He noted that you, God’s believing children, are much more valuable to God than they. Here, when talking about the flowers, Jesus emphasizes that God provides for them even though they only last for a moment, for a day, and then wither away or are cut down and burned up. But you, the ones who have believed in Jesus, who have been given the right to become children of God—your earthly life will last much longer than any flower, and, more importantly, you have an immortal soul and a body that will be made immortal at the resurrection. Your heavenly Father already gave His beloved Son into death for your sins, to purchase you for Himself. He has already clothed you, by faith, through Holy Baptism, in the robe of Christ’s righteousness. If you believe that, then how could you ever believe that He will fail to provide you with the clothing you need for your body? As Paul writes, He who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all, how will He not, along with Jesus, freely give us all things?

 “So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or, ‘What shall we drink?’ or, ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles chase after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. There’s reason number five why it’s foolish to worry about your life. The Gentiles—that is, the people who don’t know the true God, who have not yet been made His children through Holy Baptism—they chase after material things, earthly things. They spend their lives pursuing their careers so that they can get the things they need to live. In money they trust, because money is all they have to trust in. But you—you have a Father in heaven, who is above all, who sees all, who is almighty and all-powerful, and who has called you His children. And your Father knows what you need. You don’t have to chase after it. Your Father will bring it to you, whatever you need for this life, whether it’s food and clothing, or whether it’s things like companionship, or a spouse, or timely advice, or a helping hand.

You, the children of the heavenly Father, don’t have to make it your first priority to seek after these things. Instead, Jesus says, seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. To seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness means, first and foremost, to make it your first and highest priority to know the true God, to listen to His Word, to do as St. Paul says, to count all things here as rubbish, that you may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having your own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith. Your primary purpose as a human being is to know Jesus, to seek God the Father’s approval through Christ Jesus, and then to walk in step with the Holy Spirit, all the way to your grave, or to the Last Day, whichever comes first. Part of that walking in step with the Spirit is to help your fellow Christians along on this journey, and also to keep inviting non-Christians to know the Lord so that they may join you on this journey.

Seeking first God’s kingdom and His righteousness means turning your heart away from Mammon, away from earthly gain, away from worry, and turning it instead toward God, trusting that, as you seek Him, you’ll have all that you need here, because He’ll see to it for you. Leave it up to Him. That doesn’t mean, “Don’t bother working,” or, “Don’t bother going to the store to buy food or clothes.” It means, devote your life to God and to doing what’s righteous or right, which will include working, if you’re able to work, but not work for the sake of survival. Work for the sake of using your talents and your opportunities to serve God. And when I say “work,” that includes the work of a faithful Christian wife and mother of making a good and godly home for her family. It includes the work of Christian children doing their chores and honoring their parents. It includes the work of retired Christians setting aside the worldly notion of cramming as much enjoyment into their final years as possible, and, instead, still seeking God’s kingdom and His righteousness before anything else.

To sum it all up, Jesus concludes, Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. It is enough for each day to have its own trouble. Leave tomorrow, with all its troubles, with all its uncertainties, in your Father’s capable hands. Cast all your cares on Him, Peter writes, because He cares for you. In God we trust. In God let us trust! And let us find rest and respite in His goodness, in His wisdom, and in His unfailing Fatherly care. Amen.

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Chosen to offer acceptable sacrifices

Posted on September 9, 2026 by Rev. Paul Rydecki

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Sermon for the week of Trinity 14

1 Peter 2:4-10

The cry for mercy. The cry of thanksgiving for mercy received. As we discussed on Sunday, those two acts sum up the Christian life. Peter has something to say, especially about the second part, in the Second Lesson you heard this evening.

It starts with Jesus, and coming to Jesus, which is what faith is—coming to Jesus, relying on Jesus for the promised rest, forgiveness, and mercy of every kind. Coming to Him as to a living stone, rejected indeed by men, but chosen by God and precious. Here Peter, like the Old Testament prophets, compares Jesus, the Messiah, to a stone. He is the stone that shatters every human government and that fills the earth when He comes, as Daniel interprets King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. He is a stone in the road that men stumble over, as the Psalmist describes, the stone that men reject as useless and want nothing to do with, which Jesus experienced during His earthly ministry and which treatment remains to this day as most people either reject the Jesus of the Bible entirely, or recreate Him in a more palatable form. And He is the precious, perfect stone that God the Father has chosen, has sent, has laid down as the cornerstone of the only building in the whole world that God Himself inhabits, the building that is His house, His temple, His Holy Christian Church—the one Jesus promised to build on the rock that was Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God.

And, just as Jesus referred to Peter as a stone, so Peter refers to all Christians as stones. You also, as living stones, are being built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. Living stones. Your relationship to Jesus, the chosen, precious cornerstone, makes you into stones, too. Not inanimate objects, but living stones, filled with the life that flows from God, the “fountain of living waters,” as Jeremiah referred to him in tonight’s First Lesson. And yet not stones scattered around on the ground, but being built together, with all the other living stones, into God’s house, into God’s church where He dwells by His Spirit.

Not only are Christians stones. We’re also a holy priesthood, and this is where we get into the sacrifices of thanksgiving. Notice, Peter isn’t writing to ministers. He’s writing to all Christians and calls all of them a holy priesthood, which we sometimes refer to as the priesthood of all believers. The two main functions of the priesthood are approaching God with requests, and approaching God with sacrifices. In this New Testament, Christ is the only High Priest, and the only one who offered the sacrifice for sin, His own life, given into death as the sufficient payment for all the sins of mankind. But that still leaves believers, as priests, with the privilege of bringing our prayers and requests before God, and with the duty to offer sacrifices of thanksgiving—spiritual sacrifices, Peter calls them, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. Not apart from Him, but through Him, as our one true Mediator and High Priest of the New Testament.

Ministers or pastors are not rightly even called “priests” in this New Testament, except insofar as we, too, are believers and part of the priesthood of all believers. All believers bring our prayers and our sacrifices of thanksgiving to God. In that respect, the minister is simply the leader and the guide. He isn’t the one “doing” the praying, or the worshiping, or the sacrificing. He’s guiding the rest of the priests in it, with the care of a shepherd who is entrusted with guiding the sheep and seeing to it that all things are done in a decent and orderly way, as God commands. We all approach God together. We all offer our petitions and our sacrifices together. It’s the other duty of the ministry that belongs to the minister alone, namely, to bring and apply the Word of God to the people, to speak and act on Christ’s behalf, calling to repentance, and forgiving sins to the penitent. So remember, it is your priestly privilege and duty to bring your sacrifices before God, here in our worship services, and in your daily lives. Your prayers, your attention, your songs, your participation here, your hearing of God’s Word and your putting it into practice, and your bearing of the cross with patience—these are your sacrifices, as members of the holy priesthood, and they are acceptable to God, through Jesus Christ.

Therefore it is also contained in the Scripture, “Behold, I lay in Zion A chief cornerstone, elect, precious, And he who believes on Him will by no means be put to shame.” God the Father spoke these words long ago through the prophet Isaiah. His purpose was always the sending of the Christ to Israel, that all in Israel might believe in Him and be saved from every trouble. He was “elect” or “chosen” by the Father before the foundations of the world were laid, to bring salvation to Zion, and from Zion, from Jerusalem, to the ends of the earth.

Therefore, to you who believe, He is precious… That is, you believers know Jesus to be precious to the Father, and you treasure Him as the precious Savior sent to you from the Father’s side. But to those who are disobedient, that is, who do not believe the Gospel, to those who continue in their sins, “The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone,” and “A stone of stumbling and a rock of offense.” It was also prophesied in the Old Testament that most of Israel would reject their Messiah, would consider Him worthless, would refuse to build upon Him or be built into Him. That’s a rejection that continues in Israel and among most of mankind still today. They don’t want Jesus. They don’t want His word—or they want to pick and choose which of His words they’ll accept and which they’ll throw away. But man’s rejection of the Christ doesn’t get in God’s way. The Father made Jesus the chief cornerstone of the Church by raising Him from the dead. And now, the same Jesus who is the cornerstone of Christianity is the stumbling block for the rest of mankind. They can’t get rid of Him. If they won’t build upon Him, then they will stumble over Him. And they will perish eternally.

They stumble, Peter writes, being disobedient to the word, to which they also were appointed. The word of God, both Old and New Testament, points all men to Jesus. But people want to believe what they want to believe. And so they stumble, and fall. All who reject God’s word have been appointed to this stumbling and falling—not predestined to it, as if God caused them to stumble, but appointed to it, in that God has appointed all unbelievers to crash and burn because of their stubborn unbelief, because they refuse to build upon Christ.

But you—you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light; you, who once were not a people but are now the people of God, who had not obtained mercy but now have obtained mercy.

You, Peter says, you Gentile Christians, who had no part in the Old Testament people of Israel, are now part of God’s chosen and elect people. You who once served idols have now been appointed as royal priests. You who at one time were part of the mass of humanity hurtling headlong toward hell have now been separated from the earthly nations that are perishing and have been made a holy nation that will live forever. God’s own special people, chosen by God, chosen for a purpose: to offer the priestly sacrifice of praise. You cried out for mercy and received it. Now cry out with thanksgiving, like the one leper who was cleansed, and make it part of your daily, priestly service. Amen.

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This is love for God: A cry for mercy, a cry of thanks

Posted on September 6, 2026 by Rev. Paul Rydecki
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Sermon for Trinity 14

Galatians 5:16-24 + Luke 17:11-19

In last week’s Gospel, we heard, again, the summary of God’s Law, what God’s will is for mankind: To love God with our whole selves, and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. In that parable, the focus was on the neighbor. The Good Samaritan taught us how Christians are to love our neighbor, by always being willing to show mercy to the one in our path. But that, obviously, isn’t our posture toward God. We don’t love Him by showing Him mercy. How do we love God, then? The account of the Ten Lepers gives us an example of that. Love toward God, which always flows from faith in God, expresses itself in one of two ways. Either with a cry for mercy to the God whom we love, or with a cry of thanksgiving for mercy received from the God whom we love.

Our Gospel begins with ten lepers, ten men (most of whom were Jews, although at least one was a Samaritan, like the Good Samaritan from last week’s parable) who were afflicted with that terrible skin disease called leprosy. It forced them to live alone, separated from the rest of society. It forced them into poverty, because they couldn’t work. And it forced them away from God’s temple and from all the religious ceremonies that were part of Jewish life. To suffer from leprosy was a miserable existence.

But these ten men had found a ray of hope! They had heard of this Jesus of Nazareth—of His kindness and goodness to people in their misery, of His claim to have been sent by God, and of His ability to perform miracles of healing that only God could perform. They had heard. And they believed!

That believing, that beginning of faith, gave birth to their first work of love. They cried out from a distance, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us! Now, you may not think immediately of a cry for mercy as an act of love, and it isn’t always. A defendant in court may beg the judge for mercy, or a person who is being robbed and threatened at gunpoint may beg the robber for mercy, not as an act of love, but as an act of desperation, an act of fear. But where there is faith in God, and in the mercy He has promised for Christ’s sake, that cry for mercy isn’t an act of fear. It’s the response of a believer who knows that God is good, that God is merciful, that God has promised to help in times of trouble. It’s an act of worship, actually, to call upon God’s name in every trouble, seeking His mercy, and trusting in His goodness. It’s the first act that flows from faith. It’s an act of love.

Now, the cry for mercy, the “Kyrie, eleison” that the lepers cried (Kyrie is the Greek word for “Lord” and eleison is the Greek word for “have mercy!”) was very specific. They were asking for the mercy of healing from their leprosy. But the plea, “Have mercy! Eleison!” is all-inclusive. Kyrie eleison covers every need of body and soul, all in one word. Do you have guilt that needs God’s forgiveness? “Have mercy!” Are you in some kind of trouble? “Have mercy!” Are you praying for someone else who needs help, or is in trouble, or is sick or dying? “Have mercy!” Do you look at the evil world and have no idea how to cope with it any longer? “Have mercy!” It covers everything. We cry to God for mercy, because we believe in Him. We trust in Him. The very act of crying out to God for mercy, crying out to Him as your highest good and as your faithful Rock of refuge, is a form of love for God. That’s how He sees it. And He is pleased with it, whenever it flows from believing hearts.

Then the other part of love for God comes after God has shown His mercy, yet again.

Jesus, the Master, had mercy on the ten lepers. Go, He said. Show yourselves to the priests. The priests were the ones charged in Israel with diagnosing leprosy, registering a person as an unclean leper, and with diagnosing that a leper was no longer leprous, and then performing the cleansing rituals prescribed in God’s Law, so that the one who was clean of leprosy could become ceremonially clean again and reenter Jewish society. Jesus didn’t even need to say the words, “Be healed!” The healing was to be assumed, or else there would be no reason for them to show themselves to the priests.

And all ten got it. They went, as Jesus commanded. And it happened that, as they went, they were cleansed. The Lord had mercy on them, just as they had requested.

Then we see the other form of love for God, although we only see it in the one leper, not in the other nine. The one leper, a Samaritan at that, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, glorifying God with a loud voice. And he fell down on his face at Jesus’ feet, thanking him.

God shows all kinds of mercy to the unbelieving world, and it either goes unnoticed or unappreciated. But when God shows mercy to those who believe in Him, there will be a response of love in the form of thanksgiving. A cry of thanksgiving will proceed from the mouth of the believing recipient of mercy. But, notice, the leper didn’t just stop on the road, say a word of thanks up into the heavens, and then keep going. His feet took him back to where Jesus was located on earth. His knees took him to the ground at Jesus’ feet. His mouth spoke words of thanks and praise to Jesus, His God. And, of course, behind it all, was a heart that overflowed with thankfulness for the mercy he had asked for and received. The act of saying “Thank you” to God is love for God.

In fact, every genuine act of service to God, every act of obedience to His commandments, is, for the believer, an act, or a sacrifice, of thanksgiving. The entire life of the believer, who has received the mercy of God in so many forms, the greatest of all being the suffering and death of the Son of God for our sins, is obedience to God as a way of saying “Thank you” to God, which is a form of love. This is love for God, John writes: to keep His commandments.

St. Paul outlined the same thing for us in today’s Epistle. The life of the believer is to be characterized by love for God, walking by the Spirit, being led by the Spirit of God in every form of goodness and godliness, while struggling against every form of uncleanness and sin. To walk by the Spirit, to renounce the practices of wickedness—this is love for God. This is our daily practice of giving thanks.

And so we have the two basic forms of love for God highlighted in today’s Gospel: Crying out to Him for mercy, and saying “Thank you” to Him, both with our lips and with our lives, for His mercy.

If you think about it, practically all our hymns can be categorized either as prayers for mercy, or songs of thanksgiving. The same is true of all our prayers. The same is true of our liturgical responses. The same is true of the reverence we show while we are gathered here in the special presence of God. “Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there I am in the midst of them,” Jesus said. The same is true of your attentiveness to the sermon. The same is true of our celebration of the Sacrament of the Altar, which is appropriately called, “The Eucharist,” the Thanksgiving. Cries to God for mercy, and forms of saying “Thank you” to God for His mercy summarize the whole pattern of our worship, and the whole pattern of “loving the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.”

But, we note in our Gospel a breakdown in the pattern. Now, where the “have-mercy” cry is missing, faith itself is clearly absent. We saw that in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector a few weeks ago, didn’t we? The Pharisee had no cry for mercy on his lips, revealing the absence of faith in his heart, whereas the only plea of the tax collector was, “have mercy!,” revealing the faith in his heart by which he was justified. Well, in today’s Gospel, we have the “have mercy” cry of faith from all ten lepers. But then, what happened? Jesus said, “Were not all ten cleansed? But where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give glory to God except for this foreigner?” Love only reached its fulfillment in one of the nine. The initial love of crying out to Jesus for mercy was not completed with the love of thanksgiving.

Where the “thank-you” cry is missing, faith is faltering, possibly dying, possibly already dead. A word of thanks is the first act of a believer who treasures the mercy he has received from God, and a life lived in obedience to God’s commandments is how that life continues. When no heartfelt giving of thanks takes place for mercy received, when no obedience to God’s commandments follows, when no walking by the Spirit happens, then something is very wrong. The nine in the Gospel are not excused by Jesus. His words highlight a problem in their failure to return, an expectation that was not met in those nine recipients of His mercy.

You can probably identify the same problem in yourself at times. Even though you’re a Christian, there are surely times when you’ve cried out for God’s mercy, for His help, and have received a fresh dose of mercy from God, in any number of ways, and then took it for granted, or failed to acknowledge it with a word of thanks. Worse yet, some Christians receive the mercy of God’s forgiveness on Sunday, only to go out and live unthankful lives during the week, ignoring or openly rebelling against God’s commandments. That is not love for God. Not in the least.

And so, even as today’s Gospel account is a lesson in what love for God looks like in the believer’s life, it also serves as a call to repentance, and as an encouragement to acknowledge just how great Christ’s mercy truly is, in that He promises to forgive even our thanklessness, when we acknowledge it before Him. And so, inspired by His promise, we cry out again for His mercy. And He gives it! He gave it earlier in the absolution. He gives it now in the sermon. He will give it again in the Holy Communion of His body and blood, which were given and shed for these and for all sins. And then, renewed again by His mercies, which are new every morning, you are urged to give thanks again. Which you’ve been doing in the service until now, and which you will do again when you celebrate the Eucharist, the Thanksgiving, where we both cry out to the Lamb of God to have mercy on us, and give thanks to God for giving us the very body and blood of Jesus as a token of the forgiveness won for us by the giving and shedding of that very body and blood.

As you live out this life of faith, this pattern of crying out for mercy and giving thanks for God’s mercy, be assured that the words of Jesus to the one leper who returned are also constantly being spoken to you: Rise and go. Your faith has saved you. Rise and go, and let Eleison—Have mercy!, and “Thank You for Your mercy!” never depart from your lips, or from your lives. Amen.

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