Emmanuel Lutheran Church

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Sermon for the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity

Ephesians 4:1-6  +  Luke 14:1-11

In the Epistle, you heard these words of instruction from the Apostle Paul: I, therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you to walk worthy of the calling with which you were called, with all lowliness and gentleness, with longsuffering, bearing with one another in love. It’s as if St. Paul had just finished reading our Gospel for today, where Jesus both taught and demonstrated that very same thing.

In the Gospel, Jesus was invited to a banquet on the Sabbath. It was the home of a ruler of the Pharisees, and they were watching Him closely, not in lowliness or gentleness, not with longsuffering, not in love. They were watching Him to try to trap Him.

But still, they were watching. They were listening. So He bore with them in love and taught them.

The first lesson came as a man with dropsy came before Jesus. (Dropsy, by the way, is a sickness that causes a person’s body to swell up with extra fluid.) Jesus could have just healed the man, but He wanted the watching Pharisees to watch and to consider the question: Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?

They had been saying “no” to that question for quite a while and condemning Jesus for doing it on other occasions—for healing sick or demon-possessed people on the Sabbath. But when the sick man is standing right in front of them in the house, they suddenly have nothing to say.

They had forgotten what humility and gentleness are. They had abandoned mercy and compassion. They had turned the good Sabbath Law into a loveless, joyless task to be checked off on their religious scorecard. They had made it into a day for them to exalt themselves over others, at least in their own minds, by their strict observance of the command to rest. They were just like their fathers in Isaiah’s day who ignored God’s will that they should help their neighbor and instead pretended to be righteous because they outwardly worshiped God with fasting.

But God rebuked them: Is it a fast that I have chosen, A day for a man to afflict his soul? Is it to bow down his head like a bulrush, And to spread out sackcloth and ashes? Would you call this a fast, And an acceptable day to the LORD? Is this not the fast that I have chosen: To loose the bonds of wickedness, To undo the heavy burdens, To let the oppressed go free, And that you break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, And that you bring to your house the poor who are cast out; When you see the naked, that you cover him, And not hide yourself from your own flesh?

The Pharisees were hiding themselves from their sick brother, hiding behind a Sabbath commandment so that they didn’t have to help him. Not that they could help him with his dropsy. But Jesus could.

What gentleness on the part of Jesus! What humility! God has come into their midst, and yet instead of tearing into them for their indifference toward the sick man, instead of bringing judgment down on them for putting a religious façade on their hatred for their neighbor, Jesus humbles Himself to teach them, to teach us what kindness looks like, what Law-keeping looks like. Which of you, having a donkey or an ox that has fallen into a pit, will not immediately pull him out on the Sabbath day? Of course you help your neighbor on the Sabbath, if you are able. He’s much more valuable than an animal. Of course it was lawful to heal on the Sabbath, and they should praise Him instead of condemning Him. They should believe in Him instead of rejecting Him.

But they still couldn’t admit it to Jesus, even after watching Him perform a miracle and listening to His sound, Scriptural reasoning. That’s a powerful condemnation. They saw His great love and kindness in action, combined with His divine healing power, combined with His flawless illustration of helping their suffering animals on the Sabbath, and they still couldn’t admit that He was right and that they had been wrong about the Sabbath, about themselves, and about Him. “Forget about helping my neighbor,” they thought. “The Sabbath day is about me, me and my obedience, me and my resting, me and my right to sit in judgment of Jesus.”

Let Jesus’ kindness here toward the man with dropsy and toward the Pharisees stir you to love and trust in Him. He has seen your own self-centeredness and self-importance, your lack of lowliness and gentleness. He has seen you hiding from your own flesh, making excuses for yourself about why you’re right not to help your brother in his need, why you’re right not to honor and obey your parents. He calls you to repent and to believe in Him who was lowly and gentle, kind and good, in your place, who suffered and died for you in order to grant you the forgiveness of sins.

Now, learn more of the same lesson from Jesus as He gives some much needed counsel to the guests at this banquet.

Jesus watched the guests choose the seats of greatest honor for themselves at this feast, ever self-seeking, self-serving. “Me first! I should get what I want. I’m going to take whatever I want. I deserve a place of honor. I deserve recognition, more than these people around me.”

Jesus shows them how foolish they are, how foolish it is to seek honor for yourself above your fellow guests, when only the one who invited you to the banquet has the right to bestow that honor, when only his opinion counts. He can remove you from your self-chosen place of honor in an instant and shame you before your fellow guests. Or, he can move you up. He can exalt you before your fellow guests. Which is better? To be humbled by the host or to be exalted by Him? Isn’t it better to let Him exalt you? Isn’t it only fitting and right that you should walk humbly before your God, trusting in Him to notice you, to remember you, and to have mercy on you in due time? If His opinion matters most, then what does it matter if you don’t get as much honor or as many earthly benefits as the people around you? What does it matter if you sit in last place for a long time, or even for your whole earthly life? Just assume the lowest place and be happy there. As the Psalmist prays, For a day in Your courts is better than a thousand. I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of wickedness.

Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted. That’s the summary of Jesus’ teaching at the Pharisee’s house. And it’s what He taught with His whole life.

Who has exalted himself, but man over God? From Adam and Eve who played God in the Garden, to the idolaters who set up their own beliefs over God’s Word, to the false teachers who play God by substituting their lies for God’s truth, to the murderers all over our country and our world who play God in taking the lives of their fellow men, to the adulterers and sexually immoral who play God by taking His gifts reserved for marriage and use them as they see fit, to the coveters who play God by setting their hearts on things God has not given, to the Pharisee in us all who thinks he is more righteous than his neighbor, and even more righteous than God.

And who has humbled Himself, but the Son of God, who became Man? From His humbling of Himself to become our brother and to live as a servant, to His humble dealings with sinners, to His suffering and death for our sins, even the death of a cross, Christ Jesus has humbled Himself, out of pure love for His Father and for the human race, and now He has been exalted to the highest place and given the name that is above every name. Jesus is the One who walked humbly before God and man, and now has been exalted.

Now He calls out in the Gospel, Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.

You have heard His call to humble yourselves in repentance and to believe in Him, the lowly and gentle One, for your salvation. You have been buried with Him through Baptism into death and have risen with Him, and so you have been called to share in His exaltation, too, all in good time.

For now, as St. Paul writes as he sits in prison for his selfless preaching of the Gospel, walk worthy of the calling with which you were called, with all lowliness and gentleness, with longsuffering, bearing with one another in love.

This walking humbly before God and man is how Christians are to walk worthy of our calling, because we all share a common Lord, a common faith, and a common Baptism. Remember into whom you were baptized. Remember His lowliness and gentleness, and learn to imitate Him. Seek the lowest place for yourself, as Christ did for Himself, and know that God will not abandon you there. If we endure, we shall also reign with Him. Amen.

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Sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity

Ephesians 3:13-21  +  Luke 7:11-17

Today our nation remembers the death and destruction that occurred 15 years ago today, on 9/11, 2001. We’ll mention that briefly later on.

For now, I’d like you to remember that it was 24 weeks ago today that we celebrated Christ’s victory over death on Easter Sunday. And lest we let the light of Christ’s power over death grow dim in our hearts, the Holy Spirit holds it before our eyes again in today’s Gospel. Because, as the hymn says (although we didn’t sing it today), “Who knows when death may overtake me?” Who knows when death may overtake any of us? You can never be too prepared for that day, but you can be underprepared, so watch Jesus today as He deals with death in the Gospel.

The widow of Nain had already lost her husband to death. Then she lost her only son, too, and was left bereaved and desolate—not unlike Naomi in the Old Testament, who lost her husband and her two sons to death. Remember how bitter Naomi was at first, and how hopeless, even with that faithful daughter-in-law Ruth who stood by her and took care of her. What a sad funeral procession this was as the body of the widow of Nain’s boy was being carried out of the city gate in his coffin, accompanied by a large crowd.

Then along comes Jesus, with a large crowd of His own coming from the opposite direction. When the Lord saw her, He had compassion on her. Don’t read over that too quickly. People wonder sometimes if God cares about our suffering, if He understands our sorrow or sympathizes with us at all. Well, the compassion of Jesus is the compassion of God. This is how He views those who grieve, especially who grieve over death, with deep-seated, heart-wrenching compassion.

Because death was not God’s intention or desire for mankind. God made us to live, not to die, to enjoy everlasting life in His presence, not to suffer death and eternal punishment. Death is the very thing God warned Adam and Eve about in the Garden of Eden, the very thing He told them how to avoid and gave them all the tools necessary to avoid it. It was their choice to bring it on themselves and on their children, and it is the same choice that we also make, by nature, to try to play God, to tell Him what’s right and what’s wrong, to do and to believe as we please. Death is the wages we have all earned for ourselves, for all have sinned.

But what did Jesus say? I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly. He showed us that in everything He while He walked the earth. He shows it to us again in how He dealt with death at the gates of Nain.

He said to the widow, Do not weep. Why? Because nothing was wrong? No. But because Jesus had come, and He was about to make everything right.

He touched the coffin, halting the procession, stopping this death-march in its tracks, signaling that He was about to change the course of death.

He said, “Young man, I say to you, arise.” So he who was dead sat up and began to speak. And He presented him to his mother. There was no hocus-pocus. No grand ritual. No strain or effort on Jesus’ part. Just the almighty word of the Son of God—the same word that brought the universe into existence, that called the stars into being, the same word that once pronounced death upon guilty sinners. Now that word is a good word, a word of hope, a word of life.

It’s a word that Jesus has already spoken to you, through His appointed ambassadors. As He says in John 5, Most assuredly, I say to you, he who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life. Most assuredly, I say to you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God; and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in Himself, so He has granted the Son to have life in Himself, and has given Him authority to execute judgment also, because He is the Son of Man. This is the voice of the Gospel, calling out to sinners to believe in the Lord Jesus, who suffered death and the punishment for sin in your place, who rose again from the dead and gives eternal life to all who believe in His name. The preaching of the Gospel is how Jesus comes to you and says, “Do not weep.” Why? Because there’s nothing wrong? No. But because He has borne your wrongs and borne your punishment and borne your death, and will make everything right between you and God when you believe in Him.

Indeed, as St. Paul writes to the Ephesians in chapter 2, But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.

So what harm can death do to you, if you have already passed from death into life? What sin can condemn you if God has already made you alive together with Christ? Jesus has touched the coffin of all who believe in Him and has interrupted the course of death through Holy Baptism. Death will no longer end in the grave, and it will never lead the believer in Christ to hell. Instead, in a spiritual way, Christ has already raised believers to life.

But, of course, that’s not all. The hour is coming in which all who are in the graves will hear His voice and come forth—those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of condemnation. Just as Jesus stood by the coffin of the young man of Nain and told him to arise, so His voice will go out to every grave on earth and call all people to arise in the great resurrection of the body.

If that’s true—and Jesus proved again in today’s Gospel that He has the power to do exactly what He says here, then a person’s whole life has to be driven by this. How you live here on earth will have eternal consequences. Those who heard His voice calling in the Gospel during their earthly life, who repented and believed in Him and persevered in faith until death, will be raised to everlasting life. And those who failed to repent and believe will be raised to everlasting condemnation.

This was, by the way, the primary effect that 9/11 should have had on the people of our country. It should have been a wake-up call for all people to repent of their wickedness and to believe in the Son of God now, before it’s too late. Because, “who knows when death may overtake me?” And surely, by the grace of God, it has had that effect on some. But for the most part, these 15 years after that horrifying event, people continue to mock the judgment of God, and our nation as a whole continues its death-spiral with every form of depravity and wickedness imaginable, from abortion and the support for it, to unbridled sexual immorality, to evolutionary propaganda, to the love for every religion except the pure religion of Christ Jesus.

Be that as it may, the words of today’s Gospel are intended to draw you, the precious people of God, even closer to Jesus, the compassionate Lord of life and death, so that you put your trust in Him now, before death comes. This is the day of grace. This is the time of God’s favor, for you, and for your loved ones. And this is our opportunity, as a church, to celebrate and to proclaim the forgiveness of sins and the hope of everlasting life through faith alone in Christ alone. Jesus will not disappoint you. His compassion for those who grieve is just as real today as it was for the widow of Nain. And His power over death is just as real, too. Death still surrounds us in the world, but let the comfort of Jesus’ peace and love surround you even more, and let His body and blood, given to you in the Sacrament of the Altar, serve as the medicine that sustains your spiritual life until the day when Jesus calls you out of your grave to everlasting joy. Amen.

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Sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity

Galatians 5:16-24  +  Luke 17:11-19

How do you measure the health of a church? A friend asked me this week, “How is your church doing? Is it growing?” People mean well when they ask that question. But they’re usually under the false impression that growing in numbers is the mark of a church that is doing well. To them, the corollary would then also be true: a church that is not growing in numbers is doing poorly, and if it’s shrinking in numbers, it must be in crisis mode.

Let’s just dispense with all that, shall we? Let’s learn a lesson from Jesus’ encounter with the ten lepers. There are many lessons to be learned here, but today, let’s focus on the numbers: the ten, the nine, and the one.

The ten lepers were very sick. Leprosy was such a devastating disease at the time of Jesus, an infection that spread throughout the body, and from one person to the next. Spots would break out on the skin, often turning into sores or deformities or rotting pieces of flesh. Lepers were “unclean.” They were cast out of society and made to dwell in isolation, in leper colonies on the outskirts of town, making it the worst physical ailment a person could suffer, not because it was necessarily the most painful, but because it took everything away from you—family, friends, home, work, synagogue, Temple. And there was no cure for it.

But these ten lepers heard the good word about Jesus, that He was merciful and good, that He had power over sickness and disease, that God had come to earth to visit, to help His people, and that He had even come near to where they were. So they begged Him from afar, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!

Jesus said to them, Go, show yourselves to the priests. That’s what you were supposed to do, according to the Law of Moses, if you had leprosy and then got better. You would go to the priest to have him examine you, and to certify before the community that you were indeed cleansed of your disease and welcome to rejoin society. Jesus sent them away with the assurance that, by the time they got to the priest, they would be clean.

Those ten lepers represent all Christians. Not all people. All Christians. Like the rest of mankind, all Christians are infected with that devastating disease called sin. We are, by nature, unclean before God, with a flesh that is prone toward that whole list of fleshly works that the apostle Paul mentioned in the Epistle: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like. Just turn on the TV. That’s what you’ll see, whether it’s on the news or depicted on a show or in a movie. Just look hard enough in the mirror. You won’t fail to see the items on that list, hidden just under the surface, like a volcano that’s getting ready to erupt.

Like the rest, we Christians were dead in trespasses and sins, as Paul writes to the Ephesians in chapter 2, walking according to the course of this world, walking among the sons of disobedience, conducting ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind. We were “children of wrath, like the rest.”

But then, like the ten lepers, we heard the good word about Jesus, that He came to bear our sins and to take up our infirmities. We heard that He forgives sins to all who come to Him seeking mercy. And so we came. We were baptized and cleansed of our sin. Even though we still carry around the leprous sinful flesh, we are clothed in the righteousness of Christ and clean in the sight of God. All the baptized start out their life diseased before God, and then, through Holy Baptism, all the baptized are healed before God—forgiven and cleansed.

So much for the ten. All ten lepers had those things in common—their crippling disease, their hearing the good word about Jesus, their plea to Jesus for mercy, and their healing.

But now the group of ten, after they are healed, divides into two groups: the nine, and the one. The nine receive their healing from Jesus, and when they realize it, they hurry to the priest. Why? So that they can get on with their lives. So that they can get back to their homes and their families. So that they can find work and make a living and take hold again of the life that was stripped from them when they became ill. They were excited and eager to get back to the way things were. Who could blame them?

And yet, Jesus does blame them. Were there not ten cleansed? But where are the nine? Were there not any found who returned to give glory to God except this foreigner? Nine out of ten of those who were once healed by Jesus went on with their earthly lives—without Jesus.

Now, someone might argue that the nine could have given glory to God in prayer, without returning to where Jesus was, right? Jesus’ words indicate that He was looking for more than a prayer of thanks uttered to the omnipresent God while they ran to get their earthly lives back.

First of all, true faith in Christ doesn’t consider Christ to be an afterthought. For the believer, giving thanks to Him isn’t one item among many on the “to-do” list or something you do so that you can get back to the really important things like living your earthly life. No, faith in Christ keeps Christ at the center of everything. Faith in Christ makes giving thanks to God the very goal of our existence, the activity in which we are continually engaged, no matter what we’re doing in the world. But that wasn’t the case for the nine.

Secondly, faith in Christ isn’t satisfied with a prayer uttered to the omnipresent God. Yes, prayer is good. Prayer is right. God hears your prayers, whether they’re uttered in church or in your bedroom closet. But when God makes Himself present on earth, when God comes near to help, as He did when Jesus came near to the lepers, faith seeks Him where He makes Himself present. But the nine did not return.

This is what happens with many—maybe even nine out of ten?—of the baptized. They believe at first. They believe for a while. But then they get tangled up in their earthly life—friends, family, career, entertainment. They stop struggling against the sinful flesh that clings to them and let it reign over them again. They stop participating in the Eucharist—the great “Thanksgiving”—where Jesus makes Himself present again on earth in the preaching of the Word and with His body and blood in the Sacrament. The apostle’s warning to these Christians couldn’t be more stern: of which I tell you beforehand, just as I also told you in time past, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

But then there is the one—the one who, when he is healed of his leprosy, rejoices in God. He rejoices in the mercy of Christ. He isn’t forced to return. He isn’t obligated to give thanks. It’s just what he is eager to do, what he now lives to do. He has been recreated as a new man, a clean man, a man who clings only to Christ, even as he goes about the rest of his earthly life. His is a life of ongoing repentance, a life of Eucharist, a life of thanksgiving, a life of purpose in which Christ is the focus; Christ is the center; Christ is the goal.

So it is with some of the baptized, and so God wants it to be for all of you who hear this Gospel. It’s why He confronts you again today with the ten lepers, with the nine, and with the one. The merciful Lord Christ has come near to you again today in Word and Sacrament, because He knows you need His forgiveness again, and His strength. He knows your flesh is strong and is tugging at you to indulge in wickedness, to pursue your own self-interests, to turn Jesus Himself into an afterthought in your life. And so He has come near to help, to forgive and to strengthen, and also to receive your thanksgiving as you gather around Him in this Eucharist where He is really present again on earth.

How do you measure the health of a church? Not by the numbers, but by the presence of the true Word of Christ, and by the faith of His members which expresses itself in thanksgiving and in love. Some of that can only be measured by God Himself, who alone sees the heart. But some of it—the presence of Christ’s members here, at Christ’s Service, the joyful expressions of thanksgiving, and the zeal to fight against the flesh and to produce the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control—that can be seen, to some degree. May God strengthen you, His baptized children, to abandon the nine and to join the one in a lifelong returning to give glory to God in the Person of His Son, Jesus Christ. Amen.