Pretending Jesus is the devil

Posted on February 28, 2016 by Rev. Paul Rydecki

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Sermon for Oculi – Lent 3

Ephesians 5:1-9  +  Luke 11:14-28

We have another text before us today where the devil and his demons make an appearance. A demon had afflicted a man and shut up his mouth so that he couldn’t speak. St. Matthew tells us that the demon had also shut the man’s eyes so that he couldn’t see. But Jesus showed love and compassion to the poor man and easily cast out the demon from him, so that it could hurt him no longer. Demons are strong, but Jesus is much stronger.

Ironically, it wasn’t the demons who caused Jesus the most trouble in our text. When Jesus dealt with demons, He dealt with them irresistibly by His Almighty Word. They couldn’t reject Him; they couldn’t resist Him in the least. But when Jesus deals with men, it’s different. Men can resist the Word of Jesus and fight against Him, not because men are stronger than demons, but because God has chosen to allow it. Why? Because the demons are already judged. The demons are condemned already, with no possibility of salvation. But men are different. Men are “condemned already” by nature, but man’s condemnation can be removed. God has chosen not to violently force people into obedience, but to work on the hearts of men through His Word, so that His Word might convince them to repent of their sins and believe in Christ Jesus for salvation, before it’s too late, while it still is the “day of salvation.”

What that means is that some men will oppose Jesus, and even tell lies about Him, and He will allow it, for now. But He won’t necessarily remain silent about it. In our Gospel, Jesus answers the lies of those who opposed Him, so that those who hear, including you, might repent and believe in Him.

Jesus’ ability to cast out demons should have convinced the people of Israel that He was the promised Seed of the woman who had come to crush the serpent’s head, that He was the promised Messiah sent from God. And it did convince many people. It says that the multitudes marveled.

But not all were convinced. Some of them said, “He casts out demons by Beelzebub, the ruler of the demons.” Why would they make such an accusation? Because they couldn’t deny His power. It must be supernatural. But they also didn’t want to recognize His power as coming from God, because they didn’t believe in—or care for—the God He revealed: a God who demands righteousness—not just the best you can do, not just doing better than the people around you, but true righteousness and holiness and fear of God and selfless love toward your neighbor; a God who condemns sins, both “big” and “small;” a God who demands the death of an innocent to atone for the sin of the guilty; a God whose love for this world moved Him to send His Son into our flesh to be our Savior; a God who only allows Himself to be approached by sinners who acknowledge their sins and seek His mercy in Christ Jesus and His innocent, atoning death on the cross. But that’s not the God most people acknowledge or worship, including even most of the Jews in our Gospel. So they turn God into the devil and the devil into God.

It’s always been popular, as was the case in today’s Gospel, to pretend that Jesus is the devil, that the true God is not the God that Jesus revealed, but a much more tolerant God or a much less demanding God, a God who can be approached in many different ways, however anyone wants; that what Jesus says is a lie, and what I feel about God or what my ancestors believed about God—that must be true. There goes that Jesus, exposing and condemning everyone’s sins. There goes that Jesus, claiming to be the only Savior from sin, the One who saves sinners by faith alone in Him alone. Bah. His God can’t possibly be the true God. So Jesus must be the devil.

Jesus responds for the sake of those who would believe in Him. You’re foolish to lump Me in with the devil. Here’s why:

First, you should really give the devil more credit than that. Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and a house divided against a house falls. If Satan also is divided against himself, how will his kingdom stand? Satan doesn’t cast out his own allies. His kingdom is not divided against itself. If it were, you’d have nothing to worry about. He wouldn’t be such a bitter enemy to you. But the devil doesn’t destroy himself. His kingdom stands united against God and man.

We still see how the devil attacks mankind. He attacks on many fronts, all at once, and his main tool isn’t demon possession. His main tool is the same tool it’s always been: lies. He tells lies on the social front, the political front, the theological front, the scientific front. On every front, he tries to convince people that God is the devil and the devil is God, that what God has recorded in His Holy Word is unreliable and bad for you, and that true knowledge and joy and pleasure are to be found elsewhere.

Secondly, Jesus argues, you shouldn’t imagine that He does His miracles by the power of the devil. You should give the Spirit of God more credit than that. If I cast out demons by Beelzebub, by whom do your sons cast them out? Therefore they will be your judges. But if I cast out demons with the finger of God, surely the kingdom of God has come upon you. The people marveled at Jesus’ ability to cast out demons, because their people were unable to do it at all. Jesus is doing what no one else could do. His Word is the “finger of God,” or as St. Matthew says, “the Spirit of God.” And that means the kingdom of God has come! Where Jesus is, where His Spirit works and drives out the devil and brings people to faith, that’s the kingdom of God coming to earth. That’s the Spirit of God, rescuing sinners out of Satan’s kingdom and bringing them into the kingdom of heaven, right here, right now, through the Word of Christ, as we also confess in the Small Catechism under the Second Petition of the Lord’s Prayer: Thy kingdom come. How does God’s kingdom come? When our heavenly Father gives us His Holy Spirit, so that by His grace we believe His holy Word and lead godly lives here in time and there in eternity.

Third, Jesus argues, you should recognize Me, not as the devil, but as the One and only One who is stronger than the devil, setting men free from his grip, because Jesus has gone into the strong man’s house and bound him, so that the devil can’t do whatever he wishes with men anymore. Casting out demons was a sign of the spiritual salvation Christ gives to all who trust in Him. This is what Jesus came to bring as the Redeemer. Redemption! Freedom from Satan’s kingdom! As Paul writes to the Colossians, God has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love, 14 in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins.

There’s so much fear and anger and doubt in the world today, about the course of the nations, about the course of this nation. It looks so much like the devil has filled the whole world with his lies and convinced mankind that Jesus is the devil and the devil is God. But the kingdom of God has come and continues to come and will not stop coming. One holy Church will remain forever, the congregation of saints where the Gospel is purely taught and the Sacraments are correctly administered. Don’t worry about how big or powerful or influential the Church is or isn’t in this world. Where Christ is, where His Word and Sacraments are preached and administered, there is hope! There is freedom! No matter who’s in charge of any country, no matter how terrible the policies or the laws or the judgments or the persecutions.

Then Jesus issues a couple of strong warnings. He who is not with Me is against Me. If you continue to pretend that He’s the devil, you will find out one day that you were opposing the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. There is no room in Christ’s kingdom for “partial Christianity,” for nominal religion. We need to stop assuming that the people around us in the world or in America are Christians regardless of their confession of faith.

St. Paul tells us in our Epistle how Christians—how children of God—are to live in this world, as “imitators of God,” as dearly loved children, as those who were once darkness, just like the rest of the world, but are now light in the Lord. God has not called us into His kingdom so that we can lead filthy lives there, but holy lives, in “all goodness, righteousness, and truth.”

Jesus’ second warning in our Gospel is just as important as He describes what happens when an evil spirit is cast out of a man. The spirit wanders about, but then returns to see if there’s a vacancy in the heart he left, and if there is, he’ll come back with his friends and make it even worse.

That emphasizes the need for the human heart not to be swept clean and empty, but for the Holy Spirit to dwell there, so that the demon cannot return. That’s true for all who have come out of Satan’s kingdom. St. Peter tells us that the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. Well, you’ve been redeemed from Satan’s kingdom. You’re safe from his attacks while you’re clinging to Christ in faith and surrounded by the Spirit’s power in Word and Sacrament. In Holy Baptism, the gift of the Holy Spirit was given to you, to dwell in your heart always. But if you step away from the power that He is providing here on earth, from His instruments of Word and Sacrament, then you are placing yourself in great danger again. So Jesus warns against having an empty heart.

Finally in our Gospel, there is that woman who mistakenly focused on how blessed the mother of Jesus was, who bore Him and nursed Him. More than that, Jesus said, blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it! Your redemption from sin, death, and the devil; the forgiveness of your sins; your protection from evil and your connection to God does not come through Mary, or you would be lost. It comes through the Word of God that you’re hearing right now, and through the Sacrament of the Altar that you’ll receive in a moment. This Gospel is what casts the devil out and drives you into the loving the arms of Jesus, who is not the devil, but true God and true Man, your Savior, and the devil’s worst nightmare. Amen.

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Beggar-dogs from every nation receive mercy from Christ

Posted on February 21, 2016 by Rev. Paul Rydecki

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Sermon for Reminiscere – Lent 2

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

470 years ago this past Thursday, Feb. 18, 1546, Martin Luther died. Two days before that, he wrote these last words on a scrap of paper: “We are beggars. This is true.” For all that God accomplished through him, Luther never thought highly of himself, especially before God, never thought for a moment that he deserved anything good from God. Instead, he praised God’s grace in Christ Jesus. And he maintained that beggar-attitude up to his dying day.

One has to have an attitude like that, a humble, self-abasing, beggar-attitude before God in order to appreciate today’s Gospel about the Canaanite woman who was compared by Jesus to a little beggar-dog. You can only appreciate this text if you start from the position of beggar, convicted sinner, eternal death row inmate, with no entitlement mentality, no illusion that you have a right to God’s help, or to God’s attention, or even to God’s concern—no matter how sincere you may be, no matter how downtrodden, no matter how worthy.

In other words, this text is well beyond the grasp of the world, because it preaches against the very things the world praises and it praises the very things the world hates. The wisdom of the world is cast down and the foolishness of God is exalted. This is a precious text against our pride, a text that praises Spirit-worked humility and faith, and that, as always, highlights the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. So let’s dig right into it.

21 Then Jesus went out from there and departed to the region of Tyre and Sidon.

St. Matthew isn’t giving us useless information here. Tyre and Sidon were Gentile territories to the north of the land of Israel. Five chapters earlier in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus had sent out his twelve apostles with this command: Do not go into the way of the Gentiles, and do not enter a city of the Samaritans. But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. And as you go, preach, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons.

Earlier in His ministry, Jesus expressly forbade his apostles from going to Gentile territory. And this account in Matthew 15 is the only time recorded in the Gospels when Jesus Himself left the land of Israel during His whole earthly ministry. That’s significant. He came to the Jews and sent His disciples exclusively to the Jews at first, and that shouldn’t surprise us; above all the nations on earth, God chose Israel to be His special people, and He made special promises to them of grace and every blessing.

But God had also revealed in the Old Testament Scriptures that the light of the Messiah, shining from Israel, would also give light to the Gentiles, and that the Church of God would be greatly enlarged as the Gentiles came streaming into it. So, occasionally, Jesus sought out the Samaritans, the half-Jews, and preached the Gospel to them. And on this one occasion, Jesus even entered Gentile territory, not only to help a Gentile woman, but also to teach some important truths to His disciples, and to us.

And behold, a woman of Canaan came from that region and cried out to Him, saying, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David! My daughter is severely demon-possessed.”

What a tremendous confession of faith! This Canaanite woman identified Jesus as the Lord, as the Son of David—the Messiah—as the merciful One, and as the One who had the power to crush the serpent’s head, to cast out demons. Such faith could only have come from one place—from hearing the word, the good report about Christ. How she heard, we don’t know. One way or another, word had reached her. And she believed. And her faith led her to beg for mercy from Jesus.

But He answered her not a word.

Jesus seemed not to be listening to the cries of this beggar-woman. He seemed to be ignoring her. He seemed unconcerned, unmoved by her pleas. But we know how the story ends, and that Jesus not only cared about this woman, but wanted to hold her up as a shining example of faith for billions of people to see over the course of the millennia.

And His disciples came and urged Him, saying, “Send her away, for she cries out after us.”

Even the disciples seemed uneasy with Jesus’ lack of response. They also didn’t like that she just kept calling out to Him for help. So they asked Him to send her away. She seemed to have no friends at all, no one to intercede for her, not even the holy apostles.

But He answered and said, “I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

Jesus finally answers the woman, giving her just a little bit of hope, because He didn’t do what His disciples asked Him to do; He didn’t send her away, as He could have done. But what does He answer? The same thing He had told His disciples back when He sent them out, when He told them only to go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

How could Jesus say that He was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, when we know He said on various occasions that He was sent to give His life for the world, that “God so loved the world,” that when He was lifted up on the cross, He would “draw all men to Himself”? The only way to understand this is to understand that the house of Israel, which began with the physical descendants of Jacob, was intended to expand beyond the physical descendants of Jacob, was intended to grow at the time of the Messiah to include all Jews and Gentiles who would believe in Him as the Christ. But that was a mystery hidden from most and not fully revealed until after Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.

Then she came and worshiped Him, saying, “Lord, help me!”

“Worshiped” may be a little misleading. The word means “to kneel before” someone, which was certainly done to show reverence and humility in the presence of someone great, but in this case, it shows again her beggar-attitude before the Lord as she knelt before Him. She kept looking past the stony exterior to the Lord who, according to His reputation, had never once turned anyone away who sought help from Him. Maybe, she thought, maybe the Lord Jesus will still help me, even though I’m not a physical descendant of Israel. I’ll keep begging until He does, for my daughter’s sake, because His merciful reputation goes before Him.

But He answered and said, “It is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the little dogs.”

The children being the people of Israel, of course, and the little dogs being the Canaanites and every other nation on earth. This is why modern-day “racism” is so ridiculous. The only “race,” if we want to use that word—and I don’t like to, because there is only one human race—but the only “race” that has ever had a special claim of superiority before God is the Jewish race leading up to the time of Christ. Every other race, whether you were white or black or yellow or red or some shade in between, was inferior to the Jewish race. All non-Jews were like “little dogs.”

This is the severe consequence of the sin that dwells in all people of every nation. Sin separates from God. Sin makes everyone unworthy before God. The truth is, the Jews, the house of Israel, were also sinners and would have also been counted as “little dogs” if God hadn’t taken them and adopted them as His children purely by His grace. As God said to Israel long ago, “Therefore understand that the LORD your God is not giving you this good land to possess because of your righteousness, for you are a stiff-necked people.”

How did the woman respond to Jesus’ words? She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the little dogs eat the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.”

Can you imagine anyone today not being offended at being called a “little dog” because of their race? Everyone gets offended at the drop of a hat these days, because everyone’s sinful pride is alive and well and everyone’s entitlement mentality kicks in. But those who truly believe that they are sinners before God who deserve only His wrath and punishment, as the Bible declares and as you yourselves confessed just a little while ago, and those who truly believe that God is good and means us well for the sake of His Son, as you also confessed, are not deterred. Faith is willing to be humbled before God and man, and still continues to look to God for mercy, as the woman in our Gospel demonstrates so beautifully.

Then Jesus answered and said to her, “O woman, great is your faith! Let it be to you as you desire.” And her daughter was healed from that very hour.

As we’ve noted before, there are only two times in Scripture when Jesus praised someone for having a “great faith.” A Gentile centurion, and this Gentile woman. After the testing of her faith is done, this woman receives all that she wanted from Jesus, and more—even praise from the lips of Jesus for her faith, which wasn’t really to her credit as much as it was to the credit of the Holy Spirit who had worked such faith in her and who now holds her up as a shining example to Jesus’ disciples, and to us.

Jesus’ disciples needed to understand that Israel was about to expand to include people from every nation, tribe, language and people—all who would humble themselves at the preaching of the Gospel and believe in Jesus Christ as the Savior sent from God. Salvation had to come first to the Jews, because of God’s Old Testament promises, but it wouldn’t remain only with the Jews, and in fact, most of the Jews would be cut off from God’s kingdom because of unbelief. Faith alone saves, not good works, not genetics. As Paul wrote to the Romans, I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek (that is, the Gentiles). For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “The just shall live by faith.”

You and I need to understand from this Gospel that, as sinners, we do not deserve God’s help at all, that, “We are beggars. This is true.” But beggars are not cast out by God. On the contrary, spiritual beggars from every nation are the very ones who receive God’s mercy. We were once counted as “little dogs” in God’s sight. But through Holy Baptism and faith in Christ, God has now counted us as His own children and will give us every grace and blessing at His heavenly table, as St. Paul wrote to Titus: When the kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior, that having been justified by His grace we should become heirs according to the hope of eternal life. Amen.

 

 

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And lead us not into temptation

Posted on February 14, 2016 by Rev. Paul Rydecki

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Sermon for Invocavit – Lent 1

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

Jesus taught us to pray in the Lord’s Prayer: And lead us not into temptation. And yet, what does the first verse of our Gospel say? Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. Doesn’t that mean He was “led into temptation”? In a sense, He was. And it had to be that way, for our salvation.

You see, we don’t need the devil around in order to be tempted. We face temptation constantly, from without and from within, because we’re born infected, diseased, spiritually deformed. The flesh that we have inherited from Adam, after he fell into sin, is always marching away from God and from what is right, always setting up false gods to worship, including the god of “self.” That’s all we know as sinful human beings, a life where sin is our constant companion, where false beliefs comes naturally, where despair is just a heartbeat away, and where great shame and vice call out to us from within, “Go ahead and do it. You know you want to. Nothing bad will happen.” As Jesus once said, From within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lewdness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within and defile a man. That’s all we know, by nature.

But that’s not all Adam knew. Before he fell into sin, he was pure. He was holy. His thoughts lined up perfectly with the Holy Spirit’s thoughts. In order for Adam to be tempted, some evil from the outside had to sneak in and lead him astray. That’s just what the devil did. And even then, Adam had the power to resist the devil. But instead, Adam followed him and plunged our race into darkness and spiritual corruption.

Jesus was like Adam in that He wasn’t born with a diseased, sinful flesh, as we are from birth. But Jesus, our Brother, was sent into our human flesh in order to fix what Adam broke, in order to succeed where Adam failed. That meant that He had to be tempted, and tempted from the outside, even as Adam and Eve were.

So, in that sense, God the Father led Jesus into temptation, or better, led Him, by the Spirit, out into the wilderness “to be tempted,” not by God, but by the devil.

The first temptation recorded in our Gospel grew out of the fact that Jesus spent 40 days out in the wilderness, all alone, fasting. And not fasting by His own choice, but fasting according to His Father’s choice. Now, people may choose to fast, to go without food for awhile, in order to focus on self-discipline and self-denial—hence the 40 days of Lent that began this past Wednesday, during which season some Christians have, in the past, chosen to fast, or a fast was imposed on them by a works-righteous Roman papacy. Still, it was nothing like Jesus fasted—without eating or drinking anything for 40 days. That’s what His good and gracious Father in heaven chose for His beloved Son, with whom He was “well-pleased.”

The devil tried to take advantage of that God-ordained hunger, tried to get Jesus to turn from the Father’s will, to turn from His Father’s providence and use His divine power to create food for Himself miraculously. He sowed the seeds of discontent. “What kind of Father do You have, anyway? You’re the Son of God, aren’t You? You shouldn’t have to suffer. You shouldn’t have to depend on Your Father for food. You have the divine right to eat! And you have the power to do something about it. So do it! Feed your empty stomach. You know you want to.”

Jesus could have zapped the devil away with His divine power. But instead He chose to confront the devil with the very same armor and weapon that we have at our disposal: the Word of God. He resisted the devil with the Word of God, every time, and every time the devil had to flee.

Jesus resisted the devil with a verse from Deuteronomy. Here’s the context of that verse, as Moses spoke to the Israelites out in the wilderness, after they had wandered around for forty years, eating nothing but manna every day:

And you shall remember that the LORD your God led you all the way these forty years in the wilderness, to humble you and test you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not. So He humbled you, allowed you to hunger, and fed you with manna which you did not know nor did your fathers know, that He might make you know that man shall not live by bread alone; but man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the LORD. Your garments did not wear out on you, nor did your foot swell these forty years. You should know in your heart that as a man chastens his son, so the LORD your God chastens you.

God made Israel practice a sort of fast for those 40 years, and here Moses explains why. God chose to feed them with bread only for all that time, with bread from heaven that had to provided miraculously by God on a daily basis, just enough for each day, so that the only way they could survive was by means of the Word of God that promised manna every morning. God was training them to trust Him, training them to look beyond bread and beyond the needs of this life to a faithful God in heaven, who is the true Source of all good things. Israel often complained about God’s providence, even though He faithfully provided manna every day. But Jesus stood firm and kept trusting in His Father, even after 40 days of no food at all.

The devil, the world, and your flesh try to get you to curse God in times of want, when you don’t have all the things you think you should have. “If God loves you, why does He let you suffer? He must not love you. You shouldn’t have to suffer, right? You shouldn’t have to go without. If God isn’t providing what you think He should, or what you crave so badly, then, to hell with Him! You do what you have to for yourself.”

For all the times you’ve given in to such temptations, Christ Your Savior overcame the devil, for you. His victory earned for you the forgiveness of your sins. Let His example guide you in the face of similar temptations.

The second temptation recorded in Matthew’s Gospel has the devil whisking Jesus away to the pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem. “You want to live by every word that comes from the mouth of God, Jesus? Well here’s one: He will command His angels concerning you. So let’s test His Word on that, shall we? Throw Yourself down! Is the Lord truly with You, Son of God, or not? Let Him prove it! Force Him to keep His Word by sending His angels.” It was an attack on God’s faithfulness and a temptation to doubt God’s Word, to focus on one passage of Scripture while ignoring all the rest. We see false teachers doing the same thing all the time today.

But Jesus wasn’t deceived. You shall not tempt the Lord your God. Another verse from Deuteronomy, where Moses describes how Israel did tempt the Lord their God at the waters of Massah, where they challenged God to prove that He was among them by giving them water. But where Israel failed to trust, Jesus again succeeded, for you.

The devil, the world, and your flesh try to get you to test the Lord God, too, to challenge Him to take care of you. You think, I can neglect my body, my work, my studies. I can watch porn, skip church, avoid reading and studying God’s Word. And so you use Baptism and God’s promises in order to tempt the Him, in order to force Him to keep you from harm and danger, even as you do the very things He has forbidden in His Word. And the devil will spur you on, trying to pit one passage from Scripture against another to make you doubt, to give you false security on the one hand, or false despair on the other; to convince you, on the one hand, that sin isn’t so bad, or on the other hand, that God isn’t so good.

For all the times you’ve given in to such temptations, Christ Your Savior overcame the devil, for you. His victory earned for you the forgiveness of your sins. Let His example guide you in the face of similar temptations.

The third temptation recorded in the Gospel has the devil offering Christ the world, with all its riches, with all its power and glory and fame. As God, Jesus owned the world, but as a Man, He had humbled Himself in order to be our Savior. He had put the rest of humanity’s interests ahead of His own needs. He was even going to the cross for mankind, sacrificing His own interests every step of the way.

Israel gave into this temptation of idolatry and friendship with the world over and over again in the wilderness, beginning with the golden calf at Mt. Sinai. But Jesus again returned to Scripture, You shall worship the LORD your God, and Him only you shall serve.

The world is a powerful temptation for Christians, too. You want to get along with the world. You want to be liked by the world, to have the things the world has, to enjoy the things the world enjoys. And the devil tries to convince you that you can have all that you want, and your life will be better and brighter and so much more enjoyable if you just set aside the kingdom of God and go along with the world. And you don’t have to become a Satanist to do it. You just have to look in the mirror and serve the one you see there.

Again, for all the times you’ve given in to such temptations, Christ Your Savior overcame the devil, for you. His victory earned for you the forgiveness of your sins. Let His example guide you in the face of similar temptations.

And so we pray, at Jesus’ direction, Lead us not into temptation. But that doesn’t mean we won’t be tempted. What does this mean? We answer in the Small Catechism, Certainly God tempts no one. We pray in this petition that God would guard and keep us so that the devil, the world, and our flesh may not deceive us or mislead us into false belief, despair, and other great shame and vice; and although we are troubled with these things, that we would nevertheless overcome and triumph in the end.

Just as God the Father guarded and kept Jesus against the temptations of the devil—and purchased our souls in the process!, so He will guard and keep you, too, not without means, but by means of His powerful Word. God has placed that weapon in your hands for you to use, and, as our Savior demonstrated in the wilderness, the devil cannot stand against it. Amen.

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Something more meaningful than ashes

Posted on February 10, 2016 by Rev. Paul Rydecki

Sermon for Ash Wednesday

Joel 2:12-19  +  Matthew 6:16-21

There is little room for Ash Wednesday in our world. It presupposes the existence of God. And not just any God, but the God of the Bible who commands, “You shall have no other gods before Me.” It presupposes that God’s laws are still in effect, that He still expects His commandments to be fully and continually obeyed. It presumes that to disobey God’s commands is sinful, that there is shame and guilt in sinning, that God is righteous when He punishes sin. It presupposes that all people are sinners who need to repent, first by being converted to the Christian faith, and then by daily contrition and repentance in all those who profess the Christian faith as we journey through this life to our heavenly home, constantly wrestling with the sin that still clings to us and that so easily entangles.

There is little room for Ash Wednesday in the world, because the world rejects most or all of these things. And yet here we are, celebrating it again as Christians, because while we are in the world, we are not of the world. As those who are in the world, we still have a sinful flesh that produces sinful thoughts, words and deeds, and so we still celebrate Ash Wednesday with repentance and confession of sins. More importantly, we celebrate Ash Wednesday with Holy Absolution and with the Sacrament that gives us Christ’s very body and blood for the forgiveness of our sins. We celebrate Ash Wednesday, but without ashes. We have something more meaningful than ashes.

A brief word about ashes is in order. Ashes on the head once served a very useful purpose. In the Old Testament, people would sometimes throw ashes on their heads or sit in a pile of ashes as a demonstration of their sadness, including the sadness that goes along with the recognition of sins and with repentance. They wore ashes on their heads in fear of the stern judgment of God they had earned with their sins.

It was never really about ashes, of course. Rend your hearts and not your garments, Joel declared. God wasn’t at all interested in outward displays of contrition or repentance. God was interested in repentance. God was looking for people to grieve over the sins they had committed against Him and against their neighbor and to turn from their sins—to turn to Him for healing, for forgiveness. Ashes were never the goal. The goal was for God to turn away from His fierce anger and to spare His people. The goal was the forgiveness of sins, the washing away of the ashes and the restoration of the sinner.

Meanwhile, there was yet another use of ashes in the OT that we do well to consider. A very special animal—a red heifer—was to be sought and killed and burned up, and then its ashes were to be mixed with water for all purification ceremonies God commanded throughout the year. As you heard this evening from Psalm 51, “Purge me with hyssop…” That’s referring to the hyssop—the brush that was dipped in that purifying mixture of water and ashes and then sprinkled on the sinner, a ceremony that pointed ahead to Christ crucified, whose death is mingled with the water in Holy Baptism to provide purification from sin.

Everything pointed to Christ. He changed everything. Listen to this prophecy from Isaiah, which Jesus once read aloud in a synagogue and declared that these words were fulfilled by Him.

    “The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon Me, Because the LORD has anointed Me To preach good tidings to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, To proclaim liberty to the captives, And the opening of the prison to those who are bound; To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD, And the day of vengeance of our God; To comfort all who mourn, To console those who mourn in Zion, To give them beauty for ashes, The oil of joy for mourning, The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; That they may be called trees of righteousness, The planting of the LORD, that He may be glorified.” (Epiphany 1)

In the kingdom of heaven, in the Church of Christ, ashes are replaced with beauty, and mourning is replaced by joy. Here there is absolution for the penitent, the forgiveness of sins for the contrite in heart. Here there are baptismal waters that wash away the ashes and that purify the penitent and give entrance into the kingdom of God.

Here there is daily and ongoing repentance on the part of the faithful, because, if you believe you are sinner and if you believe in Christ Jesus for the forgiveness of sins, then you must also believe that sin is a bad thing and you must want to get rid of it from your life, right? But what do you find? Don’t you find, with the Apostle Paul, that sin is always there, wanting to take over? Pride is always there, wanting to show itself. Self-concern is always there, raging against the Spirit. That’s why the Christian lives in daily repentance for such sins of weakness and of ignorance. You don’t fall away from faith and from God’s grace whenever you sin. If you did, you wouldn’t spend a moment being in God’s grace.

Now, in the early Christian Church, ashes again served a very useful purpose in that regard. Because sometimes, Christians do fall away. Sometimes, Christians commit mortal sin, that is sin that leads to death, sins of rebellion for which they don’t repent. They tragically turn away from God and commit sin intentionally and continue to live in it or continue to justify it or make excuses for it. They grieve the Holy Spirit with such mortal sin, and they do fall back under God’s righteous wrath.

What did the early Church do with such public sinners? They were called to repent, and if they wouldn’t, they were excommunicated. But some of them did finally repent and confessed their sins to the minister and received Holy Absolution. They were readmitted to the fellowship of the Church. But how were the rest of the members to know that the public sinner had repented and belonged back in the fellowship of the forgiven? In some cases, the Church imposed ashes on those public sinners as a sign to the rest of the members that this sinner was indeed sorry for his or her sins, and, even though they had left the kingdom of God for a time, through repentance, they were now welcomed back into the communion of saints.

That use of ashes as a public testimony to the repentance of a public sinner served several good purposes. (1) It warned Christians to take care not to fall into mortal sin. (2) It assured Christians that sins were being taken seriously by the Church, and that the Church wasn’t just ignoring those public sins or winking at them or sweeping them under the rug. They had been dealt with, through confession and absolution. And finally (3) it offered comfort to everyone, because they could see that the grace of God and the forgiveness of sins were freely handed out to all who repent and turn to Christ for forgiveness, even the worst of sinners. That’s how the Christian Church originally used ashes, not at God’s command, but in their Christian freedom.

Unfortunately, not too long before the days of Luther, that use of ashes was replaced with an imposition of ashes on all Christians. It became symbolic of…what exactly? It depends on whom you ask. In any case, the Lutheran Reformers saw it as a public spectacle that wasn’t worth preserving in their churches. Some have tried to bring it back into Lutheran use over the past 20 or 30 years, making it a voluntary thing, of course, and explaining it in a more evangelical way. But we won’t do that here.

Even if you asked me, I wouldn’t paint ashes on your forehead. I have no call or command from God to do that, and no word from God promising any sort of benefit for it. Instead, I have something more meaningful than ashes to give you. Instead of reminding you of your sins with an ashen cross, I’ll simply preach God’s Law to you and teach you His commandments. Instead of symbolizing the death of Christ on your forehead, I’ll simply preach Christ crucified to you, whose mark has truly been placed on you already in Holy Baptism. Instead of reminding you of your mortality with this symbol of death, well, do you really need to be reminded that you are mortal and that death is all around us? Instead of symbolizing the death you died to sin when you were baptized and the new life you were raised to live, I’ll simply remind you often of your Baptism, and I’ll give you the true treasure, the body and blood of your Savior, by which you proclaim His death until He comes, and by which you are actually strengthened and made victorious in your daily struggle against sin, death, and the devil. And instead of marking you with a smudge on the forehead that is supposed to advertise something or other to the world about your faith (depending on how those who seek you interpret it), I’ll urge you to let your light shine in the world with your good deeds of love and service to your neighbor, so that men may see your good works and praise your Father in heaven.

There is little room for Ash Wednesday in our world. But for Christians, it’s yet another opportunity to receive something more meaningful than ashes: to hear the word of Christ, to hear God’s call to repent and believe the good news, to come before God in confession, in humility and sincerity of heart, and to receive the benefits of Christ in Word and Sacrament, even the forgiveness of sins, life and salvation. Amen.

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Seeing Jesus even when you can’t see anything else

Posted on February 7, 2016 by Rev. Paul Rydecki

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Sermon for Quinquagesima

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

The words of Jesus in today’s Gospel are very plain; there is no secret meaning, no lofty interpretation to be sought. He tells His disciples plainly, in detail, about His suffering, death, and resurrection, which will all take place soon. He tells them that they’re traveling toward Jerusalem, walking into all of this, on purpose. And none of it makes sense to His disciples. They didn’t think Jesus was speaking literally, apparently. They didn’t understand the Scriptures that pointed to this. They didn’t understand the need for Jesus, the Christ, to suffer, to die. It’s not what the Christ was supposed to do, in their thinking.

Why? It says that it was hidden from them, hidden from Jesus’ own apostles. The Holy Spirit was intentionally not enlightening their minds yet at this point, but was leaving them in blindness, for the moment. They weren’t supposed to understand Jesus’ suffering and death ahead of time. And Jesus, for His part, wasn’t supposed to have the comfort of friends who could sympathize with Him and who could understand what He was about to go through. So they couldn’t see the path ahead of Jesus and ahead of them, in spite of Jesus’ clear words. Even the clearest words of God are hidden from us sinful human beings unless the Holy Spirit enlightens our minds to perceive what the words mean.

For the moment, the Holy Spirit left the disciples blind. But not totally blind. They couldn’t see or understand the path of the cross that was laid out for them, but they still saw one thing clearly enough: they still saw Jesus. They still saw Him as the Christ, the Son of the living God. They still knew His selfless and committed love for sinners—the love St. Paul described in today’s Epistle, even though they didn’t yet know the full extent of that love that would drive Him all the way to the cross for them. They still trusted in Him, even though they didn’t yet understand the whole truth about Him. They still had faith, with Jesus Himself as faith’s object.

And because they did, they kept following Him. They kept walking with Him toward Jerusalem. They stayed on the path of the cross, even without understanding it. Because they trusted in Jesus. They knew Him to be truthful, to be kind and good and merciful. They knew Him to be the Son of God and the Savior of the world, and the One who would keep them safe from the just condemnation of God’s Holy Law. That was enough for them to stay with Jesus, whether they saw their path clearly or not. And when the time was right, after He was raised from the dead, Jesus did open the minds of His disciples to understand clearly the things that were now hidden from them.

Then there was the blind man they encountered on their way to Jerusalem, a beggar. He heard the commotion as the crowds traveled with Jesus to Jerusalem, and he asked what it was about. They told him, Jesus of Nazareth is passing by, so he began crying out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” “Eleison” is the Greek word, the same thing we sing in our Liturgy five or six times every Sunday. Have mercy!

It often happens with people who are blind that their other senses are heightened as they compensate for the lack of a sense of sight. That was certainly true in this blind man’s case. He had been listening, listening better than most in Israel, listening to the word about Jesus that had been spreading in Israel over the past three years, that He was the promised Son of David, the Christ, and that He was good and merciful, willing and able to help anyone with any need whatsoever.

Even more importantly, though, the Holy Spirit had been using that word about Christ to enlighten the blind man’s mind, to shine the light of Christ on him and give him spiritual sight, even though his physical eyes didn’t work at all yet. He couldn’t see Jesus with his eyes, nor did he have the benefit of the years of instruction that the apostles had. But he believed in Jesus. He believed in Him as the Son of David, the Christ. And he believed in Him as the One who is love, who is kind and good and merciful, who offers divine help to all who seek it from Him, even to blind beggars.

That faith is what led the blind man to call out to Jesus for mercy, and no one could dissuade him, even though they tried. They tried to silence him. Somehow they must have thought that Jesus was too important to stop and take time to help a beggar. But his faith led him to overcome their scolding and focus on Christ alone. He just wouldn’t stop crying out for mercy, mercy, until he received it from Christ. That’s what faith does.

And he did receive it. Jesus stopped walking toward Jerusalem, stopped the procession with the crowds who were following Him, and He asked, “What do you want Me to do for you?” He said, “Lord, that I may receive my sight.” Then Jesus said to him, “Receive your sight; your faith has made you well.” Or translated in another way, “Your faith has saved you.”

There it is again. Salvation by faith alone. Faith in what? Faith in the merciful and loving Lord Jesus Christ. The eyes in the blind man’s head counted for nothing; they were worthless. Only faith created by God’s Holy Spirit through the good report about Christ benefited the blind man. Not human reason, not good works, not some inherent worthiness in the man. Only faith in Christ. And as a result of that faith, Christ saved him from his physical blindness. And in so doing, Christ teaches us that human reason counts for nothing. But all who believe in Him, that is, all who seek refuge in Christ from the condemnation their sins have earned, are justified and saved by that faith.

By faith, Christ heals our status before God. He takes sinners and turns them into saints who are counted holy and righteous before God by faith alone.

By faith, Christ also heals our spiritual blindness, even as He healed the physical blindness of the blind man. When you can’t see God’s Word clearly, when you can’t see God’s path clearly, when the road ahead appears dark and dim…when you can’t see anything else, just focus on Jesus. Not with your eyes, but with your ears. You know Him well enough through His Word. You’ve seen that He is truthful and dependable. And you know what the apostles still didn’t know as they kept following Jesus toward Jerusalem—how He would suffer at the hands of sinners and be crucified, how He would rise from the dead, and how His Church would indeed be built over the next 2,000 years, how you yourself have been made a member of Christ through Holy Baptism, how He continues to give you His body and blood.

That Spirit-worked faith is enough. That’s all you have to see, for now, until Christ sends His Spirit to enlighten your mind further. Pray for mercy, and you will receive it. Pray for His help to strengthen your faith, and He will do it. And when you can’t see in yourself the strength to love your neighbor as you ought, pray that Christ may increase His love within you, so that you begin to love with the perfect love described in 1 Corinthians 13, with a love that suffers long, and is kind, that does not envy, that does not parade itself, that is not puffed up, that does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, that thinks no evil, that rejoices not in iniquity, but in the truth, a love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Seek His help that you may grow into His image of love, and don’t stop crying out until you receive it.

See Jesus even when you can’t see anything else. See Him during the Lenten season that begins this Wednesday, and follow Him along the path of suffering and self-denial, even when you don’t understand it, even when its outcome is hidden from you. He will lead you to the cross, but also to an empty tomb. And all who look to Him for help will find it. Amen.

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