Emmanuel Lutheran Church

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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.

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Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity

Galatians 3:15-22 + Luke 10:23-37

Even people who don’t know the Bible or pay much attention to the words Jesus spoke are familiar with the term “Good Samaritan.” They think of a Good Samaritan as basically a nice guy who stops along the road to help a stranger in need. In fact, just last week there was a tragic news story, headlined, “Good Samaritan killed after helping two South Carolina teens pull SUV from ditch.”

We need to pause again this year, on this 13^th Sunday after Trinity, to recalibrate our understanding of the Good Samaritan, to line it up with what Jesus was teaching, as opposed to what the world has come away with from this parable, which is basically the notion that you’re supposed to lend a helping hand to a stranger once in a while. That’s not why Jesus told this parable. He told the parable of the Good Samaritan to frighten his hearers to death.

Let’s back up for a moment. Let’s start where our Gospel starts. Then He turned to His disciples and said privately, “Blessed are the eyes which see the things you see; ²⁴ for I tell you that many prophets and kings have desired to see what you see, and have not seen it, and to hear what you hear, and have not heard it. Why? What was it that Jesus’ disciples were seeing and hearing that the prophets and kings of the Old Testament all yearned to hear and see?

They were hearing and seeing the Seed of Abraham in action. Remember what you heard in today’s Epistle from Galatians 3—that’s a key chapter of the Bible for understanding the role God intended for the Law of Moses to play. Paul reminds us that God made a covenant with Abraham—that God would cause Abraham and His Seed to inherit the earth, to inherit eternal life. And the apostle points out that God did not make that covenant with all of Abraham’s descendants (plural), but only with THE promised Seed of Abraham (singular), which was Christ. He was the Heir of the Old Testament. Prophets and kings longed to see His day—which meant the fulfillment of the Law, the atonement for sins, and the proclamation of the day of grace—salvation for sinners by grace through faith in the Seed of Abraham. That was always God’s intention, always the only path for sinners to inherit eternal life.

But what happened between the time of Abraham and the time of Jesus? The law was added, summarized in the Ten Commandments, and summarized again in a different way with the twofold command: You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind,’ and ‘your neighbor as yourself.’ Why was the law added to the covenant God made with Abraham and his Seed? Paul tells us that it was not added in order to void or to change in any way the promise of salvation by grace that God made with Abraham. It was added, Paul writes, because of transgressions, till the Seed should come to whom the promise was made. In other words, the law was added in order to shine a bright light on the transgressions—the sins—that all men commit, so that we might repent and believe in the promised Seed of Abraham for the forgiveness of sins and for the gift of eternal life that only He can give.

But human beings still have this innate, twisted tendency to think that we can earn a place in heaven by keeping the law, even though the law was never given for that purpose. That’s what the lawyer in our Gospel thought. What was his question again? Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? And since the lawyer was infatuated with the law, Jesus sent him back to the law for his answer, and he answered correctly—Love the Lord with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus agreed. If you do this, you will live.

The problem is, he couldn’t do it, and neither can you. Neither can anyone. As Paul wrote, For if there had been a law given which could have given life, truly righteousness would have been by the law. If life could be won by the law, it would have been done by the law. If man was capable of earning his way to eternal life, God would have made the law the way to enter eternal life. It’s a good law, after all! Love for God! Love for your neighbor! What could be better than that? But human beings are fallen. Human beings are sinful. We can’t do it. And not only can’t we do it, but we can’t even recognize that we can’t do it.

Like the lawyer in the Gospel. He heard Jesus’ reply, Do this and you will live, and he knew how broad and overarching that command was, but still tried to wiggle his way out of the law’s sweeping command—and condemnation. But he, wanting to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

Maybe if I can narrow down this command of the law to include only a small set of people—my immediate family, my next-door neighbor, people of my own race. Who is my neighbor?

That’s what prompted Jesus to tell the parable of the Good Samaritan. You heard it. You know it. We’ll summarize it briefly.

There’s a man in need. He’s been robbed and beaten and left for dead on the side of the road. Two men come upon him—two men from Jerusalem, two “holy” men, two “children of Abraham,” a priest and a Levite, the guardians of the Law. They see the man lying there, right on their path, needing their help, needing their love. He’s their Jewish brother, their fellow church member. But they each go out of their way to step to the side, to avoid him, to avoid loving him.

The Samaritans, on the other hand, were treated poorly by the Jews, despised as foreigners and half-bloods. But see how this Samaritan treats the dying Jewish man as if he were his brother, his next-door neighbor, his friend. Some people might see a wounded man on the side of the road and despise him, or fear him. The Samaritan has compassion on him. He runs over to help. He takes all those loving steps to tend to his wounds, to bring him to safety, and to see to his ongoing care there at the inn until the Samaritan returns from his journey. It’s a beautiful story of love and compassion.

But it’s also a terrifying story. Because this is what God’s law requires, if you would do something to inherit eternal life. Not the once-in-a-while helping of a stranger, but the ongoing treatment of every single person around you with this level of care and compassion, even putting your own life at risk if necessary—in addition to that perfect love for the God of Abraham who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Love your neighbor as yourself. Do to others what you would have them do to you. That’s the model the Good Samaritan sets for you. That’s the Law. Either keep it without fail, or be damned.

The parable of the Good Samaritan should terrify people. It should send them running for cover from the Law’s condemnation, which is aimed at everyone who has ever shown anything less than the mercy of the Good Samaritan in our Gospel. If people understood that, they would not think so highly of the Good Samaritan. Because he puts all men to shame and shows us what we must do, if we would inherit eternal life.

What a terrible lesson. But what a necessary lesson for us poor sinners to learn. Because most people live under this delusion, that you can be good enough for God to accept you into eternal life. But you can’t. That’s why you should fear the Good Samaritan.

But at the same time, if you’ve learned to fear the Law and to tremble at your sins, there is great comfort and hope for you in this Gospel. Indeed, as Paul writes to the Galatians, the Scripture has confined all people under sin, that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe.

The Lord God saw us wounded by the devil, abandoned by the Law, helpless to save ourselves because of our inborn sin. He saw us, wretched, poor, naked and blind, and He took pity. He had mercy. He sent His Son into our flesh, even though we were His enemies by birth. He became our Neighbor. He came and helped us, putting His own life in danger, even sacrificing His own life on the cross in order to buy the bandages and the oil and wine to heal our wounds, to forgive us our sins. He sent His Gospel to you in the ministry of the Word, He sent someone to baptize you, washing your sins away from God’s sight. He brought you into the inn of His holy Church, where His ministers look after you and keep applying the healing salve of Word and Sacrament, until He returns from His journey to bring you safely home.

Once the Good Samaritan has terrified you, so that you flee from the law and from thinking you have to do something good in order to inherit eternal life, flee in faith to the truly Good Samaritan, Christ Jesus, and thank God for Him who has loved you with a love you can never equal.

And yet, because He has loved you and granted you the gift of eternal life that is only His to give, as the Seed of Abraham, now you are equipped, as a son of Abraham through faith in THE Son of Abraham, to spend the rest of your life on earth imitating His love. You’ve experienced the love of Christ, the Good Samaritan, firsthand. So it’s a fitting thing for the Holy Spirit to call out to you now, Go and do likewise. Not in order to inherit eternal life. But because Christ has inherited eternal life for you and gives it away for free to all who believe in Him. Amen.

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Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity

1 Corinthians 15:1-10  +  Luke 18:9-14

There are two kinds of sinners portrayed for us in today’s Gospel, and also in the Epistle: those who are not easily identified as sinners and thus deny that they are sinners, and those who are easily identified as sinners and who confess their sinfulness with humility and seek help and mercy from the Lord God alone. In the Epistle, the same man—the Apostle Paul—was each kind of sinner at different points in his life. He started out a Pharisee, denying his sinfulness, claiming to be righteous before God, looking down on other people as the real sinners. But then God, in His mercy, showed Paul (or Saul) how great a sinner he actually was. God took pity on him, humbled him, brought him to repentance and faith in Christ Jesus, who died for our sins according to the Scriptures, was buried, and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures. And so Paul went from being a Pharisee-kind-of sinner who stood condemned before God to being the other kind of sinner, a penitent, humbled sinner who was justified by faith in Christ.

Now, you know and agree with the Holy Scriptures when they make the sweeping claim that all men are sinners. That all have sinned, including you. That all have earned and now deserve nothing but temporal and eternal punishment from God. If we could just start with that premise, then we could move on to talk about the solution. But we can’t start there. The Pharisees of the world—the Pharisees who dwell in our own flesh—have to be addressed first, as Jesus so directly addresses them in today’s Gospel, comparing them with the tax collectors of the world.

The Pharisee and the tax collector each go to the temple in Jerusalem to pray. The Pharisee looks up to heaven and praises…himself. He thanks God, but actually credits himself with being a fine, upstanding person—a far better person than the tax collector who entered the temple with him. He lists the fine things he has done and holds himself up before God as a model citizen and church member, fully expecting God to smile down at him, and to look down with His divine gaze on the sinful tax collector with contempt.

The tax collector knows he isn’t good enough even to lift up his face to heaven. Remember, the tax collectors of Jesus’ day were known for being cheaters, extortionists, and thieves. He knows he has sinned against God and man. He doesn’t list anything good in himself, but beats his breast and prays for mercy—mercy that he knows he doesn’t deserve, but God has revealed Himself as a God of mercy, as a God who set up His temple and His altar in the temple for the very purpose of accepting the death of innocent animals as sacrifices in the place of guilty sinners, so that He might show mercy to the sinners, all of which pointed ahead to the great sacrifice of Christ for the sins of the world.

The tax collector was right to seek mercy from God, who proclaims Himself to be a God who delights in mercy, the God who proclaimed long ago through the prophet Isaiah: On this one will I look: On him who is poor and of a contrite spirit, And who trembles at My word. True to His Word, Jesus reveals to His hearers how God viewed the self-righteous Pharisee and how He viewed the penitent tax collector. Only one of those two men went down to his house justified, forgiven, and it wasn’t the Pharisee.

The Pharisees, as a Jewish sect, no longer exist. But the Pharisaical attitude lives on. The Pharisees of today are those who, like the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable, appear to be godly people on the outside. Compared to other men, they are relatively innocent, good, righteous. They work hard. They pray. They go to church. They give generous offerings. That’s all well and good. But here’s the other quality of the Pharisees that makes them Pharisees: they actually believe that they are good people. They actually believe themselves to be righteous people, better than other men, deserving of God’s favor and blessings.

The world tends to view all Christians as Pharisees, as pompous, self-righteous hypocrites who love to talk about how good and moral they are, showing off their good works, who walk around comparing themselves to others and looking down on others and putting others down, even mistreating their neighbors and then patting themselves on the back for being fine “church people.” That’s not fair, of course, to brand all Christians that way. It’s a stereotype that the world has created to hide its own guilt and shame, to make excuses for its unbelief in the true God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

But the stereotype has had more than a few representatives over the ages, and there is certainly a warning for Christians in this Gospel. Self-righteousness is a powerful temptation that afflicts Christians, and all the more as the world around us becomes more openly godless, as sin is celebrated and truth is mocked. The contrast between a life lived according to the Ten Commandments and the way the world around us lives is becoming greater and greater. How easy it is to compare yourself to the immoral people of this world—you could even begin comparing yourself to your fellow Christians! —and conclude, “I am definitely living a better life than they are. Thank God I’m not like them.”

Watch out! Those who exalt themselves will be humbled. There’s no room for pride or self-congratulation in the kingdom of God. There’s only room for God’s mercy in Christ. If you wish to bring in your goodness, your decency, your works, your ego and hold them up before God as reasons for Him to accept you, then you will be on your own, and Jesus tells you in the Gospel how it will go for you. You will not go down to your home justified.

Instead, Jesus holds up for us the example of the tax collector as the one who went down to his home justified.

Now, there’s more than one kind of tax collector. There are at least five kinds of tax collectors, of people who are easily identifiable as sinners. First, there are the ones who recognize their sin and gladly flaunt it for all the world to see. They are just as condemned as the Pharisee. Then there are those who recognize their sin and fool themselves into thinking they can fix the problem themselves, work harder, do better, make themselves righteous. They are just as condemned as the Pharisee. There are others who recognize their sin and seek help from a false god who cannot save—the Mormon god, the Jewish god, the Muslim god, the Jehovah’s Witness god, or any of the pagan gods men have created from their own imaginations. They are just as condemned as the Pharisee. And then there are those who recognize their sin and despair of all help and mercy. Some commit suicide. Others live in deep sadness, bitterness, anger, or fear. They, too, are just as condemned as the Pharisee. And then, finally, there are the ones like the Apostle Paul, like the tax collector in today’s parable, who recognize their sin with sorrow, but who also recognize in Jesus a kind and merciful Savior who is mighty enough and worthy enough to save even the worst of sinners, and so they seek mercy from the only true source of mercy, from the Lord God, for the sake of His Son Jesus Christ.

“Be like that!”, Jesus pleads with us. Be like the tax collector. Yes, he’s done terrible things. But so has the Pharisee—his sins are just less obvious to those around him. The real difference between the two lies in repentance and faith in God’s mercy for the sake of Christ. Be like that and humble yourself before God. Acknowledge the deep corruption of your heart and the crimes, both small and great, that you have committed against your neighbor, and against God. Be like that tax collector in the temple. Confess your sins to God, trusting in His mercy for the sake of Christ Jesus who loved us and gave Himself for us. Find your righteousness, not in yourself, but in Him. And then know for certain—you have God’s word for it—that you will always go down to your house justified. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

It’s true that you’re always a sinner, so you always have sins to confess. But it’s also true that God forgives sins, and because He does, it means that you don’t need to live with guilt or shame laid upon your back, but, by faith in Christ Jesus, you are free, free to live in joy and thankfulness to God for showing mercy to you, a sinner, and then to show the same mercy in humble service to your neighbor. Amen.