No need for God’s children to worry

Posted on September 13, 2015 by Rev. Paul Rydecki

right-click to save, or push Play

Sermon for Trinity 15

Deuteronomy 6:4-7  +  Galatians 5:25-6:10  +  Matthew 6:24-34

Jesus identifies an idol for us in today’s Gospel, the idol called Mammon. Money. Wealth. But the problem with Mammon isn’t what a lot of people today think it is. Oh, there are lots of wealth-related problems: Bribery. Greed. Extortion. Fraud. Stealing. Trampling your neighbor under your feet in order to get ahead. But the problem isn’t having wealth, even a lot of wealth. Money isn’t the root of all evil. But the love of it is, as St. Paul writes. And specifically, in our Gospel, the trust in it is the big problem.

As Jesus explains it, trust in money or wealth is behind most of the worrying we do, or at least the worrying we do about material things and financial things, which is what we’re focusing on today. Will I have enough food for tomorrow? Will I have clothes to wear tomorrow? What do I have to do to make sure I have enough food and clothing for tomorrow?

At least, that’s what the disciples of Jesus were worried about. But when was the last time you had that specific worry? We live in a strange time in world history, and in a strange place called America. When was the last time you worried about putting food on your table for the next day? When was the last time you worried about having clothes to wear tomorrow? Some people do worry about those things, but I think most of us spend more time worrying, not about tomorrow, or next week, but maybe a year from now, or five years, or 50. Because, well, we have enough of a cushion to see us through for at least a little while.

And, for that matter, I don’t think most of us worry about having enough to stay alive, but about having enough to maintain a standard of living—and even a comfortable standard of living that might include a bigger house than we need, or an extra car, or gourmet food, or many changes of clothing, or a cable bill, internet bill, cell phone bill, trips to the restaurant, a college fund, and other items that are nice to have, but not essential to life.

Now, don’t imagine that I’m shaming anyone for anything on that list. What I’m saying is this: if you find yourself worrying about things like that—standard of living things or things that you may not need for six months or for five or ten years, what would you do if you were truly living paycheck to paycheck just to fulfill your most basic needs of food and clothing for the next week, as many of Jesus’ disciples were in our Gospel? You would live in a state of continual panic. And so would I. Or at least, the faithless, idolatrous sinful flesh in us would be screaming at us to panic. To be anxious. To worry, pretty much all the time. How will we get the things we need for tomorrow? Or will we starve?

It’s that your flesh doesn’t trust God. Ever, from the moment you were conceived. It doesn’t trust God to know your needs or to provide for your needs or to care enough about you to provide for them. Your flesh won’t be satisfied until you have enough money to feel safe, enough wealth. But I’ll tell you a secret: there will never be enough money for that. Money is a poor master. The more you have, the more you need, the more you need, the more you worry about how much money you don’t have.

At times, your faith may be strong enough, that is, firmly resting on God’s faithful promises of love and fatherly providence and divine goodness, that you’re able to mostly drown out the voice of your unbelieving, idolatrous flesh. But at other times, faith becomes little, which means that God becomes little in your heart, in your thinking, and money starts to grow and take’s God’s place in your heart as that thing that you need so much, that thing that you trust in so much, that thing that, if you only had it, you would finally feel safe. What will you do to get it? What will you do if you don’t get it? That’s worry, fueled by a trust in faithless mammon.

You cannot serve both God and Mammon. So recognize the idol. Call it by name. And turn again to the true God, to your Father, who knew you in eternity, chose you to be His, sent His Son into our flesh, crucified Him to make atonement for your sins, raised Him from the dead, called you by the Gospel, adopted you in Holy Baptism, and committed Himself to see you safely through this earthly life, all the way into His heavenly house.

Do you want a sign that your Father will care for you and provide you with enough food so that you don’t have to worry? Look at the birds, Jesus says. They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? It’s that last phrase that really offers comfort. God provides food for the birds. You are much more valuable than the birds to your Father in heaven. He didn’t send His Son to become a bird or to save the birds. The birds do not have eternal souls. But man was made in the image of God. Mankind has been redeemed by the blood of Christ. And you have been washed in that blood and brought into Christ’s Holy Catholic Church. So count on your Father to do much more for you than He does for the birds.

Do you want a sign that your Father will care for you and provide you with enough clothing so that you don’t have to worry? Consider the lilies, Jesus says. They neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? The Lord rightly rebukes us for not trusting in Him to provide. Now, you can either take His rebuke and go sulk in a corner somewhere, or you can take His rebuke to heart and learn from Jesus’ words and turn to your Father in faith. As Jesus says in the book of Revelation, As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten.

The Gentiles—the pagans, the heathen—run around searching for ways to provide for themselves, because they don’t have a Father like you do. But you who have a Father in heaven who has made you His sons through faith in Christ Jesus—to you Jesus says, seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.

What does it mean to seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness? It means faith toward God and love toward your neighbor: faith that looks up to God with empty hands, ready to receive everything from Him, from the forgiveness of sins to the needs of your body; and love that is busy and active, that is anxious, not to provide for yourself or to serve yourself, but to serve your neighbor in his need. You want to worry about getting more money? OK. Just don’t worry about getting it for yourself. You’re taken care of, right? Worry instead about using money to help your neighbor with it.

All this has been said about worrying over money and financial needs. But it applies to your other worries as well—health worries, relationship worries, and whatever other things you think you need to worry about. You have a good and gracious Father who has promised to provide you with your daily bread and all that is included together with daily bread. Put your today and your tomorrows in His faithful hands, and let Him worry about it. Cast all your care upon Him, for He cares for you. Amen.

Posted in Sermons | Tagged , , | Comments Off on No need for God’s children to worry

Saved by faith. Then the battle begins.

Posted on September 6, 2015 by Rev. Paul Rydecki

right-click to save, or push Play

Sermon for Trinity 14

Jeremiah 17:13-14  +  Galatians 5:16-24  +  Luke 17:11-19

There is a battle raging on in this country right now between good and evil. You know what I’m talking about. You fight in this battle every day, if you’re a Christian. In fact, you only fight in this battle if you’re a Christian. But this battle isn’t waged with other people. It’s waged within you. It’s a battle fought between the flesh and the spirit, the Old Man and the New Man, the selfish sinful nature that is hostile to God and the spiritual nature that loves God.

St. Paul teaches us about this battle in today’s Epistle, and we see it played out in our Gospel of the Ten Lepers. We see the saving effects of faith in Christ. We see the tragic results when that salvation is taken for granted and faith is allowed to die. But we also see the victory of faith over the flesh, and we’re encouraged to stay in the battle to which God has called us.

It was during His final journey to Jerusalem, on His way to the cross, that Jesus encountered a group of ten lepers, there along the border between Galilee and Samaria. Leprosy was a disease of the flesh that left a person with flesh that was spotted, disfigured, twisted, rotten, and sometimes even crumbling to pieces. It was a horrible disease that isolated a person from the rest of society and from the temple of God. These lepers had heard the good word about Jesus, and that word, powerful as it was, kindled faith in their hearts and convinced them that Jesus was kind and good and merciful, and that His mercy had power behind it, power to heal even their dreadful disease. Faith is what drove them to go out to meet Jesus and to stand there calling out to Him, “Jesus, Master, have mercy!”

That’s what faith does. It drives a person to run to Jesus, to seek help from Him and to expect help from Him, not because you deserve it, but because you know Jesus is willing and able to help those who don’t deserve anything but wrath and punishment.

Jesus honored their faith, which means that He honored His own Holy Spirit who had created that faith through the word in the first place. Go, show yourselves to the priests! That’s what lepers were supposed to, according to the Law of Moses, after their leprosy had healed, so that the priests could evaluate them and certify that they were indeed healthy again and ready to reenter society. Jesus asked for nothing in return. He didn’t ask for them to prove their worth. He just showered them with mercy and healed the disease of their flesh.

The Holy Spirit uses this account to teach us once again how Christ heals all sinners who come to Him seeking mercy, who come to Him in faith, for the healing of the disease of our flesh.

Our fleshly disease is called Original Sin or hereditary sin. It infects everyone from the moment of conception and it has various symptoms, some of which Paul listed in our Epistle: the works of the flesh are evident, which are: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like. And then Paul tells us what the judgment of God is: 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.

So the holy Law of God bans us from the society of God’s people, because we are by nature sinful and unclean. But then Jesus comes to us through the word of His apostles and says, Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved. So faith heals and Baptism cleanses. It doesn’t take away our flesh so that it’s gone. It absolves us of the guilt of our sins. And, as Paul also writes to the Galatians, it crucifies our flesh, it hangs it up there on the cross together with Jesus, where God the Father punished our sins, leaving us spotless and blameless in His sight.

Faith alone does that. As Jesus said to the one leper who returned to give thanks, Your faith has made you well. But that brings us to the tragedy we encounter in our Gospel. All ten lepers were healed by faith. But nine out of ten quickly fell away. What happened?

Luther assumes that, since Jesus told them to go show themselves to the priests, they all went to the priests immediately. But when they arrived, the priests turned them against Jesus—as we often find the priests doing in the Gospels, urging the ten healed men to give glory to God, but not to give glory to God where Jesus was, in the person of Jesus, urging them to go fulfill their legal obligations and to trust, not in Jesus, but in their obedience from this time forward, so that they may remain clean.

Whether it was the priests who persuaded the nine to trust no longer in Jesus, or whether it was just their own sinful flesh that fought against their faith and won, turning them away from Jesus to focus inward again, to focus on themselves, as the sinful flesh always likes to do, we don’t know. The result was the same. A falling away from faith, back into unbelief. The Spirit of God who created their faith in the first place was urging them all back to Jesus, to go back to where Jesus was, to give glory to God in the person of Christ, to give thanks to God through Jesus Christ for the healing they had received. But nine of them were led by their flesh, not by the Spirit of God. Nine of them left Jesus behind in their rearview mirror, as it were, and carried on with their lives without Him.

Understand this, dear Christians: your flesh would like to do the same thing. You have been healed before God. You have been baptized and brought to faith and cleansed of your guilty record in God’s courtroom. Most of you have taken your catechism classes; you have been confirmed as Lutherans, that is, as Christians. Now that you’re healed, your flesh thinks, you can back off from the Word of God and from the Means of Grace. Now that you’re healed, your flesh thinks, you should focus on yourself, and your family, and your friends, and your job, and your hobbies, and your leisure activities, and…what were you healed from, again? Who was responsible for that? Oh, that’s in the past. Surely God just wants you to be “happy” now, right?

Beware of your flesh. It’s still hostile toward God. And “the heart is deceitful above all things.” It wants to lead you away from Jesus any which way it can, whether by temptation or by false doctrine or by plain old apathy or by spiritual atrophy—by lack of the spiritual nutrition that comes from the Word of God. The flesh was successful in nine out of the ten lepers, because, although their physical flesh was healed, they all still carried around with them their corrupt spiritual flesh, and they let it get the better of them in the battle.

It didn’t have to be that way, and it doesn’t have to be that way for you, either. Look at the one who came back in our Gospel account. Look at the one who was still a believer in Jesus, who came back to give glory to God in the person of Christ and to give thanks at Jesus’ feet, even though all nine of his friends had left him to go back to Jesus all by himself. He was a Samaritan, Jesus points out. Of all the ten who were healed, he was the least likely to remain a believer. And yet his faith was preserved. It was victorious over his flesh. And Jesus acknowledged him before men.

The battle rages in every Christian between the spirit and the flesh, between faith and unbelief, and you’re most susceptible when you forget that this battle exists. If you remember the battle, then you’ll remember Jesus, who gives you the victory over every battle, because He is victorious over sin, death and the devil. That’s why you’ve come to the Divine Service today, isn’t? To remember Jesus? To seek mercy from Him and to give thanks to Him? Remember what we call the Sacrament of the Altar? The Eucharist! The Thanksgiving! It’s where poor sinners who have been cleansed of the guilt of sin in Holy Baptism now come back to Jesus regularly to give thanks to Him. How? Not by offering Him our works, but by simply acknowledging Him as our Savior, and by receiving again His mercy and His forgiveness in the place where He has promised to be found by us, where He has promised to be present with His own body and blood.

Christ Jesus, who has cleansed you from sin and made you whole before God, now calls you to battle—a battle that begins and ends with thankfulness, a battle that, if you’re fighting it, you cannot lose, because the battle depends solely on the strength and power of the Holy Spirit, who will always strengthen and fortify you through His Means of Grace. The battle rages on as long as you live on this earth, because as long as you live on this earth, your crucified flesh is still clinging to you. But if you are led by the Spirit of God here on this earth, you are not under the law. You live by the Spirit. Let us, then, as Paul says, walk by the Spirit and pursue all the fruits that He produces: love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Even if you see other Christians abandoning these things, as the one leper saw his nine friends abandon Jesus, don’t you abandon them. Remember Jesus, who loved you and gave Himself for you. And keep fighting the good fight of faith. Amen.

 

Posted in Sermons | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Saved by faith. Then the battle begins.

Either righteous by faith or not righteous at all

Posted on August 30, 2015 by Rev. Paul Rydecki

right-click to save, or push Play

Sermon for Trinity 13

Leviticus 18:1-5  +  Galatians 3:15-22  +  Luke 10:23-37

What shall you do to inherit eternal life? That’s what it’s all about, the answer to that question. You think it matters how much money you have? How nice of a house? If you have a loving family? If you’re healthy, if you feel good? If the right person is in office? That could all be taken away, gone in an instant. Death could come or Christ could come. Then what? Then eternity. Judgment. Endless life and joy and peace, or endless sorrow and pain and despair. So the question set before us today in the Gospel is a vital one: What shall you do to inherit eternal life?

Some would say, “Oh, that’s easy. Be a Good Samaritan! Be kind and merciful to strangers. Be a good neighbor to everyone who needs your help.” In other words, love! In fact, I just yesterday saw this post on Facebook: “Buddha wasn’t a Buddhist. Jesus wasn’t a Christian. Mohammed wasn’t a Muslim. They were teachers who taught love. Love was their religion.”

That statement is false on so many levels. But understand, that is how many people answer the question, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? Love! Love your neighbor! Do that, and you will live! Jesus even says so. When the lawyer asked his question, Jesus replied, What is written in the law? What is your reading of it?” So he answered and said, “ ‘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.’ ” And He said to him, “You have answered rightly; do this and you will live.”

The problem is, that’s where most people stop. They hear the parable of the Good Samaritan, and they imagine that this parable summarizes the whole teaching of Jesus, that this is how to inherit eternal life—by loving your neighbor. (Not to mention by loving the Lord God with your whole self!)

They’re wrong. Fatally wrong. What Jesus teaches in the parable of the Good Samaritan is not how a person can actually be saved, but how good and loving God demands that a person be in order to be saved by the law. What He intends to communicate with this parable is not the steps you must now take to earn eternal life, but on the contrary, He wants you to see how impossible it is for you, who are born sinners, to keep the requirements of His holy law so as to be saved by it. He wants you to face yourself in the mirror of His law and see just how lost you are, if you want to do something to inherit eternal life.

See what true love for your neighbor doesn’t look like. The man who was beaten and robbed and left for dead on the side of the road was ignored by the priest and the Levite—by the very people who were teaching people that they had to keep the law in order to be saved. How ironic! The very people who were preaching “works of love” refused to show any to the wounded man. They regularly brought sacrifices to God in His temple, but they knew nothing of mercy toward their neighbor.

But what does true love look like? Here comes a Samaritan. Remember, the Samaritans and the Jews were natural enemies who lived side by side with one another in the territory of Israel. But the Samaritan sees his natural enemy, the Jew, lying in the ditch half-dead, and he has compassion on him. Not the fake compassion that feels bad for his neighbor but does nothing. His compassion shows itself as he tends to the beaten man’s wounds, puts him up on his own animal, walks him to an inn, takes care of him some more, and then pays the innkeeper to keep tending to him until the Samaritan returns from his journey.

Go and do likewise, Jesus says. That’s his answer to the lawyer’s question. What must I do to inherit eternal life? Do the things the Samaritan did. But when Jesus says, “do this,” the word He uses doesn’t just mean do it once. It means, do it continually. It’s what Moses wrote in the Law, in the reading from Leviticus you heard this morning: You shall therefore keep My statutes and My judgments, which if a man does, he shall live by them.

To keep the law of love is no easy task. It requires that your entire life be lived for the sake of your neighbor. Every day. Every moment. All the time.

That’s where Jesus ends the lesson in Luke chapter 10. But it’s not where Jesus ends the lesson. His entire Gospel and the Epistles He sent His apostles to write make it perfectly clear that His answer to the lawyer that day is not the whole story, not the full answer. As Paul wrote to the Galatians in today’s Epistle, For if there had been a law given which could have given life, truly righteousness would have been by the law. But the Scripture has confined all under sin, that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe.

You see, the Bible actually provides two very different answers to the question, what must I do to inherit eternal life? The Law answer says, “You shall love God and your neighbor continually and perfectly, without fail.” But the main message of the Bible is that we are born law-breakers, without true fear of God, without true love for God, and without trust in the true God. That means that no one can keep the Law so as to be saved by it. The Law can’t save people who are already sinful.

But another sinful man in the Bible—a Gentile jailor in the city of Philippi—once asked the question, “What must I do to be saved?” To him the Apostle Paul gave the other Bible answer, the one that actually works for sinners: “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved.”

Jesus is the truly Good Samaritan—our blood-relative with regard to His humanity, but a foreigner with regard to His divinity. He saw us robbed of all goodness and beaten half-dead by the devil. And He had compassion on us and came to our rescue. He had His Gospel preached to us and tended to our spiritual wounds with His Word and Baptism. He brought us into the inn of the Church and has placed us in the charge of His ministers who continue to tend to our wounds until He returns, applying the Word of God as bandages and the Means of Grace as healing ointment.

Now, why didn’t Jesus just give that answer to the lawyer who approached Him in today’s Gospel? Why didn’t He point to Himself directly? Why did Jesus give him the law answer instead of the Gospel answer? Because of what it says about that lawyer: He wanted to justify himself. You can’t have Christ for a Savior if you want to you justify yourself. You can’t have the Gospel promises as long as you cling to your own works, or as long as you deny your own sinfulness. The lawyer in the Gospel asked the question, “What must I do…,” thinking he could actually do something. The jailor in Philippi asked the question, “What must I do…,” in complete and utter despair of his own works. Hence the different answers.

What’s more, the lawyer in today’s Gospel didn’t even understand what he was asking. How did his question go, again? What must I do to inherit eternal life? Do you “do” something to “inherit” something? Isn’t an inheritance something that is bequeathed to certain people when a person dies? You don’t work for an inheritance. You simply receive it because you had a relationship with someone who died.

That’s where the whole Bible comes together, and the Apostle Paul ties it up nicely for us in today’s Epistle. Long ago, even before the Law was given through Moses, God made a Testament with Abraham, a Testament of inheritance. The inheritance was promised to Abraham’s “Seed,” whom Paul identifies as Christ Jesus Himself. The inheritance of eternal life was bequeathed to Jesus, the Son of Abraham. And before He died on the cross, Jesus bequeathed that inheritance to all who believe in Him, to all who are baptized into Him, to all who partake of the New Testament in His blood, sealed to us in the Holy Supper. Only by faith in Christ is a person righteous before God. Either you’re righteous by faith, or you’re not righteous at all, no matter how many strangers you help on the side of the road.

But does God still call upon His righteous-by-faith people to love our neighbor? Absolutely! The righteousness of faith is always accompanied by love. If it isn’t, then it isn’t genuine faith in the first place. God teaches you in the Gospel to serve your neighbor in love, to be on the lookout for the people in your life who need your help, who need your service, and to have mercy on them. It usually won’t be as dramatic as seeing a stranger lying wounded on the side of the road. Instead, it will be moms and dads serving their children, and children serving their parents. It will be neighbors helping their neighbors, workers serving their employers faithfully and employers looking out for their workers diligently. It will be students offering comfort and encouragement to their fellow students when they’re hurting. It will be church members supporting and helping one another, and those with wealth sharing it with those in need.

And yet none of that can be done in order to inherit eternal life. Eternal life is an inheritance received only by faith. But it’s the heirs of eternal life who are also truly zealous to do works of love for their neighbor, because it’s the heirs of eternal life who know from experience what mercy and love are all about, because they themselves have received it from God. May God, by His Spirit, continue to increase your faith and kindle in you the fire of His love. Amen.

Posted in Sermons | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Either righteous by faith or not righteous at all

Hearing with the ears and confessing with the tongue

Posted on August 23, 2015 by Rev. Paul Rydecki

right-click to save, or push Play

Sermon for Trinity 12

Isaiah 29:18-19  +  2 Corinthians 3:4-11  +  Mark 7:31-37

There’s nothing difficult to understand in Mark’s account of Jesus healing the deaf man who could neither hear nor speak. The reputation of Jesus had gone out in Israel. This man preaches about the kingdom of God. This man teaches the Scriptures like no one else, with authority. This man Jesus can heal diseases. This man Jesus is kind and merciful. He accepts no bribe. He shows no favoritism. He helps all who come to Him for help. And He demands no payment, nothing in return.

Look! He’s just come back from outside of Israel, from Tyre and Sidon to the north. And the report has gone out that He even helped some of the Gentiles up there. This Jesus is more than just a good man. He is the Christ!

That report, that word about Jesus, had gone out and had created faith in many who heard it. As Paul writes to the Romans, faith comes by hearing! But what about those who haven’t heard? What about those who can’t hear? As Paul also writes, How shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard?

The deaf man hadn’t heard anything, ever. But his friends had ears. They heard the report about Jesus. And they believed. They also had tongues—tongues to confess faith in Jesus and love to lead others to seek help from Him. But even their tongues were useless when it came to the deaf man. So they confessed Jesus with their feet and with their hands as they led their deaf friend to the one Man on earth who could help. And they used their tongues to beg Jesus to help their friend. And, true to His reputation, He did.

The one thing that stands out in this text and makes it different from other healing miracles is the process that Jesus used to heal the deaf man. As we know from other healing accounts, Jesus didn’t need to use a process to heal people. He could heal people with a word, as He did with the ten lepers. He could heal people who weren’t anywhere near Him, as He did with the centurion’s servant. So the steps that Jesus took to heal this deaf man are significant; they must have been done for a reason.

And that reason isn’t hard to figure out. The deaf man’s friends demonstrated their faith in Jesus, based on the word they had heard about Him. But their faith couldn’t help their deaf friend; they couldn’t believe for him. He needed his own faith if he was to be saved, and not just saved from deafness, but saved from eternal death and condemnation. Your faith can’t save your neighbor. Each one needs his own faith, and only Jesus, by His Spirit, can give it. So the signs Jesus used in the process of healing the deaf man were designed to preach the word about Jesus in the only way a deaf man could “hear” it, and to give that word time to take root in the man’s heart.

First Jesus took him aside from the multitude. That showed him that this Jesus had time for him, that He was concerned for Him and ready to help, even though they were complete strangers. That’s the way it has to be. There has to be individual contact with Jesus. That’s why Holy Baptism is always performed one on one, not by tossing a bucket of water on a crowd. That’s Jesus taking a child—or an adult, of course—away from the crowd for a moment to perform the healing of the forgiveness of sins.

Then Jesus put His fingers in the deaf man’s ears. Only doctors do things like that. It demonstrates a very personal concern. And it shows that only the fingers of Jesus can open deaf ears. There’s a spiritual meaning to that, too. In the Bible, the “finger of God” refers specifically to the Holy Spirit. And it’s another way of illustrating for us that the only way to open spiritually deaf ears—ears that can’t hear the Gospel so as to believe it—is for Jesus to send His Holy Spirit into our ears through His Word. Again, faith comes by hearing.

Jesus then spat and touched the man’s tongue, because not only did his ears not work, but his tongue was tied, too. Again, a very personal way to heal. It reminds us just how close Jesus has come to us poor sinners. The Son of God gave Himself human saliva and flesh and blood for the very purpose of pouring out His blood and having His flesh destroyed on the cross as payment for our sins. This act of spitting and touching the man’s tongue is a picture of the Word of God going out from the mouth of Jesus, through His called and ordained servants. It goes into the ears, of course, but then it takes root in the heart and makes its way onto the tongue, so that, again, as Paul writes to the Romans, with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation…Whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

Then Jesus looked up to heaven and sighed. This healing miracle is not a medical procedure. Jesus is not using some sort of Western medicine or Eastern medicine. Healing comes only from above, from the God of love who sent His Son to rescue poor sinners from the consequences of their own sins, including the inborn sin, the original sin and spiritual disease with which we are born. A sigh from God as He looks down at all the mess we’ve made of this earth, of ourselves, at all the disease and death we’ve brought on ourselves by our sins, as He looks at all the broken families, and the physical and psychological illnesses that plague our race. A sigh—“You did this to yourselves.”

But then, what? What does God do? Turn His back and walk away? Finish us off with wrath and condemnation? No. He sends His Son who speaks a word of salvation: Ephphatha! Be opened! And the deaf man can hear and speak clearly. It’s what Jesus does for all of us spiritually. He sends His Spirit into our ears, into our hearts, promising salvation, promising the forgiveness of sins. He works faith there, in those who don’t stubbornly resist Him. Then He speaks the word of forgiveness, the loosing of sins, the absolution. And then our tongues are loosed to sing His praises and to give thanks to God for His mercy and help, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

You all, I think, have working ears and working tongues, at least enough to hear a sermon and speak the confession of sins and the Creed. More importantly, God has opened your spiritual ears to believe the word you have heard about the kindness and mercy of Christ and to confess Christ, not with empty words of the tongue, but from the heart. You weren’t born with open ears. God did that, for you, through His Gospel. In fact, God has to continually hold your ears open through His Gospel, because your ears are like self-closing doors that automatically swing shut if not continually propped open.

You see a little example of that at the end of our Gospel. Jesus told the people not to tell anyone what they had seen that day. He had His reasons. His instructions were clear, and the people heard them with their ears, but then their sinful flesh took over and stopped up their spiritual ears so that they stopped listening. Instead of doing what Jesus said, they went out and did the opposite. Now, you may say that they had good intentions in spreading the word about what Jesus did. But intentions are not really good if they ignore the word of Jesus. No, the people that day saw a great miracle, but then hardened their hearts to Jesus’ word and gave way to their flesh, so that they ended up misusing both their ears and their tongues.

Take a warning from that. Jesus has not opened your ears so that you can turn around and shut them again. He has not given you a tongue to confess Him before men so that you can turn around and speak in ways that He has not authorized.

Use your God-given ears and tongues for the purpose for which God gave them to you: to hear His Word and believe it, to hear His Word and put it into practice, and to speak and to sing the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light. Amen.

Posted in Sermons | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Hearing with the ears and confessing with the tongue

Justified only by faith in the God of mercy

Posted on August 16, 2015 by Rev. Paul Rydecki

right-click to save

Sermon for Trinity 11

2 Samuel 22:21-29  +  1 Corinthians 15:1-10  +  Luke 18:9-14

I hope that, by now, the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector is firmly rooted in your hearts. We hear it year after year in the Gospel for this Sunday and it summarizes the Christian faith so simply that any child can understand it. In fact, children understand it far better than great theologians and pastors and synodical officials, as another Lutheran pastor is in the midst of finding out (we prayed for him by name last Sunday). Some people are justified before God; some are not. Who are the ones who are justified—considered and declared by God to be righteous and innocent in His sight? And who are not? That’s the subject of Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector.

He tells this parable in the first place because some of the Jews who were following Him still didn’t get it. Luke tells us that Jesus spoke this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others. I hope you can see, right at the outset, how devastating that is and why Jesus had to attack it with this pride-shattering parable. To trust in yourself, to have faith in yourself, that you are good enough, that you have done enough to earn God’s favor and forgiveness—that’s a fatal mistake, a mistake that will forever keep you from being justified before God, for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled.

Jesus gives us an example of a man who exalted himself, before God and before men: the Pharisee in the parable. Now, in the world’s eyes, he may have had every reason to exalt himself—to lift himself up in his own eyes. As the Pharisee stands in the temple and prays, he sounds like a model citizen. He is no murderer, no thief, no adulterer. He’s also very religious; he fasts twice a week—a sign of devotion to God; he gives ten percent of his income to God, as God told the people of Israel to do. His works looked good enough for him to be justified before God.

But his heart was bad; Jesus reveals that to us. The Pharisee lifted himself up before God, as if he had earned God’s favor because of the good life he had led. He lifted himself up above other men, and certainly above the tax collector standing across the room. Indeed, he lifted himself up above all the saints—above Adam, above Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, above Moses, above David and all the prophets. Because all of them acknowledged their sin before God. All of them humbled themselves before God and looked to God, not for praise, but for forgiveness. All of them relied only on God’s mercy for their justification. As the Scripture says, for example, about Abraham: He believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness. Or as David wrote in Psalm 32: Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, Whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man to whom the LORD does not impute iniquity, And in whose spirit there is no deceit. But there was deceit in the Pharisee’s spirit. He was deceiving himself, that he was righteous because of the good things he did. The truth is, even the good things he did weren’t good in God’s sight, because they didn’t flow from faith in God’s mercy. By exalting himself, the Pharisee was actually rejecting God’s Word that accused him of being a sinner. By exalting himself, the Pharisee was actually despising, hating the true God, who is a God of mercy and compassion toward sinners, not a God who pats sinners on the back and praises them for being such good people. As Jesus says, the Pharisee went down to his house not justified.

Then Jesus gives us an example of a man who humbled himself before God and before men: the tax collector who stood in the distance, beat his chest and simply prayed, God, be merciful to me a sinner! This was no mere show of humility. It was genuine. The tax collectors had a reputation of being swindlers, taking advantage of their neighbor and loving money more than God. Most of them probably never set foot in the temple, for fear that lightning would strike them because they were such bad people. Now, this tax collector may have done just as many bad things as his fellow tax collectors, but he was different; he did go up to the temple. Why? Because he recognized his sins and sought forgiveness. He trusted in the God of mercy, which means he must have heard the Gospel, because no one trusts in the God of mercy by nature. No one comes to repent of his sins and trust in God’s mercy toward sinners on his own, but only by hearing the Word. So he must have heard the word that God is merciful and that God will forgive all who confess their sins to him. That’s not surprising, because the Word of God was certainly preached in Israel, even in the very sacrifices that were offered in the temple itself, each one crying out, “God will provide a sacrifice to make atonement for sins. God will forgive the one who trusts in the blood of the sacrifice!” So he dared to go up to the temple. He dared to pray. He humbled himself before God, and God exalted him. God lifted him up. The tax collector went down to his house justified.

Dear Christians, you and I know that God has now, once and for all, provided the sacrifice that makes atonement for sins. He has given His Son, who shed His holy, precious blood on the cross so that all who have sinned may wash their filthy robes and make them white in the blood of Christ. In other words, so that sinners may approach the God of mercy in faith and receive forgiveness for all their sins. We approach the God of mercy, the Throne of Grace, first in Holy Baptism, and then continually in the pastor’s absolution and in the Sacrament of the body and blood of Christ. Here is where God has promised to be merciful, and that promise inspires and creates faith. Paul reminded the Corinthians of that Gospel in today’s Epistle: I declare to you the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received and in which you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold fast that word which I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures.

Like the Corinthians, you have received that Gospel, too. You were baptized into it. You confess it here every week. You know that you have been justified by faith in Christ Jesus, and that faith is the only means by which sinners are justified, because your works aren’t good enough. You aren’t good enough. But God doesn’t justify those who are good enough. He justifies those who humble themselves and rely only on His mercy for the sake of Christ.

Now, is that a license to go out and keep on sinning? Of course not! You’ve died to sin. How could you live in it any longer? No, those who trust in the God of mercy are pleasing to God by faith. They are good trees that bear good fruit. They are branches in the vine that is Christ. And as Christ says, He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.

So being justified by faith doesn’t mean you don’t do good works or that God doesn’t expect you to do good works. It means that you don’t rely on those works to be justified. It means that you always and only approach God on the basis of His mercy in Christ and never because you think you have been righteous enough to earn His favor. That’s why David could pray as you heard him pray in the First Lesson today: The LORD rewarded me according to my righteousness; According to the cleanness of my hands He has recompensed me. For I have kept the ways of the LORD, And have not wickedly departed from my God…I was also blameless before Him, And I kept myself from my iniquity. Therefore the LORD has recompensed me according to my righteousness, According to my cleanness in His eyes. At first, that sounds kind of like the Pharisee’s prayer in Jesus’ parable, where he speaks of his own righteousness before God. But there’s a night and day difference between the two, and it lies in the heart. As the Scriptures reveal about David, he didn’t rely on his own record of righteousness as if it earned God’s favor, like the Pharisee, as if he didn’t first need God’s forgiveness to be righteous before God. No, David confesses over and over his need for God’s mercy. But as a believer in God, David did act righteously when he went up against his enemies, including King Saul who wickedly kept trying to kill David. And so God lifted David up above his enemies and gave him the victory. David was righteous by faith, and for that reason he sought to live a righteous life before the God in whom he trusted.

There’s a warning in today’s Gospel that we all need to hear, because even though we’ve been born again by water and the Spirit in the new life of faith in the God of mercy, our natural tendency is to revert to our natural state of trusting in ourselves and our righteousness. The devil would soon have you convinced that you are saved because you are so much better than others, to have you pray like the Pharisee: “God, I thank you that I do not support abortion, or practice homosexuality, or defend illegal immigration. I give generous offerings to church and I loudly proclaim that ‘all lives matter.’ I thank you, God, that I am not like other men—immoral, indecent, liberal.” Watch out for that natural tendency. You stand by faith and only by faith, not by being so much better than the next guy.

But there is great comfort in the Gospel for you who, like the tax collector, recognize that you have no reason to stand before God except that God has revealed Himself as merciful and forgiving for the sake of Christ. You are the ones who confess your sins, who plead, “God be merciful to me a sinner!” You are the ones who receive the body and blood of Christ for the forgiveness of sins. And so you can be confident that you are the ones who will go home, again today, justified. In the name of Jesus. Amen.

Posted in Sermons | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Justified only by faith in the God of mercy