A death surrounded by hope

Posted on September 20, 2015 by Rev. Paul Rydecki

Sermon for Trinity 16

Deuteronomy 32:39-40  +  Ephesians 3:13-21  +  Luke 7:11-17

Our Gospel today turns our attention to sorrow, weeping, coffins and death—and resurrection! — as if the Holy Spirit, through His Church, were preparing us for a funeral. In effect, He is. That’s exactly what He’s doing, preparing you for a funeral, your funeral or the funeral of a loved one. He’s preparing you for death, which can come for any of us at any moment, expectedly or unexpectedly, slowly or quickly, painfully or painlessly. We know that too well. Death seems distant most of the time, but when it strikes, everything stops.

So, how does God prepare you for the funerals you will take part in? Not by pretending death isn’t real, or by distracting you so you don’t have to think about it. He prepares you for death by surrounding death with hope—the hope of a compassionate Lord Jesus who will come, unexpectedly, and do something about death, even as He did in our Gospel.

A young man in the city of Nain had died. Had he been sick? Was he in an accident? Was it sudden, or was it a long, slow process? We don’t know. It doesn’t matter. He died too young. Of course, in reality, everyone who dies dies too young. The 93 year old who dies dies too young, because we weren’t supposed to die at all. God didn’t create us to die. Sin brought death upon our race, and we’ve gotten very used to death over these past 6,000 years.

Still, it’s especially hard when a mother loses a son, and even harder when the woman is left all alone, without a husband, without other children, when she was counting on her son, not only to keep her company, but to support her and care for her in her old age. Instead, here she is, burying her boy.

But then Jesus appears and meets the funeral procession as it’s proceeding out of the gates of Nain. And what it says about Jesus speaks volumes about the heart of God. When the Lord saw her, He had compassion on her. Pay attention to those words. They tell you about Jesus, and therefore, they tell you about God. The widow hadn’t done anything to earn God’s compassion. God’s compassion is aroused, not by a person’s goodness, but by a person’s misery, by a person’s hopelessness and helplessness. And even though you will not see Jesus coming up to anyone’s coffin at a funeral, this Gospel text allows you to see what your eyes can’t see, that God is not indifferent to our loss, that God isn’t cold or heartless or forgetful. He has compassion on the bereaved. That compassion is unseen when a person a dies. But what’s hidden at our funerals is revealed in St. Luke’s Gospel. So again and as always, cling to the Word of God, and not to what your eyes can see.

Jesus approaches the widow and says to her, “Do not weep.” It’s not a rebuke, not a, “Stop crying. You should be happy that your loved one is dead!” Or, “Death is no reason to cry!” No, no you shouldn’t be happy when someone dies, even a Christian who you know is only sleeping until the resurrection. Not happy, but hopeful! “Do not weep” is not a divine commandment that forbids you to weep at a funeral. It’s a word of deep sympathy from Him who can and does sympathize with us in our weakness, from Him who bore our griefs and carried our sorrows. More than that, it’s the assurance that, “I am about to remove the reason for your weeping.”

That happened immediately in the widow’s case. Jesus walked up to the open coffin as they were carrying it, touched it, halting the funeral procession, and said to the dead man, “Young man, I say to you, arise.” And the dead man sat up and began to speak. Such is the almighty power of the Word of Christ.

This is the first of the three Gospel accounts of Jesus raising the dead. And we ask, why only three? Were there no others widows in Israel who lost a son during Jesus’ time on earth? Were there no other deaths, no other coffins, no other funerals? What about all the death that has taken place from the time of Adam to the present day? If Jesus can do something about it, why didn’t He? Why doesn’t He?

He did. And He does. But His solution to death is not man’s solution. Man’s solution is, “Well, OK, sure, I rebelled against God, even though He threatened me with death if I did. But now it’s God’s fault if He actually follows through with His threat and kills me. If He were a good God, He wouldn’t punish me or anyone else with death. If Jesus were the Messiah, He would rid the world of death immediately.”

That’s man’s solution. See how arrogant it is, how idolatrous? God says that the wages of sin is death, but man says, “God has no right to punish sinners with death. It’s God who’s unjust. It’s God who’s mean and unloving and uncaring.”

You can’t overlook the seriousness of sin, including the nature-sin that infects the soul from birth. Death is God’s doing, He’s in charge of it; but it isn’t God’s fault. The soul that sins shall die, God says. And He is righteous in His judgment.

So what is God’s solution to death? It was to send His only-begotten Son into our flesh in order for Him to suffer death, in order that He, by the grace of God, might taste death for everyone. But by His death, the Righteous for the unrighteous, He conquered death. And so He rose from the dead, never to die anymore. That’s what He did.

What He does—God’s solution to death in the present time—is not to stop people from dying or to raise the dead immediately. His solution is to speak His Law that exposes our sin and brings the impenitent to acknowledge their sins, so that they feel the sting of death in their hearts. And then, through this ministry of the Word, He speaks His Gospel of peace, calling sinners to flee to Him for refuge, for the forgiveness of sins, for life instead of death. He sends ministers to baptize people and attaches the promise of everlasting life to it. He gives His body and blood in the Sacrament as the medicine of eternal life, so that whoever believes in the Son has eternal life even now, so that, when a Christian dies, death is surrounded by hope. Not the hope of an immediate resurrection, but the hope of a resurrection that will take place “soon,” when Christ returns, when He will raise your sleeping ones who were baptized into Him and remained faithful until death.

So between now and your funeral, or the funeral of your loved ones, what could be more urgent than Baptism and remaining faithful until death? It’s not in your power to force anyone to be baptized or to remain faithful until death. It is in your power to speak the Word of God, to urge your unbelieving family and neighbors to turn to the true God and the Christian faith, and to urge your believing brothers and sisters to stay close to God’s Word and Sacraments and to remain faithful until death, trusting that the Holy Spirit will be in charge of the outcome.

There will still be weeping on this earth, for many reasons, including death. Remember the picture St. John paints for us in Revelation 7: it’s only after death that Christ, the Lamb of God who sits on the throne of God, will wipe away every tear from our eyes. Our Gospel isn’t intended to turn death into a happy event, but into a hopeful event for Christians. It’s here to prepare us for death ahead of time, so that when it comes, your weeping may be accompanied by hope. Soon, and unexpectedly, the God of all compassion will remove the reason for your weeping. Soon the Lord Christ will return and put an end to funerals for good. Amen.

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No need for God’s children to worry

Posted on September 13, 2015 by Rev. Paul Rydecki

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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.

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Saved by faith. Then the battle begins.

Posted on September 6, 2015 by Rev. Paul Rydecki

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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.

 

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Either righteous by faith or not righteous at all

Posted on August 30, 2015 by Rev. Paul Rydecki

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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.

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Hearing with the ears and confessing with the tongue

Posted on August 23, 2015 by Rev. Paul Rydecki

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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.

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