Born (again) to Love Your Neighbor

Posted on September 14, 2014 by Rev. Paul Rydecki

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Sermon for Trinity 13

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

We have before us today the Parable of the Good Samaritan. It’s one of those parables that people don’t usually know how to react to. Does the story of the Good or Merciful Samaritan warm your heart? Or does it crush you and make you feel guilty and lead you to despair because you’re not like him and don’t know anyone quite like him? Or does it inspire you to be like the Merciful Samaritan? It may do all three of these things. But you have to understand it rightly. You have to read it in context.

The context is that Jesus is rejoicing. Read Luke 10, the first part of it, when you get home. Jesus had sent out his disciples on a mission to preach and teach, to heal and to drive out demons, to proclaim repentance and forgiveness of sins in the name of Jesus. And the disciples came back rejoicing, because the demons submitted to them. Jesus corrected them: Do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rather rejoice because your names are written in heaven.”

Then, for the first and only time in the four Gospels, it says that “Jesus rejoiced.” In that hour Jesus rejoiced in the Spirit and said, “I thank You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and revealed them to babes. Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Your sight. All things have been delivered to Me by My Father, and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son, and the one to whom the Son wills to reveal Him.”

Jesus praised His Father for two things: for hiding the righteousness of faith from the “wise and prudent,” that is from those who were wise in their own eyes and insisted on earning their way into heaven. And He praised His Father for revealing the righteousness of faith to babes, to little children who didn’t try to earn anything from God, but trusted in God as a gracious Father for Jesus’ sake. Jesus said those words publicly, but then said privately to His disciples the first words of our Gospel: Blessed are the eyes which see the things you see; 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.

Just then, a lawyer—one of those very “wise and prudent” people Jesus had just mentioned—stood up and proved that, indeed, the truth of Christ’s kingdom was hidden from him. “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” “Repent and believe. Repent and believe in Jesus.” That was the simple Gospel of Christ. But no, that wasn’t what the lawyer wanted. He wanted a law that he could obey to receive eternal life, not as a gift of God for the sake of Christ, but as something he could earn.

So Jesus confronted him with the harsh reality of the Law: He said to him, “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.”

And there it is: the only way to earn eternal life, according to the law: perfect love for God, perfect love for your neighbor. That is what God’s holy Law demands. Not, “Try your hardest,” but “Do this,” Jesus said—and not just once. Keep doing this, constantly, as God said in the reading today from Leviticus, You shall therefore keep My statutes and My judgments, which if a man does, he shall live by them.

“If a man does.” But a man doesn’t. Honest people who honestly compare, not only their actions, but their words and the thoughts of their hearts with God’s perfect law of love will admit that they don’t “do this,” that is, perfectly love God and their neighbor. And God’s Law has no leniency for law-breakers. The soul that sins is the one that will die, says the Law.

Ah, but the lawyer was hoping to find a legal loophole in this strict command. “And who is my neighbor?”

So to illustrate, Jesus tells the parable of the Good or Merciful Samaritan. This is what “love your neighbor as yourself” looks like. It’s not about identifying which of the people out there in the world might be your neighbors. It’s about being a kind and merciful neighbor to the one you find in need—not the one on the other side of the world, but the one who is lying in your path, your home, your classroom, your church, your job, wherever you go. The priest and the Levite—the ones who have God’s law and trust in it—they walk right on by. Only the Samaritan—the foreigner who is hated by the Jews, stops to help the half-dead Jew who has been beaten and robbed. And this foreigner who is hated by the Jews not only stops and asks if everything is all right. He tends to the wounds of the victim, lays him carefully on his own donkey, takes him to the inn, cares for him some more, and then leaves money for the innkeeper to care for him until the Samaritan returns.

It’s a warm, touching parable of love and mercy, until you realize that it preaches against everyone who hopes to earn heaven by keeping the Law. Because all people were born to love God, and all people were born to love their neighbor with all the care and compassion and devotion of the Merciful Samaritan. But no one has loved his neighbor like that, from the heart, at all times, as God’s Law demands.

It’s easy to find bad people in this world, and it’s easy to find people who are worse than you are. Those who commit or defend abortion or other forms of murder. Adulterers, gang members, drug dealers, etc. But when you consider that the Law of God doesn’t just command you not to do certain things, but also to do certain things…when you consider that the loving, merciful Samaritan is supposed to be you, every moment of every day—that that’s what God’s Law requires, it puts all people into the same boat before God’s Law.  You were born to love your neighbor, but you didn’t. You don’t, not according to the strictness of God’s holy Law.

But the requirement of God’s law doesn’t go away just because you haven’t kept it. If a man does these things, he will live by them. But here is the Gospel: Jesus was that Man. He was the merciful foreigner who came down to earth and found all of us wounded by the devil, spiritually bleeding, physically alive but spiritually dead. God looked down at the world and said, as Isaiah records: I looked, but there was no one to help, And I wondered That there was no one to uphold;   Therefore My own arm brought salvation for Me.

The law hadn’t saved anyone. The best of men hadn’t kept the Law or earned their way into God’s favor. So Jesus was born. He was born under the law in our place. He made Himself our neighbor and then loved His neighbor to the last, even to death on the cross.

As St. Paul reminded us today in Galatians 3, the Law was never given to save anyone, so that anyone could be saved by doing good deeds. Instead, as Paul says, the law was added because of transgressions (that is, for the purpose of highlighting our transgressions), till the Seed should come to whom the promise was made. Jesus is the Seed that was promised to Abraham, Abraham’s offspring in whom and by whom the Law of God was perfectly fulfilled. No one earned God’s favor by being good enough. Indeed, as Paul says, 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.

This is the righteousness of faith, that by faith in Jesus Christ, through the waters of Holy Baptism, we are born again, forgiven and made right with God without ever having done a single good deed of our own. God looks at the one who believes in Christ and sees nothing wrong with you, because He sees only Jesus.

This is the thing that brought such joy to Jesus, and that moved Him to announce to His disciples how blessed their eyes were. Because finally, the Seed of Abraham had come, His Gospel was going out, and people were hearing this message, and some were believing it. Some who, their whole lives, had been captive to the Law’s strict demands, who had spent their lives loaded down with guilt, believing they had to earn heaven, and yet knowing deep down that they couldn’t—some of them were hearing and believing that Jesus was born to win heaven for them, which was being given to them now as a gift.

So the parable of the Merciful Samaritan may crush you and load you down with guilt. It should, if you’re trying to earn your way into God’s favor with your works, because they’ll never be as good as the Merciful Samaritan’s works were. But to those who recognize that the Law doesn’t save, to those who recognize Jesus Himself in the story of the Merciful Samaritan, it’s a very tender, comforting story.

But it doesn’t end there. For the reborn, those who have been born again of water and the Spirit, you should see in the Merciful Samaritan a goal toward which you should strive, a pattern of love for the neighbor, of mercy and compassion, that inspires the Christian to be like that, to be a neighbor to the ones lying on your path. Because, as you see Jesus in the Merciful Samaritan, who stooped down to help you, to heal you with His own blood, who has brought you into the inn of the Holy Church where He has given His ministers charge over your souls, to care for you until He returns—as you see Jesus there, you see the One in whose image you are being renewed each day, the One in whose footsteps you are called to walk as He says, “Follow me.” Mercy, compassion, love for the neighbor? Of course the Christian will make that his daily goal and purpose. Because believers in Christ have received mercy and help from Christ, and you are now born again to love your neighbor, even as He has loved you—not to earn heaven by it, but because you have already been made a child and heir of heaven through faith in Christ Jesus. Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful, who also will do it. Amen.

 

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He who has ears to hear, let him hear!

Posted on September 7, 2014 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

“He who has ears to hear, let him hear!” Jesus called out those words on more than one occasion during His ministry on earth, and also in His revelation to St. John. “He who has ears to hear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” In other words, are your ears working? If so, then these words are for you to hear and to heed. They come from God’s Spirit and even convey God’s Spirit. If you claim to have working ears, but fail to hear and to heed the words of Jesus, then you might as well be deaf.

But what about those who don’t have working ears in the first place? The truth is, sometimes those who are deaf can hear better than those who have working ears. And those whose tongues don’t work can speak better than those who have working tongues.

The Holy Spirit illustrates this for us in today’s Gospel. In the first part of St. Mark, chapter 7, Jesus encountered a group of Pharisees who claimed to hear, but wouldn’t listen to Jesus’ teaching, a group of Pharisees who wagged their tongues in criticizing Jesus, but who wouldn’t use their tongues to praise His goodness or His wisdom or to acknowledge Him as Lord. In our Gospel we encounter a man who couldn’t hear or speak when he first came to Jesus, and yet he had already learned far more than the Pharisees who had ears: he had already learned that he had a great infirmity, and that Jesus was the only One who could heal him.

That’s the very basic lesson of the whole Bible. All people are miserable sinners before God, but Jesus has come to help. He has come to help, not by helping you to help yourself, but by healing you from your debt of sin before God by releasing you from your debt, by forgiving you your sins. Today’s Gospel is yet another picture of how Christ, still today, through His Word, heals sinners by forgiving sins to all who trust in Him. And where does that trust come from? From hearing His Word. Faith comes by hearing.

The deaf man in our Gospel couldn’t hear, but his friends could, and they had heard that this Jesus of Nazareth was kind and merciful and good. And the good report they had heard about Jesus worked faith in their hearts. They believed that He was merciful. They believed that He would and could help them in their need. More than that, they trusted in Him to help their deaf and mute friend with his need. So they brought their friend to Jesus and begged Him to lay His healing hands on their friend. That’s not only faith toward Jesus. That’s love toward their friend, to take him to the place where Jesus was and to commend him to Jesus’ care.

And as always, Jesus proved faithful to His reputation. He took the deaf man aside from the multitude, and put His fingers in his ears, and He spat and touched his tongue. Then, looking up to heaven, He sighed, and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened.” Immediately his ears were opened, and the impediment of his tongue was loosed, and he spoke plainly.

That’s the first and the general lesson to learn from this Gospel, and it’s the same lesson that we learn in every Gospel: faith and love—faith in Jesus as the One who is always trustworthy, merciful, kind and good to those in need, and powerful to heal and to help. And we learn love, to help our neighbor in his need, starting with his most important need: his need to be brought to Jesus, the Savior and the Great Physician.

We can also learn some specific lessons from the way in which Jesus performed this healing.

First, he took the man aside and dealt with him one on one. Jesus wanted there to be no doubt in this man’s mind: “You are the sick one. You are the one who needs help, and I know it and am willing to help you, as if you were the only man on earth.” Jesus does the same thing today through the ministry of the Word as He sends pastors, not just to deal collectively with the congregation, but to hear individual confession and pronounce private absolution, to hand out His body and blood, not to the congregation as a whole, but to the congregation as individual communicants who kneel at the Lord’s Table.

Then, He put His fingers in the man’s ears and touched his tongue, as if to emphasize: “I know exactly what’s wrong with you, I know you can’t hear, and can’t speak. Your help comes, not from the inside, not from you and your works, but it comes from outside of you, from me.”

Jesus spit. It seems like a strange thing for the God-Man to do, but then it seems strange that God was born in a manger, and took on a human body just like ours. It seems strange that He would subject Himself to all of our physical infirmities, and that He would allow wicked men to nail Him to a cross for our sins. But all of it demonstrates His zeal to heal us by His holy incarnation, by joining Himself to our flesh. It’s as if he were to say to the deaf man: “Your healing won’t be magical. It only comes from My body, from My mouth alone, from my Word, from My very saliva, from My blood shed for you.”

Jesus looked up to heaven. That’s important. It signifies, not only that Jesus came down from heaven and is the very Son of God; but it also signifies that heaven matters. God matters. You need more than just healing for your faulty ears and tongue. You need more than just food and money and clothing and stuff. More than any of those things, you need God—the true God, and Jesus Christ, whom He has sent. Only He can heal. Only He can save from death.

Then Jesus sighed. Now, a sigh can be a sign of both frustration and relief, and both would fit here. Jesus wept at the grave of His friend Lazarus, not out of despair, but out of compassion for His friends in their sadness and out of frustration for the loss that characterizes life on this earth. Jesus knows better than anyone how much damage sin has done to the human race, how much pain and suffering and trouble it has caused.  It’s our own fault. We get the suffering we deserve for our sins. At the same time, Jesus is the very One—the only One! —who brings relief from the damage of sin.

“Ephphatha!”, He said in Aramaic. “Be opened!” The Word of the Son of God is more powerful than all the pain and destruction sinners have brought on ourselves. With a word He takes away the man’s deafness and muteness. With a Word from the cross as He was about to die, “It is finished!”, He indicated that all sins had been paid for by Him. All the good deeds necessary for sinners to win heaven had been done, by Him, finished. With a word, spoken through His ministers, with a Word attached to baptismal waters, with a Word attached to bread and wine, He applies His death and His righteousness to sinners, forgiving sins and healing a person’s entire sinful history in an instant.

Your ears and your tongue may work just fine. But the deafness and dumbness that afflict some people are signs of a deeper illness that infects all people. It began in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve chose to hear the serpent’s voice instead of God’s voice. From that time on, human ears have never worked right when it comes to God. By nature, we stop up our ears to God’s Truth, to God’s Law and God’s Commandments, and we also stop up our ears to Christ’s preaching of repentance and salvation by faith alone in Him alone. Instead, people go about searching for someone—some church, some friend, some expert—to tell them what their itching ears want to hear, as the apostle Paul says to Timothy. By nature, our tongues know very well how to make excuses for our sins, how to tear others down and build ourselves up, but they don’t know at all how to confess our utter unworthiness before God, or how to sing His praises for the free salvation He has won for us in Christ Jesus.

But here is the powerful Word of Jesus again today, calling out to all who exalt themselves to humble themselves before God in repentance, and calling out to all who are humbled and troubled and terrified of their sins to take heart, because the Savior is here. He hasn’t come to destroy you, but to help you, to save you and to give you the life that is truly life. He has come to open your ears so that you hear His Word and believe it, and keep hearing it, and keep believing it. He has come to loose your tongue so that you can confess your sins, receive the healing of forgiveness, not just once, but over and over again throughout this life, and learn to speak the praises of Him who has rescued you from sin, death and the devil. “He who has ears to hear, let him hear!” Amen.

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You must never get past repentance

Posted on August 31, 2014 by Rev. Paul Rydecki

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Sermon for Trinity 11

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

I want you to understand this morning the great blessing that has been given you, the unspeakably great blessing of knowing God the Father, who is the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom He has sent. As Jesus said, that “is eternal life.” If you’re out in the world at all during the week, you probably spend lots of time surrounded by lots of people who don’t know and trust in the true God through Jesus Christ, and who, therefore, remain dead in trespasses and sins. Yesterday, I was in a room full of people who don’t know the true God. I attended a Jewish Bar Mitzvah ceremony—for the second time this year. A lot of work and a lot of emotion went into that service, and everyone who spoke or sang did a fine job. The only problem was that the people in that room were just like the Pharisee in our Gospel in relation to God.

Now, in relation to man, the people at that Jewish temple didn’t act like the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable. The Pharisee in Jesus’ parable despised his fellow man and looked down on the sinful tax collector in the temple in Jerusalem. The people at this Jewish temple were warm and welcoming. But in relation to God, they and the Pharisee were very much alike.

St. Luke tells us that Jesus spoke this parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others. Jesus paints the picture of the Pharisee for us—this pompous religious man who walks into God’s temple with his head held high, telling God what a good man he was and how many good things he had done: “God, I thank You that I am not like other men.” Now, he may have realized at some point in his life that he had sinned against God in some way, and maybe he had even repented of those things. But he was past that now. Now, sin was a distant memory in this man’s mind. He didn’t come before God in His holy Temple with sins that weighed on his heart, seeking God’s forgiveness. He came with good things, so many offerings given, so much care taken to live his life without sin. He had gotten past repentance.

That’s where the Jews are today, as a religious people. They’ve gotten past repentance. They’ve moved on. Now, they seek to be righteous people. They seek justice here on earth. They seek to be the agents of change for the betterment of mankind. In other words, they trust in themselves that they are righteous. Or, at least, they trust in themselves that they need to make themselves righteous, and for many, that is a source of constant guilty in their lives, because they know they need to be righteous before God, but, in a moment of honesty, they also know that they haven’t done it, and can’t do it. And yet they continue to trust in themselves, that they have to do it, that they have to establish their own righteousness before God.

That’s what the Apostle Paul recognized about his own flesh and blood, his own countrymen: Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they may be saved. For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For they being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and seeking to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted to the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.

The Pharisee in Jesus’ parable sought his own righteousness and so did not submit to the righteousness of God—the righteousness of faith in Christ as the Mercy Seat, as the Throne of Grace. Only the righteousness of Christ counts before God. Only His perfect love, only His perfect obedience and submission to His Father’s will, only His innocent death on the cross atones for sin. Only in Christ does God offer peace and mercy and rest and righteousness. And so, Jesus says very bluntly in the parable, “I tell you this man did not go down to his house justified.” For he exalted himself and his own works before God, and did not humble himself in repentance and faith in God’s mercy toward him, a sinner.

So it is with the Jews today. In seeking to establish their own righteousness, they exalt themselves, and they lose out on God’s peace and God’s mercy and God’s forgiveness and God’s righteousness which He gives solely through faith in Christ.

But God’s Word to you today is not, “Thank God you are not like the Jews.” No, Jesus’ words were spoken to unbelieving Jews, but St. Luke’s Gospel was written for Christians. Because you are in as much danger as the Jews were of falling into the pit of self-righteousness and this mindset of “getting past repentance.” Watch out. The only thing you’re left with when you get past repentance, is impenitence.

See how dangerous it is to get past repentance. See how damning it is to stand before God and offer Him your good deeds. The Pharisee went down to his house not justified—that is, still condemned to hell for his sins, which, even though he didn’t acknowledge them, God knew them all too well.

Now, you’ve learned too much of the Gospel and of the righteousness of faith for the devil to deceive you into relying solely on your good deeds. He can convince the Jews to do that, but not you, I think. No, with Christians who have learned the Gospel, the devil doesn’t waste too much time trying to get you to reject Christ and trust only in yourself and your own righteousness. Instead, he allows you to trust partially in Christ, even while he convinces you that you still have to rely partially on yourself.

How can you tell which righteousness you’re depending on? Well, what is your hope of heaven based on? “I was a good Christian and I did the best I could. I tried to do the right thing—oh, and yeah, I believed in Jesus, too.” Is that it? That’s the righteousness of works. Or, what do you come to church for? Do you come to confess your sins and to receive God’s mercy and comfort and peace in His Word and Sacrament? Or do you come to do the good work of coming, or to have a good time, to be entertained, to socialize, or to praise God for how good you are? Or, another question—why don’t you come to church on the Sundays when you don’t? Apart from illness or occasional work-related absence, could it be that you’ve gotten past repentance, or that you think you can receive mercy from God apart from His Word and Sacraments? Could it be that you don’t really believe He will deal mercifully with you at all?

Learn from Jesus’ parable today. If you ever begin to trust in yourself, that you are righteous, even a little bit righteous, if you ever begin to think that you don’t need God’s mercy so much, or, as a result, if you ever begin to despise others or think of yourself as better than them, remember the Pharisee and the condemnation he received from the mouth of Jesus. And then, remember also the tax collector.

The tax collector was a real sinner with real sins to confess—sins that he wasn’t proud of, sins that he now acknowledges and wishes he hadn’t done, but he can’t change the past, and he can’t cut out his sinful heart and make it clean. So he does the only thing God has given sinners to do. He goes to the house of God, where God has promised to be propitious, where God has promised to accept prayers and show mercy—the Temple in Jerusalem, the place where God’s altar was fired to burn up sacrifices every single day and to accept the blood of spotless animals as the propitiation for the sins of those who offered up the animals. To this temple the tax collector goes, with his dirtiness, with his guilt, with his sinful heart. But he doesn’t go with his head held high. He goes with his eyes toward the ground and beating his breast. He offers God nothing, no good works, not even an excuse for his sins. He simply pleads with God, God, be merciful to me a sinner! —actually, literally, he says, “the sinner,” as if he were the only one around. And Jesus tells us what God in heaven did for the sinner who came to His Temple in repentance, seeking mercy from the God of mercy: “I tell you, this man went down to his house justified.” Forgiven. Absolved. Pronounced righteous before the divine tribunal.

God does not justify those who think themselves righteous. But He does dependably, faithfully justify the sinner who repents, who seeks God’s mercy in the place where God has promised to be merciful.

That place was the Jewish Temple, but no longer. Because the One whom the Temple foreshadowed has now come. Christ Jesus is the place where God has promised to be merciful, and where God has promised to hear the prayers of those who seek forgiveness in Him. The blood of Christ has been shed, once for all, and it’s valuable enough to cover the sins of all. Those who have gotten past repentance do not seek refuge in the blood of Christ, but in their own imagined improvement. But the sinners who walk in daily repentance, believers in Christ—they are constantly seeking refuge and shelter in the blood of Christ, who is the propitiation for our sins, and not only for ours, but for the sins of the world. God invites all men to seek shelter in the blood of Christ, to find forgiveness there, not just once, not just at the time of your baptism, but every day, every week, as long as you live here on this earth.

You will not find Christ in Jerusalem, though. You will not find the place of propitiation—the Throne of Grace—in your heart. God has not directed you to somehow approach Him directly. He has directed you to Baptism once, and to the preaching of His Word and to this Sacrament of the Altar over and over and over again. Here God is propitious and merciful. Here God forgives sins, not to people who come with their own righteous, but to sinners who seek righteousness only in the blood of Christ.

This is what separates true Christianity from the Jews, and from the rest of the world. While the world seeks to establish its own righteousness before God and fails every time, Christians have righteousness and God’s favor and eternal life as a free gift, through faith in Christ Jesus. This is the blessing that you have been given: to repent and believe in Christ. This is the Word of faith that is also yours to proclaim to the world. May God preserve us from ever getting past repentance. And may He use us to spread the Word of Christ, that the Holy Spirit may bring many more to repentance through our witness. Amen.

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The Office of Christ: An Office of Service and Suffering, For Now

Posted on August 24, 2014 by Rev. Paul Rydecki

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Sermon for the Feast of St. Bartholomew

Proverbs 3:1-7  +  2 Corinthians 4:7-10  +  Luke 22:24-30

(Front cover of service insert: St. Bartholomew (referred to by St. John as Nathanael), one of the twelve apostles, was from Cana in Galilee. He was one of the early disciples of Jesus, invited by Philip to come and see “the one of whom Moses and the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth” (Jn. 1:45). At first skeptical because of Jesus’ home in Nazareth, Bartholomew was immediately convinced by Jesus’ word and made a bold confession of faith, “You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” (Jn. 1:49). According to some early Church Fathers, Bartholomew took the Gospel first to India, where he left them a copy of the Gospel according to St. Matthew; then to Armenia, where some say he was beheaded, while others claim he was skinned alive and then crucified upside down. Regardless of how he died, we celebrate St. Bartholomew’s day in thankfulness to God for the faithful witness of Bartholomew and of all who have served and suffered in the Office of the Holy Ministry so that the kingdom of Christ may be extended.)

If you read the front cover of the service insert this morning, you know what the legends are surrounding the martyrdom of St. Bartholomew. They may be true, or at least there may be some truth to them. But honestly, it shouldn’t matter to us. It didn’t take long after the death of the apostles for Christians to begin glamorizing and sensationalizing the Church on earth, and especially the history of her apostles and bishops and clergy in general. It led to an unhealthy focus on men and their great achievements, even if those achievements included facing an especially horrific death. How foolish. The kingdom of Christ has never been about exalting men. It’s about Christ. It’s always been about Christ, Christ and His suffering for our sins, Christ and His resurrection from the dead. And it’s always been about the Word of Christ. Whether or not the legends are true about Bartholomew or any of the apostles, the word of Christ that they proclaimed is true. The Christ to whom they bore witness and for whom they gave their lives is true.

That Christ, on the same night in which He was betrayed, taught His disciples a valuable lesson about what it means to be a Christian, and specifically, what it means to hold an ordained office within His kingdom, within His Church; what it means to occupy the office of Christ, the office of the holy ministry. It means serving as Christ served, and it means suffering here in this world, as Christ also suffered.

We’re told that, on that Maundy Thursday, soon after Jesus had established the New Testament in His blood and instituted the Lord’s Supper, right after announcing to His disciples that He would be betrayed by one of them, they started arguing with one another—first, about who the betrayer would be. But then, they started arguing about which of them was the greatest, which one was the most important, which one should be able to give orders to the rest.

So Jesus very patiently instructs them about what it means to hold office in His kingdom. It’s very different than holding office in the secular realm. The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and those who exercise authority over them are called ‘benefactors.’ Now, understand, this isn’t a bad thing. There is a secular realm, established by God, and God approves of it. In the kingdoms of this world, in the secular government, there are kings, lords, rulers, governors whose office it is to rule, to give orders, to force those beneath them into obedience using the strength of their authority. The earthly authorities have power, some more than others. They hold the power of the sword, and that, not in vain, but to punish the evildoer and to protect the righteous. Those who rule well and give orders well and govern well in the secular realm are called benefactors—doers of good. They are generally rewarded in this life with glory and fame. Those with earthly authority often live in mansions and are treated with reverence and get to be served by others. That’s generally the way it is, and there’s nothing wrong with it, in and of itself.

But that’s the secular realm. That’s earthly authority and worldly power. Christ’s kingdom—the Church—is much different. Not so among you, Jesus said to His disciples. On the contrary, he who is greatest among you, let him be as the younger, and he who governs as he who serves. Christ has a kingdom that’s separate from the State. In it, He alone reigns as King, and He has, through His Church, set certain men into offices of authority in His kingdom. Like Bartholomew. Like the other apostles. Like their successors—all who hold the office of the holy ministry. But unlike in the secular realm, all office-holders in the Church are equal, with the same authority. Unlike in the secular realm, office-holders in the Church are not given the sword, are not given the right to use force or physical threats to get people to do things. Instead, they are given only the Word of God, to preach, teach, correct, rebuke, encourage, to threaten sinners with God’s wrath, and to comfort the penitent with God’s forgiveness. Unlike in the secular realm, the greatness of the office-holders in the Church is not in exercising authority, but in serving, as Christ served.

For who is greater, he who sits at the table, or he who serves? Is it not he who sits at the table? Yet I am among you as the One who serves.

How did Christ serve? He didn’t live in a mansion, or have people waiting on Him hand and foot. Instead, He devoted His life to serving mankind. Serving, not by taking orders from people and doing whatever they wanted Him to do, but by giving His life to the people and for the people, by saying what they needed to hear, even when it hurt their feelings, even when it hurt His own popularity. He served, not by the power of the sword, but by the power of the Word. He identified sin, and rebuked and condemned it. He showed the people God’s grace and love in sending His Son into the world to be a sacrifice for sin, once for all. He walked into the hands of those who hated Him and gave His life to make atonement for our sins. He did it all in service to mankind, which includes you and me. He was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities. The chastisement that brought us peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed.

Now, Christ says to His dear disciples, all those who hold office in My kingdom must serve, as I served, and will suffer, as I suffered. If you’re looking for earthly splendor, for a comfortable life, for the praise of men, then seek it somewhere else. You can’t have that in My kingdom. Yes, of course, there have been countless priests and pastors in the world who have not been faithful to Christ’s Word, who have told lies in Christ’s name, who have sought earthly greatness, who have not used their authority in the Church to serve God’s people, but rather to serve themselves. To them, Christ will say on the Last Day, “Depart from Me. I never knew you.” But those who carry out their ministry well in Christ’s kingdom will have trouble, toil, and often ingratitude in this life. So be it. That’s the ministry that Christ instituted.

St. Paul’s life as an office-holder in the Church was a striking illustration of Jesus’ words. You heard in the Epistle of the service and the sufferings of Paul, together with his fellow ministers. The weakness of Christ’s ministers only serves to highlight the treasure of the cross of Christ and the power of God in gathering a kingdom to Himself, not by force or compulsion, but only by the power of His Word.

But, who would submit to such a life—to hold the office of Christ, to shun earthly glory and comfort, to live a life of humble service and to suffer in this ministry? Hear again the promise Jesus attached to this ministry: But you are those who have continued with Me in My trials.

And I bestow upon you a kingdom, just as My Father bestowed one upon Me,

that you may eat and drink at My table in My kingdom, and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. You are those who have been with Me in My trials. You are those who have seen Me suffer as a result of My ministry. You know what it will be like for you. You get to be like Me. Like Me in sufferings. But also like Me in glory. For all your trouble, toil, and earthly misfortune, you get a kingdom, the authority to reign, not separately from Me, but together with Me. But not in this world. Not here. Here you serve. Here you do not rule and reign and sit at the table. But there, in the next life, you will. You will sit with Me at My table. You will have thrones there, to judge the twelve tribes of Israel.

It was this promise that sustained Bartholomew and all the apostles in all their future hardships, and finally, in their martyrdom.  It’s this promise that sustains all faithful pastors and preachers. And actually, it’s this promise that sustains the hearers of the Word, as well. Because, while not all Christians are office-holders in the Church, all Christians are clothed with Christ and called by the name of Christ. All Christians are called to serve one another in love. All Christians are children of God, and coheirs with Christ, and fellow sharers in the sufferings of Christ. As Paul said, not to the pastors in Rome, but to all the Christians in Rome, “The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him, that we may also be glorified together.”

So the promise to sit with Christ at His table is for all believers in Christ. The promise of an end to earthly shame and suffering and of an eternal banquet of glory and peace is for all who walk by the Spirit, who persevere in faith until the end.

Until the end, Christ continues to serve His whole Church through the mouths and hands of weak, sinful men. That’s what this office of the ministry is for in the first place, not to exalt the minister, but to serve Christ’s holy people and to hold out to them the Word of life, the water of life, and the New Testament in the body and blood of the Lord Jesus. This office of Christ is the way He has chosen to serve you here on this earth, to teach you, to correct you, to forgive, comfort, and strengthen you. Don’t take His ministry for granted or allow the other items on your long to-do list to bump Christ’s ministry down out of first place, where it belongs. Instead, rejoice that Christ wants to serve you and guide you through this life and feed your soul for eternal life.

Let us give thanks to God today, first for the service and the sufferings of Christ, our only Savior, and then also for the service and sufferings of Bartholomew and of all Christ’s chosen ministers throughout the ages who have borne the office of Christ faithfully. The best way to thank God for these gifts is to make use of these gifts, to the glory of Christ Jesus, and to the edification of His holy Church. Amen.

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A Lesson for the Just from the Unjust Steward

Posted on August 17, 2014 by Rev. Paul Rydecki

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Sermon for Trinity 9

1 Chronicles 29:10-13  +  1 Corinthians 10:6-13  +  Luke 16:1-9

All things belong to God. We heard King David acknowledge that in the First Lesson: Yours, O LORD, is the greatness, The power and the glory, The victory and the majesty; For all that is in heaven and in earth is Yours;  Yours is the kingdom, O LORD, And You are exalted as head over all.

If all things in heaven and on earth belong to God, then we don’t actually own anything; we are stewards of God’s possessions, managers of God’s wealth. And if God is truly exalted as head over all, then it is God’s divine right to give His stewards directions as to how to use the possessions He has placed into our hands, and it is our solemn obligation to follow His directions.

We often think of stewardship in relation to offerings—the offerings God’s people are commanded to bring to support the ministers and the ministry of the Gospel. That’s part of it, but not all of it. God also commands us to use His possessions to provide for the needs of our families, and for the governing authorities in our land, and to help our neighbor in general.

Now, I ask you, how often do you open your wallet and pull out a dollar and think to yourself, “This is God’s dollar, and I must use it as God commands”? How often do you look at your bank statement and consider each deposit as a deposit of God’s money into your account, or each withdrawal as a withdrawal of God’s money? I don’t always think about that. I know you don’t always think about that, either, because, even as Christians, there is this idolatrous flesh that lives within you and worships at the altar of self and puts an offering on that altar called mammon—money, wealth, material possessions.

That’s what our Gospel today addresses. And let’s be clear whom it’s addressing. Jesus is speaking to believers, to Christians. Now, He says it loud enough for non-Christians to hear and to stand convicted before Him, even as the Pharisees were listening in our Gospel and grew angry at Jesus for His words. But Jesus is actually addressing the “sons of light,” as He calls Christians in His Gospel, sons of light who need to be called to repentance, first to a change of heart, and then, to a change of behavior. He uses the example of an unjust steward in order to teach the just.

That’s important, and I want to repeat it. Jesus is speaking to the just, those who are righteous by faith alone. Those who still do not acknowledge their utter depravity and lostness, those who still do not know the mercy of Christ or trust in Him for mercy and forgiveness—they can’t learn a thing from Jesus about how to do good or how to use money in a God-pleasing way. They are not God-pleasing people, due to their unbelief, and so nothing they do can please God. A person first has to be good, before he or she can do good. And Scripture reveals that the only way to be good is to receive the goodness of Christ by faith. So telling your unbelieving neighbor to be a good steward of God’s possessions is useless, and even harmful, because your unbelieving neighbor might get the idea that, by managing his money well, he is pleasing God. No, no, repentance and faith in Christ have to come first. A person has to be born again of water and the Spirit first. That’s what makes a person pleasing to God. Only then can we talk about doing the things that please God.

Jesus knows that His people need ongoing correction because of our sinful flesh, so He tells this parable. It’s a unique parable, because Jesus is intentionally using the example of an unjust person in order to teach the just, in this case, a steward who was in charge of managing the possessions of a rich man.

It’s a very simple parable, really. The steward was accused of squandering the wealth of the rich man—not managing it well. Not necessarily stealing it, but “wasting it,” not giving proper thought to where all the money was going, or letting too much go to certain things and not enough go to other things. He was called in to give an account. Then and only then did he become shrewd. Then and only then did he start to make intelligent calculations with his master’s wealth in the short time he had left. He started planning what to do with his master’s money. He decided to use it to buy the good favor of his fellow servants who owed money to their master, and he thought carefully about how much to reduce their debts, not too much, not too little, just the right amount for each one.

That is what his master praised. Certainly not his attitude or his heart. Certainly not his dishonesty or lack of integrity. But his shrewdness, the smart way he managed his master’s possessions to gain friends for himself.

Jesus then contrasts the shrewdness of that unjust steward with the laziness and haphazard use of money that often plagues His own people: For the sons of this world are more shrewd in their generation than the sons of light. Now, that doesn’t mean that the sons of this world are earning their way into God’s favor or into heaven by their shrewdness. Not at all. Nor is it to say that believers in Christ need to earn their way into God’s favor or into heaven by managing God’s possessions well. Only Christ earns a person’s way into heaven, and only by faith do we receive what He earned: best of all, the forgiveness of our sins.

But the believer is inspired by Jesus’ words to do better, to walk in daily repentance and in newness of life. The believer in Christ doesn’t rely on his good use of God’s possessions to get into heaven, nor does the believer in Christ despair because of his past sinful use of God’s possessions. The believer in Christ strives to walk in step with the Holy Spirit, to learn from bad examples of stewardship and to correct them. St. Paul referred to that in our Epistle today, how God has given us all those bad examples from the Old Testament to teach us, so that we don’t commit the same errors, fall into the same sins, and worse, fall away from faith, as so many of the Old Testament believers did.

So, what do the just learn from the unjust steward? First, to remember your vocation as a steward of God’s possessions, to not let Satan or your flesh drag you away to make yourself into your own god, so that you don’t listen to God’s instructions on how to use His possessions, because you’re too busy making your own plans to bother with His commands. The unjust steward had forgotten his place and his calling. We should not forget who and what we are.

Second, the just learn from the unjust steward to plan and make intelligent calculations with God’s possessions. You have God’s instructions, His general parameters for how to manage His possessions that are in your hands: to provide for your pastor’s needs and for the extension of the preaching of the Gospel, for your immediate family’s needs, for your extended family’s needs, for the compensation of your governors and government authorities, for your fellow believer’s needs and for your neighbor’s needs in general, roughly in that order. Notice, I said, “needs,” not “wants.” And if you still have something leftover, He allows you to use that for your enjoyment. And in order to make sure you’re not just thoughtlessly spending money, here and there, that almost certainly requires some sort of budget.

But how much exactly should you budget to each of the areas where God has commanded or allowed you to use His gifts? Ah, there God has not given specific commands. There God looks for shrewdness on your part, for sound judgment, like the shrewdness shown by the unjust steward.

And above all, God looks for you to plan your budget and to use His possessions with this overall guiding principle: to show generous love toward your neighbor. And I say to you, make friends for yourselves by unrighteous mammon, that when you fail, they may receive you into an everlasting home. It’s not that you earn your way into heaven by being generous toward other people. Heaven is God’s gift to those who rely only on Christ and His grace and mercy. But faith is proved in the believer’s life, and faith is demonstrated to those around you by the love that flows from it, and that includes the love that uses money, not in the service of self, but in the service of your neighbor.

Faith alone makes you good before God; you are just, by faith. So look to Christ for mercy. Believe in Him and receive His generous love here in His Word and here in His Sacrament. And, since you are good before God by faith in Christ, you are now able to do works that God considers good. Let your shrewdness and your wise management of God’s possessions serve as a daily thank-offering to God for all His goodness to you. If the unjust steward could learn to manage his master’s wealth wisely, how much more you, who are just by faith in Christ! Amen.

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