Emmanuel Lutheran Church

Sermon for Trinity 16

Ephesians 3:13-21  +  Luke 7:11-17

Do you remember how St. Paul described God at the end of today’s Epistle? He described Him as the One who is able to do far, far more than we can ask or imagine, according to the power that works in us. We have just a small example of that beyond-our-imagination power in today’s Gospel. With a word, Jesus raised a man from the dead. And He’ll do the same for you, one day, on an even grander scale. The funeral procession we encounter in today’s Gospel is the only funeral procession we encounter anywhere in the Gospels, which makes it, I think, a wonderful opportunity for us all to prepare for our own funerals ahead of time, and for the funerals of our loved ones. Every time we ponder the raising of the young man of Nain, we’re reminded of the hope of a Christian funeral.

King Solomon wrote in the book of Ecclesiastes, To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven…A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance. A funeral—the death of a loved one—is certainly a time to weep, for believers and unbelievers alike. Death, in some cases, may bring to an end a long life of pain and suffering, making it somewhat of a relief, but that still doesn’t make it a time to laugh. It’s still a time to weep. How much more so when death takes a young man in the prime of his life. How much more so when death takes the only son of a mother. And how much more so still when that mother is already a widow. Such was the funeral procession in today’s Gospel as it slowly moved through the city gates of Nain, heading toward the grave where the dead man would be buried, a mournful procession with plenty of weeping.

It was no accident that Jesus, and a large crowd of followers, was approaching the city just at that moment. This is the one and only time when this city is mentioned in Scripture. As far as we know, Jesus had never gone there before and never went there after. But God Himself worked out the timing of these events, even as He is always working out the timing of all things so that His good purposes for His Church may be accomplished.

Luke tells us that, When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her. We need to pay attention to that. The Lord Jesus’ reaction to death is God the Father’s reaction to death as well. Yes, He is the one who first threatened our first parents, Adam and Eve, with death if they chose to go against Him. And God is the One who has been justly following through on that threat for some 6,000 years now. But He doesn’t do it gleefully, or indifferently. Nor is He indifferent to the pain and sorrow people suffer when death takes a loved one from them. He sees our sorrow, as He saw the widow’s sorrow, and He has compassion.

Someone may be tempted to ask, well, then why doesn’t God make it stop? And the answer is that He did, and He will.

God, temporarily, made death stop for the young man in our Gospel. He approached the widow and said to her, “Weep no more.” He wasn’t denying that she had a reason to weep or rebuking her for crying. He was simply informing her that there was no longer going to be a reason for it. He came and touched the coffin, and those who were carrying it stood still. And he said, “Young man, I say to you, arise!” And the dead man sat up and began to talk, and he gave him to his mother, allowing that man to live out the rest of a “normal” earthly life with his widow mother, until he died again.

God doesn’t make death stop very often. It remains as His curse on our sinful race, and really, on the creation itself. It remains, lamentably, a “fact of life” in the story of this world, along with the toil and suffering that come before it. This is what our first parents brought upon themselves and upon their children when they chose to go against the God of goodness and life. And we, their children, are participants in their sin. We know better than to blame God for the suffering and death that befall us. We don’t expect God to remove suffering from this life or to stop death in its tracks. It’s going to continue for a little while longer.

But we take great comfort in the fact that, on a few momentous occasions, the Son of God was able, and willing, to step in and put a stop to death, as He did in today’s Gospel. With the power of His almighty Word, the Lord of life healed the young man’s body and returned its soul to it unharmed, lightening the burden of the widow mother, turning her sorrow into joy, and amazing both sets of crowds, those already following Him and those in the funeral procession.

This account gives us just a small glimpse of the power of Jesus—power which He displayed to an ever greater extent in His own resurrection from the dead, power which He has promised to use to accomplish something similar for us. In John’s Gospel, Jesus says this: For as the Father raises the dead and gives life to them, even so the Son gives life to whom He will…. Most assuredly, I say to you, he who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life. Most assuredly, I say to you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God; and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in Himself, so He has granted the Son to have life in Himself, and has given Him authority to execute judgment also, because He is the Son of Man. Do not marvel at this; for the hour is coming in which all who are in the graves will hear His voice and come forth—those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of condemnation.

So first, Jesus talks about raising people to life even before their bodies die. He speaks to the spiritually dead, which is how we all begin life when we’re born into the world, and through His word, He calls people to believe and thus raises them to spiritual life. That means that, for believers, even when your body dies, you don’t die. You have already crossed over from death to life. This resurrection is even more important than the resurrection of a dead body, because this resurrection that happens through faith in Jesus is what determines where you spend eternity. This resurrection to spiritual life is what makes you a child of God. It means your sins are forgiven, you’re clothed in the robe of Christ’s righteousness, you’re made to share in the life of Christ. Not even death can take that away from a person.

And that’s the hope of a Christian funeral, that our loved one who died in the faith has not evaporated into nothingness, is not suffering in hell, but lives on, not in our hearts, not in our minds, but in the presence of God.

The rest of the hope of a Christian funeral is that the bodily death that we see there will also be fixed by Jesus, permanently stopped and even reversed at the last day. That hour is coming, closer and closer with each day that passes. Then we’ll hear the grand “Weep no more!” because there will be no more reason to weep, over anything. Then our bodies will not only be raised, but changed, perfected, and glorified. That will truly be the time to laugh, and the time to dance.

For now, there is still a time to weep and time to mourn. God doesn’t discourage that. He simply says, through the apostle Paul, that we should not sorrow as those who have no hope. Because we do have hope. The sure and certain hope of a continuing life now, and of the resurrection of the dead soon.

This is the Christian’s hope, at a Christian funeral. And it is a hope for Christians only. While we surely want all people to become Christians and to remain Christians so that this hope also applies to them, just as God Himself wants all men to be saved, we know that not all people will believe in the Lord. Many will stubbornly cling to sin. Many will seek salvation elsewhere than in Christ Jesus, the Lord of life. We can’t force others to believe, but there are some things we can do. You can remain devoted to hearing the Word of Christ and receiving His Sacraments. You can encourage one another to remain faithful until death. You can speak the truth in love to the people in your life who aren’t believers in Jesus. You can show the world by how you live that you do believe in the Lord Jesus. And you can leave behind for your family, for your loved ones, and for your church, the kind of steadfast confession that leaves no one with any doubt: This man, this woman died in the faith. This man, this woman died as a Christian. And that is a sure and solid reason to hope! Amen.

Sermon for Trinity 14

Galatians 5:16-24  +  Luke 17:11-19

Last week, we heard the parable of the Good Samaritan who treated with such kindness that man who had been mugged and left for dead on the side of the road. This week, we hear of another good Samaritan, not in a parable, but in his actual encounter with the Lord Jesus. And just as we were instructed by Jesus last week to “go and do likewise,” to go and show the Samaritan’s kindness to our neighbor who needs our help, so we are guided by the Holy Spirit in today’s reading to “go and do likewise,” to show the kind of faith, and the kind of thankfulness, that the Samaritan showed in the healing of the Ten Lepers.

First, why does Luke include all these accounts with Samaritans? Samaritans lived in between Judea in the south and Jewish Galilee in the north. They were essentially foreigners, as Jesus calls the Samaritan in today’s account. But that’s exactly why Luke includes them, and why the Holy Spirit guided Luke to include them. They teach a very important lesson to the Jews who thought of themselves as the VIP’s in God’s kingdom, who thought that their race, that their ancestry automatically made them acceptable to God. Now, there were certainly advantages at that time to being a Jew. But there’s nothing automatic about being acceptable to God. You don’t gain God’s acceptance by having the right parents or the right genes. The only way to gain God’s acceptance is by trusting in the One whom God sent to make us acceptable.

Now, on to the story itself. There were ten men (including one Samaritan) with the disfiguring disease called leprosy. Even in the secular world, showing signs of leprosy often forced people to quarantine away from the healthy people. But in the Old Testament Law given by God through Moses on Mt. Sinai, lepers were strictly prohibited from interacting with Jewish society, including the synagogue, including the temple. It was a lonely, lonely life.

God was teaching Israel a vital lesson in how His Law dealt with lepers. God’s Law absolutely insisted that a person had to be “clean” in order to be acceptable to God. Clean and unclean were themes throughout the whole Old Testament. There were many ways to become ceremonially unclean, and specific procedures for becoming clean again. Leprosy was the ultimate form of uncleanness, a disease that couldn’t be cured, that couldn’t be washed away, because it was an ugliness that infected the skin and the body. Leprosy didn’t really have a cure, but if a person did somehow recover from it, God’s Law specified a very elaborate process, involving the priests, for examining the person and then performing the rituals needed to pronounce the person ceremonially clean.

Now, the outward disfigurement of leprosy that affected a small minority of people symbolized the inner disfigurement of sin that affects all people. There is a deep-seated uncleanness that infects us all. We call it original sin. And it’s ugly in God’s sight. Every time the Israelites saw a leper, they were to remember, that’s what I look like on the inside, unclean and isolated from God! That’s why I need the spiritual cleansing that my God provides in the sin offerings, and, ultimately, in the promised Messiah!

The promised Messiah, Jesus, has a very brief but meaningful encounter with some of these lepers in our Gospel. Ten of them had heard the word that was going around about Jesus. That He had come from God. That He was able to heal all kinds of diseases. That He was kind and merciful and ready to help anyone who came to Him. They heard it, and they believed it. And since they believed it, they called out to Him, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”

And just like that, without requiring anything of them, Jesus replied, Go and show yourselves to the priests. He didn’t need to spell out for them what that meant. They knew that the priests were the ones who had to examine lepers and pronounce them clean. They understood exactly what Jesus implied: “I have mercy on you. By the time you get to the priests, you will already be clean!”

So they went on their way. We don’t know how far they got before they noticed that their leprosy was gone. They had believed what they had heard about Jesus. They had asked Him for help. He had spoken to them a cleansing word, a promise to cleanse them of their leprosy. And they had believed that promise and had acted on it. And now the promise had been kept.

Then what? They all celebrated their cleansing. They never thought it was possible, until Jesus came along. And now their hopes had come true. Their faith in Jesus’ promise had been confirmed. But then something terrible happened. Nine of them forgot about Jesus.

But one of them, the Samaritan, didn’t forget. He remembered the source of his cleansing, and his heart was filled with gratitude. So he turned back, glorifying God with a loud voice. And he fell down on his face at Jesus’ feet, thanking Him.

Now, Jesus wasn’t surprised that the man had been healed. What surprised Him, or at least what clearly disappointed Him, was that only one out of ten came back to give glory to God. Were not all ten cleansed? But where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give glory to God except for this foreigner? Some of the nine, maybe all of the nine, were Jews who should have known better, whose first thought upon being healed should have been acknowledging the God who had healed them. Instead it was a foreigner, a Samaritan, someone who had no ancestral claim to God’s acceptance, who demonstrated both faith and the thankfulness that flows from genuine faith.

And so Jesus both commended him and assured him: Rise and go. Your faith has saved you. And the clear implication is that everyone who reads this account, everyone who hears it, should “go and do likewise.” Believe as the Samaritan believed, and give thanks to God as the Samaritan gave thanks.

Outwardly, the Samaritan began as a leper. Inwardly, spiritually, you and I all began as unclean lepers, with that “flesh” that St. Paul talked about in today’s epistle to the Galatians, that flesh that lusts against the Spirit, that flesh that is opposed to the Holy Spirit, that flesh whose works are obvious: adultery, sexual immorality, uncleanness, indecency, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, murders, drunkenness, debauchery, and things like these. Not only did you begin that way. But here’s the hard thing to hear: Your flesh is still that way, eager to engage in works like those the apostle mentioned. There’s no “cure” for the flesh, as long as we still live in this world.

But there is a cleansing before God. There is a way to be accepted by God, and it has nothing to do with your ancestry, or with your works. It’s hearing the word about Jesus, that He came from God, that He is the very Son of God, that He is kind and good to all who come to Him for cleansing. It’s hearing the word about Jesus, that He suffered and died for your sinful flesh and for the works that have come from your sinful flesh. And then it’s hearing and believing the promise He now makes: All who believe in Him are cleansed before God. All who believe in Him receive the forgiveness of sins, are made acceptable to God, are given a status that is clean and new and beautiful. The Samaritan leper believed the promise of Jesus, and his faith saved him. That is, his salvation came as a result of faith in Jesus. You should believe it, too. Go and do likewise!

Not salvation from leprosy, though. Not salvation from every illness, or from poverty, or from tragedy. Jesus hasn’t promised salvation from those things during this lifetime. What He has promised is salvation from sin, from death, and from the power of the devil. Believe that promise, by the power of the Holy Spirit, and your faith will save you, too.

But faith ought to be accompanied by thanksgiving, as it was with the Samaritan in our Gospel. If it isn’t, then there’s something wrong. And you can all think of times when you’ve received a wonderful gift from God that you went on to enjoy without actually thanking Him for. Let today’s Gospel lead you to repent of that inborn thanklessness and to follow again the example of the Samaritan leper.

And as you do, notice that the Samaritan didn’t just stop where he was on the road and say a silent prayer to God in heaven. No, he returned to where Jesus was present for him, to where Jesus made Himself available to people. You can do something similar. Jesus isn’t located in this place or that place since His ascension into heaven. But He has promised to be present in a special way where Christians gather together in His name, to hear His Word and to receive His Sacraments. He’s here among us today in that way, and He gladly hears and accepts your prayers of thanksgiving, whether sung or spoken. He gladly accepts the thanksgiving you bring as you come to His holy Supper, the Eucharist. And as you kneel, in humble thanks, to receive the very body and blood that He gave into death for your sins, just as the Samaritan once knelt at Jesus’ feet, He speaks to you, just as He spoke to the Samaritan, Rise and go. Your faith has saved you.

The Samaritan came to Jesus with His uncleanness and sought His help. He believed in Jesus’ word of cleansing and returned to give Him thanks. Go and do likewise, over and over again, with faith and with thanksgiving. Having been cleansed of the works of the flesh, make it your daily purpose to put to death the works of the flesh, to walk by the Spirit, and to produce His fruit in abundance, with thanksgiving. Amen.