Sermon for Trinity 26

2 Peter 3:3-14  +  Matthew 25:31-46

We’ve heard a lot about the Last Day in our journey through the book of Revelation on Wednesday evenings, where God teaches us about it in several different pictures. To summarize the events of that day: it will come suddenly, when people aren’t expecting it—though Christians should always be expecting it, knowing, at least in the back of our minds, that it could come at any time. All those who have died will be raised from the dead with new, immortal bodies. Those who are alive, who haven’t died, will be changed and will be given immortal bodies. Those who believed in the Lord Jesus in this life will be gathered to Him in one place. And the rest of mankind will also be gathered together in one place. The final judgment will be pronounced. The heavens and the earth will be destroyed with fire. A new heaven and a new earth will be created. The wicked will go away to eternal punishment, and the righteous to eternal life. That’s a summary of the Bible teaching about the Last Day. And it’s something God warns His people to be ready for, as the main future event we’re preparing for.

Jesus tells His disciples about one little piece of the Last Day in today’s Gospel, painting a picture of the judgment part of the Last Day. It doesn’t describe every detail of the judgment that will be pronounced or everything that led up to that judgment. Instead, it focuses on just one aspect of human behavior that God is keeping record of and that God will reveal on that day. Jesus is keeping track of how people treat His little brothers.

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then he will sit upon his glorious throne. And all nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will set the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

Jesus spoke these words just days before He was crucified. In a few days’ time His disciples would see him hanging from a cross in shame and apparent defeat. But the shame would be short-lived. And on the Last Day, when He finally returns to the earth, it won’t be in shame or defeat of any kind. It will be as the glorious King of this universe. And instead of standing before a judge, as He stood before the Jewish Sanhedrin and Pontius Pilate on Good Friday, Jesus will return as the Judge of all mankind.

Now, if you have a New King James Bible with section headings, this is one of the places you have to watch out for. The heading that the editors chose to place over these verses is, “The Judgment of the Gentiles.” What, do they think there will be a separate judgment of the Jews? Nowhere does Scripture say that. No, the word “Gentiles” is the same word in the Greek as “nations.” All nations will be gathered before Jesus and immediately separated by Him into two groups. Those whom He places on His right are the favored ones, and those whom He places on His left are the disfavored ones.

Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you blessed ones of my Father! Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”

King Jesus will invite those on His right to inherit a kingdom, the kingdom prepared for them from the foundation of the world. There’s a lot here. Notice, first, He says, “Inherit!” That affects everything that follows. He doesn’t say, “the kingdom is your reward for all the good things you’ve done, which I’m about to list.” It’s an inheritance. The ones on His right did not earn a place in heaven by their good works. They simply showed themselves, by their works, to be children of God. Now, the only way in Scripture to become a child of God is through faith in Christ Jesus, our Savior and Redeemer, who gave His life on the cross to make atonement for our sins, and who received us into His Father’s family through Baptism and faith.

Notice, too, that this kingdom was prepared for them from the foundation of the world. In other words, these are the chosen people, the ones whom God chose or “elected” in eternity, before the world began, to be adopted as His children and to inherit His kingdom. As the rest of Scripture makes clear, God knew in eternity that mankind would turn away from Him toward sin. But He planned in eternity to send His Son to redeem all mankind. He planned to have the Gospel preached, and to work through the Gospel to bring sinners to faith, to justify believers and to sanctify them in love. It’s that sanctification in love that Jesus goes on to recount to these on His right.

I was hungry, and you gave me food; I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink; I was a stranger, and you took me in; naked, and you clothed me; I was sick, and you visited me; I was in prison, and you came to me. This comes as a surprise to those on the King’s right, because the vast majority of them lived on earth when Jesus wasn’t living on earth. Even those who were alive at the time of Jesus didn’t do all these things for Him directly. But He clears up their confusion. Truly, I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these my brothers, you did for me.

One of the main things Jesus commanded His disciples to do was to “love one another.” And by “one another,” He meant your fellow Christians, your brothers and sisters in Christ. That’s what Jesus and the apostles almost always meant when they used the word “brothers,” those who became brothers of Jesus through faith in Jesus. As Jesus said, For whoever does the will of My Father in heaven is My brother and sister and mother. And the will of God the Father is that, first and foremost, all men should repent and believe in Christ Jesus and so become His brothers in the Father’s family. After that, the will of God is the sanctification of Jesus’ brothers, and, again, our sanctification is practiced above all in loving our brothers and sisters in Christ—loving them, not just in our hearts, but in tangible ways, simple ways, like giving food to the Christian who is hungry, a drink of water to a Christian who is thirsty, and so on. And it doesn’t have to be for an “important” Christian, but for the least of Jesus’ brothers. As He said in another place, whoever gives one of these little ones only a cup of cold water in the name of a disciple (that is, because he is a believer in Jesus), truly, I say to you, he shall by no means lose his reward. Those who believed in Christ Jesus and showed mercy and love toward their fellow Christians will be recognized by Jesus on the Last Day, because He keeps track of how people treat His little brothers. He calls them the blessed ones of His Father. He calls them “the righteous,” righteous first by faith, and then righteous in how they lived in this world, especially in how they treated their fellow Christians.

Then there are those who didn’t end their life as children of God, but as unbelievers, as those whom the judge counts as unrighteous. Depart from Me, you who are cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels. Notice, first, that these on the King’s left are cursed. As St. Paul says, all who have sinned are under God’s curse. Or, I should say, all who have not been brought out from under the curse through faith in Christ. We all started out life under the curse. But, as Paul writes, Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us (for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree”), that the blessing of Abraham might come upon the nations in Christ Jesus. But all those in “the nations” who didn’t believe in Christ Jesus remain under the curse.

Also notice, the everlasting fire of hell wasn’t prepared originally for men, but for the devil and his angels. Because God’s purpose in eternity wasn’t to condemn sinners, but that all should come to repentance and to faith in His Son. But, since most people don’t believe in His Son, they will have to answer for their sins. They will taste that everlasting fire together with the devil, for whom it was originally prepared.

Now, the sins committed in the world are beyond measure; they can scarcely be recounted. But here Jesus doesn’t even mention any of the terrible, violent deeds done by men. He only mentions the good deeds that unbelievers failed to do for His little brothers, for His beloved Christians. I was hungry, and you did not give Me food, thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, etc…Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me. Jesus takes it personally when unbelievers fail to help His little brothers. Imagine how personally He takes it when they abuse, harm, ridicule, and falsely accuse His brothers! He wants us to know that He will hold all people accountable for all the mistreatment that we have suffered, as well as for all the good treatment we didn’t receive because we remained faithful to our big Brother, Jesus.

And these will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.

Now, if all that is true, if as Peter says in today’s Epistle, all things here, all things in this universe are destined for destruction by fire, if Jesus is really coming again to pronounce judgment on all mankind, and if He’s keeping track of how people treat His little brothers, then, as Peter writes, What sort of people ought you to be? You ought to practice holy living and godliness, awaiting and yearning for the coming of the day of God…Therefore, beloved, since you await these things, make every effort to be found spotless and blameless before him in peace. Work on this, above all things! Work on being found spotless and blameless before God when He comes to judge the earth. Work on behaving in the world like children of light and not like everyone around you who still lives in darkness. Work on treating your fellow Christians with love and respect at all times, remembering at all times that the King is keeping track of how people treat His little brothers. But as you work on those things, don’t put your faith in how well you’ve treated anyone. Put your faith only in the Lord Jesus, and eagerly wait for His coming! Amen.

Source: Sermons

Sermon for Third-to-last Sunday (Trinity 25)

1 Thessalonians 4:13-18  +  Matthew 24:15-28

Today the lectionary begins turning our thoughts to the end times, to the state of the world and of the Church leading up to Christ’s return. It isn’t a pretty picture. But there is hope in it! Not the hope of a better world here, but the promise of God’s protection and help as we live through the dark days of the great tribulation. Alongside that promise, though, comes a warning from the Lord Jesus, an urgent warning to flee from the idolatry that will afflict the Church as we wait for Him to return.

Jesus is talking with His disciples about the signs leading up to His coming at the Last Day. He foretells a horrible event from the beginning of the New Testament period—the destruction of Jerusalem in the first century. And He uses that same event as a metaphor for the last days.

Therefore, He says, when you see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by the prophet Daniel, standing in the holy place (let the reader understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. The Old Testament prophets often refer to idols as abominations, things that God truly hates. A desolation is something that lays waste to an area. Daniel, who lived about 600 years before Christ, prophesied that an idol would be set up in the holy place, in the innermost part of the temple in Jerusalem, right next to the place where God had promised to dwell. That prophecy was partially fulfilled some 400 years later when Antiochus Epiphanes, the commander of the Greek forces in Syria, would oppress the Jews over the course of about three years, banning their religion and literally setting up an idol in the temple. But Jesus applies Daniel’s prophecy to another event yet to come, to the idolatry of the Jews who would reject Him, who would still use the temple in Jerusalem to make sacrifices for sin, mocking the sacrifice of Christ that had already been made once for all on the cross. That idolatry was the reason why God allowed the Roman armies to come in in 70 AD to cause desolation, to besiege and finally destroy Jerusalem.

Just as Scripture often uses the literal kingdom of Israel in the Old Testament as a figure of the spiritual kingdom of Christ in the New Testament, so Jesus uses that literal idol in the literal holy place and the resulting desolation in the literal city of Jerusalem to represent a spiritual abomination, a spiritual idol (or idols) in the spiritual temple of God, which is the Holy Christian Church. As He says here when he refers to the “holy place,” let the reader understand. There’s something figurative in this saying that Jesus wants us to notice.

The idolatry that grew in the holy place of the Holy Christian Church over the centuries was the papistic idolatry, the idolatry of the Roman Church, as the hierarchy began to set the saints and their merits next to Christ in the holy place of the Church, setting the penances and satisfactions of the Christian next to the atonement made by Christ, setting the pope and the Church’s hierarchy next to Christ and actually above Christ because the pope’s teaching contradicted the word of Christ, and yet he was to be believed instead of Christ, which is why Lutherans refer to the papacy as the Antichrist, or at least as the ultimate Antichrist. Because not all the idols that have been set up in the Church can be traced directly to the papacy.

Or maybe they can, in a way, if “popery” is considered more generally. Every time a teaching is set up in the Church that contradicts the Word of Christ and is supposed to be believed instead of Christ, you have a little pope there, don’t you? Every time a man (a pastor or a priest or a minister) insists on being obeyed in the Church when he’s teaching something other than the word of Christ, you have a little pope there. Every time a synod or a church body or diocese demands your loyalty, regardless of the Word of Christ, or every time Christians give their loyalty to a synod or a church body or a minister, regardless of the Word of Christ, you have a little pope there, a little antichrist, an idol, an abomination that will cause desolation.

So, “Flee!” Jesus says. Fleeing ahead of the Roman armies was a physical fleeing, and all those who listened to Jesus’ warning were able to escape Jerusalem before the desolation came. Fleeing from all these other idols is a spiritual kind of fleeing, although there may be some physical fleeing involved, too. Run away from that church or that church body that has set up an idol where only Christ belongs. Get out of the assembly where idolatry, even secret idolatry, is being openly practiced. Run away in your heart from every idol that you might fear, love, or trust in more than God.

Flee! And do it without delay! That’s what Jesus’ instructions boil down to. Let the one who is on the housetop not come down to get anything out of his house. And let the one who is in the field not turn back to get his clothes. But woe to the women who are with child and who are nursing in those days! Pray that your flight is not in the winter or on the Sabbath! In other words, anything that hinders your flight from where idolatry has taken hold in the Church will harm you! Getting away from it is urgent, and all the more urgent as the Last Day approaches, when the tribulation will be at its greatest.

You see, fleeing from Rome and from all the idols that are set up within the visible Church is essential to avoid the desolation it will cause—the desolation of souls! But it doesn’t get you out of the great tribulation. Jesus says, For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not happened since the beginning of the world until now, nor will there ever be. Indeed, if those days were not shortened, no flesh would be saved. But for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened. The Book of Revelation talks about the saints who were even then “coming out of the great tribulation.” So, in a sense, it’s been going on since the first century. But just as the first abomination of desolation was literal and the second is spiritual or figurative, so might the tribulation be. The great tribulation of the first century involved severe physical persecution and torture of the saints. The great tribulation near the end of the world may be much more of a spiritual tribulation, trouble and affliction of the spirit, the trouble of being surrounded and assaulted by false doctrine, the trouble of having a hundred different Christian church bodies, the trouble of a world that completely and thoroughly rejects God’s Word, natural law, and justice. The public schools of our country (and in most of the world) teach a sort of “gentle atheism.” They don’t come right out and say God doesn’t exist, or that all religion is evil. They just unteach everything the Bible teaches and replace it with a false history, false morality, false authority, and a false purpose for mankind. They train generations of citizens not to rely on God’s word, but on “science” and the ingenuity of the human race. Practically all the world powers deny Christ, if not by name, then by policy and by action. This is all part of the great tribulation, the work of the Antichrist, and it would be too much even for the elect to withstand, if God didn’t shorten the days for us. But Jesus promises here that those days will be shortened.

Now, sometimes He shortens the days by giving us a brief reprieve, a few moments of sanity and normalcy. But those reprieves are temporary. Sometimes He shortens the days by bringing believers out of this life, so that we finish our race in faith and win the battle by leaving the battle with our faith intact. But in the end, only the coming of Christ will truly shorten the days of the great tribulation.

Jesus has further warnings for those who live in the great tribulation: “Then if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is Christ!’ or ‘There!’ do not believe it. For there will arise false christs, and false prophets, and they will perform great signs and wonders, so as to deceive even the elect, if that were possible. See, I have told you ahead of time. False prophets pointing to false christs. Isn’t that exactly what we see in the Church at large? False prophets pointing to evolutionary Jesus, who didn’t create the world in six days; pointing to LGBT Jesus, who didn’t create them male and female and institute marriage between a man and a woman; pointing to socialist Jesus who compels people to charity by force; pointing to tolerant Jesus who would never dare judge anyone for anything—except for intolerance.

That’s the false Jesus on the liberal side. But then there are plenty of false prophets on the more “conservative” side who point to American patriot Jesus; or to contemporary worship Jesus on the one hand or to strict traditionalist Jesus on the other; or to the Jesus who forbids the little children to come to Him through Holy Baptism; or to rapture Jesus who still supposedly calls on Christians to support the Israel that rejects Him as Lord. The list goes on.

Therefore, if they say to you, ‘Look, he is in the desert!’ do not go out; or, ‘Look, he is in the inner rooms!’ do not believe it. For as the lightning comes out of the east and is visible in the west, so also will be the coming of the Son of Man. There is only one true Jesus Christ, who has ascended into heaven and will not return until the very Last Day of this world when every eye will see Him. Until then, He has left a sure and dependable witness of His teaching: His words faithfully recorded in Holy Scripture and faithfully confessed in the ancient creeds of the Church. And He has left a ministry of the Word that carries His blessing and His authority. If you go seeking Jesus apart from His Word and the ministry of it, you will only find a false christ.

Our Gospel concludes with that rather strange saying: For where the carcass lies, there the eagles will gather. It’s actually a paraphrase from the book of Job, where God is scolding Job for thinking himself wiser than God. And God has to remind him that God is the one who gave the eagle the nature and the ability to spy out the landscape from afar, to pinpoint where the dead body is, and to gather there. So it is with God’s children. We won’t miss Jesus at His coming. We won’t miss out on the eternal life He will bring. Instead, St. Paul describes the scene of the Last Day beautifully in today’s Epistle, when both those believers who have died and those believers who are still alive on that day will all be gathered around the Lord Jesus: For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will always be with the Lord.

Such is the wisdom of God, to allow His visible Church to falter and to embrace the idol, and to allow His true believers, His invisible Church, to suffer much during this great tribulation. But rather than question God’s wisdom as Job did, let us embrace it and acknowledge that God knows far better than we do what is right and necessary for this world and for His beloved Church, including each one of His dear children. Trust in Him. Watch out for idols and flee from them, wherever they are set up. Seek Him in His word and the ministry of it during this great tribulation. And eagerly expect His coming! Amen.

Source: Sermons

Sermon for Trinity 20

Ephesians 5:15-21  +  Matthew 22:1-14

Once again the Church’s lectionary, our annual schedule of weekly Scripture readings, is very relevant to what’s going on around us. Jesus’ parable of the wedding banquet teaches a powerful lesson, for example, about the things going on today in Israel. But not only in Israel. It has a powerful lesson for everyone in this room. In His grace, God prepared a wedding banquet for His Son, and He invited the people of Israel to attend, but they didn’t want to come. Now He sends out invitations to all people. Who will come to the wedding? And who will be properly dressed for it, so that they are allowed to stay? May the Holy Spirit open our hearts to understand and to heed His message: It’s baptized believers in Christ who are the chosen people of God.

Jesus told the parable of the wedding banquet during Holy Week, just days before He would be crucified. He was teaching some final lessons to the people in Jerusalem’s temple. And included in those lessons were also some stern warnings, because He knew what the Jews were about to do to Him, and why. So He tells the parable of the wedding banquet.

A certain man, a king, arranged a wedding banquet for His Son. This is God the Father, who arranged from eternity to send His Son into human flesh, to redeem fallen mankind by giving His Son as the perfect sacrifice for the world’s sins. True God, true Man, the perfect Substitute for mankind, the perfect Mediator between God and man, the perfect Savior, who makes all who believe in Him heirs of eternal life, fit to live with God forever in the new heavens and the new earth after this earth is destroyed in judgment.

Ever since Adam and Eve fell into sin, God had been sending out invitations to celebrate the future arrival of His Son into the world. But eventually, after practically all mankind had become corrupt and unbelieving, after the nations all went their own ways after the flood and the tower of Babel, God focused on one nation in particular, one people: on Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and their descendants who became the people of Israel. And God cultivated them as His people and trained them and taught them and sent His prophets to them to give them His Word, not only orally, but also in writing. They were the guests whom God invited beforehand, before He sent His Son into the world.

Then, finally, He sent His Son into the world. The Savior had been born! And the servants of the king—the shepherds of Bethlehem, Simeon and Anna, and the wise men, among others, were sent out to call the invited guests to the feast. “Jerusalem, this is your time, the time of your visitation!” But few paid attention. Still, the king had it proclaimed again, Tell those who are invited, “See! I have prepared my dinner. My oxen and fattened cattle have been slaughtered, and all things are ready. Come to the wedding!” For three years or so that message kept going out in the land of Israel. The promised Savior stood among them and taught among them. John the Baptist, Jesus’ disciples, Jesus Himself kept on announcing that the kingdom of heaven was at hand!

But they disregarded it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business. And the rest seized his servants, mistreated them, and killed them. That was how Israel, as a whole, reacted to the preaching of the Gospel. John the Baptist was imprisoned and then beheaded. Jesus was crucified. Stephen was stoned to death. James, the brother of John, was killed by the sword. St. Paul himself was, at one time, responsible for persecuting the servants of the King, and then, after his conversion, Paul and the other Christians were persecuted constantly by the Jews who refused to acknowledge Jesus as the Christ, to the point that, in the book of Revelation, Jesus refers to the Jewish synagogue as the “synagogue of Satan.”

And so, when the king heard about it, he was angry. And he sent his armies and destroyed those murderers and burned up their city. The Father had given His greatest gift to Israel, and had prepared them for it in advance, and Israel stubbornly rejected it. Not all of them, of course, but the nation as a whole. And so, as Jesus predicted, because Jerusalem was not willing to come to the banquet of God’s salvation in Christ, Jerusalem was eventually burned up and destroyed by the Roman armies. The previously invited guests missed their chance to come to the banquet.

So please don’t let anyone convince you that the modern city of Jerusalem belongs to any people by divine right. God had that city burned down long ago as the capital of His Old Testament people Israel, and as far as their rejection of Christ goes, nothing has changed since that time. That doesn’t justify the horrific atrocities being committed against those who seek peace, atrocities which are being committed, by the way, by people who are just as Christ-less and lost as the unbelieving Jews. But the punishments God sends against any nation are meant to serve not only as punishments, but as calls to repentance, because for the Jews, for the Muslims, and for the American unbelievers, too, it isn’t too late, yet, to repent! It isn’t too late to come to the wedding!

What did the king do after ordering his servants to burn down the city of those who murdered his servants? He said to his servants, ‘The wedding is ready, but those who were invited were not worthy. Therefore go into the streets and invite to the wedding whomever you find. So those servants went out into the streets and gathered together all whom they found, both bad and good, and the banquet tables were filled with guests.

God still desires that all people should be saved. He gave His Son into death for all sinners, that all should come to repentance, believe in Christ Jesus, and receive the forgiveness of all their sins. After Jesus’ suffering, death, and resurrection, the same Lord Christ sent out His apostles into all the world, to preach the Gospel to all nations. No longer was His invitation sent out to Israel only, as it essentially was in the Old Testament, but now His invitation goes out to every creature, to every ethnicity, to every person: Come to the wedding! That is, Repent and believe in Jesus, the Christ who was crucified and died in payment for your sins! Be baptized for the forgiveness of your sins! Come into the Holy Christian Church that Jesus is still in the process of building! The call goes out to both Jews and non-Jews, to anyone and everyone, to “the good and the bad,” Jesus said in the parable. Here is the forgiveness of sins! Here is life! Here is salvation! Here at the wedding! Here in Christ Jesus!

The invitation has been going out for 2,000 years and will continue to go out until the Church (which is the new Israel, the spiritual Israel) is finished being built. The wedding hall, the Christian Church, is filling up, and only God knows when it will be full, and then the Last Day will come, and Christ will return to take His beloved Church to Himself.

But Jesus adds an important detail to this parable that we shouldn’t overlook. But when the king came in to see the guests, he saw there a man who was not wearing a wedding garment. And he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you come in here without a wedding garment?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the servants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and throw him into the outer darkness. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

What does this wedding garment represent? Why is it so important for the guests to be wearing it, so important that, if they’re not wearing it, they don’t get to stay at the banquet, they get tossed out into the darkness? Well, remember, the king didn’t require good works of anyone in order for them to be invited to the feast. What is the thing He requires? St. Paul writes to the Galatians: For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.

See how St. Paul ties together faith and baptism. You are sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. You put on Christ when you were baptized into Christ. You were clothed with the robe of Christ and His perfect righteousness through Baptism, where God held it out to you, and through faith, where you, by God’s power, put it on. But faith can’t just be put on once and then you’re automatically wearing it for the rest of your life. Faith in Christ, trusting in Christ Jesus, is a continual thing. It has to be. Church membership without faith in Christ is worthless. Calling yourself a Christian without faith is dishonest. When the King comes in to inspect the guests, He will not ask who your pastor was, or which church you or your family belonged to, or how many offerings you gave. He will look to see if you’re still clinging to His beloved Son in faith. And where He doesn’t find that, a person won’t be allowed to stay.

But God will provide everything you need to sustain your faith! Faith still comes by hearing. He’ll keep sending out His ministers to preach His word and administer His Sacraments! He’ll keep calling you to repentance when you go astray, and He’ll keep forgiving you your sins when you repent. Because He wants you there, in His wedding hall. He wants you to be among His chosen people—which is not the physical nation of Israel, but the number of those who believe in Christ Jesus and thereby escape the condemnation that is coming on this wicked world.

Many are called, but few are chosen. That’s how Jesus summarizes the lesson in the parable of the wedding banquet. Many have heard the Gospel invitation, and God sincerely wants the many who hear to believe and be saved. He wanted it for the Old Testament Jews. He wants it for all who hear. But “the chosen people,” the elect, are those who actually enter into His Christian Church by holy Baptism and who remain true members of the Church by faith in Christ Jesus. That means that you, who believe in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the Living God, are the chosen people of God. Now continue in that faith, wearing the robe of the righteousness of Christ every day. And, as those who already wear Christ by faith, do as St. Paul said to the Ephesian believers in today’s Epistle. Watch carefully how you walk, not as unwise, but as wise. Make the most of the time, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is. Do not be drunk with wine, which leads to reckless behavior, but be filled with the Spirit. Speak to one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making music in your heart to the Lord. Give thanks always for all things to our God and Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Source: Sermons

Sermon for Trinity 19

Ephesians 4:22-28  +  Matthew 9:1-8

Last week we heard Jesus’ answer to the question about the greatest commandment in the Law: You shall love the Lord with all your heart, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. But, as we discussed, the greatest commandment is still not the greatest teaching in the Bible. The greatest teaching is the Gospel: how Jesus, the Christ, by His perfect life and by His innocent death on the cross, earned the forgiveness of sins for all who have broken the greatest commandments, and how the Lord now promises to forgive sins to all who believe in Jesus. We see a brilliant example of the forgiveness of sins taking place in today’s Gospel—what it is, how it takes place, and who has the authority to forgive.

We’re told that Jesus came to His own city. Now, we think first of Nazareth, where Jesus grew up. He’s known, after all, as Jesus of Nazareth. But, as Mark and Luke make clear, “His own city” is no longer Nazareth. It’s now Capernaum. Because not too long before this, the people of Nazareth, Jesus’ hometown, tried to kill Him, tried to throw Him right over a cliff. But Jesus is more than welcome in Capernaum. So welcome, in fact, that the people crowded into the house where He was teaching, crowded in so tightly that there was standing room only. That made it impossible for the four men carrying the stretcher with the paralytic on it to get in to see Jesus. So they climbed up on the roof of the house, hoisted the stretcher up to the roof, dug a hole through the roof, and lowered the paralyzed man down through the hole in the roof to where Jesus was.

What an amazing scene that must have been! But Matthew doesn’t bother with those details that Mark and Luke record. The way they entered Jesus’ presence wasn’t the important part of the story. What happened next was.

When he saw their faith, Jesus said to the paralytic, “Take heart, son! Your sins are forgiven you.”

You heard those same words this morning after you confessed your sins and your faith in Christ Jesus. Let’s take a step back and look at what it means to forgive sins.

There is such a thing as personal forgiveness. When someone hurts you in some way, you either hold it against them, so that your relationship with them remains fractured, or you forgive them and your relationship is repaired, although some consequences of the sin may remain.

That’s not what Jesus was doing in today’s Gospel, offering personal forgiveness. The paralytic hadn’t sinned against Jesus personally, not against Jesus the man. He had sinned against God directly, as all people have, and he had surely also sinned against other people, which is also a sin against God. He, like everyone else, had broken the greatest commandments in the Law, and, as a sinner, he deserved to remain separated from God for eternity. He deserved to die.

But Jesus takes all the man’s sins committed against God and against other men, lumps them all together, and simply says, “Take heart, son! Your sins are forgiven you!” Or, in other words, “You’re forgiven for all the wrongs that you’ve done!”

What does that mean, “You’re forgiven”? It means, God will not hold your sins against you anymore. God, the holy Judge, hereby releases you from your guilt and from the punishment you deserve for your sins. You are no longer condemned. You are no longer a subject of the devil’s kingdom. You are no longer going to hell. No, you are justified before God. You are declared righteous in God’s courtroom. You are now a subject of God’s kingdom, a beloved child of the heavenly Father, a member of Christ, an heir of eternal life. All of that is included in the statement, “Your sins are forgiven you.”

Are there any conditions given for this forgiveness? Not a condition, as in, “You have to do something first to earn it!” No, there’s a reason why the Holy Spirit sets a paralytic before us as a prime candidate for receiving the forgiveness of sins. Like paralytics, we are unable to move, unable to earn the forgiveness of sins. But there is a condition, or a component, or an ingredient that does have to be there. All three Gospel writers give us this key detail: When Jesus saw their faith. The Holy Spirit had all three Evangelists record this event and this specific part of the event, because it’s important. When we’re talking about forgiving sins, faith is an essential part of it.

And what is faith? It’s the confidence of the heart that Jesus is good and merciful, willing and able to help, and always faithful to His Word and promise. And faith isn’t our work or our contribution to our forgiveness. It’s simply the thing that has to be there, and it’s worked by God the Holy Spirit through the preaching of the word of Christ. This is why it’s stated so clearly in Scripture that a person is justified before God by faith in Christ Jesus and not by any works of the Law.

That’s so different from what the world thinks is the path to God. Just do your best. Just be a better person today than you were yesterday, and you’ll be fine. Just love everyone. I assure you, that is what the unbelievers in your life think. They probably even think that’s what the Christian faith is all about. So why bother being a Christian? Just be a good person, and you’ll be fine. But you have to tell them the truth. If they would really please God by doing good things, then they’d have to be a whole lot better than they are now. Impossibly better. No, it’s not a person’s record of being good enough that will ever get them to be accepted by God. It’s only faith in Christ Jesus.

And contrition necessarily comes before faith. What does a person have faith in Jesus for or to do? For the forgiveness of sins. That implies that you acknowledge you have sins to forgive. If you want God’s acceptance through faith in Christ, that means you acknowledge you’re not acceptable as you are. And if you want your sins forgiven, that implies that you no longer want to cling to them or defend them or think fondly of them. “Oh, I know that was wrong, but it was no big deal, or it was so much fun!” There can be no faith in Christ for forgiveness if you don’t hate your sin, if you don’t really want that sin to be erased from your past. But where there is contrition, where you yearn for a clean slate, and where you look to Christ in faith for that cleansing, there God is willing and eager to forgive, as Jesus did for the paralytic in our Gospel.

That leads to the other key question. Who has authority to forgive sins—to change a person’s status before God from condemned sinner to forgiven child of God?

Some of the scribes and Pharisees who were crowded into that house in Capernaum raised that issue among themselves. As Luke tells us, they were thinking to themselves, “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” They were exactly right about that. Only God can change a person’s status before God. What they didn’t account for was that God was standing right there in front of them. Yes, Jesus even knew their thoughts, which only God can know. And to prove His divine authority to forgive sins, Jesus asked them, Is it easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven you,’ or to say, ‘Arise and walk’? But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—then he said to the paralytic, “Arise, take up your bed, and go to your house.” And he did, proving that Jesus, the Son of Man had authority on earth to forgive sins.

Jesus spoke of His authority in other places. The Father has entrusted all judgment to the Son. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. All judgment. All authority. The right to grant life as He pleases, or to hold people’s sins against them. That’s why forgiveness apart from Jesus is impossible, just as forgiveness apart from faith in Jesus is impossible. He and He alone has the authority to forgive sins.

But, if all authority and all judgment has been entrusted to Jesus by God the Father, then doesn’t that mean the same Jesus has the right to share some of that authority with others, if He chooses? And He has chosen!

The text before us is actually a perfect example of what Paul wrote to the Corinthians in 2 Cor. 5: God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, not counting men’s sins against them. Now, reconciling the world to Himself doesn’t mean reconciling or forgiving the sins of everyone in the world—or everyone in the room. That’s not what Jesus did in today’s Gospel. But one by one, as the word about Christ brought people to faith, He reconciled them to God through faith. He forgave them their sins.

But then Paul goes on, and God has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God. For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. Just as God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, so He has appointed ministers, who are Christ’s divine ambassadors to call sinners to repentance and faith in Christ Jesus, and to forgive the penitent and believing.

So Jesus said to His apostles, I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. And again after His resurrection, Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

And so ministers are set in place around the world by Jesus to keep carrying out this ministry of reconciliation, to keep reconciling sinners to God, first by preaching the Law to those who need to hear it, who are secure in their sins at the moment; then by preaching about Jesus, who offered Himself as the atoning sacrifice for the sins of the world; and then by acting in Jesus name to forgive sins to those who have faith in Jesus. We can’t “see” faith, as Jesus could, so we are left to rely on a person’s confession of faith. We practiced it again here this morning in a general way. But private confession is also available, if you wish to be reexamined according to God’s Word, have your personal confession of faith heard, and have the absolution pronounced on you directly.

Now, the Christian life doesn’t end there, receiving the forgiveness of sins from Jesus through His appointed ministers. The paralytic was healed. Then what? He got up and walked. Well, St. Paul, in today’s Epistle, touched on the “Now what?” of the Christian life. Now that you’re forgiven, now that you’ve put on the New Man and put off the Old, you get up and walk according to the New Man. Live like forgiven children of God, not like unbelieving children of the devil. You wanted forgiveness for the deeds of the Old Man, right? So why would you continue to live in those deeds? Why wouldn’t you strive to get rid of them, if you wanted forgiveness for them?

There’s much more we could say about that, but we’ll leave it for another sermon, because today’s Gospel gives us enough to think about for the moment. The Christian faith centers around Christ and the forgiveness that He earned for us on the cross and offers to us in the Word and in the Sacraments. So use the ministry of the Word that Christ has instituted! Live in repentance! Believe the Gospel! And then know that the words of Christ always apply to you: Take heart, son, daughter! Your sins are forgiven you! Amen.

Source: Sermons