Emmanuel Lutheran Church

Sermon for Trinity 17

Ephesians 4:1-6  +  Luke 14:1-11

There’s plenty of ugliness in the world, as you know. We’re confronted with it every day, whenever people are involved. That’s not to say there’s no beauty in the world, or that everything everyone does is always ugly. But there is an ugliness that infects all men, including Christians, no matter how well it may sometimes be hidden. It’s an out-in-the-open ugliness we encounter in today’s Gospel, in both parts of the Gospel, an ugliness that Jesus exposes and tries very patiently to correct. It’s the ugliness of thinking highly of yourself.

Now, you know that the Pharisees were Jewish leaders in Jesus’ day who were famous for thinking highly of themselves. So it really comes as no surprise that that ugliness came out again while Jesus was attending a Sabbath supper at the home of a Pharisee, with other Pharisees and experts in the law also in attendance. Luke tells us that they were “watching Jesus closely,” not to learn from Him, but to see where they could catch Him in a sin in order to cancel Him, if at all possible, because, by this time, Jesus had gathered many disciples, and had shamed the Pharisees on several occasions for their sinful behavior and their false teachings.

There was a man there at the supper who suffered from dropsy, a painful swelling in the arms or legs, which was often a sign of heart failure. Jesus had miraculously healed many diseases before this. And some of those healings had taken place on the Sabbath Day, the day of rest. And each time Jesus had healed on the Sabbath Day, the Pharisees and other Jews had gotten very angry, both at Him and at those who dared to be healed by Him on the day when they were all supposed to be resting. In chapter 13 of Luke’s Gospel, right before the chapter of today’s Gospel, the ruler of a synagogue (the “head of a Jewish church”!) had yelled at a woman who had been suffering for 18 years, because she dared to be healed by Jesus on a Sabbath day.

So rather than wait for their accusation, Jesus decided to ask them first: Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath? Actually, it was. The commandment prohibited doing “work” on the Sabbath day. But what kind of work was meant? If you read the Old Testament, even Isaiah 58, which we just considered together this past Wednesday, it’s clear that the kind of work that was prohibited on the Sabbath Day was work that was done for a person’s own benefit, working your job, your farm, your kitchen, your yard, etc. Good works to help a person’s neighbor—even good works to help a needy animal!—were never prohibited. Not by God, at least. And the Jews all took care of their animals on the Sabbath Day.

But, for some reason, the experts in the Law remained silent. They remained silent, because they knew they couldn’t cite a single passage from Scripture to prove that healing someone was a violation of God’s commandment. While Jesus, on the other hand, could cite plenty of passages that showed that God wanted certain works to be done on that day, for honoring God and for serving the one in need. So they couldn’t say it was unlawful, and yet, in the ugliness of their pride, they refused to say it was lawful.

So Jesus healed the man and let him go. But He still wanted an answer from the experts in the Law. So He asked again, Which of you, if your ox or donkey fell into a pit, would not immediately pull it out on the Sabbath day? They all would! Anyone would! They’d help an animal on the Sabbath Day, but they wouldn’t approve of their own flesh and blood being helped. Why? Because they took pride in their resting on the Sabbath Day. What’s more, they took pride in being the Sabbath police, condemning others for not being as obedient as they were. And, to top it all off, they couldn’t stand having Jesus expose the ugliness of their pride. They claimed to be defending God’s law, but did they really care what God wanted? No. Did they care at all about what was good for their neighbor, for their fellow Israelite? No. If they had cared about what God wanted, they would have searched the Scriptures, where they would have found that love for God and love for neighbor were front and center, would have found that God’s commandments exposed their pride and condemned them for it, would have found that they needed atonement to be made for their pride, that their only hope did not lie in how well they rested on the Sabbath, but in the mercy of God toward ugly, prideful sinners like them.

There’s more ugliness in the second part of the Gospel, more prideful behavior on the part of the guests at that Sabbath supper. Luke says that Jesus noticed how the guests, as they arrived, all chose the places of highest honor, the tables reserved for the most important guests. Now, it wasn’t a great crime to do that at a Sabbath supper. But it could be embarrassing, as Jesus will point out, and, more importantly, He sees in that behavior an example, a pattern of how those same people behaved toward God, because they didn’t only think highly of themselves compared to the other guests. They thought highly of themselves before God Himself. And that’s both ugly, and deadly.

So He tells the parable, not of a Sabbath supper, but a of a wedding banquet, as the kingdom of heaven is often portrayed. When you are invited by someone to a wedding, do not sit down in the place of highest honor. Otherwise, if someone more honorable than you has been invited by him, the one who invited you both may come and say to you, ‘Give this man your place.’ Then, with shame, you will proceed to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down in the lowest place, so that, when the one who invited you comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher!’ Then you will have honor in front of all those who are sitting at the table with you.

That’s good advice for attending a wedding banquet, isn’t it? If you just assume that you’re the most important person there, you run the risk of being shamed when the host of the banquet comes and kicks you out of the place of honor. But Jesus isn’t interested in earthly wedding banquet behavior. He’s interested in saving people from sin, death, and the devil, and He knows the danger of thinking highly of oneself when it comes to God.

God invites everyone to come into His kingdom. But how you come in is incredibly important. If you approach God as someone who thinks he deserves recognition, who has worked hard and earned a place in heaven and whom God is lucky to have by His side, if you approach God on your own terms, with your own beliefs, doing what you think is right (regardless of what He has to say about it in His Word), that’s like making a beeline for that place of highest honor. But if you do that, you’re doomed, because the Host of the heavenly feast will come in and see you sitting there, all proud of yourself, and He will tell you to get up and give your place to someone else. And when Jesus says in His parable that you’ll have to go down to the lowest place, what He means is, you won’t have a place in God’s presence at all. You’ll be ushered out of His kingdom into eternal darkness.

On the other hand, if you approach God, as He has invited you to do, as someone who thinks he deserves nothing from Him, who recognizes that he has no righteousness of His own to offer God, who has earned only wrath and punishment from the just and holy God, who only looks to God for the mercy and favor He has promised to poor sinners for the sake of Jesus Christ, who died for you so that you might be accepted by His heavenly Father, if you approach God on His terms, listening to His Word and believing in His Son Jesus Christ, that’s like choosing the lowest place at the banquet. And if you do that, you’re saved, because the Host of the heavenly feast will come in and see you sitting there, where Jesus told you sit, and He will tell you to get up and go to a higher place, to the place of a son or a daughter of God, to a place of eternal life.

Jesus summarizes the whole thing with a saying that’s often repeated in the Scriptures: For whoever exalts himself will be humbled; and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. To exalt yourself is the way of the Law. It’s to think highly of yourself, as if you deserved something from God. But the Law exposes, not our worthiness, but our sin. As Paul writes to the Romans, by the Law is the knowledge of sin. When you approach God by way of the Law, as the Pharisees and experts of the law often did, your hidden ugliness is exposed every single time. So don’t exalt yourself! Don’t think highly of yourself! Don’t start to think that you’ve earned heaven by your obedience! That is the way of death. Instead, follow the way of the Gospel. The way of the Gospel is to think nothing of yourself, but to think everything of God and His promise to save you through faith in His beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, to save you out of mercy, to save you and adopt you and preserve you as His child throughout this life, until you reach the heavenly wedding banquet.

If you’ve been thinking highly of yourself and you didn’t see it before as a problem, then it’s good to have the ugliness of that thinking exposed, as Jesus does in today’s Gospel. Or, if you’re already well aware of that sinful attitude of your flesh and have been struggling against it, it’s still good to have it exposed. Because the Christian life requires a continual humbling of ourselves before God. But that self-humbling, which includes faith in Christ Jesus, our Savior and Redeemer, is always accompanied by the tremendous promise that God Himself will exalt you and lift you up on high. And that self-humbling before God will also result in humility before men, as Paul says in the Epistle, I implore you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you were called, with all humility and meekness, with patience, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace: one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above you all, and through you all, and in you all. Amen.

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.