Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 6, 2016

Text: Luke 15:1-3, 11-32

            Beloved in Christ, is forgiveness truly possible? Can someone truly receive real forgiveness? I don’t mean the sort of forgiveness that says, “Okay I’m too angry and frustrated with the situation and so I’ll just accept the apology and not do anything against you, all the while I harbor a grudge against you and never really warm up to you.” I don’t mean the sort of forgiveness that says, “I don’t trust you for a minute or believe your apology for a second, but I’m just going to pretend that I do because it’s expected of me.” And I certainly don’t mean the sort of forgiveness that says, “Well, I never considered the matter all that significant, even if you did, and so I’m more than happy to overlook such a trivial thing.” I’m talking about real forgiveness, where everyone agrees that someone has seriously wronged another person and the wronged person truly and heartily forgives the other person from the bottom of their heart.

            In today’s Gospel we see that our Lord Jesus Christ believes in that kind of forgiveness and freely gives it. And He tells a parable where there is only one person who believes that that kind of forgiveness is available, namely, the father of the two sons. But as we will see, the two sons do not believe such forgiveness is possible or maybe even desirable.

            Let me begin with the older son first. He may make his appearance last, but it is obvious that he doesn’t believe in forgiveness or redemption of any kind. He has the crasser attitude toward forgiveness—it would be highly unfair towards those who did what they were supposed to do in the first place—but his own sin is subtler and has disguised itself so much that it has fooled him into believing that he doesn’t need forgiveness and therefore forgiveness shouldn’t be offered to anybody.

Il Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
Return of the Prodigal Son

            But what do I mean when I assert that he too has sinned and is in need of forgiveness? Well, first of all, consider what he did when his younger brother demanded his share of the property. In his culture he as the eldest son was supposed to bring about some reconciliation between his father and his brother. He was supposed to have sat down with his brother and talked him out of his foolish request. But he did nothing. He just let his brother misbehave because it would make him look better.

            But it there’s more. The father didn’t just give his property to the younger son, but to the older one as well. The parable clearly tells us that “he divided his property between them.” Granted, the older son didn’t sell his share and then move away. But he didn’t exactly protest either when the father gave him his share. He should have. He should have said that it was the wrong thing to do and that he wasn’t going to claim a single thing before his father’s death. But he silently went along with what his father was doing. The younger brother may have instigated the division of property, but the older brother shared the guilt for letting it take place.

            And then we see his attitude fully on display when his younger brother finally arrived home. Listen to his words to his father: “Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends.” Now is that how a loving son shows his affection for his father? Does he say, “I’ve been slaving away for you for many years,” as if his dad were the world’s harshest taskmaster? And do you think that a father who was so generous to his youngest son, even to the point of giving him the inheritance in advance, would begrudge his son a little party with his friends? No. The older son was as distant from his father as was the younger son. The sad thing is that he didn’t know that the father who forgave and loved his younger son also loved him and wanted to forgive his churlish attitude.

            That is a real tragedy: not knowing your own faults, your own most grievous faults, and thus not realizing that you need forgiveness or that forgiveness is available to you. But the younger son reminds us that even people who are deeply burdened by their sins don’t understand that God forgives them. And so we turn now to the younger son.

            We see that the younger son had no clearer concept of forgiveness than the older son did. To his credit, he did recognize that he had done wrong. He acknowledged that his bad behavior had broken the natural father-son relationship. At most he hoped that he could become an employee of his dad’s, for he knew that his father was a good boss to have. He thought about working hard and proving himself to his father—not to be taken back as a son, but to be recognized at least as a decent human being. And so he made the same mistake as his older brother. The older brother told his father that he had been slaving away for his dad all those years. The younger brother wanted to be treated as one of the hired servants. Neither brother believed that they had a gracious father who wanted to treat them as his beloved sons.

            If only they had known that their father loved them and forgave them! Not in some kind of half-hearted way, either. No, He forgave them from the bottom of his heart. And he did so at tremendous cost to himself and his own dignity. I think that we as westerners are likely to overlook some of the ways in which the father in the parable was downright generous in his forgiveness. Of course, first, most fathers in just about every culture would understand a child’s request for the inheritance to be nothing short of telling him, “Drop dead.” Such insolence was very much frowned upon in our Lord’s society. Most people would have expected a father to treat his child as dead after such an insult, no matter how much they came groveling later on. But notice also that the father doesn’t allow his son to grovel. His son begins his speech, but the father cuts him off. The son would naturally have stooped to kiss his father’s hand, a custom of that day, but instead the father falls upon his son’s neck, which prevented the son from doing that. It isn’t because the father is angry. Quite the opposite. He doesn’t want his son to grovel in the least, but is glad to forgive him wholeheartedly. He doesn’t want the other people in the village to see his son groveling, lest they mistreat his son, even though he is at peace with him.

            To reinforce that he has completely forgiven his son and that no one in the village should interfere or act as if the son needed to make further amends, the father threw a banquet that would feed the entire town. He made sure that everyone saw that he had put his own best robe on his son and put his own ring on his son’s finger. This reconciliation would have been a costly affair, to be sure, and the father had to bear all that expense. But if he had not done it, the villagers might well have lynched the son.

            In the same way, God forgives us at great cost. It isn’t just a word or two spoken half-heartedly. It is something that cost God the Father His very own Son and that cost the Son His very own life. Nor was this a decision made on the spur of a moment, when God was overwhelmed by emotion and decided to pay such an extravagant cost—an impulse buy, if you will. No, it had been decided before the dawn of time that this is what the Son would do. The Father and the Holy Spirit poured themselves out into the Son’s work, so that it would have their blessing. The entire Triune God was intent on saving us human beings. No cost was too great to pay in order for mankind to be redeemed.

            And that forgiveness is ours today. It is real and total forgiveness. We aren’t put on probation for a while or made to be servants until we can show that we are worthy of God’s trust again. Nor is it a one-time deal, as so many people mistakenly think. You don’t just get one chance to be forgiven after you royally screw up and nothing thereafter. Rather, God gives forgiveness throughout our entire life, because He knows that we will struggle with sin as long as we live.

            God forgives lavishly and generously, for He knows that is exactly what we need. And that is why He gives that gift in many forms. He forgives us by washing our sins in holy baptism and calling us His beloved children. He forgives us our sins through the Word of God, as it is read both in church and at home. He forgives our sins by holy absolution, where the pastor by God’s command and not his own initiative imparts the forgiveness that God has commanded to be given to all repentant sinners. He also forgives our sins by imparting Christ’s body and blood in the Lord’s Supper. There we are given the very means by which Christ won forgiveness for us—the body once nailed to the cross and the blood once shed on Calvary for us.

            And that is why we gather every week. There are places that can entertain you better. There are other places that can lecture you on various enlightening topics. But only here, that is, in the holy Christian church, do you find the forgiveness of sin offered again and again. Real forgiveness for real sinners.

            Yes, real forgiveness is possible for real sinners who have committed real sins. May you believe that with all your heart! In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent, February 28, 2016

Text: Luke 13:1-9

            Beloved in Christ, we are in Lent because we need another chance. As we learned two weeks ago, if someone like the holy Son of God can be tempted, so can we—and we will not be as successful as He was. And so we need another chance. We need another chance to take on temptation and this time get it right. As we learned last week, if the high priests and religious leaders in the holiest of cities, Jerusalem, could fall into hypocrisy, formalism, and other sin, so much so that they ended up clamoring for Christ’s death, so can we. And so we need another chance. We need another chance to repent of our mediocre Christianity and to embrace the life that God has given us.

            But what shall we do with another chance? The problem with second chances is that we will simply do what we did the first time around. We will make the same errors and end up in the same place. Or we will compound the old errors with new ones and make things even more of a mess.

            That is what some people in the crowd did in today’s Gospel. They had come to our Lord Jesus Christ because they knew that He offered forgiveness and new life. But what did they do when they had a chance to live and think better than they had in the past? They pointed to some people who had suffered horribly and thought themselves better. They assumed that those Galileans who had been butchered mercilessly and in a sacrilegious manner were worse people than themselves. Because they had escaped such a fate, they assumed that everything was all right with them. But, of course, such an attitude was a very foolish one to take. After all, the Galileans who were butchered could also have reasonably thought themselves superior to their peers until Pilate killed them. Don’t boast about the downfall of others when you don’t know your own outcome.

            It is tempting to look at the manifest sins of other people and the consequences they suffer rather than to look at our own. It doesn’t help that we live in a society that is dead set against God and His Word. Just when you think it cannot get any crazier, it does. Our culture long ago decided that it was going to deify every person’s desires. Whatever you feel in your heart has to be right, it decided. At first, it simply meant that you should pursue your dreams, even if it meant shirking your responsibilities. Then it meant that you should marry someone you had fallen madly in love with, even if it was just five minutes ago and you were already married. Then people started saying that since marriage ought to be all about following your heart as it feels right now, then it doesn’t matter if it is a marriage between a man and a woman, two men, two women, or three or more partners. More recently, men have said that if they feel more like a woman (or vice versa), they must be called one by the rest of society. Even more recently, a woman has declared herself to be a cat trapped in a human body and has demanded to be treated accordingly. The Crazy Train has definitely left the station and is not turning back. And I fear that this is simply the first act of a long play in the Theater of the Absurd.

            We religious people are tempted to shake our heads and mutter about the world going to hell in a handbasket. We look to see people getting their comeuppance for this crazy behavior. Indeed, we might well point out that one craziness has grown out of earlier forms of craziness, and that there is no worse punishment than when God allows people to follow their hearts’ desires all the way to the bitter end. We expect our pastors to preach long and hard about the wickedness in this world and the folly it has unleashed. We expect our pastors to proclaim how God smote the Galileans and the people upon whom the Tower of Siloam fell in Jerusalem.

            It feels good to see people get their just deserts—or failing that, to know that those just deserts will soon be meted out. But it is not spiritual helpful for us. It takes the focus off of ourselves and problems, where it needs to be. For we ourselves are also a boiling cauldron of wicked desires. We too often live more by how we feel than by what God has to say. And so while we think of how God might smite the wicked who serve their flesh or their belly, we might easily overlook how the same fate might await us.

            A far more sensible approach would be to realize that we have been given a second chance. The Galileans didn’t have such an opportunity. They might have wanted to amend their lives in several different ways and even resolved to do so once they got back home after making their sacrifices. But they never had the chance to follow through. The people who were crushed by the collapsing Tower of Siloam were even less lucky. At least the Galileans could see the swords coming and steel themselves for the moment of death. But by the time those eighteen unfortunate souls realized that the tower was collapsing upon them, they would have been dead. But we are still alive. We still have the chance to hear the call to repent, to turn from evil, and to turn to God—and live.

            We are like the fig tree that should have borne some kind of fruit by now, but hadn’t. We have been given another chance. We may still have another chance tomorrow and the day after that and next week and in the decades to come. Maybe, but then maybe not. We don’t know when the ax will finally be laid against the tree. But we have been given another chance today. Let us avail ourselves of it.

            But why do we have another chance at all? Is it simply because God doesn’t really care whether we repent or not? Of course not. He just has “no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but [desires] that the wicked turn from his way and live.” He wants us to use our opportunity to hear His Word at long last and to stop thinking that indulging ourselves is the best way to live. He wants us to take seriously the fact that He has sent Christ into the world.

            For it is in Christ Jesus that we have all been given another chance. That second chance wasn’t an easy thing for Him to acquire on our behalf. Like the vinedresser in today’s parable, He had a lot of work to do if that second chance was going to hold. We are tempted to look at people who give second chances to people as lazy. The vinedresser didn’t want to wield an ax and that is why he talked his way out of that task. But actually the vinedresser signed up for more work. It would have taken just a few whacks with a stout ax to chop down that relatively young fig tree. But the vinedresser signed up for a more ambitious project. He would dig all around the tree and mix manure into the soil. That would take much longer to do than simply chopping down the tree, and it might even have had to be repeated more than once. And it must have stunk when he brought the manure over to the tree, and the vinedresser himself must have stunk at the end of the day. So, no, this second chance did not come cheaply to the one who gave it.

            Neither did it come cheaply for our Lord Jesus Christ. It required Him to live a completely holy life for us and then to go to the cross. It stank to have to do such a thing, especially when not everybody would welcome what Christ was doing or avail themselves of the second chance that He was winning for people. And yet He enthusiastically threw Himself into this effort.

            Because He did so, we still have another chance. In fact, we have another chance each and every day. He gave us that second chance resolutely when He baptized us and called us to faith. That was what began the good work in us and began to produce the fruit of faith—things such as trusting in God, loving Him and our neighbors, doing good works that please Him, and the like. But, of course, we realize that we do not do as much of those things as we should. It isn’t that we bear no fruit, for we are true Christians and not utterly unbelieving heathen, but we recognize that we still need more chances, for our life is not as God would have it be.

            That is why God is not just a God of second chances, but third chances and fourth chances and so on. Yes, there will ultimately be a day when we will not have any more chances to amend our sinful lives further. But until our Lord calls us home, He will greet us each day with the forgiveness of our sins. That is why we gather as Christians here every week, so that we can hear His holy words of absolution, listen to the sweet gospel being preached here, and receive Christ’s body and blood in the Lord’s Supper. We not only hear about a second chance through these gifts, but we actually receive another chance through them.

            And so, beloved in Christ, let us not focus all our attention on the way that the heathen are living. Yes, they need to be admonished, for God wants them too to have another chance. But let us take seriously the call to repent and then even more seriously enjoy the forgiveness of sins that gives us another fresh start. If we do that, if we take seriously the additional chances we have been given, then others will perk up and take notice. But the rest of society only will be moved to consider the Christian way of thinking and living when God’s own people take His Word seriously.

            Therefore, beloved in Christ, let us focus on the additional chance given to us. Let this renew us and increase the fruit of the Holy Spirit that we bear. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent, February 21, 2016

Text: Luke 13:31-35

            Beloved in Christ, when the prime ministers of Great Britain and Canada talk about the political parties that are out of power, they usually refer to them as “her Majesty’s loyal opposition.” By so doing David Cameron and Justin Trudeau are acknowledging that Queen Elizabeth had asked them to form their respective governments, but that the parties not in power are still loyal subjects of the queen, even if the government will not always take their ideas into consideration. However, all parties concerned would recognize that there is such a thing as a disloyal opposition. It would be the people who would try to overthrow the government by bullets and bombs, not the ballot box.

            Well, in the same way not every disagreement among Christians makes a person disloyal. Christians may legitimately disagree with each other about the best way to organize a congregation or which activities in a local church will have precedence over others. Some will want to decorate the church one way and others another way. Christians ought to listen to one another and weigh those ideas. But at some point a decision will have to be made, and one idea will prevail over others. In that case, those in the minority are invited to be “the loyal opposition.” They will loyally support the decision of the majority for the sake of Christian love and peace in the church, just as they will ask the reverse to hold true when they happen to be in the majority.

            Today’s Gospel, however, does not introduce us to the loyal opposition, but rather to the not-so-loyal opposition. Just as any country faces the danger of those who would overthrow it, so we as faithful Christians must recognize that there are people who oppose Christ and desire to thwart the coming of God’s kingdom.

            Some of that opposition comes from people like Herod—tyrants who see Christ and Christianity as a threat to their government. They do not want citizens who might be beholden to a higher power. They do not want to have to deal with people who live by a different standard than their edicts and laws. But people like Herod are rather crass in their opposition to God and to the Christian faith. They use rather crude instruments such as executions and imprisonments to stop the spread of Christianity. And their rather crude measures usually fail in the end because they cannot deal with something like the gospel, which is so radically different than the political machinations that they are used to dealing with. And so some of the real opposition Christians face comes from worldly powers, and we must acknowledge as much.

            But, interestingly, it isn’t the worldly powers-that-be that pose the greatest danger to the church. Instead, the gravest dangers come from those who pass themselves off as godly and pious while in reality they are rank unbelievers. It is so easy to focus on wicked people like Herod and to overlook seemingly pious Jerusalem. The Pharisees thought that the real showdown would take place between Herod and Jesus. After all, Herod was a self-indulgent, heathenish, two-bit tyrant. Surely Herod was our Lord’s enemy and Jerusalem was His friend. But Jesus saw Herod as a sideshow. The real contest would be in Jerusalem. It was Jerusalem that had murdered the prophets. It was Jerusalem that had rejected God’s attempts to win her over. It was Jerusalem, not Herod, that would crucify Jesus. To be sure, it would be Pontius Pilate—the governor—who would execute Christ, but only because the religious leaders in Jerusalem had demanded it. One must remember that Jerusalem wasn’t a political capital at that time. Rome was the capital of the empire, and Caesarea was the local power base for the Roman government. It was only because of the Passover that Herod and Pilate were in Jerusalem. Thus, Jerusalem wasn’t a political capital, but rather a holy city, a religious place—the center of godliness, of Pharisees, Sadducees, and scribes.

            Now our Lord did recognize that Herod posed a threat. He was a sly fox. He may very well have sent some Pharisees—people Herod normally would not have stomached—to warn Jesus to flee. This way Herod wouldn’t have any blood on his hands, as he had after he had killed John the Baptist, and he would still have gotten rid of Jesus. Our Lord knew that Herod was a crafty one and you had to watch him as you would a fox. But it was Jerusalem that was our Lord’s great enemy. You see, the craftiness of the heathen is not as dangerous as the hypocrisy of the pious.

            God detests those who simply go through the motions of being religious while having completely unrepentant hearts. We call this “formalism.” It is the belief that all that matters is having an outward form of godliness, all the while letting our hearts think and do anything they want. It says that we can “walk as enemies of the cross of Christ,” “with minds set on earthly things,” as long as we utter pious platitudes now and then. The problem isn’t the words. The problem isn’t the outward forms themselves or the patterns of piety. After all, we will always have to use one form or another. The problem is that we do not listen to what the words are saying.

            As the apostle Paul writes in today’s epistle, Christ had come so that He could “transform our lowly body to be like His glorious body, by the power that enables Him even to subject all things to Himself.” He didn’t come merely to go through the motions. He didn’t come to pretend to redeem the world by pretending to die on the cross. He came to deal with our death by undergoing a real and agonizing death. He came to deal with our sin by handing Himself over into the hands of sinners. He came to deal with our separation from God by undergoing an intense feeling of loneliness on the cross. He came to deal with a broken world by allowing Himself to experience its brokenness at its worst. And He came to bring us healing and life by rising from the dead. He didn’t appear merely as a ghost when He rose. He came back with flesh, blood, and bones. He didn’t doff His body as if He had had it only to go through some motions here on earth for three decades. He still dwells in that body. He will always be the Son of God who has taken on human flesh throughout eternity. He stays forever the God-Man because He is seriously committed to us human beings and He wants to “transform our lowly body to be like His glorious body” when He returns and raises the dead.

            Where does that leave us then? We do not want merely to be going through the motions.  But what is the cure? It is to cry out, as our Lord tells us to, “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!” There are two things going on when we do that. We recognize that He is the one who comes in God’s name in order to save us. And we confess that our hopes depend upon Him, for He is the blessed one. If that is our understanding, then we will do what Paul tells us in our epistle. We will be heavenly-minded instead of earthly-minded. We will imitate godly people who have lived before us rather than just living for our bellies.

            Above all, we will approach God’s Word differently. Ultimately, the problem with Jerusalem was that it was a “city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it.” And, ultimately, that is the problem with us when we are going through the motions, when we are pretending to be religious but are not listening to the Word of the Lord. Every time we open the Scriptures or come to church, we should say, “God is speaking to me here. Let me listen as if my very life depended upon it, as if all of eternity was at stake. He calls me to recognize my sin and to repent. I will do so as if I were fleeing a bear that was intent on devouring me. He calls me to trust in Him for my salvation. I will do so as if I were clinging to a branch and if I were to let go, I would fall off a cliff. He comes to transform me. He will raise me on the Last Day and give me a glorified body, just as His body was glorified after His resurrection. But in the meantime, He wants to still transform me in this life. He wants me to grow to be more like Him. And so in the time I spend with Him, I will let His Word have its way with me so that I know Him better and have a mind no longer conformed to this world, but transformed and renewed.”

            This is the attitude that we need to maintain all the time. It is an attitude that we must especially cultivate if we are like Jerusalem, people steeped in years of acquaintance with God. We may think that we know it all and have done it all. But each and every day, each and every week we must approach God’s Word as if we were coming to it for the first time and hearing its life-changing word for the first time. May God grant us to do this during this Lenten season! In Jesus’ name. Amen.