Sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Texts: Isaiah 55:6-9 and Matthew 20:1-16

            Beloved in Christ, God made us in His image. And for millennia now we have been returning the favor and trying to make God in our own image.

            I don’t mean that as a compliment. When God created us in His image, He was bestowing upon us good gifts. He was endowing us with reason, so that we would not have to live purely by instinct. More importantly, He gave us holiness and righteousness, so that all our actions would be noble and praiseworthy and so that we would live a life of trust in Him. But what did we do? We threw away that gift. Instead of holiness we pursued sin. Rather than being governed by reason, we often follow our basest desires and do so unthinkingly. But to top it all off, we started trying to create God in our own image. We pretended that He was exactly like one of us—more powerful than us, to be sure—but otherwise indistinguishable from you and me.

            We cut God down to our size by calling Him “the Man Upstairs,” as if He were a slightly older human being, but with all our foibles and quirks. We assume that He is as fickle as we are, and that He has basically the same moral outlook we do. Indeed, whatever we happen to think about a particular subject, we assume that it is His view as well, for we are smart, reasonable beings and God must certainly be like us if He is worthy of the name God.

            But then we are confronted with those words from today’s Old Testament reading: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, declares the LORD.” We may try to get God to conform to our expectations and our way of doing things, but we won’t succeed. God will remain God, not a creation of our imagination.

            Therefore, when we come to the Scriptures, we shouldn’t expect to see the LORD God confirming our preconceptions about Him. We are selfish people; the LORD God isn’t. We are tainted by sin; the LORD God is holy. We are limited in our understanding; the LORD God knows all things. Therefore, we should actually be expected to be surprised when we read the Scriptures and learn more about the LORD. This is especially true if we haven’t been Christians all that long or if we have read very little of the Scriptures or if we have read the Bible very superficially. We should expect that the LORD will surprise us when He tells us exactly what He is like.

            And so we should expect that God will demand something greater of us in the way of morality than we would. After all, we are looking for the easiest way out. We are looking for ways to justify our selfish behavior. But if the LORD God is holy and wants us to be holy too, He will have to ask for more out of us. You see, we take the saying “no harm, no foul” and recraft it as “no blood, no sin,” as if you have to harm someone badly enough that they end up in the hospital before it counts as a sin. And since we haven’t done anything that horrible, or done so only very occasionally, we look pretty good.

            But God tells us to get a deeper morality than that. Sure, He forbids us to murder others, but He also tells us not to be angry with them or call them names. Sure, He forbids us to commit adultery, but He also orders us not to look at others with lust in our eyes. Our words and our thoughts are as much subject to His scrutiny as the crassest of our deeds, and they must pass inspection no less than our actions.

            But God’s thoughts are about more than mere morality. That is one of the ways that His thoughts are so much higher than ours. The best we can think to come up with is a mediocre morality. But God wants to establish a relationship with us that is based on something even better than morality: His love, mercy, and forgiveness.

            We see that in today’s Gospel. There we see a man who hires a crew of workers at the beginning of the day and promises to pay them a denarius, which was more than fair pay for a day’s work. Three hours into the workday he realizes that he will need more workers and so he hires some more. He does so again at the sixth hour and the ninth hour. Finally, at the eleventh hour, one hour before quitting time, he hires a final batch of workers. He then pays everyone a denarius. The people who were hired first don’t like it. I suppose that neither would several federal agencies today. Sure, we would allow him to pay the last group of workers a denarius, but only if he upped the pay for the first group of workers to twelve denarii.

            Why do we instinctively have a problem with what the man in the parable? It is because we do not understand grace, that is, when God gives us something that we don’t deserve and couldn’t in fact earn. We look at God as if He were our boss, and anything we get from Him as our wages. If we work hard, we expect to be highly compensated. If we are good people, living upright lives, we expect God to give us high-paying jobs, prestige in society, a great family, and a pleasant life. And if we or someone else messes up and violates one of God’s commandments in a serious way, we expect some misfortune to strike. When it comes to our salvation, we do things the old-fashioned way: we earn it.

            And so we are scandalized by the idea that God would forgive sins, that He would give people something better than what they deserve. We ignore the fact that, if God truly paid people the wages they deserved, everyone would be condemned to hell, for all people have sinned against Him. But let’s say that we were able to live a perfect life and received as our due wages eternal fellowship with God in heavenly bliss. Now imagine that God gives the same gift of eternal life to someone who hasn’t been perfect. We would consider it grossly unfair, especially if that person wasn’t even close to our level of perfection. We would complain that we were being cheated somehow.

            But the man in the parable asks some pertinent questions. He told the workers who worked all day, “Did you not agree with me for a denarius?” Whatever the man gave the other workers, he had not violated his agreement with them. By the same token, God promises that all who are perfectly obedient to Him will receive the rewards of heaven. That agreement is not violated simply because God decides to show mercy to sinners. The man in the parable goes on to ask, “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?” And that is what it boils down to: We have no right to begrudge God’s generosity. If He wants to show mercy, we have no right to complain, as if we were being robbed somehow or another.

            Far from being cheated, we ought to realize exactly how generous God is, for even the best of us are more like the workers hired near the end of the day than those hired at the very beginning. We will enter heaven not based on our works, but as a free gift received from the LORD God, paid at the great cost of Christ’s suffering and death.

            Now this parable usually leads people to ask the question: If we all can get the same free gift of salvation regardless of whether we trusted in Christ early in life or late in life, then why should we become a Christian early in life and take the faith seriously and strive to live a godly life, when we could turn to God on our deathbed and equally be saved? There are two answers. First of all, you might not have the chance to lie on your deathbed and mull over your life and consider returning to the LORD God. You might die quite suddenly, when you least expect it, without a chance to repent. That is why the Scriptures state repeatedly: “Today is the day of salvation.” There may not be a tomorrow. But there is another reason: we don’t want to miss out on fellowship with God. You see, we embrace the Christian faith not as something laborious but as a gift from God. Or more accurately: where God Himself is the gift.

            It is not a burden to hear the invitation, “Seek the LORD while He may be found; call upon Him while He is near.” It is not a burden because we know that “He [will] have compassion on” us and “will abundantly pardon.” Therefore, beloved in the Lord, let us rejoice that God’s thoughts are higher than ours, and let us ponder what He has revealed about Himself. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Sermon for Trinity Sunday, May 31, 2015

Text: John 3:1-17

            Beloved in Christ, every so often you hear critics say, “No one can really know God. He is beyond our comprehension.” And the critics have a point. We can discern that there must be a God, but that doesn’t mean that we naturally know much about Him. We can discern from the vastness of creation that He must be mighty. We can figure out from the conscience implanted in us that He must be holy. But to understand who God is, what He is really like, what He thinks, and so forth is beyond our ability. Trying to figure out God on our own is like expecting a kid who hasn’t even learned three plus four to know how to build a particle accelerator and interpret the results of the experiments. God’s nature is so beyond us that we can never figure Him out on our own.

            To be sure, some religions openly boast that they are just speculating and guessing about God. They use their reason and experience to come up with some sort of answer. But when you ask them how they know, they have to admit that it is simply their speculation and they know nothing for certain. But that is sort of like taking a math problem where you don’t really understand the principles at work and just writing down a number because it seems rather good and hoping that you’ll convince your teacher just to accept it. It is no wonder then that the skeptics say that every religion is just people guessing at what God might be like.

            And that is where the skeptics err. They are right to say that it is difficult to learn much about God and that many religions are just guessing. But the Christian faith is not our guesswork as to what God must be like. It is founded in something deeper: His own revelation. And this is more than just God imparting information to a person wise enough to apprehend it. No, this is God coming into our midst and being the revelation itself.

            That is what Jesus was trying to get Nicodemus to understand: “No one has ascended into heaven except He who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.” Now Nicodemus was willing to compliment Jesus and say that He was a “rabbi” and “a teacher come from God,” someone with the hand of God upon Him as He did great miracles. But Jesus rejected those kind words. He said that Nicodemus didn’t know anything about the kingdom of God, indeed was outside of it, if he thought of Jesus simply as a great “teacher come from God.” Instead Jesus wanted to be acknowledged as the one “who descended from heaven,” in other words, one who was true God. In other words, He was not just another teacher, passing on third-hand knowledge of God, that is, passing on what he had read or heard from a prophet who had heard something from God. He was also not just another prophet, that is, someone hearing God but passing on his best interpretation of what he thought God had said. Instead, He was true God in every sense of the word and, therefore, able to open up to us everything that He wanted mankind to know about God.

            Yes, there are still things we don’t know about God because He has chosen not to reveal them. We will never know everything about God, for we would become easily confused with the information. Nevertheless, Christ came so that we would know everything that we need to know about Him in order to live faithfully in this life and the life to come. And so the most basic thing that we can do is to listen to His words, not as words of a great teacher, but as words of God in human flesh. As we hear those words, we are directed to where He would have us go. He told Nicodemus that he need to be “born again” in order to “see the kingdom of God.” Jesus further explained what He was talking about. He was talking about being “born of water and the Spirit”—holy baptism, as we call it. This is how God wants to work in us, in order to begin a new life in us so that we can begin to appreciate the truths that He teaches us in Christ Jesus.

            That is because baptism is more than a simple ceremony or a ritual bath. It is the way that the Holy Spirit imparts new life in us by giving us a second birth. This birth isn’t like the natural birth that we received when our mothers had us. Instead, this is a heavenly birth. Once the Holy Spirit has started this new life in us, we are no longer completely earthly minded. We can begin to comprehend the heavenly truths that our Lord teaches. More than that, we are made part of God’s kingdom and thus know about it from the inside. In baptism we are united with Jesus Christ, His death, and His resurrection. Thus, we know God in a deep way, for we have been made to undergo the most profound things that God incarnate underwent. But we also learn about the Father—who is called “God” in this passage—for we learn about His kingdom. We also are led and shaped by the Holy Spirit, who brings us to faith through this holy washing. Thus, baptism does more than just teach us about the three Persons in the Trinity. It leads us to experience the work of the Trinity.

            Once baptized, we turn our attention to the words that God has spoken. We learn the heavenly things, the real spiritual matters rather than just the child’s play. We pay attention to the words our Lord spoke. We also listen carefully to the Old Testament prophets, for Christ approved of their message and said that they pointed to Him. We also hear attentively the words of the apostles, for Christ Himself commissioned them. If Christ had never come, the words of the prophets and apostles would lack full authority. They might be divine, but how would we know for sure? But because Christ, who is God in human flesh, has come and spoken and given His stamp of approval to these prophets and apostles, we now listen to them as speaking with divine authority.

            As we listen carefully to the Scriptures, we learn to speak clearly about God. And that is all we are doing when we confess the Holy Trinity. Our teaching that God is Triune—three in one—is not some speculation on our part. It is simply stating in short-hand what the Scriptures have to say about God. The more you read the Scriptures, the more you see Jesus Christ distinguishing Himself (the Son) from the Father and the Holy Spirit. We see that in today’s gospel, where He talks about the Father sending the Son to save the world and where He speaks about the Holy Spirit’s work in giving new birth. Furthermore, elsewhere we see that each of these Persons are truly and fully God, not partially so. And yet the Scriptures emphasize that there is one God, not three Gods. How that can be, we freely admit that we do not fully understand. But we know that we won’t solve the problem by simplifying the Trinity to fit our terms, either by reducing the three Persons into one Person or by diving the one Godhead into three.

            We teach the Trinity because that accords with the explanations that God Himself has given about what He is like. Occasionally you hear people say that the doctrine of the Trinity was something Christians invented three centuries after Christ’s birth to fit in with Greek philosophy. That is the argument, for example, that Dan Brown has made in his Da Vinci Code. He argues that nobody had ever worshipped Jesus as divine until in 325 A.D. the Council of Nicaea met and tried to reconcile the Bible with Greek philosophy. You hear similar things when TV programs try to explain the origin of Christianity. But, of course, that is sheer fiction, fiction worthy of a novelist, not a historian.

            What do I mean? First of all, I do not know how anyone can say with a straight face that the first time people thought of worshipping Jesus Christ as God was in 325 A.D. I don’t even need the New Testament to prove that Christians worshipped Christ as divine from the earliest of days. Even non-Christians knew that Christians worshipped Christ as God. Pliny, a Roman governor, mentions that fact in a letter to the emperor around 112 A.D. There is also a famous graffito in Rome from around 200 A.D. that says, “Alexamenos worships his God,” and it shows a caricature of someone on a cross. Sure, it is a mockery of Christianity, but it wouldn’t make sense if Christians didn’t worship Christ as divine. And then there are theologians such as Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, and Tertullian, who all lived in the 100’s A.D. and whose main writings had the explicit purpose of proving the divinity of Christ. In fact, Tertullian was the one who coined the term Trinity, long before the Council of Nicaea. But we don’t have to go that far afield. Even the most skeptical critics believe Paul’s letters were written within three decades of Christ’s death, and it is clear that Paul thought of Jesus as divine. So the argument that the divinity of Christ and the Trinity are latecomers to Christianity is preposterous.

            Furthermore, the other argument, namely, that Christianity borrowed the idea of the Trinity from Greek philosophy only makes sense to those who have never read Greek philosophy. There is nothing like the Trinity in Greek philosophy, where three persons share one essence. In fact, that contradicts the rules of philosophy. However, those who opposed the Trinity often were heavily influenced by Greek philosophy. For example, Arius taught that Jesus was a godlike being, but not fully God. That sounds a whole lot like the Demiurge in Plato’s Theaetetus.

            Before we draw this sermon to an end, let me address one more question: what difference does this all make? Quite a bit. God doesn’t want us to live in ignorance of Him. He has created us to enjoy life and fellowship with Him. The Father sent the Son, and the Son willingly went to the cross under the Spirit’s guidance, all so that we could be freed from death and everlasting condemnation. To know God truly in the way He should be known is nothing other than life. To know Him as we ought is the basis for all true prayer. Therefore, may you hear God’s Word attentively and learn what you could never have learned on your own. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Midweek Lenten Sermon (March 4, 2015): Fruit of the Spirit: Peace

Texts: Romans 15:1-5 and John 14:25-28

            Beloved in Christ, we are now ready to look at the third aspect of the fruit of the Spirit, namely, peace. To help us understand peace better we have these two passages, one from Romans and the other from John. Let me begin with the second passage, since there Jesus explains the role of the Holy Spirit in a Christian’s life. After all, we have been talking about the fruit of the Spirit for the past couple of Wednesdays, but we haven’t really explored who the Holy Spirit is or how He works in us to bear this fruit.

            In fact, you may ask, “If we are Christians, then what does the Holy Spirit have to do with anything? We are not Holy Spirit-ians, after all, but Christians. So why don’t we speak of the fruit of Jesus Christ instead of the fruit of the Holy Spirit?” Well, we are taught by Scripture to acknowledge not only Jesus Christ as God and Lord, but to acknowledge the Father and the Holy Spirit as God and Lord, too. And yet there are not three Gods, but one God. There are three distinct persons in the Trinity and none can be blurred with or equated with another, but they remain distinct. Furthermore, each person is fully God, not just part of God. But in an awesome mystery beyond our ability to explain, there is one God. And so just as we acknowledge the divinity of the Father and of the Son, so too we acknowledge the divinity and authority of the Holy Spirit.

            Of course, we acknowledge the special role that the Son has played in humanity’s salvation. That is why we are rightly called Christians rather than Father-ians or Holy Spirit-ians. Unless the Son of God had taken on our human flesh, we would have been ignorant of God’s truth. All our theology centers around Jesus Christ. His words are the absolute standard of the Christian faith. His very existence as God in human flesh and His work of holy living, dying, and rising for us teach us all we need to know about God.

            I am not saying that the only part of the Bible that is authoritative for us is the four gospels and then only the words printed in red. After all, Jesus pointed to the prophets of the Old Testament as people who knew of and foretold His ministry. He cited them as authoritative, and well He should, for He, the Word of God, also spoke to the prophets before His incarnation. Moreover, Jesus commissioned His twelve apostles to preach and to write down words for the next generation and made their witness authoritative. Thus, throughout the entire Bible we see the words of our Lord.

            But there was something unique, we have to admit, about those three years that our Lord conducted His ministry with the apostles. As He concluded His earthly ministry, He said, “These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you.” There was nothing that our Lord failed to teach His disciples that they or we need to know. Yes, there are some things He didn’t reveal, such as the exact day when He will return in glory. But everything that was necessary for our life here on earth and for our eternal salvation He has revealed. There is no need of new revelation to supplement what Christ has spoken. In fact, Jesus makes this point clear: “The Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.” Notice how the Holy Spirit works. He teaches us by “[bringing] to [our] remembrance all that [Christ has] said.” The Holy Spirit brings no new revelation, but gets us to believe what Christ has already taught us.

            Do not despise the Holy Spirit because He seems to have a subordinate role, as if the Son is the teacher and the Holy Spirit is merely the teacher’s aide or a tutor. Every person in the Trinity delights in the work of the others and honors them for it. The Son does not reveal any truth other than what the Father has given Him. The Holy Spirit reminds us only of what the Son has originally taught. The Father glorifies the ministry of the Son and the Holy Spirit in bringing mankind back to Him.

            Wherever the Holy Spirit does His work of reminding us of our Lord’s words and convincing us to believe them, He not only brings about faith in God but also godly fruit. One aspect of that fruit is peace. Our Lord says four things about that peace. First, it is His gift to us. He is the one who leaves that peace in our midst. This peace is not something we can acquire on our own, but He must give it to us—and He freely does so.

            What exactly that means is illustrated by the next thing He says: “Not as the world gives [peace] do I give to you.” In other words, Christ’s peace is different from the world’s peace. How does the world give peace? First of all, it knows of peace that is based on external circumstances. If we can get all the warring parties to lay down their weapons and cooperate like grownups, then we will have peace. Or if life is going well for us, then we might have a feeling of peace and contentment inside of us. But Christ acknowledges elsewhere in the gospel of John that the world will hate us and fight against us. So the peace that He gives cannot be based on our external circumstances. Moreover, the world knows peace only as a temporary thing. It lasts for a while, then disappears. Historians have analyzed every peace treaty that they could find, and pretty much every one of them has been broken, in spirit if not in letter. Peace, as far as the world is concerned, is just a delay of war until one or the other party thinks that it has become strong enough to defeat the other side. But the peace Christ gives lasts forever.

            That leads us to the third point: Christ’s peace helps us not to be troubled or afraid amid a troubled and scary world. That is because Christ has conquered all the forces of evil. He atoned for our sins that could have separated us eternally from God. He has defeated the devil, who has been raging against us from eternity. He has forced death to surrender its hold on humanity by His own resurrection from the dead. He has overcome the world, even though the world had condemned Him to die.

            We know that we can put up with all sorts of things on a temporary basis if we know that there will be something good coming thereafter. We have all moved into an apartment or house that we really love. We put up with boxing everything up for a week or more before the move and with living out of those boxes for a week or even a month afterwards. We do this because we know that there will be something good that results, if we can be a little patient. In fact, we might be so excited about being in the new place that we don’t even think of how bad it is to be living out of those boxes. In the same way, we know that Christ has gained the victory and so we don’t need to worry and fret because of our circumstances now. As our reading from Romans tells us, God wants us to live so that “through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.” The Bible encourages us, which leads us to endure the bad things, so that we might have the hope that peace gives.

            The last thing Jesus says about the peace He gives is that it causes us to rejoice in Christ’s exaltation. Because Christ has conquered evil in this world and given us an inner peace to deal with the troubles of this world until He comes in glory, we can actually rejoice that He has triumphed. Yes, even when things are difficult for us, the fact that He is exalted gives us peace and joy.

            Having looked at length at the second reading, I would like to look more briefly at the first reading. You might say that in John we learned what the peace of God consists of, while in Romans we learn how that peace looks like in practice. If we have peace with God and a peace within ourselves despite what is happening on the outside, we are free to live in peace with one another. That sort of peace will show itself through the strong “[bearing] with the failings of the weak.” The world teaches us that those who are strong should force the weak to do their will. Might makes right, or so we are told. But those who live at peace will strive to bear with the weak and to build them up.

            That is because we do not strive “to please ourselves.” Those who war do so because they want the world to be more to their liking. They want weaker powers to obey them. They want the lowly to build them up. But if we are at peace with God and others, then we are free to love and serve our neighbors.

            That is true even if the world around us is very ornery and hard to please. As Paul reminds us, our Lord Himself was scorned and cursed. But He sought the world’s good, not His own, and so He let the world’s scorn roll off of Him. He, the Giver of all peace, couldn’t have His peace disturbed, not even by the most unruly of people.

            And so, beloved in Christ, turn away from your warring impulses and submit to the Prince of Peace. Let His peace cast out your selfishness. He has battled the forces of evil and conquered them so that He could establish a lasting peace. Enjoy that very peace that He has come to give you. In Jesus’ name. Amen.