Sermon for the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, 2017

Texts: Genesis 50:15-21 and Matthew 18:21-35

           Beloved in Christ, it’s not easy dealing with other people, especially people who have wronged you. Like the Apostle Peter, we may be willing to cut other people a little slack, even when we feel the sting of the injury. But, come on, be reasonable. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. And so being willing to forgive someone seven times is unspeakably generous. For Christ’s sake we might venture to do that. But then Christ says, “Not…seven times, but seventy times seven.”

Joseph Forgives His Brothers
Lithograph, 1907

            That is a tall order. But in today’s Old Testament reading we see someone who is living by exactly that principle: Joseph forgives his brothers who at one point contemplated murdering him, but instead sold him as a slave to some traders passing by because it seemed more profitable than murder. Let’s be honest. We have all been hurt by others and we have felt severe pain because of it. But most of us have not experienced something on the scale of what Joseph experienced. Therefore, the way that he forgave his brothers is worth thinking about.

            First of all, we should note that his brothers had consciences that would give them no rest. Time heals all wounds, we say. By the same token, we reckon, time should lead us to forget about all the wrongs we have done over the years. But it doesn’t work that way. If we are aware that God or one of our brothers or sisters has something against us, it may bother us for years. Consider that it had been thirty-nine years since his brothers plotted against Joseph. Indeed, it had been seventeen years since they had seen Joseph again, been forgiven by him, and invited by him to live in Egypt. For seventeen years Joseph had treated his brothers with sheer kindness. He did everything to comfort them. But it hadn’t assuaged their guilty conscience.

            You see, Joseph’s brothers assumed that he was being nice simply because he didn’t want to treat them horribly while their father was still alive. As soon as their father was dead, he would treat them as he really had wanted to all along. They thought that even their father’s dying words would have little effect on Joseph. They were willing to enslave themselves voluntarily if only that would turn away his wrath and keep him from killing them.

            When your conscience accuses you, nothing will give you rest. Even the good things God gives you won’t comfort you, because you assume that He is just softening you up before He damns you for good. This is why we must pay careful attention to the words of forgiveness that God speaks. He is not lying. He is not joking. He is not talking idly about things. When He pronounces absolution upon you, this is to be taken seriously. Even if your conscience is burdened, even if you think that there are hundreds of people rightly against you, this is the God’s honest truth: your guilt has been removed and you have been reconciled to God for Christ’s sake.

            Because we ourselves have been forgiven by God for Christ’s sake and because we see that others have been forgiven as well, we take seriously the idea that we need to forgive others too. And so we come back to Joseph and ask: why was he so willing to forgive his brothers? You can say that there are three considerations he took to heart.

            First, he asked the question, “Am in the place of God?” Every time we exact vengeance upon someone, we are acting in God’s place. You see, God is holy. He is also our creator. Therefore, He has the right to act as judge. Since He brought us into the world, He has the right to take us out of it. And because He is holy, He doesn’t let personal feelings get in the way. Whatever judgment He pronounces is righteous and fair.

            But when we judge, we don’t have the same qualifications. We didn’t create the person we are judging and therefore we do not have the right to wish them to cease to exist. Also, we are temperamental, self-serving people—and our justice would be as well. Therefore, we do not have the right to prosecute mercilessly, as if our intense examination of another person’s soul would be accurate and true.

            Now I hope you understand that I am talking about how we deal with other people as individuals. I am not talking about what happens in the law courts. After all, God instituted government to administer a modicum of justice and to keep order in society. And so a judge has rights to fine people, send them to prison, or even to execute them. They should do so impartially and not because they wish to carry out a vendetta against them. But today we are not talking about how the courts of law treat people, but rather how ordinary people like you and me interact with other people. We are not “in the place of God,” and so we must be careful not to act as if we were.

            The next truth that Joseph considered was this: “[His brothers] meant evil against [him].” Joseph forgave his brothers, but he was realistic about what they had done. He didn’t say it was all a “misunderstanding.” He didn’t call it an “accident.” He didn’t say that his brothers had had good intentions but done things in a ham-handed way and so caused harm. No, he acknowledged that they “meant evil.” It takes no effort to forgive someone who has accidentally hurt you, who stepped on your toes because they didn’t see you. It is also relatively easy to forgive someone when you realize that you misunderstood their intentions or they misunderstood yours. Once you clarify things, you see that they weren’t so bad and their offenses are easily overlooked. But when people are doing things out of malice and spite, it is much harder to forgive. But it is precisely those more difficult things that need forgiveness rather than the more mundane things.

            But there is another truth that we have to keep in mind as we acknowledge the evil that is done with evil intent all around us. Namely, while others may have “meant evil,” “God [means] it for good.” In Joseph’s case, when he was sold as a slave, it set in motion events that ended up saving not only his brothers’ lives later on, but the lives of the Egyptians and many neighboring peoples. It is not always easy to see what good God intends to make out of the evil that people plot. And probably the more horrible the evil, the less easy it is for us to understand. But we know that the LORD God is in control of the entire universe. And that means that ultimately even the wicked will serve the LORD’s purpose. And if that is true, then it is easy to forgive people who aren’t all that forgivable.

            I could stop the sermon there and say that Joseph is a fine model for us Christians to follow. And that would be true. But as much as we Christians admire the saints of both the Old and New Testaments, we love and think about our Lord Jesus Christ above all else. And so it is useful for us to consider how those three statements of Joseph would apply to the way that our Lord forgives sins.

            First, Joseph had asked the question, “Am I in the place of God?” Clearly, he wasn’t. It was not up to him to render the final judgment upon humanity or even one individual. But Christ was not just “in the place of God,” He was the Son of God in human flesh. And so He is perfectly authorized to deal with sin. He has the right to condemn all who sin and to condemn them for all eternity. But “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him.” If God wants to see the world free from His righteous condemnation, how much more should we Christians love to see the same!

            Next, just as Joseph understood that his brothers had “meant evil against” him, so our Lord understands the depth of our sin. If we had no sin—serious sin—then we need no Savior—no serious Savior, at any rate. And Christ could very well have stayed in heaven and left us to muddle along on our own. And there is an increasing number of people, even self-professed Christians, who wish that He had. They deny that breaking some of the Ten Commandments (such as the commandments against adultery or lying) would be a serious sin or even a sin at all.

            But our Lord knows better. We have “meant evil against” Him. Fortunately, for us, He as “God meant it for good.” We crucified Him because we didn’t like His meddling. But He turned that awful event into something good, a way “that many people should be kept alive,” not through some kind of famine (as in Joseph’s case) but for all eternity in fellowship with God.

            And so, beloved in Christ, let us cherish the fact that we have a God who is more forgiving than even Joseph was. And let us share that same forgiveness with others. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

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 Pentecost 17 (Proper 20B), September 20, 2015

Texts: Jeremiah 11:18-20 and Mark 9:30-37

            Beloved in Christ, can you believe what Jeremiah is saying? “Let me see Your vengeance upon them.” That’s just wrong. That’s wrong and unchristian. Someone needs to sit down and have a little talk with Jeremiah and warn him that that is not how Christians talk. We are not to ask God’s vengeance to fall upon anyone. We are never to complain about injustices that we see or experience. Instead, we are to be happy and cheerful, no matter what happens. We are to smile and be tolerant of everything. But maybe we should give Jeremiah a pass. After all, he is from the Old Testament—you know, that benighted age when they didn’t know anything about grace or forgiveness or Christ.

            I dare say that’s what many Christians would say. But that is because of our prejudices about the Old Testament and the New Testament. We think that God was angry in the Old Testament, but mellowed out by the time of the New Testament. But that is just not true. Our Lord Jesus Christ had far more to say about hell than you will find in the entire Old Testament. And in the Revelation, one of the newest of the New Testament books, you see the martyrs crying out to God to do something about those being slaughtered for Christ’s sake. Meanwhile, the prophet Jeremiah himself would go on to write eloquently about the forgiveness God would impart to His wayward people and the new heart He would implant in them. So maybe our prejudices about both testaments is getting in the way of us hearing God’s law in the New Testament and His gospel in the Old Testament—and thus of understanding what God is about.

Jeremiah Lamenting over the Destruction of Jerusalem
by Rembrandt van Rijn
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Home : Info. Licensed under Public Domain
via Wikimedia Commons - SK-A-3276.jpeg

            We in our post-modern society struggle to pray the words, “Let me see Your vengeance upon them.” But there are two reasons why we might decline to pray this kind of prayer. One is that we are cold-hearted robots without a shred of human empathy in our teeny, tiny hearts. We have no time to consider anybody else’s sorrows and problems. If they are the victims of injustice, well, they should just suck it up and soldier on instead of asking us or God to get involved in their troubles. The second reason is that maybe we do not want to be called out for our injustices. If we complain too much about the injustices that we ourselves experience or that we see going on around us, we might become the target of God’s avenging wrath. And so we pretend that God has no reason whatsoever to be concerned with the injustices in this world.

            But God does not shrug off injustice the way we do. You must understand that in both Greek and Hebrew there is only one word that means “righteousness” and “justice.” They are not two separate concepts, as they are in English. Thus, God is opposed to injustice even as He is opposed to unrighteousness. At most, He may delay His punishment until people have shown themselves to be fully guilty. He warns Cain about the anger and hatred lurking in his heart, but He doesn’t intervene until Cain has shown himself to be the murderer that he was. And so we shouldn’t assume that God is indifferent to the injustices of the world. Instead, He is giving enough rope to people to see if they will hang themselves with it.

            Nowhere do we see God saying that injustice is okay. And so we do well to consider the injustices of our day, that is to say, the injustices that are praised by our society and that we have a hard time avoiding. You see, every era, every culture, and every ideology is marked by some kind of injustice and we are no exception. We are unjust to the elderly, whom we are willing just to stick in some corner and neglect. We are unjust to the unborn, whom we are willing to kill because they are inconvenient. We are unjust to children, because we prefer to hop from one bed to another rather than create a stable household with a lifelong mother and father for our children. We are unjust to the poor, whom we despise for not having made it in our land of plenty. We are unjust to the gullible, whom we try to exploit for our advantage and then excuse it with “Buyer, beware!” We are unjust to people who do not look like us or talk like us or think like us. Injustice is not to be found just on the Left or on the Right or in the Middle. It taints our whole society.

            Now you might say, “But I do my best to respect and help the poor, the unborn, the elderly, the weak, and the vulnerable. I try not to be part of the problem, but part of the solution.” Good! That is a fine and Christian thing to do. But it is not always easy to extricate ourselves from the injustices of the world in which we live. Think, for example, how in our country the people in early 1800s New England were quick to denounce the evils of slavery in the South and bristled at all of its horrors, but they didn’t think much about using the cotton in their mills, even though the cotton had been planted and harvested by slaves. And they didn’t think much about forcing children to work long hours in their mills and putting them at risk of losing life and limb on the dangerous machinery. Often we find it difficult to extricate ourselves from the evil and injustices around us, and we find it easy to see other people’s injustices, but not our own.

            Moreover, we tend to rely on force (whether real or threatened) to end injustice, and this often leads to further injustices. The Communists in Russia claimed to be avenging the wrongs the tsar had done, but they ended up creating a bigger gulag than had ever existed in human history. The Nazis claimed to be helping Germany when it was being picked on unfairly by its neighbors, but they ended up killing millions of innocents. To be sure, there is such a thing as righteous indignation—and Jeremiah and the saints in the Revelation are examples of that—but it is a rather rare phenomenon. Usually our righteous indignation is soon channeled into unrighteous directions.

            But the good news is that God has come to put an end to the injustices of the world and to do so in a most unusual manner. Christ didn’t overcome evil by the ballot or the bullet. Instead, He Himself became a victim of the world’s injustices. He was falsely accused. He was framed. He was given a show trial. He was executed, though He was innocent. But it isn’t just that He was a victim. No, He took on both our injustices and the vengeance God wreaks upon those injustices. We cannot reconcile victim and victimizer, but Christ did so through His body on the cross. For there He was the victim but He also endured the just vengeance God poured out. Jeremiah’s prayer was heard. Injustice was ended. Righteousness was established. Peace began to reign.

            And that affects the way that we live now. Christ gives a new future to both victim and victimizer. Justice is rendered to the victim as evil is dealt with once and for all, and forgiveness and new life are offered to the victimizer—and both at great cost to our Lord. But this opens up to us all sorts of new possibilities. We are not bound to continue in the same old pattern of perpetuating injustice or excusing it or overlooking it. Instead, we show what God’s true justice looks like in the way we treat other people.

            The people who are victims of injustice are almost always the weaker people. Most people don’t pick fights with someone who can overpower them, since they don’t want to be hurt. That’s why it is the weak and the vulnerable and the lonely and the outcast who are most vulnerable to injustice. And that is also why we strive after power and try to be the greatest, because we know that we will be picked on mercilessly if we are a nobody. But if we understand that Christ has come to defend the weak and to turn the hearts of the mighty away from their pride, then we can look at ourselves and other people differently.

            That is what our Lord was doing after the disciples argued about who was the greatest. He held a child in His arms and said that the greatest person was someone who would receive such a little child. On another occasion, He would hold up a child as an example of the greatest person in the kingdom of God. Here He is saying that the greatest person is someone who would receive such a child and in so doing receive and honor Christ. These two ideas complement each other. The humble and lowly are great, and so are those who receive the humble and lowly and care for them.

            The child was apparently small enough to be held in Christ’s arms. We’re not talking a twelve year old or so. This is a small child. What can such a child do in God’s kingdom? Not much—just receive the gifts that Christ gives. But what use are even the best of us to God? Not much. All we can do is receive His gifts. But what makes the child and us valuable to God is that He loves us. And, therefore, we are the greatest in the world to Him. But so too are our fellow believers in Christ. The best thing we can do then is to love and to help our brothers and sisters in Christ, especially the weaker ones.

            If we counted others as our betters and received in humility whatever gifts God gives—in other words, if we acted with the humility of a small child who knows how dependent he or she is upon others—we would stop many of the injustices in the world. It would hold us back from participating in those injustices ourselves. And if all Christians would live their lives consistently this way, it would change the world.

            Yes, I know that we have not yet attained a perfect world nor will do so ever as long as the world lasts. We will remain part of the problem until the day we die. But Christ has come to listen to the pleas of Jeremiah and to take up his cause—and that of all who suffer unjustly at other people’s hands. Therefore, let us pursue humility and let the love of Christ flow through us. In Jesus’ name. Amen.