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 Lent 4B, March 15, 2015

Text: John 3:14-21

            Beloved in Christ, if you were to ask most people what Christianity is about, they would say that it is about learning how to live a moral life. They would go on to add that that is what all religions and philosophies are ultimately about: getting people to learn to avoid doing bad things and to do good things instead. And so they look at Christianity with mixed feelings. They believe that it is important that people don’t go around behaving badly. After all, no one wants to live in a society where people murder, rape, rob, and plunder without giving it a second thought. And yet these same people don’t like having to learn all sorts of moral lessons, especially having to hear them again and again. That is why you often hear people say how they grew up Catholic or were taken to a Baptist church when they were young, but don’t attend much anymore. What they want you to understand is that they weren’t raised in a barn. They were taught the difference between right and wrong. Even if they don’t want to be lectured about such things now that they are adults, they want to have us know that they aren’t complete barbarians.

            Now if Christianity were all about morality, you could see why people would grow uninterested in the church after a while. After all, morality is fine, but it is rather boring. But what if Jesus came to give us something better than morality? What if He didn’t deny the importance of being moral people but nonetheless didn’t say that morality was His mission? Well, that would be more like the Jesus we meet in the Scriptures and the Jesus who is proclaimed in this church. He isn’t the Jesus of popular culture. He isn’t a moral teacher or reformer. He is the Savior of the world.

            If Jesus had come to be a mere reformer or moralist instead of a Savior, John 3:16-17, the heart of today’s gospel would have read something like this: “For God so loved virtue that He gave His only Son, that whoever obeys His rules should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to save the world, but to give an example of what a moral life was truly like.” But this is how the passage actually reads: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him.” Those verses tell us many things. It tells us that we would naturally perish, if Christ had not stepped in. But God in His great love sent His Son, and the Son in His great love gave up His life, all so that we would not be condemned or perish for all eternity, but instead enjoy eternal life and fellowship with Him.

            Christianity is about light and life, about fellowship with God and the way knowing Him suffuses our entire life with His joy and peace. That’s why Jesus spoke with Nicodemus as He did. At the beginning of John 3, Nicodemus had paid Him a high compliment, calling Him a “Teacher come from God.” But Jesus didn’t want such compliments and titles, at least not if they were going to obscure His mission. He told Nicodemus that he had to be “born again,” that is, “born of water and the Spirit,” in order to enter God’s kingdom. Mere moralizing wouldn’t cut it. Instead, he—like all of us—would have to receive the new birth that God gives in holy baptism.

            As Christ unfolded the life that the Holy Spirit gives through baptism, He also told Nicodemus about His own work. And there was one image that came to our Lord’s mind that best explained what He was all about: the bronze serpent in the wilderness. If Nicodemus could understand what had transpired back then, he would understand exactly what our Lord Jesus Christ was doing when He came in human flesh and when He headed to the cross. And so you could say that this is one of the ways in which Christ explains the atonement, the process by which He reconciled sinners to God.

            Consider what had transpired in the wilderness. The Israelites were not committing some horrible crime. They were not stabbing each other to death, robbing each other, or doing some other heinous misdeed. They grumbled. They did the sort of thing you and I tend to do rather frequently. They “became impatient on the way,” and they let that impatience show by their words. They griped about the food and the water and the leadership Moses had provided. Now we might dismiss all this grumbling as nothing serious. But we would never want to be on the receiving end of such criticism. More than that, God knew that what lay behind the grumbling was nothing else than rank selfishness of the highest order, and that is the source of all sins.

            It’s not just the notorious sins that rightly earn God’s wrath, but also the smaller ones and the more common ones. No one in the crowd would have dared to stab Moses and see him dead in an instant. They knew that there would be tremendous consequences: whoever killed him would be quickly put to death. But instead of trying to kill him with one blow of the knife, they were perfectly willing to kill him over the years through thousands of lashes of the tongue. The net effect was the same, but they held themselves blameless because they never wielded a knife. Thus, we too should not overlook our more “minor” sins but instead regard them as very serious indeed.

            What was the result of the Israelites’ sins? The people were bitten by fiery serpents. As they had been backbiters, so they were appropriately bitten in their heels. Just as they had poured forth venom from their mouths, they experienced the serpents pouring venom out of their mouths. And just as they had wished Moses and God would die, so they experienced death at the hands of these snakes. The punishment fit the crime. But how could they get out of their predicament?

            Now if Christianity had all been about moralizing and teaching the difference between right and wrong, Moses would have simply given them a lecture on the vice of grumbling. But he didn’t, because he knew that this was a matter not just of right and wrong, but of life and death. And so, based on God’s instructions, he made a bronze serpent and set it on a pole. All who saw it would be healed.

            The bronze snake had that same fiery color look that the fiery serpents had, but it had none of their poison. In the same way, Christ was in every respect like sinful man, but without the venom of our sin. The bronze snake was lifted up. So too was our Lord Jesus Christ. But while that bronze snake didn’t feel anything, one way or the other, when it was lifted up, our Lord suffered horribly when He was lifted up on the cross. The bronze serpent brought healing to all who looked at it in faith. So too does Jesus Christ. When we believe that He was crucified for us, the guilt of our sin is removed. We live despite the bite sin has taken out of us. We live because Christ was lifted up for our sake.

            Christ was lifted up on the cross so that we might believe that He is the One who reconciles us to God so that we can be rescued from condemnation and eternal death. He offers us life and light. But do we want that? Our Lord has already died because of our sins, and so we are free from condemnation if we trust in Him. But if we do not put our trust in Him, we stand condemned already, for we are rejecting the one source of help. Yes, it would make as much sense as being bitten by one of the fiery serpents in the wilderness but refusing to look at the bronze serpent because you were too angry to do so. (And I’m sure that there were several people who behaved that way.) But our Lord points out a sad truth: many people will choose to continue to live in darkness rather than embrace the life and the light that Christ gives. It may be hard to fathom why anyone would do this, but Christ offers an explanation: Some people hate the light and prefer the darkness.

            Beloved in Christ, it may seem painful at first to come out of the darkness into the light. The light can bewilder and blind us at first, at least until our eyes get adjusted to it. But it is so much better in the light. Yes, the light exposes our deeds and shows how they have been tainted by sin. But, as forgiven children of God, we now enjoy Christ’s righteousness. We are clothed with it. Who would want to keep that hidden in the dark? Moreover, we begin to live a new life and walk in His holy ways. We are not terrified by the light, then, for we know that it will show the good work that God is doing in us. In short, it is delightful to walk in the light.

            That is what Christianity is about. Let’s make sure that we understand that it’s about life and light rather than just good and evil, and let’s help others to understand it too. In Jesus’ name. Amen.