Empty tables [Lent 2; St. Matthew 15:21-28]

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Jesus spoke to us today and said,

“O woman, great is your faith. Be it done for you as you desire.”

As we heard Jesus tell the Devil last week that “Man does not live on bread alone”, we should not be surprised that there is no food for this faithful woman. We should be more surprised that there is food for her, even if it is just a crumb.

This is the nature of the Laws of God. If God says man lives on the Word, then man lives on the Word and you should rejoice in your starvation. If God says deny yourself, then you should rejoice in your humiliation and oppression. If God says something, it happens with or without your consent.

In the book of Ruth, Naomi says, “I went away full, and the Lord has brought me back empty” (1:21) In this, she echoes Job’s famous saying, “Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” (1:21)

Here God is working in Naomi’s life and yet she has lost both husband and sons and all she had. These are hard words for us, because it means that we must accept good from the hand of the Lord as well as endure the bad. If you want God to be in control, this is how it has to be. This Canaanite woman must be in distress, she must be vexed by this demon, and she must struggle with the Lord. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

Her table is empty by divine design. The Lord has declared that if you do not enact all He commands and spurn the covenant, then He will visit us with terror and what we sow will be empty because our enemies will eat, instead of us (Lev. 26:16) and though you fight against it, your strength will also be empty (v.20).

The earth shall be utterly empty and utterly plundered; for the Lord has spoken this word. (Isaiah 24:3). If the Lord says the table will be empty, there will not even be crumbs for the dogs. Blessed be the Name of the Lord.

This is the Faith. This is faith in a corrupted world ruled by the cross of Christ. Suffering abounds. In the midst of life, we are in death. We rage against empty things but offer no solutions. We call the law of God unfair to His face with empty threats and empty vanity.

Repent. There is nothing you can do about the corruption around you, much less can be done with the corruption inside you. We want God to immediately heed our beck and call, relieving us of any and all discomforts and when He doesn’t, we call Him an evil God with no real power, not worth worshipping.

The life of Jesus should be enough for you. He says, But the Scripture imprisoned everything under sin…[and]…we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. (Gal. 3:22-23) You are not the only one suffering emptiness. God Himself was subjected to the same law and held in the same captivity. He was imprisoned until the coming faith was revealed.

That faith, revealed as purchased and won on the cross, was given at the Resurrection of the same imprisoned God. Our captive God, fastened to the tree of death, has freely given life and forgiveness to all who believe and He has given the gift of faith to all under the same bondage of sin and death as He Himself was.

This is why St. Paul can say, “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is empty, and also your faith is empty” (1 Cor 15:14). Empty of empties, all is empty. Empty preaching, empty faith, empty tables all without Christ Crucified. For just as Christ fills the cross and the tomb, so does He fill our tables.

The same Law that condemns you for leaving an empty table for the sojourner, Jesus perfects in filling an everlasting table with His Body and Blood. The same law that sentences this Canaanite woman to death, being outside the covenant, Jesus fulfills offering His death for her life.

The same Law that divinely held you in futility of thought, word, and deed has been cleared away by grace, through faith, for the sake of Jesus Christ.

The Canaanite woman approaches a physical Jesus. The body of a man filled with a rational soul. She sees Him, speaks with Him, and touches Him. She approaches on bended knee, struggling with the holiness of God.

And God, in His body turns towards her, looks at hear, hears her, and speaks to her. It doesn’t matter what He says, God is listening and speaking! That should be enough to fill one’s soul for three lifetimes. Do you know how many religious zealots wish their god spoke to them directly?

In the same way, you approach a physical Jesus. You bring your empty table to the Divine Service. By the time it is your turn to come near, you are ashamed and embarrassed. You imagine empty things for excuses. You become angry at being forced to live a life that clears your table, instead of filling it. You say to God, “It is unfair”.

As your sinful mouth opens in spite, the Lord simply says, “Take and eat” and in one swoop fills your mouth and your table. At the declaration of the Gospel, the forgiveness of sins, the Law flees to its proper place and grace abounds. Where sin increased, grace increased all the more. At the command to receive the forgiveness of sins by mouth, sin is silenced and faith says, “Amen”.

Yes, Lord, I am in distress, but You comfort me with Your afflictions. Yes, Lord, I am vexed by demons on every hand, but you bring relief in Your Word. Yes, Lord, I am struggling with belief, but You declare that faith can not be shaken or undone.

Not just with flowery or poetic words, but with Your true Body and Blood. Here stands a sign that the devil can not stand. Not only are we declared righteous in God’s sight, but to prove it, He enters us by mouth, to make us righteous spiritually and physically.

In our sufferings, we turn in faith to the true Jesus, Body and Spirit, and no longer find Him far away or aloof, as we do in the outside world. But here in His Church, we find Him close, literally on the tip of our tongues. And it is there that the promise of peace is manifested. Outside, it is flowery words, in here it is Body and Blood.

Your earthly table is empty, by God’s design. Earth has no pleasure I would share, you sing in your hymnals. Indeed, heaven itself would be void and empty, if Jesus were not with us. Your heavenly table is full because Christ fills it, arranges it, and sets it before you. Your earthly table is now also full, because in faith everything is a gift, even the crumbs.

Paradiso [Wednesday Vespers Lent 1; St. Luke 23:43]

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This evening, we hear Jesus speak our second word from His cross, that of paradise:

“Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

You want to know what is so great about America? Everyone can have their own garden. A garden is a luxury that was only afforded to kings in the past, because they had the wealth and time to invest in one. The common man was wed to work in order to scrape out a living, having no time for leisure.

But now, in this wonderland of freedom, everyman has a garden, or at least is able to have a garden. His land is his own. His house is his castle. He has the richness of the world at his fingertips and is free to come and go as he pleases. Truly, the United States is a land of a thousand kings.

A thousand kings that spend their luxury and leisure on dung. Our idea of luxury is getting rid of our gardens. Our idea of leisure is gathering the ugly. Indeed, we have become too rich for beauty and find it a waste of time. Our gardens lie fallow. We have turned, everyone to his own way.

Each and every time man attempts paradise, it goes the opposite way. It may be paradise for one person and not another, but even that one person will become disgusted by it, given time.

Yet it is to “delights” that our Lord first brought us into the world. A paradise of trees, Eden was a garden. A Garden of Delights, says the Bible. This is the imagery King Solomon wants us to have in mind as we listen in on his conversation between him and his wife. Eden, that perfect garden, was a delight to both God and man.

This delight was supposed to endure, instead we thrive in the squalor of earthly delights, which sin has drastically corrupted. So much so, that these same delights have become deadly sins, condemning us to hell.

Jesus says of St. John the Baptist, “What then did you go out to see? A man dressed in soft clothing? Behold, those who are dressed in splendid clothing and live in [delights] are in kings' courts” (Luke 7:25).

St. Peter declares, “But these, like irrational animals, creatures of instinct, born to be caught and destroyed, blaspheming about matters of which they are ignorant, will also be destroyed in their destruction, suffering wrong as the wage for their wrongdoing. They count [pleasure in daytime delights]. They are blots and blemishes, reveling in their deceptions, while they feast with you” (2 Pet. 2:12-13)

Now that God has been sentenced to death on a cross, there is no more paradise to be found on earth. There are no more delights that do not lead to lust and sin. There is no peace for the wicked. Thus we get to the repentant thief on the cross who begs for his innocence from the condemned criminal, Jesus.

Earthly delights are no longer heavenly delights, just as the earthly criminal Jesus is no heavenly criminal. There is no place, even for the repentant sinner, dying on a cross, on earth. He must be put to death at Jesus’ side and raised again to Paradise.

And from our icon, Paradise, that heavenly garden, is not to be filled with trees, as some sort of naturalist’s paradise, but it is to be filled with people. More to the point, it is to be filled with the One Who Conquers in the fight, the One upon the Tree of Shame Who causes life to flow out of it in His Name.

The repentant thief had already been brought to paradise, even before asking for it! Though he stood condemned in his sin and though he was suffering unbearably, Paradise was there with him, granting the free forgiveness of sins. Just as Jesus is a criminal on earth, not in heaven, so too is the one who is brought into the kingdom of God a criminal on earth.

We are not to wish to remain with our earthly delights and most of the time can’t tell the difference between things that delight us and things that hurt us. Faith drives us on to our priceless treasure, our purest pleasure: Jesus Christ.

And Christ came for criminals. He came to seek and to save that which has been destroyed in sin and death. For we are all eleventh-hour believers, being found with only a shred of hope at the last possible minute. We all come late to the party and ask for the wages of those who have been there the entire time.

But the payment is the same. The Paradise is the same. This is because the Lord of both is the same. Jesus grants us paradise in the midst of earthly life giving us hope for eternity by His side.

There was a garden with two trees. One a tree of life, the other a tree of death. At the worship of the tree of death, the tree of life also became a tree of death, eternal death. A new garden was planted with a new tree. A cross of life and death, where the life of God was given into death, in order that the death of man would be given over to life in Paradise.

Jesus the normal [Lent 1; St. Matthew 4:1-11]

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Jesus speaks today, saying:

“Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.”

What you are to take away from today’s Gospel reading, if you take nothing else, is that Jesus will be the one to take on temptation and the devil. You are not to go out looking for Satan and pick a fight. You are not to starve yourself in hopes of spiritual clarity and you are not to place yourself in life threatening danger in order to prove yourself.

Now, you may still do those things, but know they offer no spiritual increase. Maybe, if you survive, you gain a bit of wisdom, as in never do it again, but other than that, it is not your fight. Your fight is making sure you hear the Gospel preached in its purity and the Sacraments administered according to it.

However, with both Jesus and Satan quoting the Bible, how do you know you’re not listening to demons right now? So, today, you are going to hear of two very important phrases that will help you interpret the Bible especially in the face of someone else interpreting it in front of you.

The first of these phrases is “norma normans” and the second is “norma normatta”. We’ll tackle these one at a time. The first one, “norma normans” quite literally means, “the norming norm” or the “ruling rule”. You hear the word normal in there and that’s good.

It means that the thing that makes for what is normal in the Church is Holy Scripture. When anything comes up in the Church as to what’s going on and why, we should ask for what is normal, as in “how does the Church normally do things?” Thus, we start with the norm, that is Holy Scriptures, and work from there.

It is at this point that the Christian runs into the problem of, “how do you know your holy scriptures are any truer than others?” And the dutiful Christian would say, because God said so. Then the dutiful criticizer would ask how he knows God said so. And the faithful Christian would answer, because the Bible says.

That just won’t do, because that is called circular reasoning. Thus there must be something more to back up the claim that the Bible makes of itself as the true Word of God, and there is.

It is our second phrase, “norma normatta”, or the “norm that is normed” or the “ruled rule”. What this means is that everything the Christian does and everything the Church does is conformed to Scripture. The normal life of the Christian is dictated by the Bible and the normal life of the Church is, too.

Examples of “norma normattas” would be the Creeds, Divine Service, and the Book of Concord. Though, they all have Biblical proofs, they are not found in the Bible, yet they are a life lived in the Spirit and under the Bible.

The way this helps with our circular reasoning dilemma, is that we do not just appeal to a book, but a life lived. We do not just appeal to imaginary faith that anyone can make up, but to a living, breathing Spirit inhabiting us all. Thus, the key to the “norma normatta” is the Holy Spirit and faith.

Life doesn’t stop after Jesus gives His Word and life is a lot denser than He has spoken about to us. He left out whether its more godly to own a Chevy or a Ford. He left out how to get grass stains out of clothes. He left out how to heal broken hearts.

It seems like it, but really He didn’t. What we must see as normal is what Jesus presents us with today. It is normal for the Christian to be assaulted by the devil. It is normal for the Christian to suffer. It is normal to memorize the Bible and it is normal to have Jesus fight for us.

This is because there is only one victor in this battle and it is Jesus. There is only one giver of the faith and it is Jesus. There is only one “normal” person out there and it is Jesus. Jesus Who gives us the Spirit and who gives us the Faith, also gives us the Church and her norma normattas. And it is in those things that we find a true interpretation of Scripture.

Not because we have them more than others or not even because the Spirit is really speaking to us and not them, but because the Word of God is not simply written pages, but a man.

There are things certainly believed among us and those things were believed before pen and paper. Before creeds, before the book of the Bible, was the confession; the opening of the lips through baptism. Jesus wasn’t walking around writing books and letters and papers. He was speaking.

He spoke and things happened. If He said, get up and walk, whoever it was, got up and walked. If He said, Satan get, Satan got. Thus, when the Lord spoke to people, even the Apostles, something happened. And, what happens when the Lord speaks to you is you speak back.

In this way the Church is born, from speaking, and then produces things such as bibles, creeds, and confessions. But it was in baptism that the Church saw her promises come to life and the proof she wanted from God. It is in the sacraments that the circular reasoning stops.

For, the sacraments don’t just tell you how to judge someone else or how to change your life for the better. They are the change. They judge you as guilty of sin and innocent in Christ. They change your life from one of sin and death to one of righteousness and life. They are the place where the spiritual and the physical are combined in the same way that Jesus is both God and man.

Thus, what puts the devil in his place is not the wittiest answer Jesus could give, but a confession of faith in the correct way to interpret God’s Word: through the sacraments Christ promises. Because if the Bible is sacramental and not just spiritual or physical, then everything the devil tries to accomplish is a lie.

Notice all he offers. Bread, only physical. Spiritual help, only physical. Worship, only physical. The sacraments confound the devil because he doesn’t see the physical and the spiritual nor the benefits of both. This is because the benefits are all wrapped in Jesus, Himself.

Jesus is the spiritual benefit, giving His Holy Spirit. Jesus is the physical benefit, giving His Body and Blood. Jesus is the One Who will be worshipped, because He suffers and dies on the cross, both spiritually and physically. Neither stones, nor heights, nor kingdoms rescue a person from death, but the devil just can’t fathom that.

More important than the Book is the God-man, Jesus Christ.

Father, forgive them...[Ash Wednesday; 2 Peter 1:2-11]

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The Jesus speaks to you this evening, through St. Peter, who is simply repeating Jesus Who had already said:

“Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

This evening, we will begin to look at our black banners one by one and discover what Jesus’ words from the cross have to do with us, these upcoming Wednesdays in Lent. 7 are the total number, yet in Christ we find an extra word that is not on our banners, which we will talk about on Holy Wednesday.

For now, seven is the number of sacrifice. We hear in 2 Chronicles: “And they brought seven bulls, seven rams, seven lambs, and seven male goats for a sin offering for the kingdom and for the sanctuary and for Judah. And he commanded the priests, the sons of Aaron, to offer them on the altar of the Lord (29:21).”

And in Job: “Now therefore take seven bulls and seven rams and go to my servant Job and offer up a burnt offering for yourselves. And my servant Job shall pray for you, for I will accept his prayer not to deal with you according to your folly. For you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has (42:8).”

Seven is also the number of punishment. Heard from Leviticus: “Then if you walk contrary to me and will not listen to me, I will continue striking you, sevenfold for your sins (26:21).” And Deuteronomy: “The Lord will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You shall go out one way against them and flee seven ways before them. And you shall be a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth (28:25).”

For in the last Days, at the trumpet call of the seventh angel, the mystery of God would be fulfilled, just as he announced to his servants the prophets (Rev. 10:7). And at the pouring of the seventh bowl, this mystery will be completed (16:7).

To be sure, seven is also a lot of positive things in holy Scripture, but those are well known. The cross of Jesus is a backwards victory, so we must look at the hard things in life backwards to gain the correct perspective. The cross is both punishment for our sins and yet Jesus is making the sacrifice for those same sins.

So, the first of these sacrificial words Jesus speaks from His cross has to do with forgiveness or dismissal, as that same word is sometimes translated. Why complicate the word forgiveness and the plain good we can receive from it? Because you already know it. What you don’t already know is the depths of this word that Jesus uses on the cross to mean “forgiveness”.

What is telling about this word “forgive” is it is used of a fever that St. Peter’s mother-in-law had. She is suffering and Jesus dismisses the fever. The Scapegoat is dismissed from the people, carrying their sins with him into the wilderness (Lev. 16:10). If a man is caught in the act of defiling a virgin, then he is to marry her with no recourse to dismiss or divorce her ever (Deut.22:19, 29).

Of course, the point is to show that not only is Jesus asking for our forgiveness while He is suffering in our stead, a selfless act no one can equal, He is also begging our heavenly Father to dismiss our sin and divorce us from it.

This paints the gaining of salvation in its rightful, violent light. Jesus is suffering and dying 2000 years apart from us. We sterilize that image, removing Him from our crosses and make forgiveness a forgotten word, but the language of Scripture does not allow that. In Jesus’ words from the cross, “Father, forgive them…”, Jesus is calling for divorce.

In this way, whenever we hear about the severe consequences of divorce in the Old Testament we should not think how sexist and how unfair they are, but to see that if they were not so strict, there would not be such a sharp separation of us from our sin.

Father forgive them, they marry their sins and die in them. Father forgive them, they cling to the father of lies and find comfort in sin. Truly, we do not know what we are doing here.

Jesus knows what He is doing. Much more than circumcising the flesh to symbolize God’s covenant, Jesus is circumcising our hearts. Much more than rending our filthy garment and rags of crimson, He is rending our hearts. In the word of forgiveness from the cross, Jesus unleashes the Gospel upon every heart and breaks it.

We are stuck in an unholy marriage, in the depths of woe, and only unto death do us part shall there be a legal and binding separation. Wed to our sins, Jesus, the true Bridegroom, declares the marriage annulled, having been a farce in the first place, and baptizes us into the one, true marriage: Jesus and His Church.

In sin, you have been united to a foreign wife. A wife full of corruption and death. In Christ you have been reunited with your Creator, your true Lord and husband. By calling for divorce, Jesus is not saying you get to divorce nor is He saying that the Lord is in the habit of divorcing, as in maybe He could do that to us one day.

Jesus calls for the divorce of death from life, not husband from wife. God-instituted marriage is meant to remain whole and strong. Sin and death are not instituted by God and therefore must be removed forcibly.

Jesus forgives our sins and in doing so tears us away from our former selves in order that we live forever with Him instead. This is the same forgiveness of sins you ask for and receive in the Divine Service.

Love is Jesus [Quinquagesima; St. Luke 18:31-43]

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Today, the final Sunday in the Gesima season, we finish preparing for Lent by hearing Jesus speak:

“For he will be delivered over to the Gentiles and will be mocked and shamefully treated and spit upon.”

Jesus considered it all joy to go to the cross and endure its shame for you, but I’m sure He did not love that we had become so corrupt in sin and death that He had to achieve things this way.

It has been said, in the interest of self-esteem and self-motivation, “the only way to do great work is to love what you do”. What this means is that you must discover yourself and your inner dreams and desires, and then find work in the world that corresponds to it or create that work yourself.

It doesn’t matter if that work is non-essential, non-productive, or shunned in common society. You need to be you or you will forever regret not having taken that chance. Dream big. Take risks. Make mistakes. You are important.

Yet, what happens when you love what you do and are doing great work, but after a few years you don’t love it as much as you thought you did. Then, as quickly as it began, you don’t love what you are doing and you begin to do sub-par work.

Do you get rid of that and start over? Easy enough if it’s a job or an art project, but what if it involves someone else’s life? This is the excuse for ending marriages: it wasn’t what I thought it would be; I’m just not that in love with you anymore.

Truly this attempt at being inspiring is not thinking ahead into the future, but only thinking of the here and now. How can I be happy now? How can I do great work now? How can I get what’s coming to me, now?

Listen again to the Old Testament reading for today. Jesse loved his sons, I’m sure, but he left one out at a very important time. God knows this and tells Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature... For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”

David was the eighth, the forgotten son, yet he was the one to rule Israel. In him, God shows that He loves the unloveable.

Our Epistle is all about love. Love does this. Love does that. Very inspiring and a very common reading at weddings. But read it carefully. Love never “loves what it does”. Love is always just there, doing what its supposed to do, whatever that may be.

Thus, we need to change our inspirational statement. It should read: the only way to do great work is to love what you are doing. This subtle change in the verb “do”, now places the burden of love on the person, instead of the work. Instead of the person going to find that perfect job or that perfect someone, now he is content wherever he is and with whatever he is doing.

It is important to know that following your dreams is a lie. Do work and be happy with whatever you do, or else you will always be dissatisfied and unhappy your whole life., coveting what you do not have.

I am sure Jesus did not love what He did. I’m sure He did not love to watch His own creation destroy itself. He did not love to watch the sick suffer. He did not love to witness death and war. I’m positive that He didn’t even love that He had to come down and do something about it, such as healing this blind man in our Gospel reading.

He didn’t love it, because it should not have been that way. He didn’t want to heal, He wanted everyone to never need healing. He didn’t want to undo corruption, He wanted purity in the first place. He didn’t want to have to raise widows son’s from the dead, He wanted no death, ever.

He didn’t love these works He had to do, but He loved doing them and loved doing them for you. Jesus would not be a very good savior if He had to save His people for eternity, over and over again. Jesus would not be a merciful God if He had to continue to come to earth over and over, to do the same things as when He was walking around.

He did not love what He had to do, but He loved doing it. He had better things to do than to come down in man’s skin and save our sorry selves. He had quasars to implode, sonnets to compose, and life to create. He had all of creation to keep Him busy and He loved that.

When Jesus weeps, it is because He is looking upon the work He needs to do in order to undo what our sin has destroyed. He does not love that. Jesus rejoices in the work He is doing, namely saving sinners from their sins and forgiving them. His great work of salvation was done in love and joy, but He would have rather it not ended up this way.

It is important for us, then, especially as we seek to begin families, support loved ones, or any other work that we do, to love what we are doing. It may not be our dream to bale hay for a living, but if it supports loved ones, than it is better to love what you are doing than resent it for something, in your mind, that is greater.

Love what you are doing now. That is the Christian way. There may be other, better things that come along in life, but maybe not. Why waste time breaking relationships all in order to achieve some goal? Indeed, in order to fulfill Commandments 9 and 10, one must be content wherever and whatever may be.

Jesus is content. He is content with His creation. He is content with the way things have gone. He is content with His role in salvation and He is content with you, because He has suffered, died and risen again and He continues to love what He is doing, that is forgiving your sins.

Imagine a capricious god who comes and goes at his fancy. He loves us, he loves us not. Here today, gone tomorrow. In other words, as finicky and fickle as we are. We would never find him. We would never be comforted by him and we would never worship him.

The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost have always been content, are content, and will be content. They were content before the beginning, having each other in the perfect picture of love. They are content today with how things have gone, because in Christ all things are being made new. And they will be content when the total number of all who are to be saved is filled up and a new heavens and a new earth emerges.

Because this is true, love is content. Content to endure, content to suffer, content to humility and humiliation, content to struggle, and content to suffer and die for the sins of the world. Because, true love is a person. The person of Jesus Christ. It is His faith, His hope, and His love that He creates and hands out to all who believe.

It is His true love that steadies His hand and comes to us in the same manner, over and over again, never changing and never ending in offering us His true Body and True Blood for the forgiveness of sins. It is in this faith that the Christian loves what he is doing and it is great work, because what the Christian is doing is receiving from the Lord’s hand double for all his sins and God’s great work of salvation is accomplished in him.

The Sabbath is hearing [Sexagesima; St. Luke 8:4-15]

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Jesus speaks to you today, saying,

“Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God.”

Faith comes by hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ, the seed is the Word of God, and Jesus is the Word of God, being the seed that will crush the serpent’s head, and preaching is the seed which plants the Gospel inside of you every time the root of sin takes hold, which is every second of every day.

In this way we see one analogy in this parable: that is “spreading the seed” is “preaching the Gospel”, because all the soils that received the seed, received it by hearing, as Jesus explains.

Dr. Luther brings this out in his explanation of the 3rd Commandment. In this command we are commanded to remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Sabbath, as opposed to Sabba-oth from the Angus Dei, is the 7^th day of the week. It is elevated to holy day status by God on the very first Sabbath day, when He rested from creating all things.

Yet this Sabbath was not just a one time event, neither was it just a weekly event, it was and is an eternal event. Celebrating the Sabbath is a never-ending decree from the Lord. However, in one sense, the Christian is freed from the Law and therefore this celebration has no jurisdiction over him.

In the sense that we understand it as simply not-working one day of the week, this is the command we are not beholden to, especially if people want to make a law that says we need to worship on Saturday. St. Paul specifically tells us that the Lord has cancelled our debts against God and nailed them to the cross so that no one can judge you according to the observance of Sabbaths.

As is always the case with God’s Word, there is another level to this command of celebration of rest. That level is the Christological level, as in, what this has to do with Jesus. This is where we get into the preaching and the forever aspect God promises on the Sabbath.

In the 3^rd Command, we are to fear and love God so that we do not despise preaching and His Word, but hold it sacred and gladly hear and learn it. Being a Christian means you have a duty to worship together, in fact, if you do not gather around the Divine Service regularly, you call into question your own faith.

There is no specific day, especially not the Sabbath, especially not Saturday because we think that the Sabbath is Saturday. We were not created to bow down to the Sabbath, the Sabbath was made for us and our rest. The Sabbath was made for us to set aside the work we do so that God can work in us.

Thus “despising preaching and the Word of God” comes in the form of not attending public worship, not using the Word of God and the Sacraments, or when we use them in a negligent or careless way.

It is not enough to take time out to read our Bibles. It is written that we might hear it, because those who belong to God hear what God says not just once, but as often as possible. So Jesus gives His Church to you so that you may always have a space where you can say, “God’s will truly is done on earth as it is in heaven”.

Jesus spreads His Gospel, the forgiveness of sins, through preaching. We need to hold it sacred by giving it top priority in our lives. We need to gladly hear it, learn it, and meditate on it, not just reading it at home, but preaching it to our family and hearing our pastor preach it to us.

We need to honor and support this preaching and teaching, ensuring that it continues among us in this church. We need to diligently spread the Word of God ourselves. This is only done by being able to give Christ, but He must first give Himself which He does in His Word and Sacrament. Your greatest witness to your neighbor is bringing them to church.

This is not a new Law that Christian’s are freed from, this is faith acting out in real life. God requires all this not because He loves to lord it over others, but because what He offers in the preaching of the Gospel is the priceless treasure of His Son.

The Christian faith is a personal thing but not a private thing!  God does not call us to isolation, but into His church.  We are to stir one another to love and good works.  We are not to neglect meeting together. 

Because Jesus lovingly promises to come among us with His Word and Sacraments, His invitation in Matt. 11:28 is a beautiful expression of what He desires for us to receive in weekly worship, “Come unto me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” The very word Sabbath means “rest.”

So Jesus is the hard way of the cross which the seed of the Gospel falls upon and walks the hard way to the cross, for you. Jesus is the Rock that seals up death and the power of the devil and is rolled away to produce life and light. Jesus dons the crown of thorns in order to root up the thorns of sin and produce forgiveness.

The Sabbath day finds its “forever” in Jesus. It is not enough for us to observe it, it must be paid for in Blood. It is not enough for us to only rest one day a week. Either there is an eternal rest to be provided or we remain locked in a futile battle with death forever. Jesus completes the Sabbath day and fulfills its purpose, for us.

This does not mean the Sabbath goes away. It means that we now live in the fullness of the Sabbath. Because of Easter, the Sabbath now has an evening and a morning. It means we get to fulfill the Sabbath perfectly with our Lord Jesus Christ, in faith, on the eighth day, Easter Day. It means that when we gather to hear the Gospel preached in its purity and receive the Sacraments administered according to the Gospel, we fulfill the third commandment.

The true Sabbath is observed by faith, not by deed. The necessary deeds are accomplished only by Jesus and only by His holy, innocent suffering and death. In the parable, trampling paths, arid rocks, and choking thorns are a sign of death. In Christ, these tools of death are forced to produce life, in you.