Lost for your Good [Trinity 3]

LISTEN AND WATCH HERE.

READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:

• Micah 7:18-20
• 1 Peter 5:6-11
• St. Luke 15:1-10

Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, from Jesus Christ the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth.

Who speaks to you today, saying,

“And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing.”

​​In Luke chapter 15, there are actually three things that are lost: a sheep, a coin, and a son whom we do not hear about today; the Prodigal Son in verses 11-32. In each example, we are told of everyday things that we may lose, can relate to, and most importantly it appears we can recover with our own strength.

If you lose a sheep or any part of your livelihood, it is easily recoverable, or at least you can find other means of livelihood in this realm of abundance. If a farmer loses a sheep, he can either buy a new one, breed a new one, or rescue what he lost as Jesus did. If you lose a mode of transportation, a computer, or anything you need to earn a living, there is no need for supernatural intervention to gain a new one or repair an old one.

If you lose a coin, or a paycheck, or a job, though difficult sometimes, these are also easily recoverable using your own strength, talents, and skills. Earning money is easy. We may not like the work, the size of the paycheck, or the location, but there are always humans acting in need of labor and work. Again, no divine intervention necessary.

If you lose a son or any other family member to argument or political disagreement, again, using your own reason and humility, you can win back your family. Humbling yourself, swallowing your pride, and forgiving each other goes a long way on the road to reconciliation. 

So far today, Jesus has effectively preached Himself out of the “lost and found” equation and many teachers today interpret this chapter in St. Luke this way. They tell you that someone is lost. Its probably not you, because you’re sitting there listening to them. So you have privilege because you have been found, supposedly.

So its not about you, but about this other person who is lost, which sounds familiar. Christian, even. So you go along because you have been taught that its not about you. That you are not lost, someone else is. That you have the super-power and mission from God to go and find.

Repent. You believe this not just because it sounds Christian, not just because of your sinful pride, but because its easy. Yes, finding people is easy. They are all around. There’s an earth all around you with a population approaching 8 billion. Though if you’re searching for one specific person, all the rest get in the way, you don’t have to work too hard, invest too much, or be too inconvenienced by finding a lost person.

And that is true. You don’t have to search for very long at all. In fact, the Holy Spirit will tell you that the man in the mirror is lost. So satan twists this part of the Bible this way for two reasons: 1) to get you to focus on someone else and 2) to get you to focus on someone else. He wants you prideful, thinking you are superior to your neighbor and he wants you distracted from your own sin.

What Jesus is actually preaching about in these parables is not things or people simply having lost their way. The word He uses for lost is actually quite a bit stronger than that. These things and people are not just lost, but destroyed; put out of reach of any recovery efforts.

The word is apollumi. You may hear Apollo in there, the Greek god of the sun. He is known as the destroyer or the purifier among the Greeks, but then later mythology toned him down a bit and associated him with nicer things like harmony. Yet, Homer in the Iliad, says of Apollo that he sends the plagues of destruction. Apollinaris was the name of the XV Roman legion, one of the four that destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem in 72 AD.

Sodom and Gomorrah were to be destroyed, because God could not find any righteous men in it (Gen. 19:13), except Lot and his family. Pharaoh’s servants begged him to let Israel go, unless Pharaoh desired Egypt’s destruction (Ex. 10:7). King Herod and the Pharisees both seek Jesus’ destruction in His youth and during His ministry (Mt. 2:13, 12:14). Even the demons understand this word and know Jesus’ business saying, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God” (Lk. 4:34).

What we are getting at here is the truth that simply losing something is not devastating. But having something or someone you love destroyed or put out of your reach, is. And where do we find such a thing happening to us? In death.

Death is the great destroyer; the great purifier. In death we lose those things that are precious to us and have no way of retrieving them. This is part of the reason we erect grave markers over those we love, to mark that what lies there was once someone we knew and loved.

Though we can travel to the marker, we can not go where our loved ones have gone. We have lost that which we held dear and there is no more seeking and finding and rejoicing. When one is placed in the grave, there is no coming back.

This is the anxiety of the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus will not stop talking about His death so much so that the Apostles become exhausted and fall asleep three times. When Jesus is then arrested, that Word of God moves from the spiritual realm to the physical realm and becomes a real certainty and the Apostles can not handle that, so they run away.

Though only John returns to the foot of the cross, the weeping women are the only ones who seem to understand that once Jesus is dead, He is not coming back. Once they bleed Him out, He is gone. Once the tomb is sealed, Jesus is lost. 

“For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:18).

The one out of a hundred sheep that was lost is Jesus, Who was lost and destroyed in our place, having suffered and died on the cross. The one out of ten coins that was lost is Jesus, Who was buried in the darkness of the Tomb only to be found by the lamp of Easter morning, alive again.

Jesus is the Prodigal Son Who left His Father’s house of riches to seek and to save the destroyed and yet was destroyed Himself by their sin and their wickedness, lowering Himself beneath pigs in order to be found, alive again and received by His Father to His own Wedding Feast.

Make no mistake. You are lost, destroyed and Jesus has come for the lost. You are dead in your sin and Jesus has risen from the dead, baptizing you in His death and resurrection. Jesus made Himself lost to seek and to save you who are lost (Lk. 19:10). 

Jesus’ baptism, which He gives to you for free, is the way to those who are lost, those who are dead in their sins. The Word and the Sacrament, instituted by Christ and powered by the Spirit are the means by which God, and we in Christ, now find lost things on earth. Especially those who are lost beneath the earth.

The Lord promises that “not a hair of your head will be destroyed” when you yourself are betrayed and put to death because of your faith (Lk 21:18). In this Christ-given endurance, you will gain your life. In this Way of Crucifixion, which Jesus has blazed for us, you gain salvation.

In Baptism, you gain life, light and salvation. The Light of the World is given to you, so that when the Shepherd comes seeking, when the Mother-hen comes sweeping the earth, and when the Father looks out from His window, that light shines, even in death.

For, “after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you” (1 Pet. 6-11). He will restore in you the Image of God completely, which is Jesus. He will confirm and fix you firmly on the solid ground of heaven, away from death forever. He will strengthen you so that you be able to stay next to Him for eternity, with no sin. And establish you in your mansion which He Himself has prepared, in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness.

To be lost is no small thing. It is to be dead. To be separated from the Lord. Dear Christians, believe that you may live. Believe that you are lost, so that you may be found, daily. Believe that you are destroyed, in order that you be raised to new life again. Believe that you are afflicted, in order that you better sympathize with your neighbors, who may not be suffering exactly like you are suffering.

For it is all about you and yet at the same time, its not about you. Jesus seeks after you to save you from your sin, making it all about you. But it is also all about His work in accomplishing that miraculous feat. He also gives the fruit of this work to all people and what that comes down to is belief.

We believe that we may know that suffering in this life is only temporary and we hope in the resurrection of all flesh and for all to turn from their sin and live. Because ultimately it isn’t about us, nor is it about our neighbors. It is about God, in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself by His cross and by His Word and Sacrament and in those things, He gives us back all the things and people we have lost in this life and even more than that, in the resurrection.

Inclusivity [Trinity 2]

LISTEN AND WATCH HERE.

READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:

• Proverbs 9:1-10
• 1 John 3:13-18
• St. Luke 14:15-24

Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, from Jesus Christ the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth.

Jesus speaks to us today, saying,

“And at the time for the banquet He sent His servant to say to those who had been invited, ‘Come, for everything is already ready.’”

In our Gospel today, we have a problem. And it is a very big problem, from our standpoint. In fact, Jesus creates this problem by ending this pericope saying, “None of those men who were invited shall taste my feast” (v.24).

The problem this creates for us is this: say, someone comes up to you and asks you, “So , you’re saying you believe that anyone who doesn’t believe just like you is going to hell?” This is asked, because the picture Jesus gives us every time we talk about a heavenly Feast in the Bible, is one of exclusivity. Some get in, some don’t. Some are saved and some are not.

This is very offensive to people, especially if you answer their question with a simple, unqualified “yes”. Though you will be technically and doctrinally correct, you will have lost that person, because all he will hear is you condemning him in God’s Name. Not very loving on your part. That is us closing our heart against our brothers and our neighbors.

The bad news is they are right. Jesus is very exclusive. Last week, in the parable of the Rich man and Lazarus, Jesus had fixed a chasm between heaven and hell so wide that it was impossible to cross. The week before that, we recited the Athanasian Creed which is very blunt in its exclusivity saying things like, if you don’t believe thusly or think thusly, you’re out.

Same with the other times which Jesus talked about Feasts. “Many are called, but few are chosen” Jesus says of the feast in St. Matthew 22, which we’ll hear on the 20th Sunday after Trinity. When Jesus closes the door of the feast, it will not open, even for those who cry out “Lord, lord” as we will hear in St. Matthew 25 on the Last Sunday. Jesus even kicks people out of these feasts.

There is no doubt, as Jesus presents His Church and His Heaven in the Bible, not everyone will be there. If Jesus is going to be this bigoted and this intolerant, why does anyone need to believe in Him or need Him, in the first place?

Repent. What is your answer to your neighbor? Will you make an excuse for Jesus and say He only shuts the door on bad people? Then that person doesn’t need Jesus, but just has to be a good person. Will you tell them that Jesus accepts everybody just the way they are? Then that person still doesn’t need Jesus, they just have to be themselves.

God’s Law is holy and absolute. If you do not believe, you will not get into heaven. Jesus is the only way and you do not learn more about Jesus on your own, apart from His Church. But this still sounds pretty bad to your neighbor, so how does God remain God and you win your neighbor?

There is a small step you may take with your neighbor to help him along in understanding just why some are saved and some are not. The first step is to ask: do you believe that people who do wrong things should pay for them; be punished for them? 

The ratings-driven media has all forced us to think about this topic recently. When we see “bad things” happen on TV our indignation is stirred up and our blood pressure goes up as we shout and demand justice. We see a wrong committed and we clamor for common sense and decency to win the day. Of course wrong doings should be punished, what kind of world has no justice?

Good. You have them on the same page as you , there. And God would agree as He says in Proverbs 11:21 “Be assured, an evil person will not go unpunished.” And again in 2 Peter 2:9

“…the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from temptation, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment for the day of judgment.”

The second step is one more question. that is, have you ever done any wrong things? 

You know what we call that? Bad news.

That is bad news because the answer is always “yes”. Now, it is not just that we haven’t done anything bad enough to end up in prison. It is, have we ever done anything with evil in our hearts, in selfishness and attempted self-justification. If we doubt the “yes” answer, we need only ask those that have been close to us and they will confirm that there have been times you needed forgiveness.

Dear Christians, God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, you or your neighbor. He would rather you turn from your wicked ways and live and come to a knowledge of the Truth. He accomplishes this by setting a heavenly feast on earth. 

He takes on our flesh so that there is no question as to Who He is and what He is doing. In spite of sin and death, He uses earthly means to prove that His Feast is readily apparent, readily available, and readily abundant. 

This means that the Good News that Jesus died for the sins of all people, freely, is both objective and subjective. We can find it promised and made ready outside of ourselves and our ideas of justice and tolerance, and we can also find it inside ourselves both spiritually, by what God promises, and physically by what we ingest.

The Eternal Wisdom of God builds His house upon the rock of the Crucified Christ and has hewn His pillars in the shape of a cross, as our Old Testament reading from Proverbs tells us. He has slaughtered Himself, not His enemies, and has set His own Lord’s Table with wine. 

Jesus has sent to us His Apostles and His pastors to call out “Turn in here”! Physically, turn in here, to this place. Come and eat; come and drink and live. By this we know love, as St. John tells us in the Epistle, that He laid down His life for US. He brings the world’s goods, the written Word and Sacraments, and sees us in need of justice and rescue from our sin, and does not close His heart against us, in Christ.

For His call is not a call for condemnation or guilt or sentencing. What does He say? What does the Wisdom of God say? What does Christ our Lord and Savior say to every single person of all time and all places?

“Come, for everything is already ready”. 

It is ready before you get there. It is ready before you think about it. It was ready before you were even thought of. You missed your court date to stand and be judged by God, because you were deaf, dumb, blind, and dead in your sins. Yet, the court convened. The judgment pronounced. The sentence commuted.

Jesus was found guilty, not you. Jesus suffered injustice and scourging. Jesus was sentenced to death, in your place. In this way, He made ready the path that leads to heaven. He made ready the seat that is next to Himself at the Table, for you. Jesus takes on the sin of the world so that there is no longer any sin at the Table He sets up.

In this way, and this way only, is heaven exclusive. the division is simple: is this feast, set before you today, for the forgiveness of your sins, or not? Is the salvation offered in baptism a rescue from your sin, death, and the devil, or not? Is the redemption heard in the Gospel, for you, or not?

All people are not saved, because they reject the Word and resist His Holy Spirit, thereby remaining in their unbelief and under God’s judgment through their own fault. Because of the havoc, chaos, and death that sin wreaks on us and all creation, there can be none of that in heaven or at the Feast. 

Heaven would not be heaven and justice would not be justice if just one wrongdoing was allowed. Here the Father gives us the cross of Christ. With Jesus on the cross, before our eyes always, we see what our righteousness truly is: filthy rags. We see what our sense of justice and inclusion and any other virtue we think we have is: sin.

On the cross, we see God enacting our tolerance upon Himself. He gives us the end of all our virtue signaling: the death of God. But God does not stay dead. For our sakes, He offers Himself in our place to show our sin which separates us from real life, and shows us our Savior Who gives us real life, for free. 

The excuses we offer only serve to condemn us in our sins. Sin keeps us apart. Sin keeps us all separated. Sin divides us. The forgiveness of sins, in Christ, unites us. We are locked out of the feast by our choice only. It took God almost an entire lifetime to close the door to Noah’s Ark, before the floods came. He will use your entire lifetime, if need be, to convict you of your intolerant sin and forgive you, in Jesus Name.

We deny ourselves and our sense of virtue and pick up our cross, to follow Christ. This means that we believe in our hearts and confess with our mouths that Jesus is Lord. Believing in our hearts that all men are created equal and are equally deserving of salvation in Christ and confessing with our mouths that we all eat and drink the true body and blood of Jesus.

Sin is exclusive. Christ alone is inclusive. Death is intolerant. The Word and Sacraments alone are tolerant and unifying. Jesus died for all and wills all to be saved from their sin. That is universal grace, true for any and everybody. God also saves us by His grace alone; His work; His will. He has made hell for the devil and his angels.

Those these three don’t fit together nicely and reasonably and any answer we try to give just goes wrong. But we must answer and our answer is our response to any other mystery in the Church, we simply declare it and believe it. We confess what Scripture teaches us, we don’t try to answer. Men divide and condemn. God unites and saves, in Christ. And by Faith, we come to everlasting life. “O Israel, you have destroyed yourself, but in Me is your help” (Hosea 13:9).

Asserting mysteries [Trinity Sunday]

LISTEN TO THE AUDIO HERE.

READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:

• Isaiah 6:1-7
• Romans 11:33-36
• St. John 3:1-15

Jesus speaks to you today in His Gospel, saying,

“If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?”

It is easier to tear something down and destroy it, than it is to build up something good and beautiful. "Stay home, save lives," the politicians and media demanded. And Americans stayed home for months and lost their jobs and their mental and physical health. If you go out, they said, you will kill people by passing on the virus. But all of a sudden these same politicians have turned on a dime in the aftermath of the killing of a Minnesota man in police custody - all of a sudden they are not only encouraging but joining mass public protests. Social distancing has given way to the demands of social engineering. Meanwhile a large part of the US is in smoldering ruins.

In fact, in these high-coronu-active-cities you are required to socially gather with less than 12 people, even outside, which includes churches. However, you are allowed to protest with up to 100 people. So will you die from the virus or will you die if you can’t protest?

Today and every day in the Church we build up beautiful things, albeit slowly. More slowly than the destroyers of society. Today we celebrate the blessed Trinity and the undivided unity that is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Though this has not been our first stop, when going through the Church’s Lectionary. the reason the Church does not begin Catechism or the church Year with the Trinity is because it is a mystery. In fact, it is the very first of the mysteries of the Church.

The word mystery is used by the historic Church to refer to the Sacraments, primarily, and then it is used to describe those areas of the faith that defy reason. Among these secondary mysteries, we count the Virgin Birth (the Incarnation) and the Resurrection of Jesus. 

The Trinity is counted as first among them, because He is the first we encounter in the entire Bible. He is the one before Creation, the One Who created all things, and the One Who sustains all things. He is also the God we encounter in each mystery. In the Incarnation, the Father sent the Spirit Who overshadowed the blessed virgin Mary, and conceived the eternal Son.

He is also at the Resurrection where the Father raised the Son (Rom. 6:4) by the Spirit (Rom. 8:11) of holiness and glory. so it is that we are presented with 3 persons in the Bible: the Son in Psalm 2:7, “You are my Son; today I have become your Father”, the Spirit in John 15 of Whom we heard two weeks ago, and the Father in Gal 4:6, “Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, the Spirit Who calls out ‘Abba, Father’”. And yet the Bible is adamant is repeating “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deut 6:4).

It has taken us 190 days of church Year to get to Trinity Sunday. It has taken 190 days of catechism: going through Advent and Christmas, Epiphany and Gesimas, Lent and Holy Week, Easter and Pentecost to prime us to finally engage in what the Trinity is. And the best explanation for it is to say, “I don’t know”.

It is important to say “I don’t know” to explaining the doctrine of the Trinity first to comfort yourself by understanding that your mental capacities do not make God. A lot of attack on Christianity comes at these spots of mystery, because it can be turned against you. When you say you don’t have to prove the Trinity exists, you just have to believe. Someone can say, you don’t have to prove God doesn’t exist, you just have to believe. Who is right, then?

It is also important to say “I don’t know”, when talking about the Trinity, to remind yourself that there is depth to your faith. If you can explain the Trinity and everything about God matter-of-factly, then it becomes not-so-great. The first time you saw your mother whip up a birthday cake, it was miraculous. When you figured out she used a recipe and then you had to make birthday cakes for all your own children, it became a chore.

Mystery is important.

It is also important to not say “I don’t know”, when talking about the Trinity. But how can we do that with something we don’t understand? If nothing else, this present virus hullabaloo should have taught you that the world “wants to know”. They want to know so much, that they are willing to accept a lie before the truth. Then they will go to great lengths to make sure the lie stays truth, even tearing down and destroying everything in their way; the good and the bad.

Repent. We must be able to give an answer to those who ask us, in season and out of season. The world demands an answer, even though it will betray us whatever we say. And here once again we discover our fear. It is a small doubting of God’s Word that grows instantly when poked. Did God really talk about the Trinity? Did Jesus even tell us any mysteries? I don’t have to have all the answers, do I?

This is easy to counter and easy to answer. In the face of a mystery you can’t explain or rationalize, you simply assert it. In fact, Jesus gives us 5 assertions we can make about the Trinity, from Scripture, instead of explaining it as we would a math problem.

the first assertion is to reaffirm that there is only one God, not three. Moses preaches in Deut. 4:35 that “to you it was shown, that you might know that the Lord Himself is God; there is none other beside Him.” You proclaim what you know, instead of speculating on what you do not. We know, from Jesus, that there is one God.

The Second Assertion is that the Father is God. Yes, God reveals Himself as a Father, not a mother. He reveals Himself as the one and only God Who is Father and of Whom are all things (1 Cor. 8:6). They even knew He was Father in the Old Testament, as Isaiah says, “But now, O LORD, thou art our father;” (64:8).

The Third Assertion is that the Son is God. God also reveals Himself to be a Son, not a daughter. Not just any son, but Jesus Who was crucified; Jesus Who is our blessed hope and the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior. (Titus 2:13)

The Fourth Assertion is that the Holy Spirit is God, as we have already gone through before Pentecost. Basically, what these first four assertions mean is that in the holy Bible, as we read and study for ourselves, we will definitely, no matter what, come into contact with these assertions. None of these say “Trinity” verbatim, but so far they imply this Trinity that we can not explain.

Though, we would only make these assertions if we believe, because so far they are not making sense, on their own, which is why we need the rest of the Church Year to catechize us. So that, when we get to our fifth and final assertion, we get to the heart of the Trinity. That is, that the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is not the Father. 

These five assertions are the sum total of all that we can say about the Trinity. No more, no less. This is not a weakness of Christianity, because this is not what the Church stands or falls upon. All does not depend on us explaining the Trinity, but confessing the Trinity as the Bible gives Him to us.

So we build up this beautiful confession and painstakingly take the time to get it right. We do not seek the easy way, because there is none. Though the world may sprint by us, headlong into the future, we take our time to confess and assert the mysteries.

Two mysteries have become promises for us, in Christ: the mystery of the resurrection of all flesh (1 Cor. 15:51) and the mystery of Christ’s one-flesh union with His Church (Eph. 5:32). We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed. As Jesus was changed on Easter morning, we too are baptized into a resurrection like His.

A man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is great, but through Jesus, by the means of the Spirit, the unknowable, inexplicable Trinity is simply given to us. 

Our hot-heads do not need to burn with anger or frustration at how no one is woke enough or no one is understanding our beliefs. They need to burn with faith. Faith to confess the Trinity, faith to take time and patience to build up, and faith to love our neighbor enough to give him the same confession. It is our Lord’s Church and He has, He does, and He will continue to build us up in Him, until the end of the age.