Next year, in the Resurrection! [Trinity 18]

 WATCH AND LISTEN HERE.

READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:

• Deuteronomy 10:10-21
• 1 Corinthians 1:1-9
• St. Matthew 22:34-46

Dear Saints,

Grace to you all and Peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus, the Christ.

Jesus speaks to us today, saying,

“This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it...”

 One of the major take-aways from this spring, this year really, must be that we are aliens in an alien land, as our Old Testament reading today has taught us when Moses said, “He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” in verses 18-19.

 Sojourner of course being another word for not-belonging or alien. This is evident by the fact that the land in which we live thought nothing of cancelling our holy days, as if it had the power to do so, and is poised to cancel Thanksgiving as well. Since it has no respect for our holy days, it has no respect for us, which causes us to conclude that we don’t belong here.

 Jesus encounters this same issue today in the Gospel, for it appears as if He is doing and saying things that are contrary to the law of the land, laws and lands He created no less. He encounters a hard-hearted and stiff-necked people who have no need for His Word and no need for His forgiveness and mercy. He is questioned, interrogated precisely because they think He doesn’t belong.

 This is not the first time this has come up. No, on the very occasion of God ransoming His chosen people of Israel out of Egypt, He remarks on the same subject saying, “I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people” (Ex. 32:9). This coming immediately after the wonders of the plagues in Egypt and the passing through the Red Sea on dry ground, no less.

 In the same breath to Moses, Jesus even comments on the hardness of hearts of Israel, even back then saying, “He said to them, ‘Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so’” (Matt 19:8).

 From the beginning, God’s chosen were liars. Do not think you are exempt. St. Paul warns you in Hebrews 4:7, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts”, because he knows that you will.

 So when we listen to our rulers and those around us clamoring for the removal or skipping of holy days, we must begin to question, who is the stiff-necked and hard-hearted?

 One answer is the world. It does not understand the need for holy living so it does not understand the need for faithful hearts to need a yearly cycle. Well, in a sense the devil and the world do understand the need for cycles, which is the whole reason why they would bother attacking feast days in the first place. They have their cycles as well, their unholy, yearly cycles of taxation, government sponsored entertainment, elections, and so on.

 In reality, they have an endless job to disrupt the holy cycle. Hate as they might, they need to yearly obstruct these celebrations. Over and over again, because the cycle, even if interrupted, simply continues on as if nothing ever happened, and will simply celebrate its missed feasts the next year.

 In the feasts we missed this year, there are many lessons to learn. One of them we have mentioned, that we will come around again to that feast next year. Another is the constant lesson God gives to us: a reminder of our own sinful nature, our own failure to celebrate.

 For, we constantly fall for the Pharisee trap, always trying to trap Jesus in His Word. “Which is the greater command, Jesus” we ask, “to love myself, I mean my neighbor, or to be at church on a certain day?” In our sin, we think that there is a priority laid out in God’s commands and so we attempt to find it and catch God in the trap, as the Pharisees had hoped today.

 When we do that, however, we find nothing but disappointment. Not only do we not increase our holiness in attempting to fulfill this law, but Jesus also gives us a face-palm and says, “Let’s start over again from where I lost you.”

 Let’s start over again from Advent and find the place where you went astray. You missed the point of the greatest commandment, because it wasn’t about God or your neighbor primarily, it was about love. Love fulfills all of the law, but it must be a love that is pure and sacrificial. Something Pharisaical sinners such as ourselves do not have. Which is why Jesus continues to speak after He reveals that love fulfills the commands.

 What He goes on to speak of is what He is always speaking of: Himself. And we miss it. We are so caught up in “does God want this” or “Will He be happy with that” or the like, that we confuse God’s Law with God’s Gospel. We confuse “have to” with “get to”.

 Now, don’t get the wrong idea. The law will never go away. It is who God is, after all. But our mistake is thinking that we can do something about that.

 Because Jesus reveals another great commandment by His words, and yet its not a commandment at the same time. He reveals that it is a command to be able to recognize the Christ, the Messiah, and know whose son He is. It seems to even be the priority here and I would say that it is. But it is not a command, because it is on Jesus to reveal Himself. Thus it becomes a matter of love, not ours but God’s, to reveal Himself and give us faith to believe it.

 There you have it. The answer to the Pharisees and the answer to missed festivals is belief. The world has no need for Jesus’ Word because His work is alien to us. God’s proper work is to love and to save, God’s alien work is the work of the cross: to suffer, die, and rise again in order to produce faith in our unfaithful hearts.

 God’s proper work is to command and rule. God’s alien work is to serve sinners salvation. So when He encounters a stiff-necked, uncircumcised-in-heart-and-ears people (Acts 7:51), both works come into play. He comes to His own and His own receive Him not. Well, they do receive Him, but only through a cross.

 In order to keep God’s proper work on earth, we must put God to death. It is the law.

In order to keep God’s alien work on earth, we must become aliens and outcasts ourselves, enduring for a little while hardships, which include not always being able to gather as we wish or choosing not gathering because of our sin.

 Such is the gracious, proper, and alien work of our God that we are shown our sin and shown our Savior. That we are shown how sinful and afraid we really are of God working and communing among us and yet we are given grace to see another year and another chance to celebrate the wonder of His Resurrection.

 Even more than that, each Sunday in the church year is a little Easter. Each Sunday is the chance to hear again our Lord’s command and victory over death. Though the hymns are different, though the propers are different, Jesus tells us that Moses and all the prophets prophesied that the Son of Man should suffer and rise again (Lk. 24:46). 

 Every part of holy Scripture reveals Jesus’ Easter. The land that God swore to our fathers to give them is both geographic and heavenly, in the Resurrection. The gifts in Christ and the fellowship of Jesus, from our Epistle, is given through the risen Lord. Love is the end of the law to all who believe, when Jesus rises from the dead in triumph.

 Now that we have been baptized into His resurrection, we enjoy life in this corrupt world as victors who cannot be oppressed by fiat, jails, or even death. We enjoy, now, His victory as we enjoy the life of Faith in His Church, returning again and again to His person, Word, and work yearly.

 So we are sad and upset. There is always next year. That or we can chose to fear God rather than men and celebrate as we have decided to celebrate and when we have decided to celebrate in the Lectionary and the Liturgy. Both of which have been handed down to us, illegally, by aliens, saints that have gone before us and have worshipped and communed just as we do, in the midst of oppression and suffering. Which, providentially, is exactly how Jesus did it.

 

 

O God, you devil [Trinity 17]

 WATCH AND LISTEN HERE.

READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:

• Proverbs 25:6-14
• Ephesians 4:1-6
• St. Luke 14:1-11

Dear Saints,

Grace to you all and Peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus, the Christ.

Who speaks to you today, in your hearing, saying:

“Then he took him and healed him and sent him away.”

 When God becomes the devil, or devilish. That is the subject we are going to briefly explore today. Of course God is not the devil, but when we undergo temptation or testing in our own sinfulness, He can certainly seem like a devil.

 To start off, I want to talk about Adam and Eve again, because they present such a stark example of what Jesus is talking about. We love to sing the not-so-old song of the not-so-old days about walking in the garden with God. It is a seemingly, beautiful picture of what Adam and Eve probably experienced in being able actually walk with God.

 It was peaceful. The dew was on the roses. God speaks ever so gently and kindly and we never want to leave. But what the song does not go on to sing about is what happens after. Oh it hints at it, saying that He bids us go to woe, but it only suggests that we’ll be sad. The song never tells us why.

 It doesn’t tell us because it would be too hard to explain and too dark, for such a rosy song. The truth of the matter is, God bids us leave the garden because He is about to do violence. Violence from which many will not return to believe in Him.

 Let’s go back to Eden. Adam and Eve walked with God. They sinned. They were kicked out. The first thing that happens after that is violence. Violence that God commits. We are in woe because now God is a God of woe. In Gen 3:21, God clothes Adam and Eve in garments made of skin. Who’s skin? Some dead animal that God had to kill in order to get its skin.

 So it is that the God of lovey-dovey dewy roses is now the God of the butcher shop. The sweet whispers of God are now drowned out by the squeals of death. Death brought on by the sin of Adam. But now that this is God, what are Adam and Eve to do? Will He kill them next?

 Fast-forward to our Sabbath day of rest, in our Gospel reading, and the Pharisees being silent for once. Yet their silence speaks volumes. For these decedents of Adam know that God is “a hard man, reaping where He did not sow, and gathering where He scattered no seed” as the single-talent-bearing man says in Matthew 25:24. 

 So, they test Him again and again. Would God do this? Would God say that? Would God eat with them? Would God talk with her? Would God touch him? These questions frighten the Pharisees, though they ask them in other places. 

 They frighten them because, in their minds, only two options exist. Either God doesn’t associate with sinners, therefore He doesn’t care, therefore He doesn’t exist or at least has left off caring for earth and its creatures. Or God does associate with sinners and they are in for it.

 There is only losing for the sinner, because it is sin that makes God the angry God, the wrathful God, the vengeful God. Sin cannot conceive of any other option, for the self-righteous are always the victim. 

 But Jesus, I’ve always been a good boy. But Jesus, those sinners could have gotten real jobs. But Jesus, you gave us this law and told us to avoid those people.

 God becomes the devil for the sinner, making unreasonable, holier-than-thou demands in His law, demanding mercy at unreasonable times, and demanding a relinquishing of our special seat in front of God to someone at the lowest place.

 Temptations will come and testings will come. It is not by reason that we will survive the war with spirits of evil in the heavenly places (Eph 6:12). It is not by reason that we will encounter God as He is and come away believing. That way, we have no chance.

 It turns out, that we don’t have to go very far for rescue from this pharisaical problem. It turns out that brooding over our sin and how special we think we are in order to impress God, only makes things worse and will eventually make us miss the main point.

 That is that God when God becomes devilish, He does so in order to rescue us. Look at Genesis 3 again. Does God commit violence to threaten or to clothe? To demand sacrifice or to show mercy? To rescue or condemn?

 Jesus weeps when violence is done, especially when He must do it to Himself. When He kicked Adam and Eve out of the garden, it was not abandonment. He kicked them out and went with them, lowering Himself beneath their level, and producing the first death in the world with His own godly hands.

 Showing not only what He was going to do to sin, death, and the devil, but revealing that He would get His hands dirty for His creation. In kicking Himself out of the garden, Jesus went ahead of Adam and Eve, into the new land of corruption, and took it all upon Himself, even causing His name to be taken in vain by those who won’t believe.

 In covering Adam and Eve and all their decedents, Jesus has fallen into the pit of hell. In caring for and taking responsibility for all of their acts of sin, He has left His high, and mighty seat in heaven and taken the lowest place in suffering and dying as a sinner, yet without His own sin.

 The God of Eden is the God of hell, for now all that awaits the sinner in the garden is the Tree of Life, everlasting life of sin. The God of Life is the God of death. Were the sinner to eat from the Tree of Life in his sin, he would only receive eternal death. All things are in His hand and that is frightening. Especially when He appears in front of so many people as a man. Our evil spirit cannot stand it. We fall silent, as the Pharisees, with rage. We cannot contain ourselves. God must die and now, as man, He can.

 And He does. And He suffers. The lowest seat turns out to be the seat of sinners, but even worse, a God who appears to be a sinner Himself. Charged with claiming to be the King of the Jews, He dies and is buried a guilty man, falling into the well of the grave on a Sabbath day, unwilling to heal Himself. 

 But only unwilling, because it would ruin His plan of becoming a curse on behalf of His creatures. Unwilling to take the road of revenge and punishment, because He would then leave all of His poor, wretched, sinful people behind. No, as we have seen even in the first book of the Bible, God is willing even to die on a cross to save His wayward sheep.

 Now the devilish God is the crucified God and there is no question as to what His intention and will were from the beginning. Now we see the crucifix and know that His wrath was not aimed at us, but at Himself that He might keep His promise to save and not to curse. 

 In our own trials and temptations then, we don’t seek dewy roses, but a rose-colored soaked God, sacrificing Himself in order that we be covered with His righteousness. And that baptismal righteousness goes with through all testing and temptations, giving us hope.

And it is in this hope that Faith walks in a manner worthy of your calling as Christian. In the humility, gentleness, and patience with which God dealt with you, by His Son on the cross. In love, Jesus bore you out of the baptismal waters towards His own Body and Blood in which is the Spirit of peace and unity.

 In Christ, the better Eden is opened to us by His merit alone. His own Grace carries Him to the grave and His grace alone brings Him back out. In His own Faith, healing is found in His wounds any and every day of the week. In His holy Scripture, He describes for us His invitation to us. To join Him at His own feast where He is both Master and Servant. As the Master, He invites sinners. As the Servant, He gives us the best of the best in Word and Sacrament.

When God becomes the devil, it is solely to destroy sin and death and take the punishment for your sins. For God is never the devil because He never lies. Even though He may act devilish, His promise remains unshaken: Your sins are forgiven. Peace is with you. Even in your darkest hour.