Boasting [Sexagesima]

 READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:

• Isaiah 55:10-13

• 2 Corinthians 11:19-12:9

• St. Luke 8:4-15

To all of you who are loved by God and called to be saints:

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Who speaks to us today, saying,

“To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God, but for others they are in parables, so that ‘seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.’”

It would appear that knowing the secrets of the kingdom of God would be something to boast about. Not everyone has that knowledge and I would think you pretty much corner the market. In the greek, however, its not necessarily secrets that Jesus is peddling, but mysteries. And the Church has always understood these mysteries to be the weekly Sacraments she communes in. Not much of a market for those, though.

In these Church mysteries that Jesus gives each week, boasting is allowed, as we ponder Jesus’s words in the epistle reading today. For there are two kinds of boasting, human and divine. In the mysteries of the Church, we can only boast in the Lord for He is the only One acting and serving in them, making them worth something in the first place. St. Paul tells us that if we are to boast, boast in the Lord (1 Cor 1:31).

Human boasting we hear of from Jeremiah 9, let no one boast in his wisdom, strength, or riches (v. 23). This same human boasting is also outlined by St. Paul in the Epistle today in all its glorious foolishness, as he says himself. Dr. Luther describes it in a sermon from the 2nd Sunday before Lent: 

“Here we are shown what is the ground of the false apostles' boasting: their outward respectability--being of Abraham's seed, children of Israel, Christ's preachers, [etc.]. Therein they think to far excel the Corinthians, claiming their doctrine and works to be of greater weight because they have Moses and the prophets for their teachers. But they failed to perceive that their boast is of mere externals” (Luther, Second Sunday before Lent, “PAUL'S GLORY IN HIS LABOUR AND SUFFERING”, Church Postils).

Thus, human boasting is a façade; perishable and depreciates with the owner and is therefore not something to be dependent on, just as Wall Street is not to be depended on for a correct indication of a healthy economy. They are lies, falsehoods, masks that can be touched up only until the make-up runs out. The pigs can only rear up on their hind legs for so long until they have to rest.

In the parable from today’s Gospel, who has the right to boast and of what would they boast? Would the path boast in its hardness, or the rocks in their dryness, or the thorns in their violence? Is the good soil even able to boast? None can boast. None can because the One doing all the work is not the soils, but the Seed, and the Seed is the Word of God (Lk 8:11) made flesh, dwelling among us “and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:14).

This then is the first of three things that the Christian can, and should, boast in: that the Word has come to do His work. His work of enlivening even the most stubborn of soils and hearts. For the Word made flesh has brought godly light and life into humanity, by offering His most holy, precious, innocent Blood upon the cross as payment for us.

The Word made flesh, or the Seed made flesh, has been planted in the corrupt ground of our sins, suffered, died, and rose again from the dead. Our boasting is in the goodness and mercy shown to our race by our Heavenly Father Who, out of fatherly divine goodness and mercy and without any merit or worthiness within me, has received us as His children and called us to eternal life.

As His children, He places us in His home, which He has furnished for us. If we are to boast in the Lord continuously, then we must have things to boast in. We boast in our salvation purchased and won by Jesus Christ. We also get to boast in the means of the Spirit, in which He places that salvation in our hands. Our bosting is also in the Baptism and Communion of God, taking place at this church. If we are to boast, let us spiritually and physically boast in the Lord as often as we can.

The second place the Christian should boast in is in the cross, or in suffering beneath the cross. Galatians 6 tells us, “But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Gal 6:14). 

This is not to say that we bow down to a piece of wood, used for capitol punishment, with a man on it. This is to say that we bow towards the remembrance of a piece of wood that once held our dying God fast, until He died and paid for our sins. In that remembrance, we place our own suffering and death and count it all glory to suffer for the faith, as St. James says, “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness” (James 1:2-3).

Boasting in the cross is boasting in the work of God’s salvation through His only Son. It is also a boasting in the unity with God that He gives us in Christ. 

Dr. Luther puts it this way:

One of the incomparable benefits “of faith is that it unites the soul with Christ as a bride is united with her bridegroom. By this mystery, as the Apostle teaches, Christ and the soul become one flesh [Eph. 5:31--32]. And if they are one flesh and there is between them a true marriage -- indeed the most perfect of all marriages, since human marriages are but poor examples of this one true marriage -- it follows that everything they have they hold in common, the good as well as the evil. Accordingly the believing soul can boast of and glory in whatever Christ has as though it were its own, and whatever the soul has Christ claims as his own. Let us compare these and we shall see inestimable benefits. Christ is full of grace, life, and salvation. The soul is full of sins, death, and damnation. Now let faith come between them and sins, death, and damnation will be Christ's, while grace, life, and salvation will be the soul's; for if Christ is a bridegroom, he must take upon himself the things which are his bride's and bestow upon her the things that are his. If he gives her his body and very self, how shall he not give her all that is his? And if he takes the body of the bride, how shall he not take all that is hers?” (Luther, On Christian Liberty, para. 10)

It is in this union that the Christian will boast in a third thing, that is our vocation, our office, our weakness, as we heard in our Epistle reading. Life is for living, and now being purchased by Christ and unified with Him in Baptism, we then live our lives in the jobs that God puts in front of us: father, mother, son, daughter, husband, wife, or worker. We boast that God has given us work on His great earth and gives us all that we need to support this body and life.

This then is all of life. There is no room for human boasting. It is excluded, as Romans 3 tells us. By what kind of law is it excluded? By a law of human works? “No, but by the law of faith. For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law” (Rom 3:27-28). By faith we are saved, by faith we endure suffering, and by faith we live as a temple of the Holy Spirit.

It is very human to boast. What you boast in is what gives you confidence to go out and face the day. It is the thing of which you say: I am a somebody because I have that. I can beat what comes against me today because I am this. What you boast in is what fundamentally defines you; it is where you draw your identity and self-worth from.

And in this upside-down world, that confidence and strength is taken as a sign from God. But St. Paul concludes the Lord’s Epistle differently. He preaches that in order to keep him from becoming too boastful, a thorn was given to him in the flesh, a messenger of satan to harass him, to strike him with fists (2 Cor 12:7). Three times St. Paul begged for this to be removed from him and it was not.

Instead, the Lord said be content in your weakness. Be content that God is strong and works on your behalf. Be content that you have been called “beloved of God” and have found favor with God, in Christ. 

Here we see what tribulations are good for, namely that they cause us to call on God for help. Neither Christ nor His Word and faith would be strong in us when our bodies are not held captive in tribulation and weakness. God does not remove human power and creaturely comforts from us, but instead adds to this and on top of this. (Spangenberg, the Christian year of grace, p.95)

We boast in weakness, because the weakness of the Seed of God produces 100-fold fruit. We boast, because the death of a single seed defeats death. Boasting seeks glory. do not glorify yourself, but rather let God glorify you. For, “If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say, ‘He is our God’” (Jn 8:54).

Heavenly boasting is where its at, so we wait for heaven to boast in us. There is always someone on earth who is stronger, more boastful, and better than we are. In Christ, there is no boasting, indeed there can’t be, for all the Father’s glory is given to Jesus. All glory, dominion, honor, might, and blessing are His and, in order to please His Father, He desires to give you that glory.

In this, our weakness becomes eternal strength, our life eternal joy, and our temporal death eternal life, in Christ. From Psalm 8: “what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor” (v. 4-5).