Monday, May 10, 2021

Sanctified beforehand [Easter 6]

LISTEN TO THE AUDIO HERE.


READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:

  • Numbers 21:4-9

  • James 1:22-27

  • St. John 16:23-30




Our Lord teaches about prayer today and it is your Small Catechism that should be used as a prayer-book. For, Jesus just doesn’t teach us the Lord’s Prayer, but gives us life and His Church to continue to teach us to pray. As the nation celebrates Mothers today, we find mothers mentioned in the Small Catechism and should pray for them.
 
Yet, one thing that we never ask God for is parents, specifically mothers. We don’t get to choose them and we certainly don’t get the choice of having them or not. The way the world is ordered, we are given parents without our consent (the horror). Which does not mean that we are being oppressed, but exactly the opposite. In the family, God curbs our sinful selves into His proper order.
 
that Proper Order is “honor your father and mother”. This is one example of how the Father loves you, that He answers your prayer for a holy and right life even before you pray for it, even before you come into existence. So it is that this existence, this life begins with family and it is exactly that institution that our country and culture has failed most miserably.
 
Now you say, its not so bad. Anyone can be a parent if they choose. There is no Family Police breaking down doors, preventing families. There are no barricades or glass ceilings to break through. There is nothing stopping a family from coming into existence.
 
So you say. But do you see the world through God’s eyes? Yes the family is not oppressed per se, but neither is it promoted. You would think the very backbone of the country, the family that produces new tax cattle, would be treasured and held more closely. But in these grey and latter days, it is merely one choice among many on the clearance rack.
 
Yes, the family and its value is there on the national culture shelves, but things that do not sell go on that shelf. What’s put out front, on the end of the aisle, and at the check-out lane, the “impulse buy”; those are the things that sell. What’s put in those places? Not family, not motherhood, and certainly not God or prayer.
 
You would be hard pressed to find a vocation as essential as mothers. We know its essential because everyone has a mother. Adam knew this when he named his wife Eve, calling her the “mother of all the living” (Gen 3:20). This is the value of mothers, then, that they are the ones to fill the earth and subdue it. A single person may make a small difference and lead a satisfying life, but one mother can raise multiple lives and make a multitude of difference.
 
Repent. We pray to God and ask our heavenly Father for things in Jesus’s Name, but are completely disappointed with them when we receive them, if not outright reject them. Back to Adam and Eve as our example: Adam did not value Eve as a mother enough. He did not give her children right away, he did not guard and protect her from danger, and he threw her under the bus when they got caught at the tree.
 
So our prayers ascend to God, “What are we to do?” The culture battle is lost, there is no persuading anyone anymore. What do you do with a failed institution? You replace it with a better one.
 
With this in mind, we return to the Lord to teach us just what we are to replace the world’s idea of a mother with. But since God is “father” and “son”, what does He know about it? 
 
We forget all too easily that the feminine, motherhood comes from God. He made Eve, after all. Jesus even describes Himself as a mother hen in St. Luke 13:34, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”
 
Does this prove God is a woman? No. It proves that God understands best the need for a father and mother such that He sends His Son to purchase and win for us a sanctified life which fulfills the Fourth Commandment. Our heavenly Father does not pick a father or mother and make them strong, but sends His Son Whom He has made strong for Himself (Ps. 80:17).
 
He is made strong for Himself in order that He might be made man, be raised by His own mother and father, suffer, and die. In this sacrifice, His holy, innocent, and precious Blood covers the multitude of sins, even those aimed at God’s ordering of father, mother, and family. For just as our heavenly Father is our father, no matter the state or condition of our earthly father, so too do we have a heavenly mother, regardless of the state of our earthly mothers.
 
That of course is the Church of Christ. The Bride Whom the strong Son offers His life up for “that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish (Eph 5:25-27).”
 
The Bride who births Children of God through Holy Baptism. The Bride who nurtures and raises up sons of God by Word and sacrament. The Bride who educates by gathering around the crucifix so that if any is bitten by sin, they may look upon it and live.
 
The Bride who reminds her children of their natural face of sinfulness, that they might seek the Lord and His forgiveness, offered freely. The Bride who prays, non-stop, for the Church of God in Christ and for all people according to their needs.
 
This Bride, is our answer to the world’s “motherhood”. This Church, whom Jesus dies for and the Holy Spirit creates, is the answer to all prayers. It is the life that God gives to replace what the world has corrupted. And because we are a part of that corruption, we need to be given the things that we pray for.
 
And so, the Lord says in Psalm 37:4, “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart”. Meaning, that if you have faith, God will give you a clean heart and right desires. He will not let your private desires run rampant and destroy. But He will remake your sinful desires into His holy desires.
 
And what are His holy desires? That every evil plan and purpose of the devil be destroyed. That we should fear and love God alone. That anger and contempt for father and mother, fatherhood and motherhood, be cast far from us. Instead that we honor them, serve and obey them, love and cherish them.
 
Why? Because it is the Lord’s will to give you His kingdom and His kingdom consists of the Lamb Who was slain, sitting on the throne and the Lamb’s Bride, made ready by Faith (Rev. 7:10; 21:2, 9). The very existence of heaven is a marriage feast.
 
Dear Christians, Deuteronomy 7 tells us that “It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery” (Deut 7:7-8).
 
No, it was not that you were praying for the right things first, then God said, “Hey! I like this guy”. First, it was a loving God, then a very good creation, then God’s compassion upon sinful humanity. First God loved us from the beginning. Second, He makes a perfect, orderly world for us, in faith. Third, He sends His Son to reorder our hearts and prayers back to His good and gracious will, so that, in His Grace, we may pray for whatever and receive it.
 
God loves us first and knows our prayers. He answers them first, before our prayers. We continue to pray to remind us of that, so that we receive our mothers and all things with thankfulness. Thankfulness that there is still a godly life of faith to be lived, in the midst of satanic attacks and propogandist, worldly culture. 
 
thankfulness that, in loving the Son, Jesus Christ, in His Church among His holy things, we find that we also are loving the Father and the Spirit and are finding strength in our families, even our Church family, which both our mothers gave to us at God’s Word.
 
 









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