READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:
Exodus 20:1-17
Romans 6:3-11
St. Matthew 5:20-26
To you all, the Elect Exiles of the Dispersion; may Grace
and Peace be multiplied to you (1 Pet)
Who speaks to you today, from His Gospel heard in His
Church, saying:
“First be
reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift [at the Altar].”
From our Old Testament reading, we deal with the man, Moses,
who was given the task of taking God’s holy Ten Commands in his hands and
setting them before us. By the hands of a man, God’s Word is in the world.
However, that almost didn’t happen! When Moses was born, he
had less than a thousandth of a percent chance of making it to his first birthday.
At the time, Pharaoh told every Egyptian to find any son born to a Hebrew
woman, and murder them (Ex 1:22).
Now, even though this sounds like a government mandate or a
bipartisan (meaning both left and right) law passed to protect the murder of
the unborn, it is not because of those things that Moses was possibly not going
to make it. It was because God ordained it to be that way.
And God ordained it, not because God loves murder, that’s
Pharaoh. It was ordained so that God could bring Moses back from the dead. So
that He could show the power of His Great Name to call all the murdered
children back alive again.
So, it is by GRACE that Pharaoh is allowed to fall into the
great shame and vice of murdering infants. Pharaoh fell into sin, by his own choosing,
in order that Moses be brought back from the dead. Not just any death, but
death by water, for Pharaoh had ordered all to be thrown into the Nile.
Romans 1:28 says, “And since they did not see fit to
acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be
done.”
In that Grace, the reportedly “murdered” Moses, comes back
from the dead and leads God’s people out of the Egypt of sin and death, through
the Red Sea waters of Word and Life. For it was God’s promise to save His
people through the Red Sea waters.
So in a very strange-to-us-sinners way, God brings good
(salvation through water) out of evil (Pharaoh’s addiction to murder). Thus, we
hear St. Paul comment on this in Romans 9:17, “For the Scripture says to
Pharaoh, ‘“’For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my
power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.’”
God did not cause Pharaoh to sin, but He used Pharaoh’s sin
to work out the salvation of His people in the power of His Name. Moses is
baptized into death, in his little reed boat, at God’s Word. That same Word,
Moses gives to all Israel, “Believe and be baptized” in the cloud and in
the Red Sea, as St. Paul later recorded in 1 Corinthians 10:2.
All this is done in order that God’s people be made to
receive God’s Word in His proper context, that is, at the Altar.
Israel was brought out of Egypt in order to go to Church, as
Exodus 3:18 says, “you and the elders of Israel shall go to the king of
Egypt and say to him, ‘The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us; and
now, please let us go a three days' journey into the wilderness, that we may
sacrifice to the Lord our God’” and as our Old Testament chapter concludes
the 10 Commands with “make me an Altar” (Ex 20:24).
Dear Christians, in order to move to the Gospel, we need the
Altar of God. In order to have any chance of fleeing this culture of death that
we have fashioned for ourselves, we need this power and Name of God.
The Name of God was spoken to Moses in the burning bush.
Exodus 3:14-15 says, “’Say this to the people of Israel: I AM has sent me to
you.’ …“The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of
Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.” This is My Name forever, and
thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.’”
Jesus then claims this Name as His own as we hear on the 5th
Sunday in Lent from St. John 8:58-59, “Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I
say to you, before Abraham was, I am.’ So they picked up stones to throw at
him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple.”
The Jews knew Jesus was saying He was God, that’s why they
picked up the stones. They thought murder was allowed to them by God to keep
the faith pure. Little did they know that they share in Pharaoh’s sin as they
scourged and crucified Jesus, fulfilling their sick, murderous lusts.
After we hear Jesus say in John 2:19, “Destroy this
temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” along with Jeremiah 7:11, “this
[Temple], which is called by my Name”, do we have a man or a building? “But
Jesus was speaking about the temple of his body.”
Though the Gospel is the murder of Jesus Christ, true God and
true man, on behalf of the whole world, it is not for you to accomplish. God
accomplishes His Gospel for you. This is because murder and anger keep you from
God and His Altar. So the goal of not murdering, not getting angry, and of
reconciling to your adversarial brother is for you to be able to go to the
Altar.
In truth, it is not enough for you to just be righteous or
practice righteousness, as Jesus teaches today in the Gospel. It doesn’t matter
if you go around “not murdering” people or not being angry. That is your
Christian duty. No holy points to be earned there.
No, you must make it to God’s Altar. You must make it to the
reconciliation. You must be able to go to the “place where I cause my name
to be remembered” in order that God “come to you and bless you” (Ex
20:24). If that doesn’t happen, no amount of NOT murdering is going to
help.
The key to the Temple is the Altar and the Temple is Christ.
The Key to the Altar is His Name which gives salvation as St. Luke 24:47 says, “that
repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all
nations”
God’s Great Name will be used for the forgiveness of sins.
It will not be used to justify racism, military or political power, or murder.
God’s Great Name will be used to locate His Altar which is the powerful thing
here.
Christ’s Altar was the Tree where on the world’s behalf, He
shed a blood unlike the blood of goat or calf, to seal God’s guarantee of grace
that cannot fail (LSB #564:3). This is the great power of the Name of God: not
only can it perform plagues and wonders and miracles, but it can change you
into someone who can be at His Altar.
The death and resurrection of Jesus seals God’s guarantee of
salvation from your anger, from your murder, and from every little thing that
prevents you from approaching God’s Altar of reconciliation to Him. Because He
does the reconciling and He does the calming.
Here then, St. Paul teaches us from the Epistle reading, “You
must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Rom.
6:11). You have no other choice. Do not look at your murdering heart for
reform. Do not look toward your own righteousness for ascent. Look to Christ.
Remember your baptism. Believe that you have a seat at the Altar because you
have been united with Jesus in His death and resurrection.
The baptism that Moses underwent, from death to life, is
yours. The baptism that Israel went into, from evil to righteousness, is yours.
The Baptism that Christ took on Himself, which plunges a man into the depths of
hell and raises him to the uttermost parts of heaven to sit next to God in
Christ, is yours.
All this has been the plan and has been true since the first
tree betrayed us. “You shall not plant any tree as an Asherah beside the
altar of the Lord your God that you shall make” says Jesus in Deuteronomy
16:21. This is because He would plant His own tree and it is the cross.
“And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and
after that comes judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins
of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who
are eagerly waiting for him” from Hebrews 9:27-28.
We face sin, death, and the devil to push us towards God’s
love at the Altar of His Son’s sacrifice. We face murder and anger to reveal
that God’s murder and anger is all used up on Christ Crucified. God ordains
this for us that we would hear His Word and Sacrament and believe it, from the
hand of Moses.
That Word being “I am the Lord your God, who brought you
out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” in Exodus 20:2 and
Romans 8:38-39, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities,
nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor
any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is
in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Offered to you, by the Grace of God, at this Altar in Accident,
MD.
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