The Eleventh Sunday after Trinity (Trinity 11)

(Audio)

Luke 18:9-14; 1 Corinthians 15:1-10; Genesis 4:1-15

 

In the Name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Jesus told the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector “to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and treated others with contempt.” This is a parable of disordered love, of loving the right things in the wrong way. Dante Alighieri, the 14^th century Italian poet, wrote of this in The Divine Comedy, specifically in Book One, The Inferno. Disordered love is how Dante describes sin. He assumes that mankind, created in God’s image, was created to love like God. Thus, when we sin, it is not that we don’t love – that’s impossible – but it’s that we love the right things in the wrong way. Take lust for example. Lust is a disordered form of love. When we have lust we have a disordered love for the body, beauty, and sexual intercourse, all of which God created as very good and to be desired, in the right way. Similarly, what is avarice or greed, but a disordered love of the good things God gives to us. Both sins are idolatry, a sin against the First Commandment, because we have loved something or someone before and more than we have loved God.

Trust in ourselves that we are righteous is also disordered love. Our fear, love, and trust are to be in the LORD above all else, even ourselves. That also is a transgression of the First Commandment. God is the creator of all things. God is our creator. He is good and just and righteous, and He is the source, origin, and creator of all things. Therefore, everything that is is in relation to God. If something or someone is good, that goodness must be measured in relation to God’s goodness. Before the Fall, our first parents Adam and Eve were good. God made them to be good, declared them to be good, and they truly were good. All their thoughts and deeds, even their free will, was in alignment with God’s good thoughts, word, and will. The serpent’s temptation was to think and to act according to a different word and will. A different word and will. Take note of that! God created Adam and Eve and gave them free will, but what would it mean for them to exercise it? It would mean that they had thought and acted according to a word and a will that was not God’s. Truly, that was the essence of their fall into sin. Until the serpent asked, “Did God really say?” Adam and Eve had never contemplated anything other than that which was of God.

Then their eyes truly were opened to both good and evil, for what is evil but opposition to good, and what is sin but a disordered love of that which is good. What their eyes were open to were thoughts, words, and deeds that were not God’s thoughts, words, and deeds. They became aware of their own will, which was not God’s will. They began to resent God and to believe that He was holding out of them something good. They thought evil of God, for they now thought Him capable of not being good, capable of not loving them. That is what sin does. Sin corrupts our reason and our senses so that we cannot perceive things as they are, so that we put the worst construction on things and people and our love for them grows cold as our resentment grows hot. Our love becomes disordered, misdirected, twisted, and curved inward on ourselves. We were created to receive the love of God and to love Him in return through our love of others. But sin has so corrupted us that we cannot rightly love God, and so we cannot rightly love our brothers and sisters and our neighbors.

Genesis chapter three records our first parents’ fall into sin. Genesis chapter four records the fruit of that sin, resentment, jealousy, anger, hatred, and murder. Adam and Eve’s firstborn son Cain murdered his younger brother Abel. Both men had offered appropriate sacrifices to the LORD. Cain offered the first fruits of his harvest and Abel offered the first of his flock. As the story goes, the LORD favored Abel’s sacrifice but not Cain’s. No reason for this is stated, but it becomes obvious in Cain’s reaction. Cain became sullen and resentful, jealous and angry towards God and towards his brother Abel. It is the preacher to the Hebrews who informs us that the LORD accepted Abel’s sacrifice because it was offered in faith and love but rejected Cain’s because it was not offered in faith and love. This is clear in the LORD’s words to Cain: “The LORD said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it.’” Why was Cain concerned about how the LORD felt about his brother’s sacrifice in the first place? If he obeyed the word and the command of the LORD, what had he to be concerned with? Should he not have rejoiced with his brother that the LORD so favored his sacrifice? You see, bitterness, resentment, and disordered love were already long at play in Cain’s heart and mind even before he made his sacrifice, and this was the reason the LORD had no regard for his sacrifice. Cain resented the LORD and his brother. He convinced himself that he was being treated unfairly and unjustly. Cain’s self-righteousness blinded him to the LORD’s goodness, justice, and righteousness so that he judged his brother unworthy of God’s favor and worthy of death, and he judged the LORD’s justice and righteousness and found it wanting.

Jesus told the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector “to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and treated others with contempt.” This is a parable of disordered love, of loving the right things in the wrong way. The Pharisee feigned to love the LORD so much that he boasted about it, “I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get,” never mind the fact that these things were required under the Law of Moses. Like Cain, the Pharisee did not offer these sacrifices in faith and love for the LORD but out of a sense of obligation, and he took pride in that he fulfilled the Law and considered himself justified before God because of it. As Jesus teaches concerning works of the Law, “So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.’” Even worse than the Pharisee’s self-righteousness, however, was his lack of love and utter contempt for those he deemed beneath him and to be sinners, like the tax collector in Jesus’ parable. “The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.’” Just as Cain did not offer his sacrifice out of faith and love for the LORD, so the Pharisee did not offer his tithes and prayers out of faith and love for the LORD but out of a sense of obligation believing that he merited the LORD’s favor. Consequently, because their love of God was disordered, they did not and could not love their brother and neighbor.

In contrast, the tax collector did not approach the front of the temple or raise his head before the LORD and the assembled worshippers, but he prostrated himself in the back and would not look up at all. He did not boast of his tithes and prayers, nor was he concerned about what anyone else was offering or how they were received by the LORD, but he emptied himself, confessed his sins, and plead for mercy trusting that the LORD is good, just, righteous, and above all loving and merciful and forgiving. And as Abel’s blood cried from the ground for justice, so Jesus says that it was the tax collector who went home justified that day. Because he knew and confessed that he didn’t deserve it, the tax collector was in a position to receive all good things from the LORD. For, only sinners can be forgiven, and only the dead can be raised to new and everlasting life in Jesus. If we do not love our brother whom we have seen, we cannot love God whom we have not seen. And if we do not put our fear, love, and trust in God above all things, we will have no love for anyone at all, but will fall into disordered love, loving the right things in the wrong way, which is sin and leads only to death and damnation away from the love of God and men somewhere east of Eden.

Self-righteousness is a sin that is a fruit of disordered love, loving the right things in the wrong way. Such disordered love threatens to cut us off from God and from those He has given us to love, our spouses and children, our extended family, friends, and neighbors, and each other in this congregation. We are all guilty of self-righteousness and countless other fruits of disordered love. But the God of love is present here today and every time we gather to receive His gifts to wash us clean in the blood of Jesus, God’s greatest gift of love for all the world, and to restore us to a right relationship, a relationship of love, with Him and our neighbor once again. That is why we are here. That is why we will gather here again next week and every LORD’s Day until He comes again. We are like the tax collector in Jesus’ parable. We do not gather here to boast before the LORD of our sacrifices and good works, but we gather here to receive from the LORD His love, mercy, grace, and forgiveness so that the fruit and works we bear in our lives, words, and deeds will be His fruit and His works of love towards others to the glory of God. Our Divine Service is not our service of God, but it is God’s service of us. Here in this place where two or three are gathered in His Name to receive His gifts is where He forgives, restores, and renews us, and from whence He sends us to be a gift of love to all the world. We, the Church of Jesus Christ, are how God so loves the world.

Interestingly, the lowest level of Dante’s Inferno, hell, is where Lucifer resides for all eternity. You might be surprised to learn that it is not a place of fire and heat, but it is frigid cold and in its very center Lucifer is frozen in ice up to his chest, for disordered love is not full of the fiery heat of God’s love, but it is curved in on itself, always resentful, dissatisfied, discontent, unloving and unmerciful, cold and lifeless, dead as ice. The antidote to this is the love of God poured out in Jesus Christ. That LOVE is present for you here and now. Come and receive God’s gift of love, the only thing in this dying world that can enliven you to live and love.

In the + Name of Jesus. Amen.

Why is it so hard to live freely?

It is really hard to live in the freedom of the Gospel. The flesh actually likes, loves the Law. Well, ok, it's a love/hate relationship. The flesh loves the Law because it justifies itself (falsely, of course) by it. The flesh hates the Law because it forbids what it wants to do.  Like a toddler, however, the flesh rebels against the Law in part to test that it is still there. The flesh receives comfort knowing that the rules are still in force.

This plays out in interesting ways in the Christian life. How tempting it is for those who are justified by grace through faith in Jesus Christ to grope around for laws to follow and to impose upon others? And then there's the temptation to rebel against the Gospel itself, because it contains the Law fulfilled in Jesus. This is to say that we are free *in* the Gospel, not *from* the Gospel. The Law is fulfilled; it has not been abolished, nor did it pass away. That's a BIG difference!

Well intentioned Christians both cast the justified back into the shackles of law and teach that the law no longer applies! My heart is comforted in the proclamation that Christ has justified me in His blood, and then some yahoo comes along and says, "Now you have to do this...: evangelize, witness, read your Bible more, attend small groups, whatever." Of course, some other yahoo will come along and say, "Just go to mass, that's all."

No. Justification means something. It means that you are freed from the Law's demands that you may live freely *in* the Gospel. You see, that's a bit different from the kind of antinomian freedom some peddle. In Christ you are a new creation; that means a new life and a new way of living. It doesn't mean a sinless life, but it means a repentant life, a contrite life, a humble life. However, the works of this new life are not to be quantified or measured -- that is purely a human rationalistic idea. The fruit of faith is not to be quantified or measured, but they must be there; and they will be there, if there is faith. Christ says that faith as small as a mustard seed can move mountains. I don't know anyone who's moved any mountains. Undoubtedly, "O ye of little faith" are amongst the best that our Lord will ever find. "O Lord, I believe; help me in my unbelief," a father cried. "He who believes... will be saved." How much? How often? Doesn't enter into the equation.

"Give, and it will be given..."
"Love God...., and love your neighbor..."
"Forgive...., and you will be forgiven..."

How much? How often?
Doesn't enter into the equation.

Living in the freedom of the Gospel can only be done in continual contrition, humility, and repentance in faith and trust in Jesus Christ who is making (still) all things new. The faithful follow Him in the Way that He goes. They cannot be Him, but they are baptized into Him and He will make them like Him throughout their lives, culminating in the resurrection of their bodies on the Last Day and eternal life with Him thereafter.

What does that life look like? Perhaps it's better to say what it does not look like. The new life does *not* look like a life lived under the Law or law. It does not have a long list of "must dos" or "pieties" or "steps" or anything else contrived by human reason and sinful pride.  It does not force a rationalistic interpretation upon God's Word breaking it into "three rules" or "seven dispensations" or any other forced categorization. I suppose it might be said to look like the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount, not because they describe a new Law, rule, or guide for the Christian life, but because they describe Christ and His kingdom which has broken into this world and is day by day establishing its reign until the culmination and unveiling of Christ's glory on the Last Day.

Think fruits, not rules.
Think contrition, repentance, and humility, not works and obedience.
Think what Christ has done, not what I must do.
And, do your vocation. Be your vocation. Faithfully, in humility and repentance, every day of your life.
Live *in* the freedom of the Gospel. That is all.

There Are No Postmodernists In Electric Chairs

There Are No Postmodernists In Electric Chairs » First Thoughts A First Things Blog

Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris on the epistemological equivalent of “There are no atheists in foxholes”:

It has become fashionable nowadays to speak of the subjectivity or the relativity of truth. I find such talk ridiculous at best. Let’s go back to Randall Dale Adams. He found himself within days of being executed in “Old Sparky,” the electric chair in Walls Unit, Huntsville Texas.

There is nothing post-modern about the electric chair. It takes a living human being and turns him into a piece of meat. Imagine you – you the young journalists of tomorrow – being strapped into an electric chair for a crime you didn’t commit. Would you take comfort from a witness telling you that it really doesn’t make any difference whether you are guilty or innocent? That there is no truth? “I think you’re guilty; you think you’re innocent. Can’t we work it all out?”

Well, the answer is: No. We can’t. There are facts. There is a world in which things happen and the journalist’s job is to figure out what those things are. Anything less, is giving up on the most important task around – separating truth from illusion, truth from fantasy, truth from wishful thinking.

And…., a great comment to the post:

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that postmodernism has been more influential outside of the discipline of philosophy than within it–where most academic philosophers in the United States think it sloppy thinking at best. Postmodernism has tended to be more influential in departments of English, history, and the social sciences–all places that placed a low premium on precise thinking or the truth of the matter and high premium on being original and even eccentric. This general observation is particularly true of Richard Rorty who has not been influential with academic philosophers but who has exercised influence outside of the philosophical rank and file. Meanwhile, one hardly thinks the French were wrong to make fun of Rorty. Consider Foucault’s attempt to carry out what might be called a Nietzchean program of analysis. Foucault was certainly aware that Nietzsche didn’t aim to make us think in a new way but rather to subvert the foundations of thought and to replace thought with will to power. What then can Foucault’s project be? It is at best Foucault having fun at the expense of those who take him seriously, when he does not meant to be so taken (he told a former teacher of mine that he was quite deliberately obtuse in all his writing). It is at worst Foucault’s own attempt to exercise will to power over his readers and over those who fall under the spell of his work. Being persuaded by him would then to become enslaved to his mastery rather than to arrive in those elysium fields of the truth of the matter. Postmodern philosophy shoots itself in the foot–and the prescient postmodern philosopher knows this and doesn’t care. Rather, he seeks to use it for his own advantage.

Prolegomena

Exhortation of the mind to the contemplation of God. – It casts aside cares, and excludes all thoughts save that of God, that it may seek Him. Man was created to see God. Man by sin lost the blessedness for which he was made, and found the misery for which he was not made. He did not keep this good when he could keep it easily. Without God it is ill with us. Our labors and attempts are in vain without God. Man cannot seek God, unless God himself teaches him; nor find him, unless he reveals himself. God created man in his image, that he might be mindful of him, think of him, and love him. The believer does not seek to understand, that he may believe, but he believes that he may understand: for unless he believed he would not understand.

St. Anselm: Basic Writings, Second Edition. Open Court, 1962.

Luther On the Faith of Infants and the Place of Reason

Let us look at the reason why they hold that children do not believe. They say since they have as yet not come to use their reason, they cannot hear God’s Word. Children have not come to the use of their reason, you say, therefore they cannot believe. What if you have already fallen from faith through this reason and the children had come to faith through their unreason? My friend, what good does reason do when faith and God’s Word are concerned. Is it not a fact that reason resists faith and the Word of God so that because of it, no one can come to faith or put up with God’s Word unless reason is blinded and put to shame? A man must die to reason and become a fool, so to speak, yes, and must become more unreasoning and irrational than any young child if he is to come to faith and accept God’s grace, as Christ says (Matt. 18:3) “Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of haven.” How often Christ points out to us that we must become children and fools and how often He condemns reason!

Again, tell me, what sort of reason did the little children have when Christ caressed and blessed and assigned to heaven? Surely they, too, were as yet without reason. Why, then, does He order that they be brought to Him, and why does He bless them? Where did they get the faith that made them children of the kingdom of heaven? The fact is that just because they are unreasoning and foolish, they are better fitted to come to faith than the old and reasoning people whose way is always blocked by reason, which does not want to force its beg head through the narrow door.

What Luther Says, 142 Objection: Unreasoning Infants Cannot Believe, p51.

Luther On Infant Baptism

I still maintain, as I have maintained, that the surest Baptism is infant Baptism. For an old person may deceive, may come to Christ as a Judas and permit himself to be baptized. But a child cannot deceive. It comes to Christ in Baptism as John came to Him and as the little children were brought to Him, that His Word may come over them, touch them, and thus make them holy. For His Word and work cannot pass by without effect; and in Baptism they are directed at the child alone. If they were to fail of success here, they would have to be entire failures and useless means, which is impossible.

What Luther Says, 139 Baptism of Infants Surely Efficacious, p50. Emphasis mine.

The Bread of Freedom

The Seventh Sunday after Trinity 26 July 2009

Mark 8:1-9 / Romans 6:19-23 / Genesis 2:7-17

Audio of sermon.

In the Name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Ever since the fall into sin, labor and bread go together. We all need our daily bread to live, and there’s no such thing as a free lunch. In the 60’s the term bread became synonymous with money, the means by which bread was acquired. Money implies work, but that same generation loathed work. The fall into sin brought the curse, “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread,” and then death, “till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The result of the curse is that we must toil and labor to put daily bread upon our tables. Each day is a struggle to survive – with the end result that we die. All our striving to feed ourselves and our families, to put a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs, all our striving to do the right thing, the moral thing, the good thing, leads to death. Life is short and then you die.

Notice how we call it a “fall” into sin? Almost makes it sound like an accident, doesn’t it? And of course, if it’s an accident, then we like to reason that “We didn’t mean to do it, it just kind of happened.” And that doesn’t sound quite so bad. However, honestly, man didn’t simply fall into sin, it was a choice. In fact it was man’s first free choice. The LORD God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” That day is today. That day is tomorrow. That day is each and every day that you insist that you provide for yourself. That day is each and every day that you insist on determining for yourself what is good and what is evil. That day is each and every day that you insist on being god unto yourself.

In the beginning, God provided for man’s sustenance – all that he needed to support his body and his life. The fall into sin, the willful eating of that one forbidden food, the one free choice that man made of his own will in opposition to the will of God, to decide for himself what was good and what was evil, was a willful turning away from God. And from that day, and every day since, man has toiled and striven to provide for himself, physically and spiritually, daily bread – to the inevitable end, death. For the wages of sin is death – what you earn for your labor, what you earn for your striving, what you earn for your struggle, is death. From the very moment of conception we die a little more each and every day. It is what we have chosen freely. It is what we have earned.

Too much is made of human free will. There was no free will in the beginning, at least not in the way we commonly think of free will, for there was only God’s will. Man, made in God’s image, knew God’s will and shared God’s will. Man knew nothing other than God’s will. It was in the eating of that forbidden food, a sustenance that the LORD had not given man, a food that the LORD had commanded man not to eat of, it was in the eating of that forbidden food that man came to know something other than the will of God. And in his knowledge of good and evil, free will entered the picture – man no longer shared the will of God, but man knew something in opposition to God’s will – his own will. Dietrich Bonheoffer put it this way:

In knowing about good and evil, human beings understand themselves not within the reality of being defined by the origin [God], but from their own possibilities, namely, to be either good or evil. They now know themselves beside and outside of God, which means they now know nothing but themselves, and God not at all. For they can only know God by knowing God alone. The knowledge of good and evil is thus disunion with God. Human beings can know about good and evil only in opposition to God.

And so what seemed like freedom, turned out to be slavery. Man found himself knowing that he must do God’s will, and striving to do it, but without knowing any longer what God’s will actually was. And worse, man, exercising his own fallen will, began to call good evil and evil good. Man presented the members of his body as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness with the result that the fruit of his efforts, the fruit of his labor and toil, was still more lawlessness: man’s striving to produce bread on his own still leads only to death.

Bread is not supposed to bring death, but life – Bread is a staple for life, bread is good for you. The poorest people on the earth eat bread and drink water and survive. But man’s bread still brings only death, not life. For man does not live by bread alone but by every, but man lives by the Word that proceeds from the mouth of God. And God’s Word became flesh and made His dwelling here amongst us. As in the beginning God provided man’s daily bread, so again God would provide the only Bread that truly give life – Jesus Christ, the Bread of Life, our Bread King, the daily Bread of our earthly lives and the Bread that gives life that never dies.

Jesus was the Second Adam. He was sent to labor and travail and to die. By the sweat of His brow and the stripes on His back He would produce the Bread of Life. He would eat the bread of our death so that He might provide us His bread that brings life. Jesus looked at that crowd and had compassion on them because they had been with him three days and had nothing to eat. That word compassion is telling – it literally means “to suffer together with”. Jesus didn’t simply feel pity for the 4,000 plus, but he suffered with them – He suffered their toil, their struggle, and their strife, and, ultimately, He suffered their hunger and their inability to produce life-giving bread. Jesus took the meager offering of bread that they could produce – seven loaves and a few small fish – and in a way hidden from the crowd provided them food enough that they were satisfied, with leftovers to spare.

But there’s still no such thing as a free lunch and the wages of sin is still death. Shortly after the miraculous feeding of the four thousand Jesus began to teach His disciples that “the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again.” The bread He provided them in the feeding of the four thousand was but a foretaste of the bread that He would die to provide them. Jesus, who knew no sin, was made to be sin for us. Even though He was innocent, sinless, holy, Jesus became our sin. He became our sin so that the wage of death would no longer be ours. He didn’t just take our sin upon Himself, He became our sin. And death was meted out to Him – PAID IN FULL. It is finished. You are free, truly free – free to worship Him without fear, holy and righteous in His sight all the days of your life.

“When you were slaves to sin you were free in regard to righteousness. But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? The end of those things is death. But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, [‘slaves of God’, see, I told you that free will was overrated] the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.”

On the third day He provided hungry, fainting pilgrims bread in the desolate wilderness. On the third day our Bread King was raised from the dead to give us the Bread of Life which a man eats that he may never die. And that Bread of Life is His body, given for you, and His precious blood shed for you for the forgiveness of your sins. This bread is not food enough to keep you alive in this body forever, it’s barely enough to keep you from fainting today; but this Bread will keep the life freely given you in Holy Baptism alive forever, and it is all you will ever need.

In the + Name of Jesus. Amen.