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Sermon for Trinity 17

Ephesians 4:1-6  +  Luke 14:1-11

There’s plenty of ugliness in the world, as you know. We’re confronted with it every day, whenever people are involved. That’s not to say there’s no beauty in the world, or that everything everyone does is always ugly. But there is an ugliness that infects all men, including Christians, no matter how well it may sometimes be hidden. It’s an out-in-the-open ugliness we encounter in today’s Gospel, in both parts of the Gospel, an ugliness that Jesus exposes and tries very patiently to correct. It’s the ugliness of thinking highly of yourself.

Now, you know that the Pharisees were Jewish leaders in Jesus’ day who were famous for thinking highly of themselves. So it really comes as no surprise that that ugliness came out again while Jesus was attending a Sabbath supper at the home of a Pharisee, with other Pharisees and experts in the law also in attendance. Luke tells us that they were “watching Jesus closely,” not to learn from Him, but to see where they could catch Him in a sin in order to cancel Him, if at all possible, because, by this time, Jesus had gathered many disciples, and had shamed the Pharisees on several occasions for their sinful behavior and their false teachings.

There was a man there at the supper who suffered from dropsy, a painful swelling in the arms or legs, which was often a sign of heart failure. Jesus had miraculously healed many diseases before this. And some of those healings had taken place on the Sabbath Day, the day of rest. And each time Jesus had healed on the Sabbath Day, the Pharisees and other Jews had gotten very angry, both at Him and at those who dared to be healed by Him on the day when they were all supposed to be resting. In chapter 13 of Luke’s Gospel, right before the chapter of today’s Gospel, the ruler of a synagogue (the “head of a Jewish church”!) had yelled at a woman who had been suffering for 18 years, because she dared to be healed by Jesus on a Sabbath day.

So rather than wait for their accusation, Jesus decided to ask them first: Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath? Actually, it was. The commandment prohibited doing “work” on the Sabbath day. But what kind of work was meant? If you read the Old Testament, even Isaiah 58, which we just considered together this past Wednesday, it’s clear that the kind of work that was prohibited on the Sabbath Day was work that was done for a person’s own benefit, working your job, your farm, your kitchen, your yard, etc. Good works to help a person’s neighbor—even good works to help a needy animal!—were never prohibited. Not by God, at least. And the Jews all took care of their animals on the Sabbath Day.

But, for some reason, the experts in the Law remained silent. They remained silent, because they knew they couldn’t cite a single passage from Scripture to prove that healing someone was a violation of God’s commandment. While Jesus, on the other hand, could cite plenty of passages that showed that God wanted certain works to be done on that day, for honoring God and for serving the one in need. So they couldn’t say it was unlawful, and yet, in the ugliness of their pride, they refused to say it was lawful.

So Jesus healed the man and let him go. But He still wanted an answer from the experts in the Law. So He asked again, Which of you, if your ox or donkey fell into a pit, would not immediately pull it out on the Sabbath day? They all would! Anyone would! They’d help an animal on the Sabbath Day, but they wouldn’t approve of their own flesh and blood being helped. Why? Because they took pride in their resting on the Sabbath Day. What’s more, they took pride in being the Sabbath police, condemning others for not being as obedient as they were. And, to top it all off, they couldn’t stand having Jesus expose the ugliness of their pride. They claimed to be defending God’s law, but did they really care what God wanted? No. Did they care at all about what was good for their neighbor, for their fellow Israelite? No. If they had cared about what God wanted, they would have searched the Scriptures, where they would have found that love for God and love for neighbor were front and center, would have found that God’s commandments exposed their pride and condemned them for it, would have found that they needed atonement to be made for their pride, that their only hope did not lie in how well they rested on the Sabbath, but in the mercy of God toward ugly, prideful sinners like them.

There’s more ugliness in the second part of the Gospel, more prideful behavior on the part of the guests at that Sabbath supper. Luke says that Jesus noticed how the guests, as they arrived, all chose the places of highest honor, the tables reserved for the most important guests. Now, it wasn’t a great crime to do that at a Sabbath supper. But it could be embarrassing, as Jesus will point out, and, more importantly, He sees in that behavior an example, a pattern of how those same people behaved toward God, because they didn’t only think highly of themselves compared to the other guests. They thought highly of themselves before God Himself. And that’s both ugly, and deadly.

So He tells the parable, not of a Sabbath supper, but a of a wedding banquet, as the kingdom of heaven is often portrayed. When you are invited by someone to a wedding, do not sit down in the place of highest honor. Otherwise, if someone more honorable than you has been invited by him, the one who invited you both may come and say to you, ‘Give this man your place.’ Then, with shame, you will proceed to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down in the lowest place, so that, when the one who invited you comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher!’ Then you will have honor in front of all those who are sitting at the table with you.

That’s good advice for attending a wedding banquet, isn’t it? If you just assume that you’re the most important person there, you run the risk of being shamed when the host of the banquet comes and kicks you out of the place of honor. But Jesus isn’t interested in earthly wedding banquet behavior. He’s interested in saving people from sin, death, and the devil, and He knows the danger of thinking highly of oneself when it comes to God.

God invites everyone to come into His kingdom. But how you come in is incredibly important. If you approach God as someone who thinks he deserves recognition, who has worked hard and earned a place in heaven and whom God is lucky to have by His side, if you approach God on your own terms, with your own beliefs, doing what you think is right (regardless of what He has to say about it in His Word), that’s like making a beeline for that place of highest honor. But if you do that, you’re doomed, because the Host of the heavenly feast will come in and see you sitting there, all proud of yourself, and He will tell you to get up and give your place to someone else. And when Jesus says in His parable that you’ll have to go down to the lowest place, what He means is, you won’t have a place in God’s presence at all. You’ll be ushered out of His kingdom into eternal darkness.

On the other hand, if you approach God, as He has invited you to do, as someone who thinks he deserves nothing from Him, who recognizes that he has no righteousness of His own to offer God, who has earned only wrath and punishment from the just and holy God, who only looks to God for the mercy and favor He has promised to poor sinners for the sake of Jesus Christ, who died for you so that you might be accepted by His heavenly Father, if you approach God on His terms, listening to His Word and believing in His Son Jesus Christ, that’s like choosing the lowest place at the banquet. And if you do that, you’re saved, because the Host of the heavenly feast will come in and see you sitting there, where Jesus told you sit, and He will tell you to get up and go to a higher place, to the place of a son or a daughter of God, to a place of eternal life.

Jesus summarizes the whole thing with a saying that’s often repeated in the Scriptures: For whoever exalts himself will be humbled; and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. To exalt yourself is the way of the Law. It’s to think highly of yourself, as if you deserved something from God. But the Law exposes, not our worthiness, but our sin. As Paul writes to the Romans, by the Law is the knowledge of sin. When you approach God by way of the Law, as the Pharisees and experts of the law often did, your hidden ugliness is exposed every single time. So don’t exalt yourself! Don’t think highly of yourself! Don’t start to think that you’ve earned heaven by your obedience! That is the way of death. Instead, follow the way of the Gospel. The way of the Gospel is to think nothing of yourself, but to think everything of God and His promise to save you through faith in His beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, to save you out of mercy, to save you and adopt you and preserve you as His child throughout this life, until you reach the heavenly wedding banquet.

If you’ve been thinking highly of yourself and you didn’t see it before as a problem, then it’s good to have the ugliness of that thinking exposed, as Jesus does in today’s Gospel. Or, if you’re already well aware of that sinful attitude of your flesh and have been struggling against it, it’s still good to have it exposed. Because the Christian life requires a continual humbling of ourselves before God. But that self-humbling, which includes faith in Christ Jesus, our Savior and Redeemer, is always accompanied by the tremendous promise that God Himself will exalt you and lift you up on high. And that self-humbling before God will also result in humility before men, as Paul says in the Epistle, I implore you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you were called, with all humility and meekness, with patience, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace: one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above you all, and through you all, and in you all. Amen.

Source: Sermons

Sermon for Trinity 17

Ephesians 4:1-6  +  Luke 14:1-11

When God made Adam and Eve, He made them in His own likeness and image, which means, as we discussed recently in Bible class, that they had true knowledge of God and were truly righteous and holy like God. One of the key components of that righteousness is love, and one of the most basic traits of love is that it focuses outward, away from oneself. Love focuses, first, on God—who He is, what He thinks, what He has said and done, what He wants done. And love focuses, second, on the neighbor—what he or she needs, what would benefit him or her. That doesn’t mean we’re to have no concern at all for ourselves. After all, God says, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” But the focus is outward, toward God first and toward the neighbor second, so that we spend very little time thinking about me—what I think, what I want, what I’m suffering, or what I might suffer if I serve God and my neighbor. Love doesn’t waste time dwelling on how great I am, or what a failure I am. It doesn’t have time to dwell on those things. There are too many other people to focus on. “What does God say? What would help the people around me?” These are the questions God would have us focus on. To live like that is to live in love, which is also to live in humility. That’s how God made us to be.

But since the fall into sin, it isn’t who we are, by nature. One of the main effects of sin on our race is that it has taken that outward focus of love and curved it inward, so that by nature we spend most of our time worrying about what I think, what I want, what I need, what I’m suffering, what I’m going through, how great I am, or how worthless I am. I think I’ve told you before that one of my teachers used to call this, “navel-gazing,” staring at your own belly button, focusing on yourself. We’re all prone to that. It’s one of the defining characteristics of sinners, in fact.

But Jesus wasn’t—wasn’t a sinner, wasn’t prone to navel-gazing. His focus was always outward, toward His Father in heaven, and toward the rest of humanity whom He came to save at great cost to Himself. He shows us in today’s Gospel the importance of an outward focus for God’s people.

It was a Sabbath Day. Jesus was invited to a meal at the house of one of the rulers of the Pharisees. The Pharisees were notoriously focused on themselves, how obedient they were, how much godlier they were than others. There was a sick man there, a man who had dropsy. Jesus planned to heal him, but first, He wanted to guide the Pharisees and the other guests to understand this outward focus. Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?, He asked. They remained silent. Not a word. They didn’t turn first to God, to see what He said about it in His Word. (If they had, they would have realized that God never forbade helping your neighbor on the Sabbath Day.) Instead, they turned inward. They made the Sabbath to be about themselves, their obedience to God’s commandment to rest on that day. They didn’t want to see anyone healed on the Sabbath. But they couldn’t come right out and say that, or they would have looked just as self-centered and mean spirited as they actually were. So they remained silent.

Jesus healed the man and let him go. Then He asked them, Which of you, having a donkey or an ox that has fallen into a pit, will not immediately pull him out on the Sabbath day? And they could not answer Him regarding these things. Of course, all of them would have helped their own animal on that day. But, again, they couldn’t admit that, because it would show that they had more concern for their animal than they did for their fellow Israelite who was suffering.

The fact is, God made the Sabbath day to emphasize that outward focus, on God, on His Word, and on the neighbor. The Sabbath rest was not designed so that the Israelites could look at themselves resting, could focus on themselves obeying the commandment, but on their workers who needed a break, on their family members who needed a break from work. My neighbor needs rest! My animals need rest! God’s Word must be heard! The ministry must be used! The needy must be helped! Every other day, the focus, by necessity, perhaps, was more about, my work, my chores, my needs. But one day a week, they were to focus exclusively on God’s word and their neighbors need. So not only did the Law permit healing on the Sabbath. It actually required it—if healing were in your power.

So Jesus’ kindness and compassion for the man with dropsy show us what true, humble, outward-focused love toward the neighbor looks like, and at the same time it highlighted the self-centeredness and inward focus of the Pharisees.

Then we come to the second part of our Gospel. At the same meal, Jesus noticed how the guests chose the best places for themselves. In their culture, the seating arrangement at a banquet said something about how important or how unimportant a guest was. And all these guests seemed to think of themselves as more important than the rest, as deserving of the best spot available. Again, focused inward, on their own importance.

But where should they have been focused? On the one who invited them! Gratitude toward the host for inviting them at all! And deference to the host’s decision about where each guest should sit. He’s the one you should be focused on. And since God is the Host of the heavenly banquet, and the King of His kingdom, which is the holy Christian Church, He will determine where each one belongs. And Jesus tells us here what pleases Him and what displeases Him.

It displeases God when we exalt ourselves, when we raise ourselves up in His presence, when we put ourselves ahead of others, when we make ourselves the judges of ourselves. Leave that to Me, He says. Leave it to Me to decide. Let Me be the Judge, because I am the Judge and I will determine where each one belongs. As for you, go and sit down in the lowest place, so that when he who invited you comes he may say to you, ‘Friend, go up higher.’

How do you choose the lowest place before God? You admit, as you did in the confession of sins today, that you are a poor miserable sinner who has justly deserved His wrath and punishment. That means you admit that you’re no more worthy of His grace and mercy than anyone else. In fact, you see yourself as “chief of sinners.” That goes contrary to what our sinful nature wants. The most natural thing is to choose a place in the middle. No, I’m not the most deserving out there, but surely I’m not the least deserving! I’ll go over here to the middle and choose a place for myself. But no, Jesus says. That’s wrong, and dangerous, too. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled. No, go and sit down in the lowest place. Admit before God and man that you are the least deserving, because you haven’t maintained that outward focus toward God and your neighbor that God demands. Not even close. You’ve spent more than a little time focused first on what you need, how you’ve been treated, how you’re suffering, what you deserve, how great you are, or how wretched you are. It’s time to let God be the Judge, and that means lowering yourself all the way down to the bottom of the heap before Him.

For those who do, Jesus makes an amazing promise: He who humbles himself will be exalted. There are no if’s or maybe’s about that promise. Admit your unworthiness before God, confess your curved, inward focus. Look to God, not for recognition of how worthy you are, but only for His mercy in Christ Jesus. And God will exalt you. He will lift you up. He will forgive you your sins and give you a place of honor in His kingdom, a good place, the right place, a place of His choosing, a place with Him.

And He’ll do all this, because Jesus, your Substitute, maintained His outward focus on God and on His neighbor for you, in your place. He maintained it all the way through Holy Week and up to the cross, never flinching, never crying out, “What about Me? What about what I deserve?” It was all, every moment of it, every drop of blood, spent yearning to fulfill His Father’s will, yearning to earn mankind’s salvation.

As a new person in Christ, that is the example you have also been called to imitate. Walk worthy of the calling with which you were called, with all lowliness and gentleness, with longsuffering, bearing with one another in love, endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There it is, the outward focus on your neighbor, and especially on your fellow Christian. It’s hard not to worry about yourself. It’s hard not to focus on your own successes and on your own failures. It’s hard to look up, away from your own belly button. But God, right now, is gently lifting up your head to stop worrying about yourself, to stop complaining, to see only the people around you—your family, your church, your neighbor. And He lifts your head even higher, to see Him, and to know that Christ, your Savior, and God, your Father, is not focused on Himself at all, but on you. One Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all. You, focused on Him, He, focused on you, with the promise to raise you up and give you all you need—what need do you have to focus on yourself? Amen.

Source: Sermons