Luke 14:1-14
It would be easy to think that the two stories Jesus tells in today’s Gospel lesson are just about good manners. But if we think that, we will be missing important lessons Jesus wants to teach us.
Take a look, please, at our Gospel lesson, Luke 14:1-14, starting at verse 7: “When [Jesus] noticed how the guests picked the places of honor at the table, he told them this parable.”
A parable, of course, is a special sort of story. A parable is a story woven from people's everyday experiences, with another story of deep significance rolled alongside of it. The term parable has been transliterated into English from the Greek word, parabolos, a compound word composed of para, a prefix meaning alongside (as in parallel) and bolos, related to the terms throw or ball. A parable is a story with another story, a deeper story told alongside it. Jesus’ parables always tell us something about the kingdom of God that Jesus brought into the world and still brings to those who believe in Him.
Jesus told the two parables in today’s Gospel lesson while He sat a banquet at the home of a Pharisee. We know something about the Pharisees, of course. Although they wouldn’t have expressed themselves in quite this way, the Pharisees didn’t believe that rightness with God—what the Bible calls righteousness—is a gift from God given to those who repent for sin and believe in the God we now know in Jesus. Instead, they believed that, by their actions, they would earn a place in heaven.
Despite their seeming faithfulness, the Pharisees really tried to whittle God down to human size, to turn God into a deity they could force to make concessions to them because they were such good people.
Today, people don’t worry so much about God’s favor. We moderns seem to have whittled God completely out of our lives. Or we’ve twisted the Bible’s teaching that God is love and turned the mighty God of the universe into an indulgent sugar daddy.
Many people, even those identifying themselves as Christians, seem to think that all roads lead to heaven. Polling, in fact, repeatedly shows that Christians in the United States accept Jesus’ teaching that there is a heaven. But much smaller numbers of Christians accept the word of Jesus that there is a hell. How it's possible to accept some of Jesus' teaching, while not accepting other of His teachings, while claiming Him as Lord is something these folks can't explain very well.
Let’s face it: The Bible is filled with inconvenient truths we would rather not hear about. I know that this is true for me. We’re like the rebel people of God the prophet Isaiah addressed some seven hundred years before Jesus. “Give us no more visions of what is right!” they tell the prophet in Isaiah 30:10. “Tell us pleasant things…”
By contrast, for all their many faults, most of the Pharisees would never have knowingly taught things contrary to the will of God. In fact, like the dumb sheep that populated many of Jesus’ other parables, they unknowingly and thoughtlessly drifted into their false beliefs.
Christ’s Church always struggles to resist such unintentional drifting from God. That’s why the Reformation begun by Martin Luther and others back in the sixteenth century must be a continuing part of our lives today. We need to constantly return to God, to God’s Word, to God’s will, to Jesus Christ.
But many Christians seem to have settled into a new kind of Pharisaism in which we are expected to passively go along with what I call Christianity Lite, the religion of anything goes so long as it conforms to the shifting standards of society. Someone has said that if Jesus were to come to a typical Christian congregation in North America and teach, as He did to the Pharisees in first-century Judea, “Stop trying to earn righteousness and salvation,” the response would be, “Who’s trying to be righteous?”
Many churches and many Christians--even we ourselves, we must confess--have wandered from surrendering trust in Christ and from reverence for God’s Word and will.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who was executed by the Nazis at the end of World War II, warned Christians against what he called “cheap grace,” which he described as “the grace we bestow on ourselves…the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession.”
Still and all, in this time with so little consciousness of God or concern about the will of God, people are, as in first-century Judea, still in a frenzy to push themselves to the top, to be noticed, to win, to die with the most toys. These impulses are bred in our sinful bones. And Jesus’ two parables are aimed as much at us as they were at His original hearers.
The first one was told specifically to the guests who were jockeying for places of honor at the banquet. Take a look at it, please, starting at verse 8. “When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited. If so, the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, ‘Give this person your seat.’ Then, humiliated, you will have to take the least important place. But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, ‘Friend, move up to a better place.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all the other guests. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
From the very beginning of Luke’s Gospel, we’re told that Jesus came into our world to flip humanity’s standard operating procedures on their head. His mother, Mary had it right, when she said, in what we call the Magnifcat, “[God] has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty.” [Luke 1:51-53]
Mary knew the truth that Jesus affirms in today’s first parable, that those who humble themselves before God, even if despised by the world, are exalted in God’s kingdom.
Jesus calls us to live in confidence not in ourselves or our achievements or our shrewd exploitation of people and circumstances, but in the God Who loves us just as we are and Who is committed to helping those humble enough to confess their sins and their need of Him to enter the process of becoming more Christ-like in this life.
Those who trust in Christ are God’s children forever. There’s nothing you can do or need to do to earn that exalted status. When you have Jesus living within you, you most certainly will try to be and do your best every day. You’ll want to do everything to the glory of the God Who made you and sets you free from sin and death. But you also will know that the God Who sent His Son to die and rise for you will honor your repentance and shower you with a sense of your infinite value in the eyes of heaven, whatever your job, irrespective of how many degrees you have acquired, however large your income, no matter how good your health, however popular you may be, or even if you get the best spot at the banquet or the football game.
In Christ, I hope and pray that you know that no matter what you’ve done, or how guilty you may really be for some past wrong none of us could guess, or how inadequate you may feel, you could not possibly be more loved by God than you are at this very moment.
And if we are willing to let God tear down all the walls we have that can block out His grace and love, if we are willing to repent for our sins and receive forgiveness, we become God’s personal reclamation projects. Not only can God erase the power of sin and death over you, He can, for those who surrender each day, decrease your taste for the sins that may keep you from knowing peace with God and peace with yourself.
The Lord wants you to take a place of honor at His table even if you think that you’re too lowly or too unworthy to take it. God loves you and all people are welcome to, in the words of Scripture, “taste and see that the Lord is good.” [Psalm 34:8]
Jesus next tells a kind parable to His host, a scenario in which He asks the man (and us) to imagine himself (and we ourselves) as the lead character. You can read it, starting at verse 12. ““When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or sisters, your relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”
Jesus isn’t making deals here. He’s saying that we who have been welcomed by God our host into the kingdom of God are called to also welcome others. All others.
Jesus is here expressing again what He says in the Great Commission: “...go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” [Matthew 28:19-20]
Filled with God’s Spirit, you and I are to be the instruments God uses to invite others to hear God’s Word, Law and Gospel, to hear God’s call and command to repentance, to hear God’s call and command to believe in Jesus and know life everlasting.
We have no control over whether those we invite to follow Christ with us will let go of their sins to grasp hold of the grace offered in Jesus. But we must never stop telling them, by our words and our lives, either the inconvenient truth about human sin and our need of God or the incredible, life-changing, good news of the God Who, in Christ, can turn our lives upside down and in doing so, turn our souls right-side up, facing God for life, following Christ for hope, being filled with the Holy Spirit to give us a joy that will never end. Amen!
[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Showing posts with label Psalm 34:8. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Psalm 34:8. Show all posts
Sunday, August 28, 2016
Monday, May 06, 2013
Do Lutherans Celebrate the Mass? Yes! (Part 16, The Augsburg Confession)
We’ve been looking at what it means to be Lutheran Christians by considering the Biblical underpinnings for one of the Lutheran movement’s basic confessional documents, The Augsburg Confession. Since all Lutheran bodies claim to accept the Confession’s understanding of Christian faith, it’s a good place to go to for guidance. Today, we come to Article 24 of the Confession, titled The Mass.
For some of you, hearing a Lutheran worship service called the Mass may seem strange. But that’s what we celebrate together when we receive Christ’s body and blood in Holy Communion. The word mass comes from a Latin word for dismissal which appeared at the end of an ancient Roman Catholic liturgy for Holy Communion. “Ite missa est,” the presiding minister would say: “Go, it is the dismissal.”
We often have something similar in our own Lutheran Communion liturgy when we sing a musical setting of the words of Simeon after he had seen the eight-day-old Jesus at the temple in Jerusalem. We call it the Nunc Dimittis, another Latin phrase that means, “Now dismiss,” as in: “Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace...”
In the Mass, God gathers us together to literally taste and see the goodness of the Lord in Holy Communion, as well as to hear His Word receptively, allowing the gift of faith to take root and grow within us, then God sends us into the world to make disciples. Fortified by Christ’s body and blood and the forgiveness He brings to us through Holy Communion, God dismisses us to tell our neighbors that they too can have eternal life through repentance and belief in Jesus Christ.
So, yes, we Lutherans celebrate the Mass. But someone else might ask, “Didn’t we already talk about Holy Communion in this series?”
Yes, we did, back on March 3, when we looked Article 10, The Lord’s Supper. But The Augsburg Confession is divided into two sections. The first twenty-one articles deal with subjects that Philipp Melanchthon, the colleague and friend of Martin Luther who wrote the Confession, felt for certain that none of the Roman Catholic theologians he was to dialog and debate with at Augsburg, Germany in 1530, could possibly disagree with. (That turned out not to be true.)
The last seven articles dealt with subjects over which Melanchthon expected to receive more pushback. So, in Article 24, which you can find starting on page 25 in the buff and brown editions of The Augsburg Confession, Melanchthon deals with Lutheran understandings of the Mass he knew would be controversial.
They still are. But like Martin Luther, we insist that unless we can be shown by Scripture and plain reason based on Scripture where we have erred, we must stand with Christ and with His Word as we understand them.
Article 24 is long. So, I want to hone in on four main points it makes.
The first is this: Anyone who receives the Sacrament should do so with the deepest reverence, love, awe, respect, and fear of God.
Starting in the second sentence of the article, we read that: “The Mass is held among us and celebrated with the highest reverence.”
I don’t need to belabor this point. Lutherans take Jesus literally when He says, “This is my body” and “This is my blood.”
We may not be feeling it on the days His body and blood are offered to us.
We may not be able to understand His promise to be present “in, with, and under” the bread and the wine in the Sacrament.
It doesn’t matter!
Jesus, the One Who died for us and then rose for us, can be counted on to keep His promises.
If Jesus says that His body and blood are in the bread and the wine, you can bank on it.
This means that every time you receive the Sacrament, even on the days my sermons are off, even when the kids are restless, even when the choir or Cyndy hit a rare sour note, even if you’re tired, whatever your circumstance, you’re coming to the altar to meet the King of kings, the Lord of lords, the God of the universe. He deserves our reverence.
A second and related point the Confession makes is this: Holy Communion should only be shared after we have made confession of our sins.
Slide down to the last half-sentence at the bottom of page 25. It says: “No one is admitted to the Sacrament without first being examined...”
This is stated well in Paul’s words about Holy Communion, 1 Corinthians 11:27-29:
Confessing our sins lets us, like King David in Psalm 139, pray to God:
A third point the article makes is this: Everyone who is able to receive Holy Communion in public worship should do so.
Except in the cases of shut-ins, the ill, their families, or others in emergency circumstances, the term private communion should be an oxymoron. Holy Communion is meant to be a community meal partaken by all who have repented for sin, who believe that Christ is truly coming to them in the Sacrament, and trust Jesus’ promise that this Sacrament is “for you.”
There was a practice in the Church back in the days when the Confession was written of paying priests, often handsomely, to celebrate private masses. Melanchthon cites 1 Timothy 3:3 as condemning any practice designed to make money from the ministry of Word and Sacrament. There we’re told that anyone who wants to be an overseer of this ministry should not be “greedy for money.”
But greed for money on the part of clergy isn't the only wrong motive for the celebration of private Communions. I once heard of a man who wanted a pastor he liked to bring Holy Communion to him because he didn’t like the pastor of his congregation. But the pastor he contacted explained to him that as flattered as he was by the man’s admiration, the effectiveness of the Sacrament didn’t depend on which called pastor handed him the bread or the wine, but on the Word and promise of God meeting the bread and the wine. He explained: “In a way, for me to bring private Communion to you would be showing contempt for Christ and the Sacrament.” That pastor was right. But after that, the man disliked two pastors.
The fourth and most important point the Confession makes here is this: Jesus is not sacrificed again every time we celebrate Holy Communion.
The theology of the majority Church of the sixteenth century held that Jesus’ death on the cross only covered up humanity’s original sin and that in order to cover the sins people commit each day, Jesus had to be sacrificed over and over again.
That, it was held--and is still held by Roman Catholic theology today--was what Holy Communion--the Mass--was: in essence, putting Jesus back on the cross and crucifying Him again every time the Sacrament is offered.
For Lutherans, this teaching doesn’t ring true for two reasons.
First: It drains Jesus’ crucifixion of its power, making it seem like a half-measure. Please turn to Hebrews 10:11-12. Contrasting the sacrifices the Jewish priests made constantly for people’s sins to Jesus’ sacrifice of Himself on the cross, Hebrews says:
A sacrifice, one scholar has written, “is a ceremony or act which we render to God to honor him.” But “a sacrament is a ceremony or act in which God offers us...the promise joined to the ceremony.” In sacrifices, human beings are the actors. In sacraments, God acts and we are called to receive in faith what God promises.
For example, Jesus says this about Holy Baptism in Mark 16:16: “He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe is condemned.” We can’t understand how Holy Communion (or Holy Baptism, for that matter) may work. We know only that we can receive it in faith, trusting Jesus at His Word to be present in the Sacrament and to give us life and forgiveness through it. He’s already done all the work to set us free from sin, death, and the devil. He’s already done all the work to set us free from the sins we confess, known and unknown to us, that we bring to Him. He’s already died on a cross as the atoning sacrifice for all our sins. He’s already risen from death to give new lives to us. We simply receive His body and blood with a desire to be clean and a desire to trust in Him. Jesus will do the rest!
The Mass in which God calls His people in Christ together to receive His body and blood is a great gift.
It’s a gift to be received with reverence.
It assures the repentant that Christ Who died and rose for them gives them forgiveness of sin.
It’s a gift Christians should be eager to receive as often as it’s offered.
And, it’s something God does for us, not something we do for God.
There’s nothing we have to do to be worthy of this gift but to turn from sin, to turn to Christ, and trust Him when He says, “This is My body; This is My blood.” Amen
For some of you, hearing a Lutheran worship service called the Mass may seem strange. But that’s what we celebrate together when we receive Christ’s body and blood in Holy Communion. The word mass comes from a Latin word for dismissal which appeared at the end of an ancient Roman Catholic liturgy for Holy Communion. “Ite missa est,” the presiding minister would say: “Go, it is the dismissal.”
We often have something similar in our own Lutheran Communion liturgy when we sing a musical setting of the words of Simeon after he had seen the eight-day-old Jesus at the temple in Jerusalem. We call it the Nunc Dimittis, another Latin phrase that means, “Now dismiss,” as in: “Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace...”
In the Mass, God gathers us together to literally taste and see the goodness of the Lord in Holy Communion, as well as to hear His Word receptively, allowing the gift of faith to take root and grow within us, then God sends us into the world to make disciples. Fortified by Christ’s body and blood and the forgiveness He brings to us through Holy Communion, God dismisses us to tell our neighbors that they too can have eternal life through repentance and belief in Jesus Christ.
So, yes, we Lutherans celebrate the Mass. But someone else might ask, “Didn’t we already talk about Holy Communion in this series?”
Yes, we did, back on March 3, when we looked Article 10, The Lord’s Supper. But The Augsburg Confession is divided into two sections. The first twenty-one articles deal with subjects that Philipp Melanchthon, the colleague and friend of Martin Luther who wrote the Confession, felt for certain that none of the Roman Catholic theologians he was to dialog and debate with at Augsburg, Germany in 1530, could possibly disagree with. (That turned out not to be true.)
The last seven articles dealt with subjects over which Melanchthon expected to receive more pushback. So, in Article 24, which you can find starting on page 25 in the buff and brown editions of The Augsburg Confession, Melanchthon deals with Lutheran understandings of the Mass he knew would be controversial.
They still are. But like Martin Luther, we insist that unless we can be shown by Scripture and plain reason based on Scripture where we have erred, we must stand with Christ and with His Word as we understand them.
Article 24 is long. So, I want to hone in on four main points it makes.
The first is this: Anyone who receives the Sacrament should do so with the deepest reverence, love, awe, respect, and fear of God.
Starting in the second sentence of the article, we read that: “The Mass is held among us and celebrated with the highest reverence.”
I don’t need to belabor this point. Lutherans take Jesus literally when He says, “This is my body” and “This is my blood.”
We may not be feeling it on the days His body and blood are offered to us.
We may not be able to understand His promise to be present “in, with, and under” the bread and the wine in the Sacrament.
It doesn’t matter!
Jesus, the One Who died for us and then rose for us, can be counted on to keep His promises.
If Jesus says that His body and blood are in the bread and the wine, you can bank on it.
This means that every time you receive the Sacrament, even on the days my sermons are off, even when the kids are restless, even when the choir or Cyndy hit a rare sour note, even if you’re tired, whatever your circumstance, you’re coming to the altar to meet the King of kings, the Lord of lords, the God of the universe. He deserves our reverence.
A second and related point the Confession makes is this: Holy Communion should only be shared after we have made confession of our sins.
Slide down to the last half-sentence at the bottom of page 25. It says: “No one is admitted to the Sacrament without first being examined...”
This is stated well in Paul’s words about Holy Communion, 1 Corinthians 11:27-29:
Therefore whoever eats this bread or drinks this wine in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of the LORD. But let a man examine himself [or a woman examine herself], and so let [them] eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For he who eats and drinks in an unworthy manner eats and drinks judgment to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.This is why our liturgy offers us the opportunity to confess our sins every time we receive the Sacrament.
Confessing our sins lets us, like King David in Psalm 139, pray to God:
Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me and lead me in the way everlasting.When God shows us our sins, we can confess them and lay them at the foot of Jesus’ cross, confident that they are lost forever in what some call God’s “sea of forgetfulness” and we can welcome the body and blood of Jesus as a sign and seal of God’s gracious forgiveness of our sin!
A third point the article makes is this: Everyone who is able to receive Holy Communion in public worship should do so.
Except in the cases of shut-ins, the ill, their families, or others in emergency circumstances, the term private communion should be an oxymoron. Holy Communion is meant to be a community meal partaken by all who have repented for sin, who believe that Christ is truly coming to them in the Sacrament, and trust Jesus’ promise that this Sacrament is “for you.”
There was a practice in the Church back in the days when the Confession was written of paying priests, often handsomely, to celebrate private masses. Melanchthon cites 1 Timothy 3:3 as condemning any practice designed to make money from the ministry of Word and Sacrament. There we’re told that anyone who wants to be an overseer of this ministry should not be “greedy for money.”
But greed for money on the part of clergy isn't the only wrong motive for the celebration of private Communions. I once heard of a man who wanted a pastor he liked to bring Holy Communion to him because he didn’t like the pastor of his congregation. But the pastor he contacted explained to him that as flattered as he was by the man’s admiration, the effectiveness of the Sacrament didn’t depend on which called pastor handed him the bread or the wine, but on the Word and promise of God meeting the bread and the wine. He explained: “In a way, for me to bring private Communion to you would be showing contempt for Christ and the Sacrament.” That pastor was right. But after that, the man disliked two pastors.
The fourth and most important point the Confession makes here is this: Jesus is not sacrificed again every time we celebrate Holy Communion.
The theology of the majority Church of the sixteenth century held that Jesus’ death on the cross only covered up humanity’s original sin and that in order to cover the sins people commit each day, Jesus had to be sacrificed over and over again.
That, it was held--and is still held by Roman Catholic theology today--was what Holy Communion--the Mass--was: in essence, putting Jesus back on the cross and crucifying Him again every time the Sacrament is offered.
For Lutherans, this teaching doesn’t ring true for two reasons.
First: It drains Jesus’ crucifixion of its power, making it seem like a half-measure. Please turn to Hebrews 10:11-12. Contrasting the sacrifices the Jewish priests made constantly for people’s sins to Jesus’ sacrifice of Himself on the cross, Hebrews says:
...every priest stands ministering daily and offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But this Man [Jesus, God and human, Priest and sacrifice] after He had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God...Slip down to verse 14:
For by one offering [Jesus] has perfected forever those who are being sanctified [that is, being made holy, set apart for God].1 Peter 3:18 affirms this same truth:
For Christ also suffered once for our sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God...Second: To see Holy Communion as a sacrifice makes something less than a sacrament of it. Splitting hairs? I don’t think so.
A sacrifice, one scholar has written, “is a ceremony or act which we render to God to honor him.” But “a sacrament is a ceremony or act in which God offers us...the promise joined to the ceremony.” In sacrifices, human beings are the actors. In sacraments, God acts and we are called to receive in faith what God promises.
For example, Jesus says this about Holy Baptism in Mark 16:16: “He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe is condemned.” We can’t understand how Holy Communion (or Holy Baptism, for that matter) may work. We know only that we can receive it in faith, trusting Jesus at His Word to be present in the Sacrament and to give us life and forgiveness through it. He’s already done all the work to set us free from sin, death, and the devil. He’s already done all the work to set us free from the sins we confess, known and unknown to us, that we bring to Him. He’s already died on a cross as the atoning sacrifice for all our sins. He’s already risen from death to give new lives to us. We simply receive His body and blood with a desire to be clean and a desire to trust in Him. Jesus will do the rest!
The Mass in which God calls His people in Christ together to receive His body and blood is a great gift.
It’s a gift to be received with reverence.
It assures the repentant that Christ Who died and rose for them gives them forgiveness of sin.
It’s a gift Christians should be eager to receive as often as it’s offered.
And, it’s something God does for us, not something we do for God.
There’s nothing we have to do to be worthy of this gift but to turn from sin, to turn to Christ, and trust Him when He says, “This is My body; This is My blood.” Amen
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Welcome to God's Upside Down Kingdom
[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]
Luke 14:1, 7-14
It would be easy to think that the two stories Jesus tells in today’s Gospel lesson are just about good manners, fables complete with morals. But if we thought that, we would be missing important lessons Jesus wants to teach us.
Once more today, please pull out the Celebrate inserts and go to the Gospel lesson from Luke 14. Look at verse seven with me: “When [Jesus] noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable.”
A parable, of course, is a story. But a parable is a special sort of story. In the Greek in which the New Testament was written, the word that we transliterate into English as parable is parabole. It’s a compound word that literally means to throw or roll alongside. A parable is a story woven from people's everyday experiences, with another story of deep significance rolled alongside of it. Jesus’ parables were always meant to tell us something about the kingdom of God that Jesus brought into the world.
Jesus told the two parables in today’s Gospel lesson during a banquet at the home of a Pharisee. Pharisees, you’ll remember, were Jews who, like Jesus, believed in the physical resurrection of the dead. But they also believed that if they adhered to certain rules, most of which were made up by human beings and did not come from God, then their behavior would force God to give them places in the heavenly banquet hall.
In the end, of course, the Pharisees did not believe that rightness with God—what the Bible calls righteousness—is a gift from God conferred on those who repent for sin and trust in God. Instead, they believed that, by their actions, they would earn a place in heaven that not God, the devil, or the world could deny to them. Despite their seeming faithfulness, the Pharisees really tried to whittle God down to human size, to turn God into a tiny deity they could force to make concessions to them simply because they were such good people.
Today, people don’t worry so much about God’s favor. We often seem to have whittled God right out of our lives. Or we’ve twisted the Bible’s teaching that God is love and turned the mighty God of the universe into an indulgent sugar daddy. Many people, even those identifying themselves as Christians, seem to think that all roads lead to heaven. Polling, in fact, repeatedly shows that Christians in the United States accept Jesus’ teaching that there is a heaven. But much smaller numbers of Christians accept the word of Jesus that there is a hell.
Let’s face it: The Bible is filled with inconvenient truths we would rather not hear about. We’re like the rebel people of God the prophet Isaiah addressed some seven hundred years before Jesus. “Do not prophesy what is right,” Isaiah heard them saying, “speak to us smooth things…”
By contrast, for all their many faults, most of the Pharisees would never have knowingly taught things contrary to the will of God. In fact, they unknowingly and thoughtlessly drifted into their false beliefs.
And Christ’s Church always struggles to resist such unintentional drifting from God. That’s why the Reformation begun by Martin Luther and others back in the sixteenth century must be a continuing part of our lives today. We need to constantly return to God, to God’s Word, to God’s will.
But many Christians seem to have settled into a new kind of Pharisaism in which we are expected to passively go along with what I call Christianity Lite, the religion of anything goes so long as it conforms to the shifting standards of society regarding what is politically correct.
Someone has said that if Jesus were to come to a typical Lutheran congregation in North America and teach, as He did to the Pharisees in first-century Judea, “Stop trying to earn righteousness and salvation,” the response would be, “Who’s trying?”
That’s how far we Lutherans have wandered from Martin Luther’s belief that whenever God’s Word is proclaimed—whether from a pulpit or in all Christians’ everyday interactions with others, we must include the Law (the revelation of God’s will for human beings) and the Gospel (the Good News that in Christ, we who don’t measure up to God’s will for us, can be forgiven and made new and filled with the power of the Holy Spirit to turn from our sins and sinful impulses and receive eternal life from God).
We’ve wandered, too, from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who was executed by the Nazis at the end of World War II, who, in The Cost of Discipleship, warned Lutherans and all Christians against what he called “cheap grace,” which he described as “the grace we bestow on ourselves…the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession.”
Still and all, in this time with so little consciousness of God or concern about the will of God, people are, as in first-century Judea, still in a frenzy to push themselves to the top, to be noticed, to win, to die with the most toys in their possession. These impulses are bred in our sinful bones. And Jesus’ two parables are aimed as much at us as they were His original hearers, the Pharisee host and all his guests.
The first one was told specifically to the guests who were jockeying for places of honor at the banquet. Read along with me, starting at verse 8. “’When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host; and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you,”Friend, move up higher”; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
From the very beginning of Luke’s Gospel, we’re told that Jesus came into our world to flip humanity’s standard operating procedures on their head. A few weeks ago, we looked at the words of Jesus’ earthly mother, Mary, who said of God: “He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; He has brought down the powerful from their thrones; and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things; and he has sent the rich away empty.”
Mary knew the truth that Jesus affirms in today’s first parable, that those who humble themselves before God, even if despised by the world, are exalted in God’s kingdom. Jesus calls us to live in confidence not in ourselves or our achievements or our shrewd exploitation of people and circumstances, but in the God Who loves us just as we are and Who is committed to helping those humble enough to confess their sins and their need of Him to enter the process of becoming more Christ-like in this life.
As believers in Jesus, we can live each day knowing that, whatever the world may think or say, we are God’s children forever. When you have Jesus living within you, you most certainly will try to be and do your best every day. But you also will know that the God Who sent His Son to die and rise for you will honor your repentance and shower you with a sense of your infinite value in the eyes of heaven, whatever your job, irrespective of how many degrees you have acquired, however large your income, no matter how good your health, however popular you may be, or even if you get the best spot at the banquet or the football game.
In Christ, I hope and pray that you know that no matter what you’ve done, or how guilty you may be, or how inadequate you may feel, you could not possibly be more loved by God than you are at this very moment.
And if we are willing to let God tear down all the walls that can block out His grace and love, if we are willing to repent for our sins and receive forgiveness, we become God’s personal reclamation projects. Not only can God erase the power of sin and death over you, He can, for those who surrender each day, decrease your taste for the sins that may keep you from knowing peace with God and peace with yourself.
The Lord wants you to take a place of honor at His table even if you think that you’re too lowly or too unworthy to take it. God loves you and all people are welcome to, in the words of Scripture, “taste and see the goodness of the Lord.”
Jesus tells a second parable to His host. You can read it, starting at verse 12. “He said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”
Jesus isn’t making deals here. He’s saying that we who have been welcomed by God our host into the kingdom of God are called to also welcome others. All others. Jesus puts it this way in the Great Commission, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.”
Filled with God’s Spirit, you and I are to be the instruments God uses to invite others to hear God’s Word, Law and Gospel, to hear God’s call and command to repentance, to hear God’s call and command to believe in Jesus and know life everlasting.
We have no control over whether those we invite or welcome will let go of their sins to grasp hold of the grace offered in Jesus. But we must never stop telling them, by our words and our lives, either the inconvenient truth about human sin and our need of God or the incredible, life-changing, good news of the God Who, in Christ, can turn our lives upside down and in doing so, turn our souls right-side up, facing God for life, following Christ for hope, being filled with the Holy Spirit to give us a joy that will never end. Amen!
Luke 14:1, 7-14
It would be easy to think that the two stories Jesus tells in today’s Gospel lesson are just about good manners, fables complete with morals. But if we thought that, we would be missing important lessons Jesus wants to teach us.
Once more today, please pull out the Celebrate inserts and go to the Gospel lesson from Luke 14. Look at verse seven with me: “When [Jesus] noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable.”
A parable, of course, is a story. But a parable is a special sort of story. In the Greek in which the New Testament was written, the word that we transliterate into English as parable is parabole. It’s a compound word that literally means to throw or roll alongside. A parable is a story woven from people's everyday experiences, with another story of deep significance rolled alongside of it. Jesus’ parables were always meant to tell us something about the kingdom of God that Jesus brought into the world.
Jesus told the two parables in today’s Gospel lesson during a banquet at the home of a Pharisee. Pharisees, you’ll remember, were Jews who, like Jesus, believed in the physical resurrection of the dead. But they also believed that if they adhered to certain rules, most of which were made up by human beings and did not come from God, then their behavior would force God to give them places in the heavenly banquet hall.
In the end, of course, the Pharisees did not believe that rightness with God—what the Bible calls righteousness—is a gift from God conferred on those who repent for sin and trust in God. Instead, they believed that, by their actions, they would earn a place in heaven that not God, the devil, or the world could deny to them. Despite their seeming faithfulness, the Pharisees really tried to whittle God down to human size, to turn God into a tiny deity they could force to make concessions to them simply because they were such good people.
Today, people don’t worry so much about God’s favor. We often seem to have whittled God right out of our lives. Or we’ve twisted the Bible’s teaching that God is love and turned the mighty God of the universe into an indulgent sugar daddy. Many people, even those identifying themselves as Christians, seem to think that all roads lead to heaven. Polling, in fact, repeatedly shows that Christians in the United States accept Jesus’ teaching that there is a heaven. But much smaller numbers of Christians accept the word of Jesus that there is a hell.
Let’s face it: The Bible is filled with inconvenient truths we would rather not hear about. We’re like the rebel people of God the prophet Isaiah addressed some seven hundred years before Jesus. “Do not prophesy what is right,” Isaiah heard them saying, “speak to us smooth things…”
By contrast, for all their many faults, most of the Pharisees would never have knowingly taught things contrary to the will of God. In fact, they unknowingly and thoughtlessly drifted into their false beliefs.
And Christ’s Church always struggles to resist such unintentional drifting from God. That’s why the Reformation begun by Martin Luther and others back in the sixteenth century must be a continuing part of our lives today. We need to constantly return to God, to God’s Word, to God’s will.
But many Christians seem to have settled into a new kind of Pharisaism in which we are expected to passively go along with what I call Christianity Lite, the religion of anything goes so long as it conforms to the shifting standards of society regarding what is politically correct.
Someone has said that if Jesus were to come to a typical Lutheran congregation in North America and teach, as He did to the Pharisees in first-century Judea, “Stop trying to earn righteousness and salvation,” the response would be, “Who’s trying?”
That’s how far we Lutherans have wandered from Martin Luther’s belief that whenever God’s Word is proclaimed—whether from a pulpit or in all Christians’ everyday interactions with others, we must include the Law (the revelation of God’s will for human beings) and the Gospel (the Good News that in Christ, we who don’t measure up to God’s will for us, can be forgiven and made new and filled with the power of the Holy Spirit to turn from our sins and sinful impulses and receive eternal life from God).
We’ve wandered, too, from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who was executed by the Nazis at the end of World War II, who, in The Cost of Discipleship, warned Lutherans and all Christians against what he called “cheap grace,” which he described as “the grace we bestow on ourselves…the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession.”
Still and all, in this time with so little consciousness of God or concern about the will of God, people are, as in first-century Judea, still in a frenzy to push themselves to the top, to be noticed, to win, to die with the most toys in their possession. These impulses are bred in our sinful bones. And Jesus’ two parables are aimed as much at us as they were His original hearers, the Pharisee host and all his guests.
The first one was told specifically to the guests who were jockeying for places of honor at the banquet. Read along with me, starting at verse 8. “’When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host; and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you,”Friend, move up higher”; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
From the very beginning of Luke’s Gospel, we’re told that Jesus came into our world to flip humanity’s standard operating procedures on their head. A few weeks ago, we looked at the words of Jesus’ earthly mother, Mary, who said of God: “He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; He has brought down the powerful from their thrones; and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things; and he has sent the rich away empty.”
Mary knew the truth that Jesus affirms in today’s first parable, that those who humble themselves before God, even if despised by the world, are exalted in God’s kingdom. Jesus calls us to live in confidence not in ourselves or our achievements or our shrewd exploitation of people and circumstances, but in the God Who loves us just as we are and Who is committed to helping those humble enough to confess their sins and their need of Him to enter the process of becoming more Christ-like in this life.
As believers in Jesus, we can live each day knowing that, whatever the world may think or say, we are God’s children forever. When you have Jesus living within you, you most certainly will try to be and do your best every day. But you also will know that the God Who sent His Son to die and rise for you will honor your repentance and shower you with a sense of your infinite value in the eyes of heaven, whatever your job, irrespective of how many degrees you have acquired, however large your income, no matter how good your health, however popular you may be, or even if you get the best spot at the banquet or the football game.
In Christ, I hope and pray that you know that no matter what you’ve done, or how guilty you may be, or how inadequate you may feel, you could not possibly be more loved by God than you are at this very moment.
And if we are willing to let God tear down all the walls that can block out His grace and love, if we are willing to repent for our sins and receive forgiveness, we become God’s personal reclamation projects. Not only can God erase the power of sin and death over you, He can, for those who surrender each day, decrease your taste for the sins that may keep you from knowing peace with God and peace with yourself.
The Lord wants you to take a place of honor at His table even if you think that you’re too lowly or too unworthy to take it. God loves you and all people are welcome to, in the words of Scripture, “taste and see the goodness of the Lord.”
Jesus tells a second parable to His host. You can read it, starting at verse 12. “He said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”
Jesus isn’t making deals here. He’s saying that we who have been welcomed by God our host into the kingdom of God are called to also welcome others. All others. Jesus puts it this way in the Great Commission, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.”
Filled with God’s Spirit, you and I are to be the instruments God uses to invite others to hear God’s Word, Law and Gospel, to hear God’s call and command to repentance, to hear God’s call and command to believe in Jesus and know life everlasting.
We have no control over whether those we invite or welcome will let go of their sins to grasp hold of the grace offered in Jesus. But we must never stop telling them, by our words and our lives, either the inconvenient truth about human sin and our need of God or the incredible, life-changing, good news of the God Who, in Christ, can turn our lives upside down and in doing so, turn our souls right-side up, facing God for life, following Christ for hope, being filled with the Holy Spirit to give us a joy that will never end. Amen!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)