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!

Set Free!

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]

Galatians 4:1-7
A woman I worked with years ago, a Roman Catholic, was trying once at the end of a workday, to clarify what Lutherans believe about Mary, the mother of Jesus. “You don’t think she was a virgin, right?” she asked. I was surprised, but assured her, "No, we say that Jesus was 'conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary' when we worship on Sunday mornings, just like you do."

I guess that I shouldn't have been too surprised though, because, oddly enough, there’s always been a lot of misunderstanding and disagreements among Christians over Mary.

Today, August 15, is a special day on church calendars all over the world. For our Roman Catholic friends, this is the Feast of the Assumption, commemorating the day that they say that Mary was bodily assumed into heaven at her death. Lutherans find no reason to believe that's what happened.

Be that as it may, we Lutherans believe that Mary has a lot to teach us about what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ.

We also are amazed by the way in which God used this young teenager from an obscure village to bring the Messiah into the world.  Mary herself was amazed by that and amazed too, that, based on her own experience, God so obviously cares about the eternal destinies of all the world’s "ordinary" people. (One thing we know for sure, though, is that while we all may be "ordinary" people, God's love for each of us is extraordinary!)

In today’s Gospel lesson, composed of the Magnificat, Mary’s song of praise which comes during her visit with Elizabeth, Mary sees God reversing the fortunes of both those who trust in God’s grace and of those who trust in the "gods" favored by most in the world. God, she says, “has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants for ever.”

Mary understood that in Jesus, God was turning the world on its head, ensuring that eternity will belong not to those who claw and take and scheme and reason their way to power or prominence or influence or other worldly advantages, but to those who trust totally in Christ.

Our Gospel lesson came up this past Advent Season. So, I want to turn our attention away from it and, in a move of which I think Mary would approv, away from Mary, toward the Lord she served.

Pull our your bulletins, please. In the very middle, you’ll find the text of our second lesson, expanded by three verses from what’s officially appointed for today. It’s Galatians 4:1-7.

Galatians, you’ll remember from our sermon series based on that book earlier this year, is a letter written by preacher and evangelist Paul to a church in an area that we know today as Turkey. The letter was written back around 50AD. The church in the city of Galatia was composed of Gentiles, that is non-Jews. Paul was anxious to refute false teachers who told the Galatian believers in Jesus that in order to be truly saved from sin and death, they not only needed to believe in Jesus, but also had to adopt Jewish religious law, like circumcision for men and certain food and feast days for all.

In Galatians, chapter 3, which immediately precedes our lesson, Paul has asserted that we justified in God’s eyes not by what we do, but by our faith in Christ; that all who are baptized in Christ are clothed in His forgiveness and the righteousness—or rightness with God—that Jesus came to give those who trust in Him; and that in Christ, all who repent and believe in Him, have the same status before God.

Then, at the start of chapter four where our lesson begins, Paul comes up with a great way to illustrate what religious law, even the Ten Commandments, can and, most importantly, cannot do toward securing a right relationship with God for we sinful human beings. Read those first two sentences from Galatians—verses 1 and 2--with me out loud now.

“My point is this: heirs, as long as they are minors, are no better than slaves, though they are the owners of all the property; but they remain under guardians and trustees until the date set by the father.” 

What Paul is saying is that before God acted decisively by sending Jesus to the cross to take our punishment for sin, paying the debt we owe, our world was kept under control by the laws of God. The law acted as guardian and trustee over people too immature and too imprisoned by sin to live life the way God designed it to be lived.

Anglican bishop and New Testament scholar N.T. Wright says that this passage shows how the story of the human race before the arrival of Jesus was one of “people who stand to inherit a fortune (of sorts) but who are quite unaware of the fact.”

In the meantime, like a parent hemming in toddlers who are bound to get themselves into trouble otherwise, God gave His law as a way of keeping things under control until the time was right.

This was true even of non-Jews who had never heard of Moses or the Ten Commandments because, as the Bible reminds us elsewhere, God has written His law on our hearts. No matter how much we may try to deny it, violate it, or excuse our breaching of it, the whole human race knows that there is a law of right and wrong.

One evidence of this may be that while human laws may be unjust or designed to serve the interests of certain groups, even the most corrupt of dictators will claim that his law conforms to a notion of right and wrong that all his citizens would agree on without having ever discussed it. That's because our  notions of what's right and what's wrong come from God; it’s the law of right and wrong we all seem to know that hems our world in, at times just barely, from total chaos.

This is exactly what Paul is talking about when he writes in the next verse—read along with me silently:

“So with us; while we were minors, we were enslaved to the elemental spirits of the world.” 

Now, for some people, that’s the end of the Christian story. They think that being Christian is about trying to live according to some rules, or trying to be nice people, or working to never make anybody upset or mad, or to fighting injustice. All of those things should be part of daily living for Christians. We should try to obey the law of God and, to glorify God and make the lives of our neighbors bearable, abide by the rules of society. We shouldn’t go out of our ways to cause strife or arguments and we should by all means fight injustice.

But none of those things, however faithfully or impeccably executed, will transform you and me from minors or slaves in need of constant goading or hemming in by the law of God into the free inheritors of all that God wants to give to us. As Martin Luther writes in his commentary on this passage, “…mere outward decency does not constitute Christianity.” He goes on to explain, “The heathen observe the same restraints to avoid punishment or to secure the advantages of a good reputation. [But in] the last analysis such restraint is simple hypocrisy.”

It’s in the next two sentences, verses 4 and 5, that Paul gets into what can move us from slavery to becoming children of God, from minors hemmed in by God's law to heirs set free by God, inheritors of forgiveness and everlasting life with God. Read those next two sentences with me aloud, please.

“But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.”

That phrase, “the fullness of time,” is important. The New Testament, including Philippians, was written in Greek, as you know. In Greek, there are two main words for time. The first is chronos, which refers to chronological time. The other word is kairos, which means God’s time. Paul is saying that at the right time, at the precise moment chosen by God, after everything had happened that needed to happen, God acted to free us, to give us our inheritance.

And how did God do that? He sent the Son, Jesus. Jesus came from God and was God. But, He was also born of a woman, voluntarily born subject to the same law to which you and I are subject. Only Jesus perfectly kept the law so that when the law accused Him and put Him on a cross, it had the wrong guy. When Jesus was executed for our sins, Jesus redeemed—that is bought out of slavery all of us who live under the law. The result is that we are God’s children no matter what!

Paul does some celebrating in the last two verses of our lesson. Read along with me—with all the enthusiasm the words deserve, please:

“And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.” 

Ever been desperate enough to cry out to the God you know in Jesus, but not been sure what to say? Then know this: In those moments...in those moments when you knew that there was no one and nothing else you could turn to...that God’s Holy Spirit was telling you something. The mere impulse to pray demonstrates that you belong to Christ! Your desperation proves it because it's only in desperation that any of us are truly open enough and humble enough to admit our need of the God Who loved you so much that He went to a cross, open enough and humble enough to receive the inheritance of life and forgiveness we can't earn, but that God gives to all who trust in Christ. May we always be that desperate!

Your conscience need never accuse you for sins you committed and for which you already repented!

You need never think that because you aren’t perfect, God doesn’t care about you!

The Savior you somehow just know can reach out to in your times of desperation, Whose Spirit prompts you to do just that, will stand by you and love you now and always!

The Savior Who came into the world to share our lives and deaths so that all with faith in Him can also share in His victory, His life, and His eternity with God, wants you to know that you are no longer hemmed in, no longer a slave to sin, no longer a minor pining for the day when you will be acceptable to God.

If you are baptized and trust in Christ alone, you are absolutely acceptable to God! And no one can take you from your Father's hands! In Christ, we are free to be God’s people, free to look forward with confidence to the certainty of eternity with God.

In his commentary on Galatians, Martin Luther quotes Saint Augustine, a great Catholic theologian revered as much by Lutherans as Catholics: “every [person] is certain of [their] faith, if [they have] faith.” Luther goes on to write, “We ought to feel sure that we stand in the grace of God, not in view of our own worthiness, but through [what Christ has done for us]. As certain as we are that Christ pleases God, so sure ought [the believer in Christ] be that we also please God, because Christ is in us.”

This was the faith that sustained Mary: faith in Christ and the good will of God for those who trust in Him. May that be our faith too!