Freed to Love As We've Been Loved

[Below you'll find the message prepared for worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, on Sunday, August 28.]

Luke 14:1-14

In today’s Gospel lesson, Luke 14:1-14, Jesus tells us: “...all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” (Luke 14:11) Jesus here teaches us an important truth: The Gospel given to us in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ, achieves what God’s Law cannot. And humility receives what pride cannot. Jesus is going to tell us this three times over in our lesson. Let’s pay attention to His words.

The lesson begins: “One Sabbath, when Jesus went to eat in the house of a prominent Pharisee, he was being carefully watched.” (Luke 14:1) It’s important to note that the wedding feast is happening on a Sabbath day. Our translation says that it takes place at the house of a “prominent” Pharisee. The Greek in which Luke, like the other New Testament writers composed his Gospel, says that the owner of the house was an ἀρχόντων (archonton), a ruler of the Jews. This guy was a leading Pharisee. Pharisaism, you’ll recall, was a sect of Judaism that effectively taught people they could be right with God if they obeyed God’s Law. Jesus had already had run-ins with the Pharisees over the Sabbath. Now, every Pharisee in the room is watching Jesus closely, looking for Him to violate God’s Law, giving them a reason to seek Jesus’ execution.

Luke tells us that in front of Jesus was a man suffering from dropsy, an “abnormal swelling of his body.” Jesus asks the Pharisees and the teachers of religious law (the Scribes), “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?” (Luke 14:3) We could rephrase Jesus’ question as, “Will God damn a person to hell for showing kindness to someone, praying for them, sharing the Gospel with them, feeding them a meal, on the Sabbath?” The answer should be obvious. Both the Old Testament and Jesus Himself summarized God’s Law as loving God completely and loving our neighbor as we love ourselves. This is the point of the Ten Commandments, God’s basic moral law. It shows you how completely sinful we are at birth that God has to command us to love. And even when He does, we can’t in our own power love God completely or love others with the same commitment with which we love ourselves. With the apostle Paul, we’re bound to say, “...I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.” (Romans 7:18)

The Pharisees thought otherwise. They were sure they kept God’s Law scrupulously and just to be sure, had created more than 600 additional laws by which they were certain they proved themselves righteous and worthy of life with God. In the process, they pitted God’s Law (or their version of God’s Law) against God’s love. There are times in their previous confrontations with Jesus that they condemn Jesus for acting lovingly on the Sabbath. After Jesus poses His question today, the Pharisees and Scribes, “remained silent.” (Luke 14:4) So, Jesus heals the man of his dropsy, then confronts the Pharisees and Scribes again, asking them: “If one of you has a child or an ox that falls into a well on the Sabbath day, will you not immediately pull it out?” Now, only a monstrous parent or a stupid owner of livestock would wait until after the Sabbath to rescue their child or their ox. But now, Luke says, the Pharisees “...had nothing to say.” (Luke 14:4)

Jesus, as God the Son, is the Lord of the Sabbath. He created the Sabbath not to provide an excuse the self-righteous can use for not loving God or neighbor one day a week. God gives us the Sabbath so that we can hear and learn His Word. You and I are born with a debt to God that we, in our own goodness, cannot repay. Jesus offered His sinless life on the cross to cancel the debt we owe to God for our sin and to give us everlasting life with God. He gives all this to us as a free gift we cannot earn. So, it’s OK to be compassionate on the Sabbath…or on any other day of the week. We don’t have to love God or neighbor to be saved from sin and death. Jesus has destroyed the power of sin to condemn us and separate us from God. In the Gospel, Jesus has set us free from sin and death–that’s the Gospel. With this gift then, He sets us free to live lives of love. Proud people, certain of their own goodness, can never be right with God or have life with Him. The humble, on the other hand, realize their salvation is entirely the work of God in Christ and, their pride broken, receive life from Him!

Now, the Pharisees and the Scribes aren’t the only ones who are watching in our lesson. Verse 7 tells us that Jesus is observing how everyone is seeking places of honor at the feast. Jesus tells His host and fellow guests not to push themselves forward like this. If someone higher on the ladder shows up, Jesus says, your host will be forced to tell you to take a seat at a lower spot. Instead, Jesus says, take a seat in the lowest place. Then the host may approach you and say, “Come on up to a higher place, a place of honor.”

Now, don’t misunderstand Jesus here. He isn’t establishing a new law. Jesus isn’t saying that we’ll earn better places at the heavenly banquet to which all His saints will go when they’ve been raised from the dead. Instead, Jesus is telling us to face facts, like the sinful tax collector in one of His parables. Remember, Jesus said, the tax collector entered the temple and didn’t dare come close to God, aware that he didn’t merit even being in the presence of God. Instead, from a place of lowliness, he cried out, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” (Luke 18:13) The humble know that, sinners though we are, it’s only through Jesus that we have a place in His kingdom. I don’t know about you, but knowing that I don’t deserve the forgiveness of my sins or everlasting life with God, I’m not going to be particular about the seating arrangements in heaven. Wherever Jesus puts me in His Kingdom, I won’t deserve it. I’ll just be grateful that He died and rose for someone like me! The psalmist writes, “I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked.” (Psalm 84:10)

Lastly, Jesus tells the Pharisees and Scribes that when they host a dinner, they shouldn’t invite people who can repay them. Instead, Jesus says, “...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.” (Luke 14:14) Now, again, Jesus isn’t giving us some new law. He isn’t saying, “If you’ll invite the riff raff, the drug dealers, the thugs to your house, I’ll invite you into My kingdom.” Jesus is saying that because by God’s grace through faith in Jesus, we already have a place in the Kingdom of God, we don’t need to play the world’s games. The proud want to have an in with powerful, important people. The humble know that even the powerful and important of this world are mortals and sinners in need of God’s grace. This is why God’s Word tells us, “Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings, who cannot save…Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God.” (Psalm 146:3, 5) When you know you have the favor of God, you needn’t seek the favor of the world’s kings, queens, bosses, big shots, or pop stars. Jesus gives us the confidence to love others without thinking of repayment because we know He has already loved us and given us an eternal place with Him!

The Gospel gives us what God’s Law cannot. And humility receives what pride cannot. A place in God’s kingdom doesn’t belong to those who self-consciously perform good religious works, who, in their heart of hearts, harbor the belief that their goodness and achievement make them worthy for life with God. A place in God’s kingdom belongs only to those who know with Saint Paul that, “...it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.” (Ephesians 2:8-9) Friends, our only boast is in Jesus. He is the One Who calls us to life with Him in His kingdom, the highest and best place anyone could be, no matter what the world may think of us. Jesus calls out to you again today, “Friend, move up to a better place,” the place where Jesus is our saving King and we are His people forever. Amen

The Right Time to Love

[This message was shared earlier today during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Luke 14:1-14

Imagine a scene with me. You walk outside the church building this morning toward our parking lot and look across Congress Park to see a man about 6’5” tall, muscular, weighing about 250 pounds, throw a toddler violently and abruptly a distance of some ten feet. When the child lands on the pavement of the sidewalk across the street, she appears to be shaken up and bruised. She cries.

What would you do in this situation? What should you do?

If you’re a Christian, your answer to these questions should be rooted in your identity as a baptized child of God, a disciple of Jesus. As such, your response ought to reflect the love of God, a love that saves us by grace through faith in Christ, whether we deserve being saved or not. (By the way, none of us deserves it.) Christians are the grateful recipients of the ultimate act of love: God becoming human, bearing the death sentence for sin that we deserve despite His own sinlessness, and giving new and everlasting life to all who repent and believe in Him. As Romans 5:8 tells us, “...God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” 

When Christ comes to live in believers in Him, we are set free to love God and love others the way Christ loves us. 

So, as you see the big man throw the little baby, the love of Christ should inform your response. 

But what is the loving response?

And speaking of that, what exactly is love? 

The world offers all sorts of definitions. 

Many of these definitions are rooted in the idea of affection. If you feel affection for someone, the world says, that's love.

For example, people say that you ought to be able to marry whoever you love, whoever you have affection for, whatever their gender or yours. 

That’s true legally. Society allows that.

But what does God think? Well, when Jesus, who lived in a Roman-dominated world in which homosexual and bisexual behaviors were far more prevalent and accepted than they are today, spoke about marriage, He always assumed that the covenant of marriage involved a husband and a wife. When Jesus is asked a question about divorce, He cites Genesis and says: “...at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’” (Mark 10:6-9)

So, if Jesus is telling us that some affections people may form for each other are contrary to God's will and plan for human beings, what is God’s definition of love? 

The writer and scholar C.S. Lewis considered that question in reading the Bible and gave what I think is an accurate summary of what God calls love as revealed in His Word, the Bible: “Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”

In other words, from God’s vantage point, love is willing and doing that which is best for the other person: Best for them not just for today but for all eternity, best for them spiritually even more than financially or emotionally.

Love has little to do with how we or others feel about people and everything to do with seeking what is best for them, even when it costs us, even when it's inconvenient. 

It’s a love that does not come naturally to we human beings, a love that God implants in those willing to daily surrender their lives and wills to the One Who died and rose for us. 

Such love may sometimes incite us to say or do unpleasant things to protect people from physical or eternal dangers. 

Love tells a child to stay away from the fire for fear of the child being burned. 

Love also tells a child to keep sex for marriage for fear of emotional and eternal dangers. 

The apostle Paul told the first-century-Christians at Phillippi to let the transplanted love from Christ fill them, even when doing so brings pain, rejection, or misunderstanding, as it did to Jesus Himself. “In your relationships with one another,’ Paul says, “have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant…” 

And that is what love is. Love is servanthood to God and to others in the name of Jesus Christ, Who saves us from sin and death. It confidently loves and serves others in Jesus’ name even when it puts people’s goodwill or our lives at risk, knowing that because of what Jesus has accomplished on the cross and because of His empty tomb, we belong to God forever!

In the past, I’ve preached several sermons (which I’m sure you all remember) on the last eight verses of today’s gospel lesson. Today, I want to focus on just the first six, Luke 14:1-6. It tells us what it means to love as Christ loves in our everyday lives. Take a look at the passage now, please.

Verse 1: “One Sabbath, when Jesus went to eat in the house of a prominent Pharisee, he was being carefully watched.” 

In the preceding chapter of Luke, we’re told that Jesus violated the Pharisees’ sensibilities when, on a sabbath day, He did the work of bringing miraculous healing to a woman suffering from a crippling disease. At that time, Jesus asked the Pharisees whether “this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, [should not] be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?” (Luke 13:16)* 

Jesus was saying that, whether on the Sabbath or any other day of the week, it’s God’s will that we live in the freedom of His grace to serve God and others in His name. The Pharisees are unmoved and instead, as today’s gospel lesson begins, have their eyes fixed on Jesus, wondering if He will once more do God’s will in defiance of their expectations. 

There's a lot of their attitude in the world and in the Church these days. People expect the God we meet in Jesus to conform to their expectations and standards. 

Some people, though they would never say it, want to out-holy God. They're like Jonah in the Old Testament who didn't want to go to Nineveh for fear that if he spread the message of God's condemnation for their sin among the Ninevites, they might repent and be saved by God. He was disappointed when that happened, angry that God didn't do His God-business the way he thought God should. 

Other people, advocates for their favorite sins, parse Scripture to show how God agrees with them. 

Our call as human beings is to submit to the gracious lordship of Jesus not so we can make God conform to our image of Him, but so that God can go to work conforming us to His image. Seeing God in the flesh in Jesus, the Pharisees didn't like that idea very much. Do we?
Verse 2: “There in front of him was a man suffering from abnormal swelling of his body.” The word used of the suffering man’s condition in the original Greek involves an inflammation of his extremities, likely caused by congestive heart failure. Jesus decides to use this as a teachable moment. So, He turns to the Pharisees gathered for dinner in verse 3: “Jesus asked the Pharisees and experts in the law ‘Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?’ But they remained silent. So taking hold of the man, he healed him and sent him on his way.”

Jesus’ question wasn’t a hard one. But the Pharisees didn’t answer. They preferred a God and a faith tethered to their rules, expectations, and beliefs, rather than having a living God Who sets us free to do God’s loving will. 

Luke says that Jesus took hold of the sick man, healed him, and then released Him. Jesus pulled the man to Himself, then set him free. That's what Jesus wants to do for us and it's precisely what He does every time He calls us to confession and pronounces His forgiveness, His absolution, over us.

The Pharisees aren't impressed with Jesus' healing of the man, it seems. They might not have minded Jesus performing such an act of love on any other day of the week. But they thought Jesus had no business doing so on the Sabbath.

Verse 5: “Then [Jesus] asked them, “If one of you has a child or an ox that falls into a well on the Sabbath day, will you not immediately pull it out?” And [again] they had nothing to say.”

Love is servanthood to God and to others in the name of Jesus Christ, Who saves us from sin and death. 

And the right time to live out that love is every moment of every day. 

When the love of God invades our lives, it will cause us to do things like...

• speak and work against injustice, 
• share the good news of new life through faith in Jesus, 
• help with disaster relief, 
• pray for those who hate us, 
• sacrifice for our kids as well as discipline them, and 
• speak uncomfortable and unwelcome truths to friends in hopes of bringing them help, safety, or salvation.

And what about the brute who threw the baby in the imagined scene on Congress Park? Well, imagine that a split second after the man threw the baby to the sidewalk on the other side of the street, an RTA bus goes speeding by. The man wasn’t harming the child; he was saving the child who had somehow wandered out into the road. The man put himself at risk to save the child. 

That, friends, is love.

It’s a love that reflects the love of God Himself for us as seen on the cross. 

True story: A man was flirting with an affair with a woman from work. 

A friend, like Jesus pulling the sick man to Himself in today’s gospel lesson or the burly man in our illustration flinging the baby to safety, pulled the man aside and told the man bluntly, “Don’t do this. Don't do this.” 

The man was angry. He railed at his friend. “How dare you tell me what to do? You’re not perfect.” 

His friend didn’t rail back. He allowed as how he wasn’t perfect, how he made mistakes, how he committed sin, how he, to his regret and pain, had committed the very sin against which he was now trying to warn his friend. As a Christian, chastened by that experience, he tried to turn away from his sin and turn to God each day. He was only giving his friend what he thought was loving counsel. In Paul’s phrase, the friend spoke “the truth in love.” 

What truths are we willing to tell others in love and gentleness? 

What boats are we willing to rock to lovingly serve neighbor, friend, relative, spouse, parent, child, stranger, foreigner, immigrant? 

Are we willing to love our neighbor even when the time does not seem right?

These are the questions Jesus lays before us today. May we, as Jesus’ disciples, already saved from sin and death by Him, choose this day, in the power of the Holy Spirit, to love and serve others in His name. Amen

*The woman Jesus heals in Luke 13, followed by teaching on humility, and His healing of the man in this passage from Luke 14, followed by teaching on humility, exemplify Luke's characteristic pairing of incidents involving women and men throughout his gospel. Sometimes he contrasts their faith responses. At other times, their responses affirm one another's and underscore God's faithfulness. For example, early in the gospel, Zechariah is told by an angel that he will become the father of John the Baptist and doubts, while Mary is told by angel that she will give birth to Jesus and accepts the message. In the temple in Jerusalem, where the baby Jesus is taken by Mary and Joseph to be circumcised at eight days old, two elderly people, Simeon and Anna, separately affirm that the child is the Messiah-Savior of the world.

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

The Cost of Being a Disciple

Luke 14:1-14
An old bit of wisdom says, “Let the buyer beware.”

It’s a good idea whatever we’re in the market for to be careful not to buy a “bill of goods” and to make sure that whoever is trying to convince us of anything is engaging in “truth in advertising.”

Our Gospel lesson from Luke for today finds Jesus engaging in “truth in advertising.” He wants people to know exactly what is involved in following Him, in being His disciple.

God’s grace, His forgiveness and favor, is a free gift; but to grasp hold of it costs us our whole lives.

To take hold of Jesus means to let go of the world’s way of thinking and living. It means also letting go of our own way of thinking and living. Those are hard things to give up!

Jesus wants us to understand that there is a cost to being His disciple.

Take a look, please, at this morning’s Gospel lesson, Luke 14:25-33. Verse 25 starts: “Large crowds were traveling with Jesus...”

Whenever Luke references crowds, Luke is talking about people who are interested in Jesus, maybe even hopeful that Jesus will do something for them, but who haven’t committed to following Jesus.

The crowds wanted just enough of Jesus to get from Him what they wanted, but not enough to let Him change their lives. If this is our approach to Jesus, no matter how many good things we do--in church or outside of church--we’re no more Jesus’ disciples than those crowds.

It's important understanding the difference between being part of a crowd acquainted with Jesus on the one hand, and being a follower of Jesus, on the other hand, as we consider Jesus' words to us today.

Read on with me, please: “...and turning to them he said: ‘If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.’”

In Aramaic, the language that Jesus spoke every day, the word hate didn't necessarily imply hostility, but often was a comparative term. It meant to love less, to hold one thing or person as having less importance than another.

In this verse, Jesus is telling us to love our families and our own lives less than we love Him, to love Him more than these things.

Frankly, this command from Jesus has incredible relevance for how we live our lives in 2016. This past week, I saw a stunning Infographic on bigthink.com about 'helicopter parenting,' you know the phenomenon of parents hovering around the lives of their kids, no matter how old the kids are.* They talked to job recruiters, people in charge of finding people to fill professional positions and learned, for example, that "30% of recruiters have had a parent submit a resume for their child." And that "12% had a parent call to set up an interview."

Parents like these think that they're being loving toward their children. But if one of the goals of parenthood is to prepare children for adulthood, then their behavior can only be described as unloving. Helicopter parenting cripples kids and creates unhealthy co-dependencies. And it stems not from love, but from egotism, narcissism, and a need to be needed, which is nothing other than the ancient human desire to "be like God."

The truth is that we will love our families better if we love Jesus most of all.

In commanding us to this, Jesus isn’t expecting more of us than He expected of Himself: It would have been easy for Jesus to listen to His family’s and followers’ plea to avoid the cross. But He ignored them to pursue the will of God by taking the cross, where He loved us and offered us the possibility of salvation through faith in Him, which he couldn’t have given to us had He not given God the Father first place in His life!

I like what a person wrote in an online article a few years ago about the God Who comes to us in Jesus: "God does not offer us a choice. He comes, not hat in hand, but ready for battle. He breaks into the strong man’s house [that is, He breaks into our wills, held captive by sin from the moment of our conceptions] entering into contention against the heart, soul & mind of the [sinner]. The rational free will of [human beings] cannot believe or accept this & as such God always ...appears as the opposite, contrary to our expectations, confounding appeals to choice."

Where do Jesus and His Word found in the Bible fall on your list priorities in life?

Is Jesus everything or is He nothing to you? (Because those are the only two choices before us.)

Read verse 27 now [Jesus is still speaking]: “...whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”

One scholar says of these words, says: “Bearing a cross has nothing to do with chronic illness, painful physical conditions, or trying family relationships. It is instead what we do voluntarily as a consequence of our commitment to Jesus Christ. Cross bearing requires deliberate sacrifice and exposure to risk and ridicule in order to follow Jesus. This commitment is not just a way of life...It is a commitment to a person. A disciple follows another person and learns a new way of life.”

That person Who calls us to a different way of life is Jesus.

Discipleship means breaking with the world’s values in order to follow Jesus and His Word alone.

After saying these provocative things Jesus tells two parables, each meant to urge those considering following Him to count the cost involved.

In one, Jesus says that farmers, who in first century Judea where He lived, often built towers to give themselves early warning about marauding thieves or wild animals, would be crazy not to figure out whether they could afford the structures before starting to build them.

Similarly, Jesus says, a king who didn’t know about the strength of an opposing army would be foolish to start a war with that army. Again, Jesus wants us to know that following Him isn’t easy.

Then, in verse 33, Jesus says what may be the most dumbfounding thing of all in this lesson: “...those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples.”

What do we make of this? In James 1:17, we’re told: “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights…”

Every penny that comes into our possession, no matter how hard we work for it, is a gift from God to be used not just for our own needs, but for the glory of God, the sharing of the Gospel, and the good of others.

We may say, “I earned the money through brain and brawn and hours of over-time or extra work.”

But who gave you the brain and the brawn and the power to put in extra time?

Who made the resources from which our daily bread and our luxuries are made?

Jesus is not asking every Christian to take the vow of poverty. He’s calling us to allow His grace to change our attitude about our money and possessions. He wants to be the Lord of our money, our life, our families, our intimate relationships, our work, our everything. We can have nothing of Jesus’ kingdom unless we are willing to let Him be King over every part of our lives!

And make no mistake: Jesus has every right to demand that of us! On the cross, we were bought out of slavery to sin and death by Jesus’ suffering and death.

In response to such unfathomable grace, He calls us to give Him the final say on how we spend not just our time and our lives, but also our money.

The old saying tells us, “You can’t take it with you!” That’s true. But we can invest it in the kingdom--in sharing the good news, in expanding the ministries of churches, in helping the poor. In short, we’re to use our money for the same purposes for which we’re to live our lives as grateful recipients of God’s amazing grace: To love God, love neighbor, love the Church, tell the good news that all who believe in Jesus Christ have everlasting life with God. To...

Reach up,  
Reach in,  
Reach out!

Now, if these words of Jesus for this morning are as daunting to you as they are to me, I want you to consider some very good news. Three times in our lesson, Jesus uses the phrase “cannot be my disciple”: in verses 26, 27, and 33. In the original Greek, the same words are used in each place, giving the verses this literal meaning, “You do not have the power to be My disciples unless you put Me in first place, take up the cross, and give Me access to your whole life.” Jesus uses that word for power or ability in another place in Luke’s Gospel. It comes after Jesus tells the disciples that it will be harder for a rich person to enter God’s kingdom than it would be for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. The disciples, who to that point, thought that wealth was a sign of God’s favor, ask Jesus, “Then, who does have the power or ability to get into the kingdom?” Jesus says, literally, “The things that human beings cannot do [or don’t have the ability to do], God can do.”

Sisters and brothers in Christ, those who follow Jesus have all the gifts He came into our world to bring: forgiveness of sin, lives lived for good purposes, strength when we’re weak, eternity with God.

But unless Jesus rules over our lives without rival, these gifts cannot come to us. The good news is that your ability to follow Jesus, the Savior Who died and rose for you, doesn’t depend on you.

If you want Jesus to take first place in your life, all you need is to make yourself available to Him and ask Him to help you do just that. Give Jesus room to work in your life and He will work in your life. Right now. Every day. The Holy Spirit Jesus sends into open lives and open wills can take care of the rest!

Now, if you’re anything like me, immediately after you tell the Lord something like, “I’m available, Jesus; be first in my life,” you’ll start making your own plans, dreaming your own dreams, obsessing on your own thoughts, maybe even committing your own favorite sins. Keep asking Jesus to take first place in your life. He is faithful, even when we’re not.

But, just as the buyer should beware, the would-be follower of Jesus should be aware, too: Let Jesus into your life and He will start to make of you what cannot make of yourself. Despite the temptations you face, despite the sins for which you must repeatedly repent, as you turn to Jesus, He will relentlessly, lovingly, and in ways you yourself will be unable to perceive or understand, turn you into the person God wants all people to be, the person our secret hearts most yearn to be.

Do you know what Jesus will make of you? He will make you His disciple.

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This was shared during worship with the people of Living Water yesterday.]

*Thanks to writer and blogger Leslie Sholly for sharing this Instagram on Twitter.]

AUDIO: When upside down is rightside up

Here.

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

When Upside Down is Rightside Up

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.]

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!