Sermon for the Fourth Sunday After the Epiphany of Our Lord
Experience is a Good Teacher, but a Lousy Preacher
Theme: When it comes to God’s Words, trust what you hear rather than what you
have experienced.
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord Jesus
Christ! In today’s Gospel, Jesus quickly answers prayers in exactly the way the
people wanted their prayers to be answered. “They appealed to Him” on behalf of
Simon’s mother-in-law, who “was ill with a high fever.” Jesus healed her
without hesitation. Soon “all those who had any who were sick with various
diseases brought them to Him, and He laid His hands ON EVERY ONE OF THEM and
healed them.” Hearing this Gospel, sometimes God’s people might feel tempted to
say, “Why hasn’t Jesus done the same thing for me or for those whom I
desperately want to keep healthy and alive?”
Dear Christian friends,
This Gospel is a wonderful Gospel for showing you that your personal
experiences in life will give you VERY LITTLE HELP in understanding God’s Bible
and in benefiting from its promises.
Make no mistake about it: Experience is, for the most part, a wonderful
teacher. As you become more experienced in reading books, you not only become a
better reader, but you also gain a deeper awareness and understanding of the
world around you. (That is why reading is important for every child’s
education.) The more experience you gain in your profession—butcher, baker or
candlestick maker—the better you will be at your job. The more years you live
and struggle and survive in this world, the wiser you grow to be (at least in
theory).
One thing your personal experiences will not do so well for you: They
will not help you to understand the Scriptures of God. In fact, your personal
experiences in life might prove detrimental and destructive to your reading of
the Word. At the very least, your experiences will make you feel like you are
on the outside looking in, so to speak, impossibly separated from the events
written in God’s Book. Your experiences will deceive you into thinking that God
treats other people better than He treats you. That is a lie, but it is a lie
your life’s experiences will not hesitate to tell you over and over again. You
might even begin to believe the lie.
Think about some of the many ways your personal experiences will lie to
you about the Living Word of God and its rich promises:
· If you have many regrets, and if your conscience feels weighted by
accumulated guilt, your experiences in life might make you wonder whether God’s
promises of forgiveness are truly for you, and not just for other people who
are holier than you. Ignore your experiences and the recurring feelings of
guilt they carry with them! Trust instead what God says to you so clearly in
His Word: All your sins are forgiven in the shed blood of Jesus, and every
scrap of blame has been removed from you eternally.
· Perhaps you have lost important people in your life, or never had very
many to begin with. Your personal experiences might make you think that you are
alone in the world, that not many people love you, or maybe that you are not
too terribly lovable to begin with. Force yourself to disregard your
experiences, dear saints. Such experiences will blind your eyes wonderful
family God your Father gave to you at your Baptism, when He made you part of
His holy Christian Church. “Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s
people” (1 Peter 2:9). “The one who makes men holy and those who are made holy
are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call [you] brothers”
(Hebrews 2:11, NIV). “You are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part
of it” (1 Corinthians 12:27).
· Some people have not had very good experiences at the hands of men in
particular. Husbands, fathers, and brothers sometimes fail—frequently fail—in
faithfully loving those who are entrusted to their care. If you have
experienced a father’s heavy-handedness, a husband’s inattention, or a
brother’s contempt, you might not feel terribly impressed or comforted when you
hear that our God is Father (Matthew 6:8) and Elder Brother (Romans 8:29) and
Husband (Jeremiah 31:32, Ephesians 5:25) to us, His Church. It matters not
whether you are man, woman or child: Your personal experiences at the hands of
the men in your life might skew the picture a bit. Such experiences must be
categorically ignored for the sake of hearing and believing the Word; and in so
believing, receiving its benefits.
Today’s Gospel will give you an equally bad time of things if you hear and
understand these Words based on the lies your personal experiences in life will
tell you:
Simon's mother-in-law was ill with a high fever, and they appealed to [Jesus]
on her behalf. And He stood over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her,
and immediately she rose and began to serve them. Now when the sun was setting,
all those who had any who were sick with various diseases brought them to Him,
and He laid His hands on every one of them and healed them.
For anyone who has ever prayed for healing—and whose prayers were NOT answered
in the manner they had hoped—this is a distressing and unsettling Gospel. How
is it possible for you not to feel jealous or even angry with God when He seems
to fall over Himself healing as many people as possible in this Gospel, but has
somehow not seen fit to heal you or the one whom you dearly love? “He laid His
hands on EVERY ONE OF THEM,” and it is not too difficult to think that some of
those who were healed did not even love Jesus all that much. They got their
healing and went happily away while you have lovingly and faithfully stayed
right here, begging for blessings you have been forbidden to receive.
If today’s Gospel would have us know anything, it would teach us that our Lord
Jesus Christ is fully capable to heal every affliction of body and spirit. By
contrast, if your personal experiences in this world have anything to say about
this Gospel, those experiences will lie straight to your face and tell you that
Jesus has no such abilities at all. At the very least, your personal
experiences will suggest that you and your loved ones are not as well loved by
Jesus as were these people “Capernaum, a city of Galilee.” After all, “Simon’s
mother-in-law was ill with a high fever, and they appealed to Him on her
behalf” and succeeded in gaining what they desired. Obviously your prayers have
not met such stunning success. Then temptation sets in:
· Did God not answer your prayers because He is angry with you, because
you have committed too many sins in your life, or because you do not believe in
Him strongly enough? That is one of the lies your personal experiences will
tell you.
· Does our Lord Jesus favor some people more than He favors others,
opening His hand in one direction while swinging His fist in another? That,
too, is lie spoken by experience.
· If Jesus is fully capable of healing every disease of body and spirit,
as this Gospel suggests, and if He does not heal your diseases of body and
spirit, doesn’t this experience suggest the possibility that Jesus is something
less than 100% merciful to you and loving toward you and compassionate with you
all the time?
This is a hard Gospel. This Gospel is hard because it forces us to choose
between God’s revelation in His Bible and our personal experiences in life,
which are so deeply contrary to what we read. I cannot tell you why Simon’s
mother-in-law rises while our loved ones fall. I cannot tell you because I do
not know. I do know and I can tell you—and I insist upon it in the Lord—that
the God who cares for this woman in this Gospel is the same God who cares
equally for you and for yours. Guard yourself against your personal
experiences, dear saints! Allow the living Words of God’s book to defy and
contradict and negate your personal experiences! When it comes to reading and
hearing God’s Words, your personal experiences in this life will do but one
thing to you, if you will allow them to do it: Your personal experiences will
drive you away from God’s Words and away from the resurrection and life they
carry in their utterance to you and your loved
ones.
Do not think of today’s Gospel as something distant from you, based on your
experiences. Think of today’s Gospel as the story of your life—the unending
life your Lord Jesus has created and given to you despite your experiences!
Stated another way, do not look at your body and conclude, based on what you
can see and experience, “Jesus has not healed me.” Instead, look at God’s
miracle of Baptism and conclude—not based on what you can see but based on what
you have been told by God—conclude, “My Lord Jesus has healed me or my dear
loved one already, despite the fact that our bodies appear to be
disintegrating. I will not trust what I am experiencing. I will trust what God
says.”
Now when the sun was setting, all those who had any who were sick with various
diseases brought them to Him, and He laid His hands on every one of them and
healed them.
Treat your experiences with contempt and force yourself into that crowd
which gathered at Jesus’ door! In the ongoing benefit of your Baptism, in each
preaching of the divine Word, in every celebration of Holy Communion, your Lord
Jesus does for you every miracle and exorcism spoken about in today’s Gospel.
If it is true that you have forgiveness of your sins, despite whatever guilt
you feel (and it IS true that you are forgiven); if it is true that you have
God’s abiding peace, despite whatever upheaval you may be experiencing or
whatever discomfort you might feel (and it IS true that you have God’s peace);
if it is true that you have been given a very large and exceedingly loving
family in the church, despite what loneliness you might feel (and it is true
that you have been given this family); then it must also be true that you and
your loved ones have likewise been given the divine gift of healing of your
bodies, even if your body feels as
though it is falling apart. Even while you personally experience illness and
death, insistently confess with Isaiah in defiance of your experiences, “By
[Jesus’] stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). God has said that this is so.
How shall we respond to God’s Words, if not by paraphrasing St. Paul: “Let God
be true though every [experience] were a liar” (Romans 3:4).
The peace of God which passes all understanding guard your hearts and
minds through Christ Jesus. Amen.
___________________________________________________________________________
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