The Thirteenth Sunday of Pentecost
Law & Gospel Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ! Amen. Jesus our Lord speaks with true mercy and divine love in today’s Gospel: Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. For from now on in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law. Dear Christian friends, In our confirmation lessons, the *Small Catechism* introduced us to the Law and the Gospel by giving us crisp and neat little definitions for each. There we read: · In the Law God commands good works of thought, word and deed [and in the Law He] condemns and punishes sin. · In the Gospel, [which is] the good news of our salvation in Jesus Christ, God gives forgiveness, faith, life, and the power to please Him with good works. There is nothing false about these definitions, but they might be a little misleading. These definitions might give us the impression that God’s Law and God’s Gospel are a simple matter of reading the Scriptures with pen in hand, underlining the Law statements in blue and the Gospel statements in a pretty pink. If we stick with these definitions alone, we can think of ourselves as keeping God’s Law and His Gospel in little boxes on our shelves: whenever we feel the need, we can reach for the Law or reach for the Gospel, just like we would a bottle of Tylenol. · Jeremiah in today’s Old Testament alerts us that the divine Law might be something more for us than information for our meditation. “*Is not My Word like fire, declares the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces*?” (Jeremiah 23:29). · Throughout their writings, our Lutheran forefathers give us the impression that the Law of God is like a wolf that tirelessly pursues us with snapping, foaming jaws; or like a judge who never runs out of accusations to read against us. · In today’s Gospel, Jesus wants us to know that the Law of God is an explosive, divisive force that broods within our everyday family connections: “*Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division*.” Why would the Great Physician (Luke 5:31) of our bodies and souls wish to wound us? Why would the God of Peace (Romans 16:20) wish to refuse us peace in the most intimate precincts of our lives? Jesus speaks today’s destructive Gospel to us because He knows us; because He knows exactly where our favorite idols live; and because He knows that our beautiful idols have no power to save us. For from now on in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law. Fathers and sons; mothers and daughters; even mothers-in-law: all of these have come to us as gifts from God above. We turn them into our gods, loving them and sometimes fearing them far more than we fear and love Jesus. Yet Jesus in today’s Gospel knows that our family idolatries are not merely a matter of loving the gift more than the Giver (James 1:17). Jesus in today’s Gospel knows that we feel constantly tempted to change the Christian faith and accommodate our loved ones; rather than expect our loved ones to change and measure up to the faith. I repeat, and I am just as guilty of this as you are: we Christians feel constantly tempted to change the faith and accommodate our loved ones; rather than expect our loved ones to change and measure up to the faith. I will give you a couple of examples, and they are not pretty: 1. Let’s begin with the obvious example: Our children are leaving the church in droves. For many people, the Sunday after confirmation day is the day they make it known by their absence that they despise the Word of the Lord and its preaching. Our children are not merely departing from public worship. They are feeling tempted to depart from the forgiveness and life that Jesus promises. They are flirting with re-entering the darkness. Yet we cannot bring ourselves to call an apple an apple, or call unbelief unbelief. Why are we unwilling to do so? Because our unbelievers are too beautiful; they are our flesh and our blood. What do we do instead? We blame Jesus and we start telling lies: · “So-and-so in my family is living unashamedly in sexual sin. He is still a Christian, though.” (That makes Jesus a liar. Jesus is the one who said, Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that… they may enter the city by the gates. Outside are… the sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood (Revelation 22:14-15)). · “So-and-so in my family remains stubbornly absent from worship because she does not feel like she is getting fed here.” (That is simply a way of telling our Lord Jesus that His Word is not nearly as powerful as He thinks it is.) · “So-and-so in my family thinks we should change everything the church says and does, so that worship will be more accommodating to today’s young people.” (That is a downhill slope with no bottom. As soon as you begin to accommodate unbelief, you will be expected to accommodate more and more unbelief without end. In that event, it will not take very long for everyone to know who your god really is.) 2. To make our temptations worse, we each have direct family ties to fellow Christians who despise and reject our confession of faith. For example: · We have historically practiced closed communion. Call it close communion if you wish. Either way, our practice is designed to bar from the Communion those Christians who refuse the Words of Jesus, “*This IS My body; this IS My blood*” (Matthew 27:27, 29). Our practice is a matter of brotherly love because our God has warned us against unworthy eating and drinking (1 Corinthians 11:27-29). Here is the problem with our good and godly practice of closed communion: My daughter married a Methodist Christian and has joined his congregation. Now she cannot communion here with me. I think we should throw away closed communion. That way, I can keep my daughter happy—and at the end of the day, nothing is more important than my little girl. Jesus roars NO in today’s Gospel. Jesus hurls a kitchen chair in today’s Gospel. Jesus in today’s Gospel unleashes the attack dog of His Law, and the dog’s teeth want dearly to meet our idolatrous behinds: For from now on in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law. Why would Jesus speak so brutally about our family values? Jesus speaks this way because He loves us. Jesus divides family connections in today’s Gospel because your son and your daughter have no more power to save you than you have power to save them. Jesus wants His law to be a wild, unpredictable, divisive force in our daily lives—yes, even in our family lives—so that His Gospel of forgiveness and life may finally be something more for us than pink-underlined Words on a page. When the Law of God is merely information for us, then the Gospel of God remains mere information for us, and we all end up snoring our way straight into hell. When the Law of God turns into the hammer that crushes rock, and the sword that divides our deepest and tightest family connections, then the Gospel of God unleashes its faith-sustaining power for us. Only in the broken pieces, created by the Law, shall the Gospel of God be for us: · the divine force that keeps our hands from drooping and our knees from buckling (Hebrews 12:12) under the constant pressures of family idolatry and beautiful unbelief. · a living hope, created for us “*through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead*” (1 Peter 1:3). · medicine for our souls and balm for our wounds. This is your God’s promise to you, concerning Jesus—and God never wavers in His promises: “*By My Son’s wounds you are healed*” (Isaiah 53:5). · the source of faith that lives and abides, no matter how good or bad we feel. God’s Gospel—that is, the forgiveness of sins that is now yours in Christ Jesus—God’s Gospel brings you a faith that cannot be felt inside of you and cannot be confused with family bliss. God’s Gospel gives you a faith that remains as “*the assurance of things hope for and the conviction of things not seen*” (Hebrews 11:1). · our true peace. Not a dinner-table peace; not a get-along-with-the-in-laws peace; not even a keep-my-coddled-child-happy peace. The peace that God gives through His powerful Gospel is the peace that abides and remains, even “*in the midst of much conflict*” (1 Thessalonians 2:2). The peace of the Gospel is the peace that passes all understanding; the peace that keeps your heart and mind in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:7). It is the peace that promises soon to “*crush Satan under your feet*” (Romans 16:30) and the peace that will allow you to keep your family life safely in the perspective of the one true faith. The peace of God is the only peace that matters. In order to keep your heart and your mind focused upon that one true peace, Christ Jesus in today’s Gospel happily promises to shatter for you all other forms of peace. Sometimes No is the most loving and gracious and forgiving Word that could ever be spoken. Today’s Gospel is one of those times. Here is your Lord’s merciful promise, which shall result in your eternal life: “*Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? I tell you, No*.”
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