[Machine transcription]
The name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Dear baptized brothers and sisters in Christ, especially you today, Alton, as the same Lord Jesus Christ in holy baptism has written his name on your heart, and he has made you an heir of his kingdom. Amen.
I have to admit that preparing for today, especially going into the last part of this past week, I was really having to think about what to preach. It’s usually pretty easy. Fairly easy. You look at the appointed verses and you pick one or more from the lessons and then you go to work. You just get after it. But the past few weeks have been, to say the least, very challenging. Maybe heartbreaking is a more correct adjective to use. For some, I think it has indeed challenged their faith.
And we’ve indeed seen some atrocious acts of violence that somehow have seemed to us, at least, it seems to be worse than anything that we can recall. Right? I mean, you know, on 9-11 when we thought we would be remembering the terror attacks that happened 24 years ago, instead we were reeling over the news of the assassination of a public figure. And it was just a few days before that that we kind of were holding our mouth and gasping at the news of this brutal murder of this young Ukrainian woman on the train in Charlotte. And before that, we were horrified by the shooting that happened at the school in Minnesota.
And so it’s been kind of a brutal summer, not just heat-wise. And it makes us wonder, I think, what kind of country we’re living in, even though the same thing, worst things, in fact, are going on all over the world, but it makes us say things like, well, this isn’t supposed to happen here. And it makes us ask things like, well, what are we supposed to do about it? What can we do about it?
For… I think it seems that we Christians in some very specific cases are being quite literally targeted because of what we confess that goes against what much of the world would say is a personal choice and not sin. So I think we have to be on guard to not let this spiral us into our own hatred for other people. Rather, we have to continue to pray for them, and we have to do as Jesus tells us today to call them to repentance, not being afraid to speak the truth of the gospel for all people, even at the risk of being alienated from friends and maybe family or, God forbid, harmed physically.
And we also have to be ready to rejoice when repentance comes, if they do repent. And we, of course, ourselves have to repent. So as to what I’m going to preach today, well, yesterday we were doing acolyte training here, and at the end of it, I asked, well what should I preach about today? And Andrew said, Jesus. And I said, sounds good. Spoiler alert, I was going to preach on Jesus anyway.
But let’s hear what Jesus has to say. For my hope is that we can hear these words and somehow we can find some comfort as we consider and think on what has happened and then how we are going to try to live in the days ahead. Right. So this morning we hear the first two of these three parables that our Lord Jesus Christ uses to teach about repentance.
Now I think for us, the most familiar is probably the third, the parable of the prodigal son, which we actually don’t get to hear today. And so he precedes this with the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin. Now I think first it’s helpful to kind of remind ourselves about parables, why it is that Jesus uses them and teaches them as he does.
Right. So a parable is essentially a story that illustrates some spiritual truth. And in the parables, we typically see an allegory or some type of symbology, a representation of how God is bringing his kingdom to earth in the person of Jesus. And how given this reality that God then expects all people, especially his own people, to live and how they had to conduct themselves under his reign.
So parables are moral lessons, yes, but they’re far more than that. But Jesus says not all are going to understand this, for they will close their eyes and ears to what is being done and said. And Jesus actually explains this to his disciples in Mark 4 when he says, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables, so that they indeed see but do not perceive and may indeed hear but not understand, lest they should turn and be forgiven.”
And it is that very last part that Jesus is actually quoting Isaiah 6, when the Lord commissions the prophet to speak to his people, knowing full well that they are going to reject him. They won’t see, they won’t believe, they won’t hear, they won’t comprehend. So we see the parables to be used for at least two purposes: to bring those who do both see and hear to a knowledge of the kingdom of God and to repentance, but to conceal truths and pronounce judgment on those who refuse to.
And so Jesus speaks these parables in response to the Pharisees and the scribes who were, much like their forefathers, grumbling. They were murmuring against what they perceived, Jesus condoning this sin of those he was eating with, these tax collectors and sinners. I think we know about the reputation of tax collectors in Scripture. We’re actually going to hear about a specific one next week at the Feast of St. Matthew.
But who are these sinners we hear about? Amen. I don’t think you’re kind of your average run-of-the-mill sinners who maybe were skirting the lines of the law a little bit. It’s more than likely they were exactly the kind of people that St. Paul tells us about in the epistle lesson today, especially those who were leading and living sexually deviant lives. Because these people were especially condemned by the Pharisees. And yet here Jesus himself is being condemned for breaking bread with them, and he’s incurring the wrath of the religious authorities in the process.
But rather than go toe to toe and try to satisfy some legal argument with them, he just basically says, this is the parable, right? And this must have been difficult for the Pharisees to grasp, especially this parable about the lost sheep, because they would first have to be able to identify with someone who cares for their sheep. They were actually above being shepherds. And they were, in fact, the same type of shepherds which the Lord had the prophet Ezekiel prophesy against. The shepherds of Israel who were too busy fattening and feeding themselves than looking after the fold, much less to be joyful at the return of them.
They can’t even picture themselves expending any kind of effort to go bring the lost sheep back. And they, after all, they’re not the lost ones, so what’s the big deal? It’s not really worth making a fuss about. And so now Jesus gives them the second parable. Perhaps maybe using an example that they could care about, a lost coin. Coin is worth about a day’s wage, a denarius. Not an insignificant amount for this woman. I mean, the shepherd had only lost one sheep out of a hundred, but here this woman has lost basically one-tenth of her savings.
And so she’s going to do whatever it takes to find it. She lights this lamp. She’s burning precious expensive oil to find it, most likely gets on her hands and knees to find it, to find this precious coin. And when she does, she makes an entire production in this celebration of finding it. And it seems kind of over the top like it’s too much, but it is a picture, as Jesus says, of the joy in heaven, this joy that comes with the repentance of even one sinner. So even the angels too cannot help themselves to be overwhelmed with elation.
And as I said, these two parables are really kind of the setup for the third, the prodigal son. And it’s probably in that parable where the Pharisees really ought to see themselves if they look in the mirror. And they would realize Jesus is talking about them as the older brother who cares not that his younger brother is returned. So the Pharisees murmur while everyone else, including the angels, are rejoicing.
But even in their murmuring, in their accusations, and in their true contempt for everyone, who is lost, the ones that Jesus seeks to bring to himself, Jesus still loves them. He loves them also. He wants the Pharisees to love the tax collectors and the sinners. He wants their teaching of law to have love and not condemnation as its end. He wants them to call sinners to repentance with the promise of grace and mercy and not with the threats of shunning and scolding.
So Jesus points out their hypocrisy, not so he can ridicule them, not so he can embarrass them, but so they may also repent. Because after all, he would go to the cross for their sins as well.
So we ask, what do we take away from this lesson today? Again, given kind of in the context of things that have happened. And I’ll admit, like I said before, I’ve kind of struggled with finding the right words because in times like this, you can sometimes say too little, and then you can also say too much.
But as to what we’ve seen kind of transpire over the past few weeks, I think there’s one thing we know. We don’t know what’s going to happen next. You’ve got people though saying that things are changing, that something must change, and indeed change may already be on the way, at least in terms of what is acceptable for people to say, acceptable response to things that were done last week.
And so we see actually some of the very ones who called the truth of scripture hate speech are themselves now being punished for their own hateful words. And we even have people calling for a civil war of sorts, not with lethal weapons, but with something like a reverse cancel culture. Maybe it’s deserved.
But my prayer is that as we consider where we go from here, we Christians will be restrained in our own words, and we won’t take the light in the downfall of others. That we pray for hearts to change rather than punishment to be handed out, especially for mere words. And this is going to be hard to do. I know because it’s going to be hard for me.
Because it’s very easy to hate the person who killed Charlie Kirk because of his faith. And that’s exactly why he was killed. Some say it was for his radical comments or his rhetoric. But saying that the word of God is true and proclaiming salvation for all people is not rhetoric. And it may be radical to this world, but it’s not hateful.
And it’s also easy to hate the man who killed those two children in the Minnesota Catholic Church school. And it’s easy to hate the man who killed the young Ukrainian refugee for reasons unknown. But it’s far harder to pray for people who do these things and to pray for them to repent. And it will be harder, harder still, to rejoice if they do.
And yet, that’s exactly what we see today with Jesus. He seeks out the lost. He brings back the strayed. He binds up the injured. He strengthens the weak. He delights in the sinner’s repentance, just as he delights in our repentance. And this is what the Pharisees cannot see. They cannot delight in the loss being found.
And ironically, they are the ones who are lost, for they have wandered away not just from the law which they claim to uphold, but they have wandered away from God himself, from his love, from his grace, and from his mercy. So I think we have to ask ourselves today, do we share in this same desire for repentance?
Or would we rather wish that the sinner would get what’s coming to him? Do we think it’s okay to react to these events with hatred of others on our own? Now, this is something else that is being said. It’s okay to be mad. It’s okay to be angry about all this to an extent. In Ephesians chapter 4, Paul writes, “Be angry, but do not sin.”
That is, don’t let your anger go from being directed at the nature of sin itself and then it turns into hatred and anger for the sinner, or of those who may say very despicable things that no one should say. Amen, because that will only lead you into more sin. So may we also continue to repent of our own sin. But may we continue to pray also. Pray despite the mockery of it.
We continue to pray despite what the world thinks and what the world says about the futility of prayer. And yes, when these tragedies happen, solutions abound. They come out of everywhere. If we only had more mental health resources, or if we only had judges who would impose longer prison sentences, or if we would have stricter gun laws or any sort of remedy that… Weak man can propose.
But we already know what the solution is. We know that the solution is faith in Christ. We know that the solution is repentance. We know that the solution is to turn to the Lord who created us in his image so that we might be made holy when we do trust in him and confess that we need Christ as our Savior and believe that he forgives us.
The law, the law of God convicts us of our sin, but the gospel of God gives us that promise. That promise is the forgiveness of sins. But if we don’t know either of those, then our hearts are indifferent toward God, and so they are going to be indifferent toward our fellow man. And our hearts will be hardened against all that is true because we refuse to hear it, much less believe it.
So repentance is a change of heart. And so we have to change our hearts too. And the way we feel, even about the most vile people who would rather see us dead. We have to repent even of this. Hard words to hear, I know, but that’s what God demands.
So brothers and sisters, these parables show the work of Christ and ushering in the kingdom of God, and they show us how in His great love for us God spared nothing, not even his only son, so that he may seek us out when we were lost and bring us to him.
Jesus was the one who placed us on his shoulders and carried us home. He was the one who took our sin on himself and carried that heavy burden to the cross. And God sent him, the light of the world, into the world so that he may find us in those places where we were lost, in the dark. For we are far more precious to him than silver coins.
And he promises, indeed, to deliver us someday from this veil of tears, to be with himself in heaven. And whether that’s in many years from now or perhaps in a matter of hours, we want to be ready to meet him face to face. But in the meantime, we ought not be afraid to speak the truth in these next days because he promises that he never will leave us or forsake us.
And so brothers and sisters, in this may… We truly rejoice with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and with the angels of God in heaven. Amen. Of the peace of God which surpasses all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen. Please stand.