The God Who Finds Us

[Below, you'll find live stream videos of both worship services with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio, yesterday. Also, you'll find the text of the message. It was a blessed day for our congregation, as we welcomed a total of 11 new members to our congregational family: 1 at the first service and 10 at the second. If you live in the Dayton area and don't have a church home, please consider worshiping with us on some Sunday in the future!]





Luke 15:1-10

In the chapters of Luke’s gospel leading up to today’s lesson, Luke 15:1-10, Jesus repeatedly makes the point that in the Kingdom of God He has come to usher into the world, everything gets turned upside down. “Indeed,” Jesus says, “there are those who are last who will be first, and first who will be last.” (Luke 13:30)

Here, Jesus is sounding one of the great themes of His Gospel on which Luke repeatedly focuses. Bible scholars call it the great reversal.

This theme can be heard in Mary’s song, the Magnificat, in Luke 1, when she says of what God is going to do in Jesus, “He has performed mighty deeds with his arm; he 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)

This, in fact, was a theme in the Old Testament as well. While pride may be applauded in our world, there is no place for it in God’s Kingdom! Proverbs 16:5 says: “The Lord detests all the proud of heart. Be sure of this: They will not go unpunished.”

Jesus underscores heaven’s condemnation of pride when He says in Luke 14:11, our Bible verse from last month: “...all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Pride, exalting ourselves, is a violation of the first table of the ten commandments, because the proud, no matter how pious and godly they may think themselves to be, have another god besides the one true God of the cosmos: themselves.

Pride too, is a violation of the second table of the ten commandments, because the proud do not love others as they love themselves.

Pride then is a violation of God’s command that we love.

And, as James tells us, “...whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.” (James 2:10)

This is uncomfortable, to say the least! Like the apostle Paul, honesty may cause us to confess, “...I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.” (Romans 7:17) Speaking personally, I want to avoid the sin of pride, but I seem to fall into it all the time!

If that personal confession goes for you too, we’re not alone. We’ll see that in our gospel lesson for this morning. It begins: “Now the tax collectors and sinners were all gathering around to hear Jesus. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.” (Luke 15:1-2)

Luke’s description of those straining to hear Jesus isn’t complimentary. They’re “tax collectors and sinners.”

Tax collectors in those days were extortionists. They held franchises to collect Roman taxes in a given area and were allowed to take some of the revenue for themselves as they did so. But the Romans didn’t mind how much money beyond the tax rates the tax collectors took. The tax collectors were then, by and large, unscrupulous fat cats.

As is true today, these particular unscrupulous fat cats tended to keep company with others as unscrupulous as themselves: prostitutes, pimps, and other thieves.

When Luke describes this crowd as “sinners,” he doesn’t mean ordinary sinners like you and me, people who, according to the Bible, are sinful from conception. These were unrepentant, brazen sinners who flouted any notion of right and wrong. Even Jesus, in other places in Luke’s gospel, described people like these as “tax collectors and sinners.”

Yet, as our Gospel lesson begins, these are the very people who want to hear Jesus. They want to hear His Word. In doing so, they keep God’s Third Commandment: “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.” In The Small Catechism, Martin Luther reminds us that this commandment isn’t about a day of the week; it’s about our desire and willingness to hear God’s Word. “We should fear and love God,” Luther writes, “so that we do not despise His Word and the preaching of it, but acknowledge it as holy and gladly hear and learn it.”

Standing on the periphery as Jesus taught and interacted with these notorious sinners were Pharisees and scribes, teachers of God’s Law. They believed, as you know, that they could perfectly obey God’s Law and were sure that their obedience was the means by which they would be welcomed into God’s eternal kingdom. They didn’t need God’s forgiveness or grace; they were good people and God would have to let them into heaven. They were proud of their righteousness, even though you can’t be both proud and righteous.

Righteousness, acceptability to God, has always been God’s gift to sinful human beings! Righteousness isn’t a state that we can attain through our efforts or goodness!

Not even Abram, later to be called Abraham, the patriarch of Biblical faith was capable of a perfect obedience to God’s law that could make him righteous. Genesis says of him: “Abram believed the LORD, and [God] credited it to him as righteousness.” (Genesis 15:6)

Today, God has come to us in Jesus Christ, God the Son, crucified and risen. We can only be made righteous and be saved from sin and the death sentence that our sin warrants, by God’s grace–His charity–through the faith in Jesus given to us by the Holy Spirit through God’s Word.

We believe in the Savior Jesus for whom God’s people had long looked and by that God-given faith, God credits Christ’s righteousness to us!

This is the very gracious Word and promise that the tax collectors and sinners craved as Jesus moved among them! It was good news and they knew it. Do we know that it’s good news for us as well?

Aware of the derision of the proud religious folks who thought Jesus couldn’t be of God if He shared the Gospel Word with sinners, Jesus told two parables for all, like us, prone to the sin of pride.

The first is about a shepherd who loses one of his one-hundred sheep. He leaves ninety-nine sheep “in the wilderness” in order to go find the lost one. While in Old Testament times, shepherds were valued by God’s people, by Jesus’ day, people like the Pharisees and teachers of the law viewed shepherds as low-lifes. They even had a list of dirty, contemptible professions, and shepherds were on it.

Yet, in Jesus’ parable, the shepherd is a stand-in for God Who so loves every single human being, that He sent His Son to seek and save everyone who would otherwise be eternally lost in sin and death.

Jesus sought and still seeks you and me in the very depths of our sin and death, bearing our sin in His sinless body and enduring death on the cross so that He could give His righteous perfection and life with God as we turn from sin and trust in Him.

When, in Jesus’ parable, the shepherd finds the lost sheep, he carries it back to the wilderness with other ninety-nine sheep, but to his home. He then invites his friends to a party.

Jesus says that, just so, there’s more joy in heaven over one sinner who turns to Him than over ninety-nine proud people, like the Pharisees and scribes, who trust in themselves and don’t think they need to repent or trust in God.

Notice too, what the lost sheep has to do in order to be saved by the shepherd: nothing.

Repentance and faith in Jesus consist in just this: being found by Jesus, our good shepherd.

If we will not stand apart from Jesus, as the Pharisees and scribes did, His Word can find us and bring us saving faith!

Jesus tells a second parable about a woman who loses and then seeks to find one of her ten coins.

Like the lost sheep, the lost coin does nothing to find itself, any more than we can find ourselves or save ourselves or overcome our sins or avoid dying.

God comes to us in His Word and in the Sacraments, bringing us the salvation Jesus has earned through His death on the cross for us. When that Word finds us and when, by God’s grace, faith takes hold in us, we are saved from sin and death.

At that, God and all the angels in heaven rejoice. This partying happens every time we encounter God’s Word and the Spirit incites us to gladly hear, learn, and believe it. The righteousness of Jesus covers all our unrighteousness.

Jesus humbly offered Himself on the cross to overcome all our sins, even our pride. The God Who searches for us in God the Word, Jesus, brings us saving faith in Jesus and we who are born lost and needy are found.

Whether because of pride or some other sin that tempts us daily, you and I are prone to wander from the God Who searches for us in love. We get lost.

May we then each day lay aside our pride, asking God to crucify it and our whole sinful selves, knowing that without Jesus’ grace, forgiveness, and righteousness, we are lost.

So, let this be our prayer as we turn to God In Jesus’ name each day: “Lord, find me again today. Find me every day. Then carry me into the kingdom You have won for all who trust in You alone.” Amen

Who's the Boss?

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

Luke 20:9-20

The questions that today’s gospel lesson puts before us as disciples of Jesus are these: Who has authority over us? And how are we to acknowledge or live under that authority?

There are different kinds of authority, of course. In a verses of Luke's gospel that appear just beyond today’s gospel lesson, Jesus tells His hearers to give to Caesar, that is to the government, what we owe the government and to God what we owe God. 

Because I feel privileged to live in the United States, I’ve never minded paying my taxes. Justice Holmes said: “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.” Scripture teaches and Lutherans have always believed in the necessity of government authority. Since not all people voluntarily accede to the authority of God, Who commands us to love God and neighbor, we need government to keep the sinful impulses of a fallen humanity at bay. While it’s right for Christians, in the name of Jesus, to demand that governments be loving and just--the prophets were sent by God to place this very demand on governments and peoples, we also realize that it’s beneficial to our neighbors and to us that governments exist. All of which is why I usually switch the channel any time a commercial for Optima Tax Relief comes on my TV screen: Jesus is clear that if we owe Caesar, we’re to pay Caesar.

But there is a far greater authority, an authority to which all of us--presidents, prime ministers, dictators, bishops, pastors, business people, accountants, teachers, contractors, doctors, lawyers, and everyone else is answerable. 

It's the authority of the One Who, after creating the first human beings and placing them in the garden, directed, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” (Genesis 1:28) God was asserting His authority. God gives the human race the world and commands us to use it and our whole lives in ways that honor God.

This isn’t always a popular message. Adam and Eve were tempted to sin by the serpent’s promise that if they disobeyed God, they would “be like God.” This is the central ambition of every child born to the human race--except Jesus: to be like God. 

And it’s especially the ambition of those to whom the world has given power, authority, comfort, prestige, and money, even in the smallest of doses. 

Jesus talks about the common human desire to usurp God’s authority and be gods unto ourselves in today’s gospel lesson, Luke 20:9-20. Let’s take a look at it.

Verse 9: “He went on to tell the people this parable: ‘A man planted a vineyard, rented it to some farmers and went away for a long time. At harvest time he sent a servant to the tenants so they would give him some of the fruit of the vineyard. But the tenants beat him and sent him away empty-handed. He sent another servant, but that one also they beat and treated shamefully and sent away empty-handed. He sent still a third, and they wounded him and threw him out.’”

Jesus has multiple audiences in mind when He speaks. 

1. He knows that His apostles are listening and will make us, as we read and hear their witness in Scripture, one of the audiences to what He says. He had promised the apostles that after He died and rose again, the Holy Spirit would help them to recall what He taught and did so that they could understand and teach others about Him as the Lord Who saves human beings by grace through faith in Christ alone (John 14:26; Ephesians 2:8-9). 

2. When Jesus first told this parable, He spoke it to a crowd of common people thronged around Him in the temple in Jerusalem. 

3. But He also knows that there are others listening in, the religious leaders anxious to hold onto their power to exploit others’ guilty consciences and have authority over them. 

Through the parable, Jesus is warning the religious leaders (and all of us who get little doses of authority in this life and may not handle it very well) that the authority that is a a trust from God will be one day be taken from those to whom it's granted unless they repent for their sins and trust in Him as the only One Who can make a human being right with God. 

This is a warning to all leaders, whatever their field. 

If they’re arrogant or unjust, if they show preference for those who can grease their palms, if they’re bullies, they will have to answer to God. 

When you’re the victim of evil leaders--whether at work, at school, at home, or in governments, you may wonder where God is. 

But in this parable, Jesus underscores the promise of Proverbs 11:21: “Be sure of this: The wicked will not go unpunished, but those who are righteous will go free.” 

There will come a day, Isaiah 2:17 tells us, when, “The arrogance of man will be brought low and human pride humbled; the LORD alone will be exalted…”

In the centuries after God made His covenant with ancient Israel, He had sent one prophet and preacher after another, like the vineyard owner of Jesus’ parable sends servants to the renters in Jesus' parable, to tell His people (and the world) to give to God what they owed God for giving them life. 

In the Ten Commandments, God tells ancient Israel and the world: “You shall have no other gods before me…” (Exodus 20:2). Yet human beings have a marked penchant for worshiping idols they think will give them the ability to control their lives and get what they want.

Through the prophet Micah, God reminded the people of the world, “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8) Yet, it's an enduring characteristic of the human race that we act unjustly, treat others unmercifully, and walk in arrogance away from God.

In Leviticus 19:33-34, God told His people, “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God…” Yet the people of Israel (and the people of the world) have a decided penchant for turning life into a contest between "us" and "them," siloing us ourselves off from those we deem "different" or "other." 

In Jesus’ parable, the prophets and preachers of God’s truth, who reminded people of God’s authority over our lives, are portrayed as servants who are brutalized and murdered. It was precisely this human penchant for rejecting God’s servants that caused Jesus to lament, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you.." (Luke 13:34)

In the parable, the vineyard owner is beside Himself with anguish over His tenants, as God is for us. When our kids first learned to drive and took off for work or school for the first hundred times, I remember the anxiety I felt as time seemed to drag as we awaited their return. Parents want their children to grow up, be independent, and do things for themselves. But you can't help but feel anxious as they take their first steps into adult responsibilities. Magnify the feelings of parents by an infinite amount and you can begin to imagine that anguish God feels for us as He places us in the vineyard, that is the world. God risks losing us by letting us go. He risks seeing us turn from, be contemptuous of, or to forget about His authority over us and losing us forever!

To reject God’s authority over our lives is also to reject His authority over our sins, our death, our vulnerabilities, His authority to give us new and everlasting life. 

It’s only when we entrust our whole lives to the gracious authority of God that He can give us all that He has in mind to give us through faith in Jesus, all that we can be as grown-up, maturing, confident, adult children of God. 

Verse 13: “Then the owner of the vineyard said, ‘What shall I do? I will send my son, whom I love; perhaps they will respect him.’ But when the tenants saw him, they talked the matter over. ‘This is the heir,’ they said. ‘Let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ So they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.” (Luke 20:13-15a) Here, Jesus prophesies His own crucifixion. Not interested in yielding to God the authority that they want to keep for themselves, the people of the world, led by the arrogant leaders of the Jews and the governor from Rome, would take Jesus outside the walls of Jerusalem and murder Him. They didn’t realize that in voluntarily going to the cross, the sinless Jesus was dying for all human sin and that those who dare to lay down any claim to have authority over their own lives will have life with God that never ends.

Verse 15: “What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them? He will come and kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others.” Here, Jesus says that there will be a great reversal, the very kind that His earthly mother Mary had spoken of in The Magnificat. In Jesus, Mary said, “...[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)

Strangely enough, even the common people who heard Jesus tell this parable, were appalled by it. Our translation tells us that they responded to the idea that human arrogance would be punished by God by saying, “God forbid!” Actually, they say, in the Greek in which Luke and the other writers composed the New Testament, “Μὴ γένοιτο,” a more literal translation of which would be, “Never may it be!” Or, “No way!”

Why would they react like this? Jesus was offering them freedom from the arbitrary authority of self-glorifying human leaders. More than that, He was offering, as He still offers today, freedom from sin and death, freedom from the cruel demands of human authority, replacing them all with His loving lordship over our lives, the freedom to be all that a loving, omnipotent God can make of us for all eternity! 

The answer, I think is simple: As children of a fallen race who have only ever known the dog-eat-dog world in which we live, life in the kingdom of God is scary. 

We’ve never lived in a world in which we were accepted just as we are and helped to be all that we can be. 

We’ve never lived in a world that says if we will die to self, we will live with God. 

Accepting life in this upside down world that Jesus brings means that we must give up all pretense of having the authority of God over the world--or even our own lives. 

When death comes, as it does to us all, we must finally admit what we sometimes spend our lives trying to deny: Only the God we know in Christ can give us life. 

At the beginning of this message, I said that Jesus’ parable forces us to wrestle with two questions: Who has authority over us? And how are we to acknowledge that authority? 

It’s the God we meet in Jesus Who, alone, has authority over our lives, no matter how much we may pretend otherwise. 

And there’s only one way to acknowledge Christ’s authority: It’s to lay aside all our arrogance and sin and trust in Jesus alone to give us the greatest gift of all, eternal life from the hand of God. Amen

[I'm the 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.]