Listen to the sermon with the player below, or, download the audio.
+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
My being back here at Pilgrim this morning—as a participant in the Divine Service with its faithful use of the liturgy and hymns, as a preacher in this pulpit, and as a celebrant at this altar—is good, God-willing for me and for you. As I mentioned in my cover article in the congregation’s July newsletter, the Elders and I did not initially intend for me to be absent the last three Sundays in a row, but in the end that is what God permitted. I thank you all for your understanding, especially of my absence on that “middle” Sunday, and I also thank God for the privilege and pleasure of again serving all of you here in Kilgore.
While I was gone, you all began the season of Sundays after Pentecost, in this year’s case, with their largely “continuous reading” of St. Matthew’s divinely‑inspired Gospel account. Last Sunday you jumped into the middle of what is usually regarded as Jesus’s second major section of teaching in the account, what can be called “The Missionary Discourse”, and today we heard the end of that Discourse. Although there are somewhat parallel statements in St. Luke’s Gospel account that we hear in the third year of our lectionary series, today’s Gospel Reading uniquely combines this teaching and applies it, both to those sent and to those who hear them. What might seem to be three separate things—divisions within households, conditions of discipleship, and rewards of discipleship—are in fact closely related. We consider the whole of today’s Gospel Reading under the theme “Religion and Families”.
Do not all of us have some sort of religious difference with members of our immediate or extended families? In my case, all of my uncles, aunts, and cousins on both sides of my extended family were Missouri Synod Lutheran, at least initially. But, over time, some joined the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and so at a minimum gave up the genuine Lutheran confession of the Christian faith, and others went to other denominations and so may have given up the Christian faith altogether. I know what family division over religion is like, and I do not like it any more than anyone else.
We may want peace in our families at all costs, but today’s Gospel Reading suggests both that family division over religion should be expected and that something else should come at all costs, namely, following Jesus. The Gospel Reading does not put down families or attack such family relationships, but the Gospel Reading makes clear that loving and following Jesus is more important. As at the time of the Lutheran Reformation, people may wrongly accuse those confessing the Truth of unnecessarily stirring up trouble, but Jesus goes so far as to say that He came in order to set family members against one another. Like Jeremiah in today’s Old Testament Reading before Him (Jeremiah 28:5-9), Jesus is a true prophet of true peace. We may want not to offend anyone, but Jesus essentially says that cannot be so. Humanly speaking, some may want compromise or silence, but too often when we yield in such ways we deny Jesus. Our confessing Jesus will result in unpleasantness, a cross we must bear if we follow Him.
Are we really following Him? Or, are we trying to follow Him without taking up any sort of cross? Are we clinging to something evil in our lives and refusing the peace that Jesus offers us? When we honestly consider God’s law, we are like St. Paul in today’s Epistle Reading (Romans 7:1-13). We admit that the law is holy and righteous and good, and we admit that we would not have known sin apart from the law. The law shows our sin to be sin, it shows that we are sinful beyond measure, and so the law produces death in us. From that death of sin, God calls us to repent of our sin and to believe that He forgives us for Jesus’s sake.
Jesus not only did what we fail to do, but He also made up for our failure to do it. Jesus confessed the truth, even at the cost of distancing Himself at times from His extended family, and Jesus lost and found His life for us. On the cross, which St. Matthew’s account mentions for the first time in today’s Gospel Reading, Jesus died for your sins and for mine, so that we do not have to die the eternal death we deserve. God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, the Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6), Who brings peace on earth between God and those of His good will (Luke 2:14). Those favorite Christmas passages do not contradict today’s Gospel Reading, nor does today’s Gospel Reading contradict them. “For all its peaceful intent”, Jesus’s coming “forces a decision between good and evil and proves to be … the sundering sword” (Franzmann, Follow Me, 96). When we turn in sorrow from our sin, trust Him to forgive our sin, and to want to do better than to keep on sinning, then God forgives us—our sinful beyond measure human natures and all our actual sins. He forgives it all, through the ministry of His means of grace.
Today’s Gospel Reading makes clear the close connection between following Jesus and receiving (believing or welcoming) His ministers and so receiving the “reward” of the forgiveness of sins that they offer on Jesus’s behalf, essentially receiving Jesus Himself. Similarly St. Paul refers to how the Galatians received him as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus Himself (Galatians 4:14). Jesus Himself is given to us with water and the word in Holy Baptism. At the Baptismal Font, we take up His cross on our forehead and heart, and the Name of the Triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—is put on us. In that same Triune Name, those who privately confess the sins that they know and feel in their hearts are forgiven by Jesus speaking through their pastor in individual Absolution. And, those who are instructed, examined, and so absolved, are welcomed at this rail to receive Jesus Himself, His body in bread and His blood in wine, for the forgiveness of sins, and so also for life and for salvation.
To be sure, the faithful practice of opening communion only to those who make the same confession of faith and closing communion to others divides families and households at the very time we are to depart in peace. We who are faithful bear the cross both of family members who cannot commune here and of our not communing at altars where they commune. Such necessary division is in keeping with today’s Gospel Reading, though such division now at this rail need not necessarily be taken as reflecting the eternal division of those in heaven and those in hell.
When I come to visit someone, I am usually content with a glass of water. Although perhaps the heat of Texas’s summer perhaps does not come close to the burning heat of the eastern sun in the Holy Land, there a cup of cold water is “the least work of hospitality” and “hardly [an] extraordinarily generous act” (Davies-Allison, ad loc Mt 10:42, 229). Yet, in the Gospel Reading Jesus says that someone who receives one of His ministers even in that way will by no means lose his reward, salvation by grace through faith in Jesus (see Matthew 25:35, 40). God the Father loves us in the Person of His Son, Jesus, Who sends us His ministers. In turn, we believe their message and both show them hospitality—welcome them into our families—and otherwise support their ministry. For, “behind the ever‑changing faces of the preachers of the Gospel there stands the Son of God Himself, and behind Him God the Father” (Davies-Allison, ad loc Mt 10:40, 226). Ideally, each of us would leave a legacy of true believers in our families. What more could a parent or grandparent want? But when the sad reality is otherwise, we bear that cross, with repentance and faith, living each day in the forgiveness of sins, including forgiveness for our failures to confess Jesus as we should. If we are cast out of our earthly families and all alone, we all the more consider our brothers and sisters in Christ, born of the same Father through the baptismal water and fed by the same Son in the family meal. Anything we lack now we receive a hundredfold in the coming eternal life (Matthew 19:29).
Politics may be a close second, but nothing seems to divide families like religion. We can be shocked by Jesus’s words in today’s Gospel Reading that He came not to bring peace but a sword, to set family members against one another. Truly such is the result of His great love’s not being received and reciprocated by all. We who repent and believe take our cross of a divided family and follow Him, we lose our life for His sake, and so, through the ministry of His means of grace, we will find it eternally. Our Hymn of the Day pointed to the “celestial joy” we will have then, and we conclude by praying the final phrase of its second stanza, which anticipates that eternity in heaven: “Jesus, here I share Your woe; / Help me there Your joy to know” (Lutheran Service Book 685:2).
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +