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For Circuit #14 Monthly Winkle, Pilgrim Lutheran Church, Kilgore, TX
+ + + 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 in the Office of the Holy Ministry and Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Even before today’s three Readings were read moments ago, probably most of us had heard them once already this week, as Lutheran Service Book appointed them as the Readings for this past Sunday. The Gospel Reading (Matthew 18:21-35), largely carried over from The Lutheran Hymnal’s historic one‑year lectionary series’ Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity, continues Jesus’s so‑called Fourth Discourse from St. Matthew’s divinely‑inspired Gospel account and centers on life in the Christian community, how Christians are to forgive one another. The Epistle Reading (Romans 14:1-12), part of a continuous reading from Romans, is expanded slightly from its pairing with the Gospel Reading in Lutheran Worship’s three‑year series and now has both an almost incongruous question about passing judgment on one another and a “coincidental” mention of individual accountability before God. And, the Old Testament Reading (Genesis 50:15-21), almost the end of both the book of Genesis and its nearly fourteen‑chapter Account of Jacob, tells of his son Joseph and his brothers after he died and is most‑likely paired with the Gospel Reading because it can be taken to illustrate Jesus’s teaching of our need to forgive our brothers and sisters in Christ from the heart. Since I preached on the Gospel Reading Sunday, as some of you may have also, this morning I wanted us to focus more on the Old Testament Reading, and we do so under the theme or title “The Place of God”.
You probably remember Joseph’s story, how his brothers conspired to kill him but in the end sold him to Ishmaelites who took him to Egypt and sold him to Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh, the captain of the guard (Genesis 37:12-36). There the Lord was with Joseph, even as he was wrongly accused of sleeping with Potiphar’s wife and put in prison (Genesis 39). With God‑given interpretations of dreams, Joseph eventually rose both to be second in command behind Pharaoh and to save, from a great famine, the people of Egypt and the surrounding area, including his own father and brothers (Genesis 40-47, especially 47:25; 45:5-7; confer 41:57’s “all the earth”). After several of their successive visits, Joseph revealed himself to his brothers and, although he never specifically told them that he forgave them, he did tell them not to be distressed or angry with themselves for selling him there (Genesis 45:5). But, as we heard, when their father Jacob died, they sent a message to Joseph saying that their father commanded them to ask Joseph to forgive their sin against him. When they spoke to him, Joseph wept and asked them whether he was in “the place of God”.
Bible commentators differ as to whether or not Jacob actually commanded such a thing, they differ as to why Joseph wept, and they differ as to what Joseph meant when he asked them whether he was in “the place of God”. For his part, The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther, in his 15‑45 lecture on Genesis 50, commented that Jacob meant he was not above God, that if God had forgiven them then they should not doubt that he did also, and Luther commented that part of the reason for Joseph’s forgiving his brothers was because God brought such a great good from such a great evil (AE 8:327-328). To be sure, Joseph had neither the power nor the right not to forgive his brothers’ sin against him (confer Leupold, ad loc Gen 50:18-21, 1216), especially since God essentially had already spoken on the matter and Himself forgiven them (confer Von Rad, ad loc Gen 50:15-21, 432). Joseph’s brothers seem to have had a keen awareness of their own sin, and Joseph likewise was keenly aware of his need to forgive them.
How keenly aware are we of our own sin? Of course, even pastors are sinful. The Lutheran Agenda’s old “Pastor’s Daily Prayer” has us especially confess our “indolence in prayer”, “negelect of [God’s] Word”, and our “seeking after good days and vainglory”. Of course, we all sin in so many ways, for we all are sinful by nature. We may not have sold a brother or sister in Christ to the Ishamelites and into slavery in Egypt, but we surely have not as we should have honored the authorities over us; helped and supported our neighbors in every physical need; lived a sexually pure and decent life in what we say and do and loved and honored our spouses (if we have one); helped our neighbors to improve and protect their possessions and income; defended our neighbors, spoken well of them, and explained everything in the kindest way; and been content with the possessions and people God has given us in our lives.
How keenly aware are we of our need to forgive our brothers and sisters in Christ the sins they commit against us? When I was still a layman, my own pastor sat in my living room and told me how he could not forgive a specific person a specific sin that had been committed against him. I had the unenviable duty of speaking to him the warning like that Jesus gave at the end of the Gospel Reading: “if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matthew 6:15). What sins committed against us are we unwilling to forgive? Then there is our whole responsibility as pastors of in some sense being in “the place of God”. Although L-S-B’s Setting of the Divine Service we used this morning did not have me say it, pastors stand in the “stead” of the Lord Jesus, they are in His position, they perform His function of forgiving people’s sins—not the people’s sins committed against the pastors but the people’s sins committed against God, and every sin is a sin committed against God. How well do we distinguish such forgiveness for the people God has entrusted to our care, urging them to make private confession for the sake of receiving individual Holy Absolution?
God calls us to repent of all of our sin: to turn in sorrow from it, to trust Him to forgive it for Jesus’s sake, and to want to do better than to keep on sinning. When we so repent, then God forgives our sin. Forgiveness of our sin is a good that God brings about from the evil of our having sinned in the first place. Indeed, as St. Augustine writes in The City of God and Luther quotes seemingly favorably, “God is so good that He does not permit evil to be done unless He can draw great good from it” (Book XIV, ch. 27; confer AE 8:328). And, when wrestling with the question of why an all‑knowing God would have created humanity knowing how they would sin, some answer that God permitted the evil of humanity’s sin so that He could draw from it the good of humanity’s redemption. And, by grace through faith in the God-man Jesus Christ, you and I truly are redeemed, forgiven. Joseph was arguably a prophetic type pointing forward to Jesus, and Jesus as the antitype or fulfillment of that prophetic type is greater. Jesus’s death on the cross saves far more than the people of Egypt and the surrounding area from a great famine. Jesus’s death on the cross saves all people of all places and times from the eternal death they deserve on account of their sin.
And, as Luther writes in the Smalcald Articles, “God is surpassingly rich in His grace”, offering “counsel and help against sin in more than one way” (III iv). With Matthew 18 in our minds from the past two Sundays’ Gospel Readings and with its connection to Matthew 16, we think of the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven given for the benefit of the Church and exercised by the apostles and their successors, pastors today. Yes, pastors are in “the place of God” when they with the congregation’s “Amen” both bind sin in excommunication and loose sin individual Holy Absolution, but pastors are also in “the place of God” when they preach, baptize, and consecrate and distribute the Lord’s Supper, which comes with its own set of responsibilities: to instruct, examine, and absolve people before they receive Christ’s body and blood in the bread and wine.
From what we can tell from the book of Genesis, God did not deal with Joseph exactly as He had with Joseph’s father Jacob before him. For example, while both had dreams with important messages or appearances from God (for example, Genesis 37:2-11; 28:10-22), we are not told that Joseph wrestled with God in the form of a man, as had his father Jacob (Genesis 32:22-32). Still, both were patriarchs, and both most likely were, in the same sense as pastors, in “the place of God”. As we have reflected on this Old Testament Reading today, we have realized our own sin, but, we also have received God’s forgiveness by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. After receiving His body and blood, we will go forward from this place, according to our respective vocations, living in His forgiveness of sins and forgiving one another.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +