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+ + + 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.
No doubt that, at one time or another, all of us have asked for something from friends and family‑members and then have had them give us what we asked for. Such experiences of asking for and receiving from friends and family‑members are used by the Lord Jesus in today’s Gospel Reading as a foundation for our confidently praying our Heavenly Father to give us the Holy Spirit. As we this morning consider today’s Gospel Reading we ultimately realize that God gives evil people the greatest gift. So, this sermon’s theme is “God gives evil people the greatest gift”.
Today’s Gospel Reading has been called “Luke’s Prayer Catechism” (Joachim Jeremias’s term quoted by Stählin, TDNT 9:161). In the Gospel Reading, the Lord Jesus Himself was praying in a certain place, and when He finished, one of His disciples asked Him to teach them to pray. As preserved by the Divinely‑inspired evangelist St. Luke, Jesus on this occasion gave a slightly different (but substantially the same) version of the Lord’s Prayer that we know better and use from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount recorded in St. Matthew’s Gospel account (Matthew 6:9-13). And then, as St. Luke in part uniquely records, Jesus gave two real‑life examples of his hearers asking for and receiving food first from friends and then from family. Ultimately, Jesus said that if we who are evil know how to give good gifts to our children, how much more will the Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to His children who ask Him.
Now, of course, we recognize that not everyone has had overwhelmingly positive experiences asking for and receiving things from friends and family (probably not as overwhelmingly positive as the children of the so‑called “working-class billionaire” who were ubiquitous at the Republican National Convention this past week). Jesus is not taking into consideration all the various possibilities of our experiences, however, but Jesus is envisioning the normal case of friendship and familial love (confer Bertram, TDNT 3:955). You and I may be reluctant to ask friends and family for help, maybe because we ourselves are reluctant to give friends and family whatever they ask of us. Likewise, you and I may be reluctant to pray God for the Holy Spirit, maybe because we doubt His promise to hear our prayer and grant it. For whatever reasons, we end up disobeying God’s command for us to pray to Him, just as we end up disobeying all of God’s other Commandments. Truly Jesus spoke also of us as evil people, by nature sinful from the moment of our conception and sinning still even after we have come to believe in Jesus. Apart from such faith in Jesus, we deserve to die in this life and suffer eternally in the next life.
But, God calls us both to repent of our sinful nature and all of our sin and to trust Him to forgive our sin for Jesus’s sake. Moreover, God gives us His Holy Spirit so that we are able to repent and believe and so to be forgiven of our sin and to be saved from the death we would otherwise deserve. As we sang in today’s Psalm, the Lord regards the lowly, the repentant believers, but the haughty, the unrepentant unbelievers, He knows from afar; on the day we call, He answers us and increases the strength of our souls (Psalm 138: 6, 3). When we repent and believe, then God forgives our sin—our sin of failing to pray as we should, our sin of failing to give to our friends and family as we should, whatever our sin might be—God forgives all our sin for the sake of His Son, Jesus Christ the Lord.
Today’s Epistle Reading (Colossians 2:6-15), part of our four‑week more‑or‑less‑continuous reading of Colossians, reminds us of such things as how the whole fullness of the deity dwells bodily in the man Jesus and how God cancelled the record of debt that stood against us by nailing it with Jesus to the cross. We are filled in Jesus, Who is the head of all rule and authority, and we are buried with Him in Holy Baptism and there also raised with Him through faith in the powerful working of God the Father, Who raised Jesus from the dead. And so, together with Jesus, God also has made us alive, who were dead in our trespasses and the uncircumcision of our flesh, but now who have had all our trespasses forgiven and have been circumcised, as it were, in Holy Baptism. At the Baptismal Font, we receive the Holy Spirit of adoption as God’s children, by whom we are enabled to pray “Father” (Romans 8:15). So Baptized, we ask for individual Holy Absolution, seeking forgiveness for the sins that trouble us most, as it were knocking on the door of heaven, that its keys may be turned and the door opened in order to admit us to the eternal feast therein.
In today’s Gospel Reading, food is common to the Lord’s Prayer and to the two real‑life examples of asking for and receiving from friends and family. Yet, not the good gifts of fish and egg but the greatest gifts of bread with Jesus’s true Body and wine with Jesus’s true Blood are what our Heavenly Father gives us here. The obligations of hospitality as an expression of table fellowship are certainly involved in the Gospel Reading (Stählin, TDNT 9:161), but, something far greater than friendship and something far greater than familial love is here, for here we have Divine sacrificial love that, with Jesus’s Body and Bood, freely gives us the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. Here, the Holy Spirit is actively working to transform our lives so that we, for example, pray to God as we ought and give to our friends and family as we should.
God knows what we need before we pray (Isaiah 65:24), and He even gives us and unbelievers things without our prayers (Small Catechism III:13). Yet, in today’s Gospel Reading, Jesus takes for granted that we will pray. Prayer is an exercise of our faith that freely receives the forgiveness of sins through God’s Word and Sacraments (Pieper, III:216). When we get up from bed, before and after meals, before we lie down in bed, and at other times during the day, we confidently pray to God, even if we are not quite as confident and bold as Abraham was when he interceded for sinful Sodom and Gomorrah in today’s Old Testament Reading (Genesis 18:20-33). We are confident that God will hear our prayers not because we ask impudently, for God’s motivation to hear and answer our prayers is far greater than a friend or family member’s motivation to give us what we ask for: God hears and answers our prayers out of His mercy and grace. So, we are confident that God will hear our prayers because He promises to do so. Still, our confident prayers themselves are shaped by the Gospel Reading’s connection between Jesus’s encouraging us to pray and the Lord’s Prayer that precedes that encouragement (confer Noscent, 4:329-338). The prayer that we can be most-confident that God hears and grants, Jesus says, is our prayer for the Holy Spirit.
Far more than we give to friends and family, God gives to evil people who repent and believe the greatest gift: the gift of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit keeps us repenting and believing and receiving God’s forgiveness for Jesus’s sake through His Word and Sacraments, until He returns or until we are otherwise delivered of this life. As we pray God for the Holy Spirit, we can be certain that God wants us to ask Him and that He will certainly grant that prayer. For, we have His Word on it!
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +