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. (Amen.)
You may know that what are called the “propers”, the parts of the Divine Service that change according to the day of the Church Year—such as the Collect, Readings, and hymns—ideally all fit together around a central theme. The Readings, in their larger contexts of the Bible’s books from which they are extracted, may have one emphasis, but, in the context of the Divine Service in which they are combined, the Readings may have another emphasis. This morning, we might say that today’s propers emphasize that “You are chosen and treasured”.
For example, in the first verse of today’s Old Testament Reading (Deuteronomy 7:6-9), the Lord through Moses told His Old Testament people that He had chosen them to be a people for His treasured possession. The same thought is expressed with the same words a few chapters later in Deuteronomy (Deuteronomy 14:2) and still later in one of the Psalms (Psalm 135:4). And, in today’s Old Testament Reading, the Lord made clear that He did not set His love on them and choose them because they were more in number than any other people, for they were the fewest of all people. But, because the Lord loved them and was keeping the oath that He swore to their fathers, He brought them out with a mighty hand and redeemed them from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. So, the Lord wanted His people to know that He was their God, the faithful God Who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love Him and keep His commandments.
Of course, like the individuals out of God’s chosen and treasured people of the Old Testament, we too often do not love God and do not keep His Ten Commandments, neither those Commandments regarding our loving Him nor those Commandments regarding our loving our neighbors. If our being chosen and treasured depended on something about us, we would all be lost, not picked at all—far worse than being the last one “chosen” for a sports team that has to take us whether or not they want to take us. God is not making equal teams on the basis of merit or even popularity! All of us are sinful by nature, and so we actually sin. We actually sin by thinking, saying, and doing things that we should not, and we actually sin by not thinking, saying, and doing things that we should. So, we deserve both death here and now and torment in hell for eternity. In today’s Gospel Reading’s “Parable of the Net”, Jesus uses fishermen’s sorting the good fish into containers but throwing away the bad fish to tell again how, at the end of the age, the angels will separate the evil people from the righteous and throw the evil into the fiery furnace—imagine a place hotter than we have had it in East Texas this past week and will have again today—a place where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth (confer Psalm 125:4-5). The evil people then will be sorry that they forfeited communion with God in the fulfillment of His Kingdom (Stephenson, CLD XIII:122), but their sorrow will be too late.
Thus, now is the time for us both to be sorry for our sin and to trust God to forgive our sin for Jesus’s sake (for example, 2 Corinthians 6:2), and the Holy Spirit calls and enables us so to repent! In today’s Epistle Reading (Romans 8:28-39), St. Paul reminded us that those whom God has “predestined”, or “elected” or “chosen” in Christ Jesus from eternity (Ephesians 1:4-5; Formula of Concord Epitome and Solid Declaration XI:5), God also calls and justifies, that is, makes righteous for Jesus’s sake, and then ultimately God glorifies them. Contrary to what some wrongly believe, teach, and confess, God does not choose those who are saved because God foreknows that they will respond favorably to His call, but God chooses them because of God’s love, as today’s Old Testament Reading said that God in love chose His people to be a treasured possession.
One commentator says that today’s Old Testament Reading “could have been on Jesus’s mind as He described the treasure” in today’s Gospel Reading’s “Parable of the Treasure Hidden in a Field” (Fickenscher, Looking Forward, 193). Despite some differences, the “Parable of the Treasure Hidden in a Field” and the “Parable of the Merchant in Search of Fine Pearls” are both usually taken as teaching essentially the same central truth, but commentators disagree whether that same central truth is about our selling all that we have to acquire the reign of God that comes in Jesus or about God’s giving His Son in the man Jesus Christ in order to redeem us lost and condemned people from sin, death, and the power of the devil. That view seems to fit best with the rest of today’s propers! In today’s Epistle Reading, St. Paul says that God did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all. And, in today’s Hymn of the Day, based in part on today’s Epistle Reading, is translated by Lutheran Service Book as saying that God “sent His greatest treasure / In Jesus Christ, His Son” (Lutheran Service Book 713:4). Similarly, nearly forty years ago, “contemporary” Christian songwriter Michael Card in his track titled “The Promise” twice asked the rhetorical question “What more could God have given / Tell me, what more did He have to give?” Truly, on the cross, God gave all he could give. On the cross, Jesus died for all people, as our substitute, in our place, and then Jesus rose from the dead. When we are sorry for our sin and trust God to forgive us for Jesus’s sake, then God does forgive us: God forgives our sinful nature and all of our actual sins, whatever our actual sins might be. God forgives us by working through His Word and Sacraments.
The purely preached Gospel and the rightly administered Sacraments—Holy Baptism, Holy Absolution, and the Holy Supper—not only create faith and forgive sins but also are what we call “marks” of the Church: that is, they help us identify where the true Church is, though not necessarily who is in the true Church. The true Church is the assembly of saints, but, since we cannot see what is in people’s hearts, we must go only by their confession of faith—like that confession of faith that we will hear from Sharon, Rudy, Christen, Taylor, and Maggie this morning—and by their outward acts. Despite our best efforts, like the net that gathers fish of every kind out of the sea, the Church as it appears to us gathers both righteous and evil people out of the world; evil people’s being in the Church as it appears to us should not offend the righteous, and all people should know that the Sacraments are efficacious even when evil men administer them (Apology of the Augsburg Confession VII/VIII:1, 19). But, ideally, like the apostles, their successors, trained for the kingdom of heaven, who deal with us faithfully, bring out of their treasure both what is from the New Testament and what is from the Old Testament, each in light of the other (for example, Scaer, Discourses, 314-315). Such preparation of understanding “scribes”, whether for early house Churches or for later congregations of the Christian Church, was arguably emphasized more on this day by its earlier set of propers, which has as its Old Testament Reading King Solomon’s asking God for wisdom (1 Kings 3:5‑12; see LSB: Historical Archives, 4:344).
As Lutheran Service Book has prescribed them, today’s propers emphasize that “You are chosen and treasured”. Today’s Collect of the Day prayed that, receiving what God has promised, we may love what He has commanded. At least one man Jesus commanded to sell presumably all of what he possessed and to give to the poor in order to have treasure in heaven (Matthew 19:21), but most of us, as a response for God’s redeeming us in Christ, give only a sacrificial portion as the first‑fruits of what God has entrusted to our use, whether time, talent, or treasure, whether volunteering to clean the church or mow the lawn, or arranging and paying for someone else to mow the lawn. And, we rejoice as the man who found the treasure hidden in the field rejoiced, even as we suffer various afflictions (Romans 5:3), knowing both that the sufferings conform us to the image of God’s Son and that nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. (Amen.)
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +
