St Luke 15.1-10;
Micah 7:18-20 Trinity 3
St Johns Ev LC,
Victor, IA 2013.6.16
In
the name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Micah
has a hard time understanding what sort of a God this is that Israel
has. In the Old Testament reading for today he wrote, "Who is a
God like you?...Pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression...
He does not retain His anger forever, because he delights in
steadfast love."
God
is hard to understand because He's so different from us; unlike our
merciful God we have a problem with retaining anger.
Someone gets under our skin and we tend to hang onto the anger until
it turns to bitterness. But there must be no hanging onto anger
/ when you're hanging about with the God of Israel. He's the
God who loves to forgive, to pardon, to pass over transgression.
He looks for excuses and opportunities to wipe out sin and
reestablish relationships. He longs to show mercy! And He
invites us to live in that bounty of forgiveness, that river of
mercy.
“He
will have compassion on us,” rejoices Micah, “he will tread our
iniquities underfoot. You will cast all our sins into the
depths of the sea.” And so He has. Not a few of our
sins, leaving us the rest to work on ourselves. No, He has a
water that drowns every single one of them. "You will cast
ALL our sins into the depths of that sea," and that means that
none of them are left for us to deal with. That deep sea, of
course, is Baptism.
And
if there are none of our own sins to hang onto anymore, then there
can be no holding onto sins of anyone else, either. No deep sea
diving to scavenge for what God has cast away under the waters of
Baptism. If your sins are all left there (in the waters of
Baptism), then so are your neighbor's sins. All of them buried
by your God in the water with a warning sign: "No diving
allowed."
But
this is not to say that He doesn't leave you with nothing to do. You
still have a life to live. So He shows you how to live with others.
Instead of hanging onto your sins or the sins of others, He shows you
"faithfulness and steadfast love." That's the God of
Israel, and that's the very same God who also claimed a man named
Paul to be His own apostle, sending him out to preach and teach and
live God's life of faithfulness and steadfast love.
Listen
to how one theologian summarizes Paul's life: “He appointed
me, [Paul,] to his service - ME, a blasphemer, a persecutor, an
insolent opponent. He wouldn't let me stay that way. He
insisted on giving me mercy. I was acting ignorantly in
unbelief, refusing the gifts of God, and yet the grace of the Lord
overflowed for me, and so I'm here to tell you one thing you can
absolutely count on for sure: Christ Jesus came into the world
to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. And why did I
receive this mercy? So that everyone of you might have reason
to hope. If He could be patient with the likes of me, the worst
sinner of all, then that shows you that He will be patient with you,
too.”
Mercy,
mercy, mercy. That is the theme which runs all through the
readings today. The central message being this: see what the
Lord Jesus does, and what He loves to do: He's welcoming
sinners who have come to hear Him, He's talking with them and He's
even eating with them. In contrast to all this, you heard how
Jesus doing His mercy-thing makes the Pharisees quite upset.
And
what's a Pharisee but anyone who can look down on another because
that person is a sinner. Beware, dear Christian, / are you a
Pharisee? Are there people in the body of Christ, baptized into
the same ocean of mercy as you, whom you are angry with? Whom
you have spoken unkindly of? Whom you have JUDGED in your
heart, tried them and condemned them?
Repent.
For Jesus is rich in mercy, and welcomes them just as He welcomes
you. For love of them and for love of you, He the Good
Shepherd, left His 99 sheep - the angels up in heaven - and came to
earth in search of his lost and wandering one. And you are that
one. Each of you: lost and wandering, alone and in danger.
But then our Jesus grabs hold of you, He tosses you up on His strong
shoulders and carries you back to home, back to heaven, where to our
shock and surprise there is joy over our homecoming. Heaven,
then, is the place where the sinner is welcomed and loved and
restored. Hell is where the Pharisee lives; that's where the
sinner is judged and condemned, where grumbling and complaining take
place against the Lord and His mercy for welcoming sinners; the Lord
wants us to get out of that hell and into His heaven.
And
then there's this woman with her coin. “Woman”, in Jesus'
parables, always suggests the Church. The Church gets in on
this, too. She lights the lamp of the Word of God, and uses the
broom of her preaching, to sweep the house and find the lost coin,
the one that bears the image of the King, and restores it to the
others. And when she finds the lost, she
celebrates too. "Rejoice with me!" Just so,
says Jesus, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who
repents.
Today,
dearly beloved, our Lord reaches to you, to each of you, His gift of
repentance. Today he calls you to turn away from harsh words
and unkind judgments and every form of bitterness, anger,
self-righteousness and pride that would divide those whom He has
joined together. He says: "Child, leave it all
behind. Come and rejoice in the unity of my Body. What I
have joined together, let not man put asunder. Hear my words of
mercy and let them sink deep into your soul and bring you peace.
Feast on my body and blood and let me give you forgiveness for all
your sin; forgiveness so abundant, in fact, that you can share
generously with each other. You are mine. All of you.
And to belong to me is to be forgiven and to forgive; to be a people
of mercy. For that is who I am: the God of mercy
made flesh and blood. The God of mercy that lifted every sin
off your shoulders and bore it myself unto death on my cross so that
I could lift you and bring you home. The God of mercy who rose
in victory over death and the grave. The God of mercy who
established my Church on this earth to be the forgiveness place - for
you, for all. Today I give you the gift of letting go of all
that would hold you back from living fully and freely in that
forgiveness, for today I reach you in my Body and Blood, which is the
steadfast love which binds you not only to me, / but also to one
another.
//
In
response to such an invitation, what can we do but fall down before
our God and cry out with Micah: "Who is a God like you?"
In
+Jesus' name. Amen.
*Much of this sermon is borrowed from Rev William Weedon, LCMS Director of Worship
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