Third Sunday after
Pentecost
June 18th, Year of Our + Lord 2023
Our Savior’s and Our
Redeemer Lutheran Churches
Hill City and Custer,
South Dakota
God's Call and God's Way
“I can’t do this, Sam…” Many of you know Frodo Baggins and Samwise
Gamgee. Two little folk from J.R.R.
Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, these hobbits from the Shire are
unlikely candidates to save Middle Earth.
But at least Frodo is honest. Our
diminutive protagonist is the bearer of the One Ring of Power, which must be
destroyed, lest it’s forger, the Dark Lord Sauron reclaim it. Because this missing Ring is the only thing
that limits his awesome power. With it,
Sauron will quickly and easily overwhelm the forces of free men, dwarves and
elves, and usher in a dark age. From the
relative safety of the elf lord Elrond’s enchanted forest, Frodo naively and
bravely volunteered for the task. (How
often true bravery is somewhat naïve.)
Frodo agreed to bear the Ringto Mt. Doom and throw it back into the
volcanic cauldron where it was forged, the only force on earth capable of
destroying it. One small problem: Mt.
Doom is the very heart of the Dark Lord’s lair, surrounded by hordes of orcs,
evil men and frightful creatures, all bent to Sauron’s will.
All hell breaks loose wherever Frodo carries
the Ring, hidden on a chain under his shirt.
It attracts evil powers who are ranging all over Middle Earth, preparing
Sauron’s final war, while always and ever seeking his missing Ring. And the danger is not just from without. The Ring corrupts from within as well,
tempting its bearer, and those who travel as his helpers, to seize it and use
it, to become a great warrior lord. Men
who side with good against evil imagine in their hearts that they
could wield the Ring for good, and defeat Sauron. This of course is a fantasy. Frodo also feels and understands this inner
temptation, and he fears the violent chaos that follows him wherever he
goes. So, in a particularly bad moment,
hiding from a raging battle with his friend and servant Sam, Frodo speaks the
frightening truth: “I can’t do this,
Sam.”
J.R.R. Tolkien was a Christian, and Biblical
themes and truths infuse his writing, even his imagined fantasy world of Middle
Earth. Chief among these themes are the
weakness and fallibility of Frodo and the rest of his companions, which
threaten their noble aims. The nine
souls who form the Fellowship of the Ring, four hobbits, a wizard, two men, an
elf and a dwarf, commit themselves to helping Frodo achieve a seemingly
impossible task. But they are grimly
aware that their chances of success are minimal.
Not so God’s people Israel, gathered at Mt.
Sinai. The call to be God’s holy people,
of following His instruction, of rejecting evil and choosing the good, this
noble task is set before Israel. They
know quite a lot about who God is, having witnessed and experienced the Exodus
from slavery in Egypt, God’s decisive victory over the greatest power then
known on earth. They hear the most basic
outline of God’s plan, His covenant proposal, that they should hear and obey
His voice, and in turn the LORD will make them a kingdom of priests and a holy
nation. Hearing God’s proposal, with one
voice, Israel declares: “all the LORD has spoken we will do.”
No, they won’t. Israel
was not wrong to commit themselves to God’s covenant offer, no more than Frodo
was wrong to volunteer to carry the Ring of Power to Mt. Doom. In Tolkien’s fantasy world, Frodo had no idea
of what really lie ahead of him. In the
real world, ancient Israel didn’t know what it really meant to live by God’s
covenant. But more details would begin
to come shortly, the Ten Commandments and what not, recorded in the rest of
Exodus 19, through chapter 23. Then again
in chapter 24, the Israelites, now somewhat better informed, repeat their
commitment to the covenant, and promised to do all the words the Lord had
said.
But no, they wouldn’t. Sad to say, even after twice promising to
keep God’s covenant, Israel abandoned their commitment very quickly. Moses goes back up on Mt. Sinai, this time
for forty days, to hear the LORD’s detailed instructions concerning
worship. While they wait, Israel loses
patience, and demands that Aaron, Moses’ brother and assistant, build them an
idol, a god fashioned by human hands. A
manageable god, not so frightening as the Holy One, hidden in thick darkness
and thunder up on the mountain. They
choose their own way and even pretend to be worshiping the LORD God, while they
dance and party around the Golden Calf. So much for keeping the Covenant.
The New Covenant of God, the
New Testament agreement that Jesus Christ inaugurated and gave to His people,
is different from the Old Testament, the Old Covenant agreement between God and
Israel.
The Old Covenant was good and true and
right, a very fair deal. God said: I
will do these things for you, and if you do these other things for me, then I
will bless you and we will be together forever.
Yes, we will do it, said Israel, we will
keep our part of the covenant.
But no, they wouldn’t.
Israel failed to do their part. So Jesus came, with a new plan, a New
Covenant, or Testament, a new agreement for the relationship between God and
His people. The way of salvation which had
been God’s ultimate plan all along.
The Old Covenant announced at Mt. Sinai was
a regular two-way covenant, essentially a contractual agreement with
obligations of performance by both sides, of the kind we deal with every
day. The New Covenant Jesus brought is
different; it is all one-sided. God
would do it all, because God had to do it all.
The Old Covenant was of the Law, good and right, a very good offer, very
fair terms. But since neither Israel nor
anyone else could keep it, God planned a new way of gaining and keeping a
people for Himself, a human family for God to love and bless and enjoy
forever. God would do it all. Or maybe better to say, God would do all the
critical bits, the things required to seal and maintain the New Covenant all
belong to LORD.
Because, of course, New Testament Christians,
that is, you and I, have all kinds of things to do! And we do many things. You managed to get yourself here this
morning, good for you! But you don’t
imagine that your eternal salvation is due to the very mundane and doable task
of choosing church attendance over another hour of sleep or a walk in the
park. God does want you in the pew. But He doesn’t only want to see
you in the pew. The Lord wants, indeed,
only accepts, holy people, with pure hearts, guiltless and good, inside and
out. Our going through the outward
motions of Christian behavior is not enough to cleanse our hearts and
minds.
No, God must do that, and in and through
Jesus Christ, He does! This re-creative,
“make all things new” work, which we desperately need, is finished! God achieved the deed, and God delivers the
goods, down to this very day, here, in this very place. The Holy Spirit, using the Gifts of Christ,
comes and remakes us, gives us new birth.
This second birth, just like our first, is not something that we
“do.” Oh, we were intimately involved in
our first birth, and also in our second.
But we were never the protagonist.
Birth, biological and spiritual, is something that happens to
us.
God does all the essential work required in
the New Covenant. And then,
paradoxically, He puts us to work. We
see this in our Gospel reading this morning.
The Lord of the harvest wants His beloved people to be involved in His ongoing
harvest. And so He calls them and sends
them to work in that harvest. And yet we
can see that Jesus hasn’t stopped driving the work, even when He works through
others.
Listen to the words of our Gospel. First, Jesus went through all the cities and
villages, teaching and proclaiming the Gospel of the Kingdom, and healing every
disease and affliction. And then He
calls and sends 12 disciples to, wait for it, go and proclaim the kingdom, and
to heal every disease and affliction.
The 12 simply do what Jesus does, and only by His authority and
power. He works through
them, or they will do nothing. For, as
Jesus would later declare in the Vine and Branches, “Apart from Me, you can do
nothing.”
There’s another interesting point in our
Gospel reading that drives home the “God does it all” nature of the New
Testament. Jesus tells His followers to
pray to the Lord of the Harvest to “send out” laborers into His harvest. Jesus then tells the 12 to “cast out”
demons. In Greek, “send out” and “cast
out” are the same verb, (“ekballo,” for those of you keeping score at home.) I hope it is clear to all of us that casting
out a demon who has possessed a human soul has to be a work of God, even if
done through a Christian. So does
sending out workers. Indeed, while Jesus
before His Ascension would commission the disciples to go into all the world
and make more disciples through Baptism and Teaching, the missionaries of the
Church barely left Jerusalem, until persecution forced them out. Cast them out, you could say. The nudge required to get us to go and do things
for His mission comes from the same God who drives demons out of people.
The New Testament is full of declarations
that the work of the Church is really the work of God through the Church. Whether you are an Apostle, a Deacon, a
prophet, prophetess or lay member, everything we Christians do to benefit the
Church’s mission is, in its essence, God working through us. We are intimately involved. And we get the joy of seeing the Holy Spirit
at work through the Gospel. But we know
to give all the glory and credit to the Lord, because He does the real work. As the Apostle Paul said: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the
growth.”
Since we know it is God who is with us, who
goes ahead of us and is our rearguard as well, we should never cry out like
Frodo Baggins: “I can’t do this.” Again,
St. Paul is helpful when he declares, “I can do all things through Christ who
strengthens me.” Whatever role the Lord
calls us to in support of His mission, and we all play a part, we should
eagerly respond: “Yes sir, let’s do
it!” “Here am I, send me!” Whether the call is to sacrifice time and
effort to deeply teach your family the faith, or to show your neighbor the love
of Jesus, and maybe also tell him or her about Christ. Whether the call you feel is to give more to
support the ministry of your congregation, or to support a Lutheran missionary
in Africa, even if it is to consider going to seminary, whatever the call might
be, we should never protest, “I can’t do it.”
But of course we do. We do say: “I can’t.” We see the resistance and opposition of the
world around us, and we quail. We feel
the inner turmoil, the indifference to God’s mission from the sinner that still
exists in us, and we whine and resist doing what we are called to do.
And so once more, Frodo Baggins offers us a
reminder of how God gets things done.
Our hobbit friend said he couldn’t do it, and he was right. But, against all odds, he and Sam do make it
to the foot of Mt. Doom. All that
remains is to climb to the crest of the cauldron and throw the Ring into the
fire. Easy-peasy. Sam even carries Frodo much of the last
stretch. But when he reaches the edge, Frodo succumbs
to the Ring, refuses to destroy it, and declares himself its master, taking it
out from hiding, and slipping it on his finger. This would have ended very badly, with Sauron coming
to reclaim it, except for a great surprise.
Just at this moment, here comes Gollum. Gollum is a strange and twisted creature who had
once owned the Ring and who had been trailing after Frodo for months, seeking
to regain it. Gollum jumps on Frodo, and
tries to steal back the Ring. They
struggle desperately at the edge of the cauldron, until Gollum bites off
Frodo’s finger with the ring on it. He
falls backward, eyes entranced with the sight of his precious Ring. But his fall takes him over the precipice and
into the magma below. In the end, Frodo
could not destroy the ring, but evil Gollum unintentionally did it for him.
All of the difficult and essential stuff of
salvation must be done by God, and the LORD will even work
through evil things and people to achieve His ends. Including the greatest part of the work, the
overcoming of sin, death and the devil.
As evil Gollum accidentally destroyed himself and the evil Ring of Power,
so also Satan, through the wicked men who crucified Jesus, achieved the plan of
God by killing His only begotten Son.
Because in Jesus’ death, and only in Jesus’ death, could all our sins be
paid for, and all our guilt washed away.
Because Jesus died, Satan no longer has real
power to accuse sinners, for Jesus paid for all sin, and so all who trust in
Jesus and not themselves are washed clean, forgiven, made new, declared holy
and righteous and good by God. And because
Jesus rose from the dead, death no longer rules over those who are joined to
Him by Baptismal faith.
This is the great mystery of God’s
love. People at their best are sometimes
willing to lay down their lives for friends and family. But God
shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, enemies of God, Christ
died for us. We have now been justified,
declared not guilty, by the blood of Jesus.
And so, we don’t need to listen to Satan’s accusations, nor need we fear
the wrath of God against sin. Because our
union with Jesus will save us. For in Christ,
joined to Jesus, God sees us as perfect, holy, totally good people.
We by our sins and sinfulness were all once
enemies of God. But the death of God’s Son has reconciled us to God, ending the warfare between us, and makes us
pleasing to the Father. And so in the
end, at the Last Day, we will be saved, by the life of Jesus. And in this we rejoice. We rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus
Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.
So, can you do the work God calls you to
do? In and with Jesus, of course! Some of you probably have a neighbor, friend
or relative who needs your help, and who also needs you to speak of Christ and invite
them to Church. The Holy Spirit is
nudging others to give more of your time, talents and treasures to support the
Gospel. Some of you perhaps have a
feeling that you might serve the Church in a larger, more formal way, maybe
even as a missionary or Church worker.
You need not fear any of these calls.
For your Jesus has already done the hard part, and He is still doing all
the important stuff, for you, and even through you. Rejoice, and fear not, whatever comes, your
God will bring you through,
in
the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
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