Third Sunday in Lent, March 23rd,
A+D 2025, Our Redeemer and Our Savior’s Lutheran Churches, Custer and Hill
City, South Dakota
Seven Words about God’s Hatred of Sin,
and His Glory in Mercy
Ezekiel 33:7-20, 1 Corinthians 10:1-13, Luke 13:1-9
Audio of the sermon available HERE.
O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy, be
gracious to all who have gone astray from Your ways … Seven Words about God’s
Hatred of Sin, and His Glory in Mercy.
And so, first, preachers better preach.
This is the message of the first three verses of our reading from
Ezekiel: So you, son of man, I’ve made a watchmen for the house of Israel
whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning for me. As the hymn says “Preach you the word, and
plant it home, to men who like, or like it not.
Through Ezekiel the Lord gives us a call for fearless faithfulness in
proclamation. No shirking, no skipping
the unpleasant parts.
It’s not easy being a faithful watchmen for the House of Israel. Even stick in the mud confessional Lutheran
pastors want to be liked by the people that they serve. But we are called to love, not to like. I am not called here to be liked by you, but
to share the love of Christ with you. And
real love is truthful, truthful about who we are, and truthful about who Christ
is.
For the sinner, that is for each one of us, the message about sin needs
to be specific, specific to my sins and
specific to your sins. We need to talk
about real sins. We need a specific personal condemnation of the sin that
remains in us, for the sake of then hearing a specific and personal Gospel,
good news, for you. So that you will:
Return to the Lord, your God, for He is gracious and merciful, slow to
anger, and abounding in steadfast love. (Joel 2:13)
2. God hates sin, but it is His Glory to have
mercy on Sinners.
The LORD has no pleasure in the death of the
wicked, but that the wicked would turn from his way, and live!
And so, second, be perfect, as your father in heaven is perfect. The message of the rest of our reading from
Ezekiel is just this: You must be perfect.
If the righteous man or woman betrays their righteousness and does evil,
then they face death. If the wicked man
or woman turns from their sin and makes everything right, makes restitution and
puts things back as they should be, well, then they will have life. You see perfection is God‘s standard in His Law.
The righteous may protest: “We’re
trying so hard. We’re doing so well generally.
How can you ask us to be perfect?
The wicked made despair: “How
could I ever pay for what I’ve done? How could I make restitution for all the
things that I’ve done wrong?” You might
even find yourself both protesting and despairing, as you consider your life.
God is not unjust. He created us to be righteous, to be perfect, and so
we are to be righteous and perfect. God‘s standard is not unjust just because
we cannot fulfill it. And yet, God does
not desire our death, but that we turn from our sin and live.
And so, since we can’t do achieve or maintain righteousness, he gives us His
righteousness. We need His righteousness, which is received by faith. This is
why the prophet Habakkuk declares “the righteous will live by faith.” Faith receives Christ and His perfect
righteousness, this is our life, today and every day, and so
Return to the Lord, your God, for He is gracious and merciful, slow to
anger, and abounding in steadfast love. (Joel 2:13)
3. God hates sin, but it is His Glory to have
mercy on Sinners.
So third, do not despise your baptism. Ancient Israel was baptized, in a
way, as they escaped from Pharaoh’s armies through the waters of the Red Sea,
that were pushed up on either side of them.
Through this rescue, ancient Israel was made to be God‘s special people,
His chosen, precious, blessed people.
You are baptized with an even better baptism. For by your baptism into Christ you have been
made to be a child of God. You have
been clothed with Christ’s righteousness.
You’ve been given the Holy Spirit.
You are adopted by the Father in heaven.
So do not be like Israel, who despised their baptism so quickly. Shortly after the rescue at the Red Sea, they
were complaining and turning away and worshiping a golden calf. It’s kind of like this: If you were to take a job working for the
Denver Broncos, how would it go if, on your second day of work, you showed up
in a Kansas City Chiefs jersey? Not
well, I think.
When the baptized live like the world it is as if we are changing teams, abandoning
the family that God has called us into.
If we mouth all the right words on Sunday, but live Monday through Saturday
as if we know nothing of Christ, we are despising our Baptism. If we do not treat others with the kindness
with which Christ has treated us, if instead we are cruel and selfish, we are
despising our Baptism. If we speak badly
of the Church to our non-Church friends, if we are living with our significant
other without marriage, pretending that God doesn’t know just because the pastor
doesn’t know, we are despising our Baptism.
Perhaps worst of all, if we treat Baptism like a lucky rabbit’s foot, and
abandon the services of God‘s house altogether, if we quit reading, quit
hearing, quit praying God‘s word, well that is to abandon our Baptism. Repent, and
Return to the Lord, your God. Yes,
this may be scary, but repent and confess your sins, and return, for He is
gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.
4. God hates sin, but it is His Glory to have
mercy on Sinners.
So, fourth, do not despise the Lord’s Supper. Those baptized-in-the-Red-Sea
Israelites were miraculously fed by God day after day in the wilderness. Heavenly bread, the manna they just picked up
every morning. They were also given
water from a rock, and Paul tells us that rock was Christ.
You who have been baptized into Christ have been given access to a much
better miraculous meal, spiritual food and drink that is Christ himself, His Body
and His Blood, given and shed for you for the forgiveness of all your sins. Do not despise the Supper.
How would you and I despise the Supper.
If we neglect to come and receive it.
Or if we reject the Word and refuse to believe, refuse to declare what
Jesus says that this is his Body and Blood. I mean, we don’t want people to think we are a
bunch of weirdos, believing such things.
We also despise the Supper if we receive it while we’re living in
unrepentant sin. Paul warns against
unworthy eating and drinking, For the Supper is even more holy than the Holy of
Holies in the Tabernacle and Temple. Just
as entering there unauthorized could kill, Paul tells us that to receive the
body and blood of Christ without discerning the body to receive the body. Blood
of Christ, or to do so while clinging in unrepentance to a favorite sin, such
eating and drinking is not blessing but dangerous. Communing unworthily is bad for you. It doesn’t kill immediately, because God is
gracious and merciful, desiring to bring us to repentance, that we can come to
the table in faith. He wants you to:
Return to the Lord, your God, for He is gracious and merciful, slow to
anger, and abounding in steadfast love. (Joel 2:13)
5. God hates sin, but it is His Glory to have
mercy on Sinners.
So, fifth, do not imagine that “they” are worse sinners than you. Do not imagine that the people who are not
here, or the people who are not members of a church are bigger sinners than you
and I. Jesus talks of some hicks,
Galileans, who came to the big city, and Pilate killed them in the Temple. And also of some big city Jerusalem Jews, who
died a sudden and evil death when a tower fell on them.
It was easy to think that there must’ve been something particularly wrong
with those people who suffered such violent deaths. But, no, says Jesus, God is not less angry
with your sin. Unless you repent, you
too will perish. When our Lord and
master Jesus Christ said, repent, he meant that the whole life of the Christian
would be one of repentance. Humility about who we are and daily dependence on
Christ and his mercy: this characterizes the life of a Christian, so repent,
and
Return to the
Lord, your God, for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding
in steadfast love. (Joel 2:13)
6. God hates sin, but it is His Glory to have
mercy on Sinners.
And so sixth, even the fig tree must produce fruit or else. Or else it will be cut down. But, what does
this even mean?
The fig tree is a symbol for the nation of Israel for the people of God. Israel, God’s fig tree, was called to live faithfully to repent from their
sins. They were expected to bear fruit
in keeping with repentance, fruit of
love for the neighbor, fruit of praise for God.
We are reminded that true Israel does not consist of those people who
simply share the blood of Abraham.
Rather, true Israelites are those who share the faith of Abraham. Abraham was definitely a sinner. He definitely
failed again and again. But he did not
refuse to repent when God confronted him in his sin, and he believed the
promise the promise of a seed a seed that would come from his own body, a Descendent
of his who would be a blessing to all nations.
His faith in that promise was credited to him as righteousness. Abraham
lived each day in that faith in that repentance, and so in that righteousness.
Jesus, with this short parable about the fig tree, is warning the Jews of
his day not to think that they are right with God just because of their
bloodline. This warning is also good for
us. Just because we show up and we are
in church does not mean that we do not have things to repent. We too are called to produce fruit of
repentance in our lives, so
Return to the
Lord, your God, for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding
in steadfast love. (Joel 2:13)
7. God hates sin, but it is His Glory to have
mercy on Sinners.
Finally, seventh, the fig tree has been cut down, and so also the fig
tree has born fruit. In Jesus’ short parable,
there is an owner who wants to cut down the worthless fig tree that eats up the
soil and takes the water and use the sun, but produces no fruit. The vine dresser intercedes for the fig tree
and asks for one more year. Give the fig
one more year, and then if it doesn’t bear fruit we’ll cut it down. It’s hard to say if this parable was actually told
a year before Good Friday, but it’s certainly possible, perhaps even probable.
I think it’s the point that Luke wants us to get. For Jesus in the end is Israel, the only faithful
Israelite. Israel distilled down to one
man, who was entirely faithful.
We skipped over the manure in the parable, no reason to get into
disgusting things. Except that Jesus
didn’t skip the manure. The filth of
Israel’s sin, the filth of my sin and your sin, He bore all that to the tree. What he did not deserve, to be cut down for
not bearing fruit, he gladly suffered, for us.
And so, He alone is the fig tree that bears fruit for salvation. Because death could not hold him. He rose
again on the third day. So sin and its
power over you and me is destroyed, in Christ. In him, by trusting in him you are righteous
and holy, and you will be faithful. For you
are a child of God.
This is the joy that Jesus look forward to, the joy of having you and
presenting you to His Father.
O come, let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our
faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the
shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews
12:2)
Because he is seated there we can live for him, not in order to gain our
salvation, but because He is our salvation.
Because He is seated at God’s right hand, we are free to live for him. We
joyously live for him because we know he is our salvation.
Because he is seated there at God‘s right hand we can die for him. We can
give our lives over to the One who has given us life in His own death.
Because he is seated there we can always, in repentance, and also in confidence,
Return to the Lord, our God, for He is gracious
and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. (Joel 2:13)
In the Name of Jesus, Amen.
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