Sixteenth
Sunday after Trinity
September 20th, Year of Our + Lord 2026
Our Redeemer
and Our Savior’s Lutheran Churches
Custer and Hill City, SD
Freed from
Death, Freed to Love
Psalm 30, 1
Kings 17:17-24, Luke 7:11-17
Audio of the Sermon can be found HERE.
You have turned for me my
mourning into dancing; you have loosed my sackcloth, and clothed me with
gladness, that my glory may sing your praise and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give thanks
to you forever!
Each week our
lectionary suggests an Introit, which consists of Psalm verses that serve as
our entrance into God’s Word, often providing the theme for the Sunday. A full Psalm is also suggested, along with a short
responsive reading we call a Gradual.
One of these is to be sung or recited after the Old Testament reading;
we usually use the Gradual. Today, I
decided to replace the lectionary’s appointed Introit, from Psalm 86, with a
few verses from our appointed Psalm, Psalm 30.
I did this because Psalm 30 matches up so well with both our Old
Testament and our Gospel readings.
Two widows passed
through great tragedy, one almost nine centuries before Christ, and one during
the time Jesus visibly walked this earth.
But, praise be to God, both were lifted out of their sorrow and given
joy, just as Psalm 30 recounts. Weeping
may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning. O Lord my God, I cried to you for help, and
you have healed me. Sing praises to the
Lord, O you, His saints, for His anger is but for a moment, and His favor is
for a lifetime.
This is our second
Sunday in a row with the Widow of Zarephath.
Last week we heard that she and her son were facing starvation, but the
Lord gave her a miracle through the Prophet Elijah, a jar of flour and a jug of
oil that never ran out, until the drought and famine were over. I assume she was overjoyed with this
miraculous blessing. Which had to make
her fall at the start of today’s Old Testament reading that much harder: God
had provided food, but nevertheless, her only son fell ill and died. What good is all the flour and oil in the
world when you lose your only family member, your beloved only son?
.tif)
The Widow from the
village of Nain similarly lost her only son, a young man. His tearful funeral procession collides with
the joyful parade of Jesus and His followers.
Jesus has been teaching, speaking God’s truth like no one ever had, and
miracles were coming fast, healing the sick, casting out demons, rescuing
hurting people everywhere He went.
Happy, expectant people followed Jesus around.
Life from God
collided with the death we all dread, and life won! Elijah cries out to the LORD, and performs a
very up close and personal miracle, stretching himself out over the dead boy
three times. Funny how the number three
is always coming up in the Bible.
Jesus runs into the
funeral procession and tells the widow, “Do not weep.” Now, every once in a while at a funeral I
hear a well-meaning person say something similar to “do not weep” to family
members who are mourning the death of their loved one. I try not to get too upset, but I do try to
intervene and correct these very unhelpful words. Feeling very sad and crying at a funeral are
normal, and often very necessary.
Death is an enemy,
not part of God’s original plan for us.
So, console mourners with the promises of Christ, and please do not tell
them to not take it so hard, to not cry.
Don’t say this, unless of course, you are then going to go up to the coffin
to call the deceased back to life!
The LORD turned the
sackcloth and mourning of these two widows into dancing and gladness. These two miracles foreshadow the promise of
resurrection that God has made to all His children, and that Jesus guaranteed
by His own suffering, death and third-day resurrection. We rightly pray for healing and life when
death threatens, especially if death threatens a young person. And yet we know that not even death can
separate us from the love of God that is ours in Christ Jesus. We walk by faith, not by sight, and our path
through this dying world will include great sadnesses. But the Righteous and Resurrected One walks
with us, and because He lives, we know that all who are joined to Him by faith
will also live, even though we die physical deaths. Death has lost its sting, because Jesus was
pierced, for us, and rested in the tomb, and rose on the third day.
These two wonderful
reversals for the widows also give us a good opportunity to talk about
Christian freedom, about what it means to live in the liberty that Jesus has
won for us.
It is interesting
to note how the LORD seems to break a lot of rules in these two death and
resurrection stories. Yahweh is the God
of Israel, but He sends Elijah to live with a foreigner. Do you suppose that the local gossips had
much to say about the Widow of Zarephath providing lodging to this Israelite
preacher who showed up at her door? At
Nain, Jesus not only dares to tell the widow not to weep, but then He breaks
Moses’s prohibition against touching a dead body.
The pallbearers at
a Jewish funeral were not just bearing a heavy physical and emotional load. By their service, which required them to come
into contact with a dead body, they were made ritually unclean, and would have
to go through a purification process, before they could enter the synagogue or
Temple again, before they could fully rejoin their community. But Jesus walks right up and touches the
bier, the litter on which they carried the young man, and so He made contact
with the dead body.
You might know that
such rule breaking was pretty common for our Lord. According to the rules, a pious Israelite did
not hang out with Gentiles, that is, with pagan foreigners. A righteous Jew did not associate with tax
collectors or prostitutes. Lepers were
not to be touched. And yet Jesus did all
these things, and more. He broke the
rules, and that is o.k. Indeed, in this
we see a hint of the freedom that Christ has won for us. First and foremost, freedom from sin and its
punishments by God, and also freedom from the many detailed rules and
restrictions God gave through Moses.
We should remember
that, even though in general He submitted to the Law, Jesus as God was not
actually bound by the rules He had given to Moses. They were given because of human sin, and
Jesus had no sin of His own. And the
purpose of God’s Law has always been to guide sinners to salvation. Saving lives, saving souls, is God’s goal,
not just that rules be followed. Rule
following is important for us, but Jesus understands better than anyone that
His Father’s ultimate desire is to save.
So, when it helped Him heal and save, Jesus broke some of the rules, in
particular the added-on rules of the Pharisees.
In His mission,
Jesus also fulfilled and set aside all the special ritual sacrifice rules of
the Temple, the numerous detailed demands that He had placed on Israel through
Moses. All these ceremonial laws had the
same purpose: to point forward to the work Christ would do for us, on His
Cross. So, after the Resurrection, the
detailed requirements for worship in the Temple, all the required sacrifices, none
of these ceremonial laws apply to Christ’s Church. We are under the New Covenant, and so are
freed from the demands of the Old Covenant.
This does not mean there are no rules, no
laws for Christians to follow. There is
an order, there is a way that God intends human life to be lived, a way for His
children to interact with each other, and with the world. We find a lot of this order in Genesis one
and two: In His own image God created them, male and female. Be fruitful and multiply and fill the
earth. Exercise dominion over the earth,
and all living things. A man shall leave
his father and mother and cling to his wife, and the two shall become one
flesh.
We also learn much
of God’s order for our lives in the Ten Commandments. And here, in regard to the 3rd
Commandment, we also learn about Christian freedom. God commanded Israel to remember the Sabbath
Day, the 7th day, by keeping it holy. In Third Day Freedom, the Christian Church
obeys the principle of the 3rd commandment, but not the detail. For Jesus has perfectly fulfilled the
Sabbath, by His rest in the Tomb, for us.
God does command
all people to worship Him, but the specific requirement to do it on the seventh
day of the week, the Sabbath for Israel, Saturday in our calendar, no longer
applies. To stop, rest, hear God,
receive His gifts and give praise and thanks to Him, this is built into the
order of God’s creation from the beginning.
But the specific day that Moses designated as required, along with a
bunch of other detailed requirements about worship, these no longer apply under
Christ. To celebrate the Resurrection of
Jesus, the Church established the tradition of worship on the first day of the
week. But in truth, every day is a good
day to worship. The foundational
principles are to let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly, and Do
not give up gathering together, as some are in the habit of doing.
What other rules
apply to Christians? Well, proclaiming
God’s Word is not optional. As the
resurrected Jesus said: Preach the
Gospel to all the Creation, to all the Nations, from Jerusalem to Judea to
Samaria to the ends of the earth.
And, when the Gospel creates opportunities, the Church is to baptize, to
make disciples by applying plain water combined with the three-fold name of
God revealed by Jesus: In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the
Holy Spirit, Amen.
Huh, there’s that
number three again.
Anything more? Take and eat, this is My Body, says
Jesus. Take and drink, the New
Covenant in My blood, shed for you for the forgiveness of sins. Do this, as often as you drink it, in
remembrance of me. Also, as we heard
from St. Paul last week, So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to
everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.
In essence, the freedom of the Christian is to
live out the two great commandments, “Love the Lord your God with all your
heart, soul and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.” Christian wisdom knows that loving God
starts, and can only continue, by first receiving His love, which
overcomes our sin, and empowers our love.
We love, because He first loved us. And so gathering around Christ’s Word and
gifts, weekly and daily, to receive again the love and the wisdom of Christ, this
is built into the order of God’s Church.
The exact details of how we organize our worship, the shape of our
spaces, how we dress, what our music sounds like, these things are not
specified in the New Testament. We have
the truth of Christ, His Law, His Gospel, His mysteries of Baptism and the
Supper. With these always before our
eyes and in our ears and hearts, in Christian freedom, we seek to worship in
ways that best deliver Jesus’ saving Gospel.
Loving our
neighbors is also not optional. We are
of course warned many times in the Bible not to be corrupted by the sinful
world. At the same time, we are to seek
to love both friend and enemy, and be ready to give the reason for our hope,
that is, to speak of Christ and His love.
As we were reminded a few weeks ago in the parable of the Good
Samaritan, when God puts people in our path with needs, we are to love them, as
God in Christ has loved us.
Now, you might be
thinking, “Wow, this Christian Freedom doesn’t sound all that free.” And there
is a lot of shape and detail to the way God calls us to live, a rightly ordered
life that God really cares about. So,
besides the number of rules, is there a difference between living under the Law
of Moses and living in the Freedom of Christ?
Absolutely, the
difference between death and life. First
and foremost, loving God and neighbor are a fruit that flows from saving faith,
not a requirement for salvation.
Note how the Psalmist ordered his words: You have turned for me my
mourning into dancing; you have loosed my sackcloth, and clothed me with
gladness, that my glory may sing your praise and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give thanks
to you forever!
First God rescues
us, first God saves us, and then we are set free to sing His
praise and thank Him, in our worship, and in our lives. The Old Covenant said: Do these things,
sinner, and you will live. But we
cannot, and so death threatens. The New
Covenant does not command, but rather delivers:
Here is Christ, who has fulfilled the Law, for you, living in perfect
love, and dying under infinite punishment, in order to forgive you and set you
free. His resurrected life is your new life. His Good News renews your heart and mind, and
creates in you the desire to pursue the life of love, the desire to pass on the
love you’ve received, for this is who you are, in Christ.
In Christ Jesus,
you are free. Free from sin, for He has
washed it away. Free from fear and guilt,
for you are covered with His righteousness.
Free to love, to pursue the life of love that God created you to
live. Free to reject the temptations of
Satan. Free to flee to the Son Who died
too young, but rose again on the Third Day, for you, and every sinner. In good times and bad, flee to Christ, for He
is always ready to receive you, to rejoice with you, and as you need it, to restore
you again, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
Amen.
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