Relief from a Self-Inflicted Famine - Sermon for Sexagesima Sunday, February 4, A+D 2024

Sexagesima Sunday, February 4^th, Year of Our + Lord 2024
Our Redeemer and Our Savior’s Lutheran Churches
Custer and Hill City, SD
Relief from a Self-Inflicted Famine
Isaiah 55, Hebrews 4, Luke 8

Audio of sermon available HERE.

   Hear the Word of the Lord from the prophet Amos, chapter 8:“Behold, the days are coming,” declares the Lord God, “when I will send a famine on the land - not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord.  ¹² They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, to seek the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it.  (Amos 8:11-12)

    The Word of the Lord appointed for us today is all about the Word of the Lord.  Today is Sexagesima Sunday, the 2^nd Sunday before Ash Wednesday, and “Sola Scriptura,” Scripture Alone, is our theme.  The salvation of God flows from His grace alone, as we discussed last week, only because He is kindly disposed toward us, not because of any merit or worthiness in us.  And this “by Grace Alone” salvation gift is defined and revealed and delivered to us by Scripture, God’s Word, Alone. 

   God chooses to work His rescue through His Word.  The Holy Scripture, the Holy Writing that we most commonly call the Bible, is the sole norm and source of Christian teaching.  When we gather and hear the Word of the Bible, Jesus promises that we hear Him.  And His Word is effective, always achieving the purpose for which the Lord sends it into our world.  God gives us His Word as a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path, a solid rock to which we can always return, for correction, restoration, comfort and instruction.  By the Word of God the universe was called into existence.  The things that are seen were not made from prior visible things, but from nothing, ex nihilo, by the strong Word of the Lord.  By His living and active Word, the Holy Spirit enlivens and strengthens and guides His Church.  God does this collectively, for congregations and synods, and also for each individual believer, through His Word.   

   We depend on God’s Word.  Which makes the words of the prophet Amos shocking.  Amos proclaimed a warning from the Lord God, that He would send a famine on the land, not a lack of bread or water, but a famine of the Word.  For ancient Israel, whose whole existence had been founded upon and flowed from the Word of the Lord spoken to them through Moses and the Prophets, Amos’ words must have been terrifying.  And they should frighten us, too. 

   As Christians, you have heard and have begun to understand God’s Word.  You’ve begun to grasp how He is working through His Word to uphold the world, sustain His Church with forgiveness, and call sinners to repentance for sin and faith in Jesus.  Isn’t it kind of hard to imagine losing the Word of God today?  It’s freely and widely available.  The printing press, recording technologies, radio and T.V., and of course the internet, these technological spaces are all new since the Bible was first written.  Through them, the Bible is everywhere.  There could not be a famine of the Word in our day. 

   Except that there is.  Despite the ubiquity of good translations of the Bible, still today  most people are starved of God’s Word.  The culture is at best apathetic, and at worst openly hostile to the message our gracious Lord has recorded and protected through the centuries in the Good Book. 

    Biblical literacy used to be commonplace in our land.  George Washington peppered his writings and speeches with allusions and quotes from Scripture.  In 1783 he exhorted all citizens to do justice, love mercy, and humbly imitate "the Characteristicks of the Divine Author of our blessed Religion."   He didn’t need to give any references, because almost everyone knew without explanation he was paraphrasing the Bible, Micah chapter 6, to be precise.     

   Lincoln’s “four-score and seven years ago” that opens the Gettysburg Address is a riff off Psalm 90:10, where the span of a man’s life was said to be “threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength, they be fourscore years.”  In the same speech Lincoln made many Biblical allusions, and several other straight quotes.  "Judge not that we be not judged" comes from Matthew, and "Woe unto the world because of offenses!" was taken from Luke.  Early in his political career Lincoln famously declared that “a house divided cannot stand,” which comes from Matthew 12. 

   Quoting and referring to Scripture was routine for American presidents, because this was how Americans talked.  I don’t pretend to know the personal faith of any of these men.  But this does demonstrate how central to American conversation God’s Word used to be.  And that seems, in retrospect, like a good thing.  We poor sinners will in this life always fall short of Biblical truth, standards and ideals.  But upholding ideals as good is a necessary first step to fulfilling them, even partially.  Having the sharp sword of God’s Word coming to our ears even from our civic leaders is a good thing.      

   The two current leading candidates for president in the fall elections do not rise to such heights.  One is nominally a member in good standing of a Christian Church that is a strong voice for the sanctity of human life.  But that message hasn’t penetrated.  Instead, protecting the right to kill an unborn child throughout nine months of pregnancy is a fundamental plank of his campaign.  During the 2016 election, the other leading candidate famously professed to be a Christian.   But when in an interview he was asked about repentance and seeking forgiveness, he said he’s not into that.  Repentance, forgiveness, and love for human life are the most basic features of Biblical Christianity.  I do not pretend to know the heart of either man, that’s not my point.  My greater concern is that neither candidate has paid a significant political price for these anti-Biblical positions.  No one seems to care, because the Bible and a Biblical perspective on life no longer holds an important place in the lives of most of our fellow citizens.    

    In such a culture, what was not so long ago unthinkable is now more than thinkable, actually commonplace.  Biblical marriage and family have been the bedrock of our civilization since Christianity took over the Roman world.  We sinners have never done marriage and family perfectly, but there was a faithful and fruitful Biblical ideal that kept nudging us back toward better things.  On top of marriage and family grew civilization, and the population, and the economy.  We Americans started out calling our first president the Father of his Country, un-ironically.  George Washington was seen as a paragon of virtue, and no one could think of a better honorific title to confer on him than ‘father.’ 

   Fatherhood is not so highly esteemed today.  Vanishingly rare is the media portrayal of a dad as anything but a buffoon or a beast.  Motherhood, the vocation through which our Savior chose to be delivered into our world, is still often held up as noble.  If that’s your choice, of course.  If you prefer to dispose of your baby, well, that’s great too, according to the world. 

    Whatever you do, don’t expect anyone to support the idea that a mother and her child might need and deserve to have a husband and father around to help.  Surely Mary could have fled to Egypt on her own, without Joseph’s assistance, right? 

   Men and women need each other, and do better in mutually supportive, monogamous and committed relationships.  But affirming this, affirming Biblical marriage is, according to our cultural elites, to hate women. 

   It’s perverse.  Our culture marginalizes men as backward and unnecessary, and tells women they can do anything, on their own, without a man.  Such messaging makes both men and women worse.  Many hopeful young couples today, who dare to try to form a family, sadly have such thoughts in the back of their minds.  These lies make them prone to treating each other badly, and all too ready to give up.  Many bail on the marriage at the first difficulty, often before it really gets started.  And so children suffer, if they even come into the world in the first place. 

   Speaking of lies, the Bible teaches us not to bear false witness against our neighbors.  Twisting the truth to get ahead, or avoid accountability, or to hurt someone you are upset with, all such lying used to be widely frowned on in our culture.  Why?  Well, because Jesus said so, in His Word.  Not so today.  Huge swaths of our economy are built on promoting lies, and nobody seems to care.  Public officials lie in real time, then change their stories in a few days, and we collectively shrug.  Students lie to their teachers, and teachers and administrators lie to students, and parents and unions defend the lies of their favored side. 

   So-called medical professionals nod and agree that men can become women and women can become men.  Rioting and stealing get labeled as mostly peaceful or understandable, given the norms of this or that so-called community.  Which of course never does anything wrong.  Rather, they’ve been marginalized, so we can’t expect different. 

    I’ll stop.  It’s exhausting to think about.  Worst of all, today’s most popular proclaimers, the “internet influencers,” and the talking heads, routinely proclaim these depravities are good.  They are presented as imperatives, as human rights.  It’s abundantly clear that the Biblically informed perspective, which for centuries held vast influence in our culture, is lost.  Bibles are super-abundant, freely available.  But very few are listening.  And so we reap the harvest of a self-inflicted famine of the Word. 

   Brothers and sisters, what can we do?  What can we, hearers and believers of God’s Word, do to fight back and resist this self-inflicted famine of the Word?  Well, we might start with repenting.  None of us can claim to not be influenced by the lies and degrading entertainments of our modern world.  Garbage in will produce garbage out; we can all repent, and choose to see and hear less of the preaching of the world.    

   We can repent, and then sow the seed like that crazy farmer Jesus.  In today’s parable, the Sower of the Seed casts it all over, willy-nilly, even though much of it will get eaten by birds, or die on the rocks, or be choked off by weeds.  Repenting of believing the world’s lies is how the soil is prepared for receiving the good seed.  But most human soil is hard.  And yet, Jesus casts His seed far and wide, despite the shameful way it gets rejected.  If Christ cast the seed like this, we Christians can do likewise.   

   We can cast the seed of the Word into our society as if we believed Isaiah.  The Lord promised through the prophet that His Word will not return to Him empty, but will accomplish the purposes for which He sends it out.  This promise frees us to send out the Word with confidence.  We may not see the harvest, but God in His Word has promised it will be bountiful.  So cast the seed boldly.

   We can cast the seed into our own ears, so we will have strong enough faith to try to cast it somewhere else.  The Bible calls you to serve yourself with God’s Word, to tend to your own garden.  You should devote time and effort to feeding your own faith, for your own good.  But feeding your own faith is never just for your own good.  The Holy Spirit is saving you by planting His Word in your soul, and through that He is also preparing you to be His mouthpiece, His instrument, to cast His Word farther still.  To ‘let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly’ is both self-serving wisdom, and evangelistic preparation.   

   We can cast the seed, and rejoice.  Despite the sad state of our culture and our world, the message of the seed, the central teaching of the Bible, is that Jesus has come and brings pleasure eternal.  His strong Word comes to break the darkness, and shine with the light of forgiveness and new life.  The Suffering Servant, who bore our sins, by whose stripes we are healed, He is the heart and center of the Word.  Christ crucified and resurrected is the kernel of the seed, which fell into the ground, and sprang up on the third day, bearing a harvest of forgiveness for sins, all sins, and the promise of eternal joy with God and all His holy ones. 

   My failures and your failures to hear and heed and cherish the Word of God, our shameful indifference, even these are forgiven, washed away, by this same Word.  We might, with a renewed zeal for hearing and reading and sharing God’s Word, we might see a change in our world.  This is our prayer.  Still, come what may, in Christ’s Word, your salvation is assured, the Father’s pleasure with you is revealed, and the Spirit tells you your future is glorious, in the Name of Jesus, the Sower of the Seed, Amen.