Don't Worry! Sermon for the 15th Sunday after Trinity

Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity
September 8^th, Year of Our + Lord 202
Our Redeemer and Our Savior’s Lutheran Churches
Custer and Hill City, SD
Don’t Worry! - Matthew 6:24 - 34, 1 Kings 17:8 – 24

 Sermon Audio Available HERE.

Hymn LSB 760 - What God Ordains Is Always Good

1 What God ordains is always good: His will is just and holy. As He directs my life for me,I follow meek and lowly. My God indeed, In ev'ry need, Knows well how He will shield me; To Him, then, I will yield me.

2 What God ordains is always good: He never will deceive me; He leads me in His righteous way, And never will He leave me. I take content, What He has sent; His hand that sends me sadness Will turn my tears to gladness.

    “Do not worry,” our Savior commands; God is on your side.  He who provides food for the birds and arrays the lilies of the field more beautifully than King Solomon in all his glory will surely provide for all our needs.  So don’t be anxious! 

      How does this Word strike you?  Is it easy for you to avoid worrying about the future?  Do you trust firmly and cheerfully in the Lord, or do you get your confidence, or your worries, from your job, your retirement fund, or your home?  Does your optimism and lack of worry depend on your material and financial status?  Be careful!  What we worry about can easily become what we worship.  And you cannot serve God and money.

     We have comparatively little to worry about, especially compared to the Widow of Zeraphath.  She faces crushing problems.  Imagine then, her reaction and thoughts when God spoke to her about feeding Elijah, the prophet of Israel.  Or when Elijah showed up, asking for drink and food, and told her not to worry.  Fear not, just feed me.  Elijah sounds a bit like Bob Marley:  “Don’t worry, ‘bout a thing, cuz every little thing is gonna be all right.” 

     Sure it is…

     Our Old Testament reading from 1^st Kings touches on many parts of the Doctrine of Christ.  This is an outreach story, about missions and evangelism.  God’s Word is extolled and held up as reliable and full of promise.  And of course, along with Jesus’ teaching from Matthew 6, the interaction between Elijah and the Widow of Zarephath speaks to the proper Christian attitude concerning trust, confidence, and avoiding anxiety.  We Christians, we baptized followers of Jesus are the winners, don’t ya know?  So, we should always have a great attitude.  We should rejoice always, overflowing with thanksgiving to God and love for our neighbors.

     I imagine it was not so easy for our widow.  She has lost her husband.  Now, she and her only son are about to starve to death.  She is a citizen of Sidon, a neighboring country to Israel, a nation where Baal is the ruling god.  Sidon is a major source of conflict for the God of Israel and His faithful remnant.  The wicked King of Israel, Ahab, had married Jezebel, the princess of Sidon, and she enthusiastically and violently promoted the worship of her idol Baal among God’s people. 

     In response to their idolatry, God stops the rain for three years, to punish Ahab and Israel, trying to bring them back to Himself.  Sidon is also suffering from the drought and the famine it caused.  Things are bad all over.  Surprisingly, the LORD tells Elijah to go to the town of Zarephath, in Sidon, to ride out the famine with a widow there.  God has already commanded her to feed Elijah.

     This woman seems to have heard the LORD’s command, for she readily obeys Elijah’s request for a drink of water.  She knows who Elijah is and that his God is Yahweh Elohey Yisrael, the LORD God of Israel.  We are not told whether she trusted in the LORD, rather than in Baal or some other Sidonian deity.  We only know that the LORD had already, in some fashion, commanded her to care for Elijah.  And we know that she and her son are starving to death.  God sends His Word to her, and then He sends His prophet, to proclaim the Lord’s promises, to her, in person. 

     It’s kind of like today.  False gods abound, tempting God’s people, and our neighbors, to worship idols instead of Jesus.  And yet God keeps sending out His Word, and His preachers, to call people back to Himself.  But it’s hard to stop worrying and trust in Christ when life is going badly, when your children are hungry, or rebelling against you, or your nation seems to be circling the drain.  Maybe we can learn something from the Widow of Zarephath. 

      We tend to connect outreach or mission work with mercy and charity, especially with providing for basic human needs.  We often use mercy work as a bridge to proclaiming the Gospel.  But in Zarephath, the Lord takes the opposite approach: He starts His outreach to this woman by demanding she feed His missionary, Elijah.  Seems like a risky plan.   

 3 What God ordains is always good: His loving thought attends me; No poison can be in the cup, That my physician sends me. My God is true; Each morning new, I trust His grace unending, My life to Him commending.

4 What God ordains is always good: He is my friend and Father; He suffers naught to do me harm, Though many storms may gather. Now I may know, Both joy and woe; Some day I shall see clearly That He has loved me dearly.

     Our hymn might strike some as a bit optimistic, or even as naively hopeful.  We are doing pretty well, in the area of food security, at least, so we may not worry like this Widow.  Still, bad things do come into our lives.  But notice, Jesus doesn’t say: “Don’t worry, when things are going well.”  He commands us to not be anxious in every situation, period.  Instead, we are to seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and the Lord will provide for all our other needs as well. 

     Which is pretty much what Elijah calls on the woman to do.  Trust me.  Trust the LORD.  Just do what I say, make me a little mini-loaf of bread first, and everything will be alright.  I promise.  God promises.   In reply, the Widow of Zarephath lays out the facts: she has barely enough flour and oil left to make a final bite of bread for herself and her son.  She has nothing to share with Elijah.  To which Elijah replies: trust me.  Do not fear. 

     The Word of God is living and active; it is effective.  By God’s Word the universe was created, and is sustained.  All those laws of physics, which keep the earth spinning and the sun shining?  The biology that fills the fields with ripe grain?  God maintains those.  For our good.  The Creator of heaven and earth sent His Word to this widow, and she heard and believed.  Maybe not boldly, maybe not completely.  She can, after all, see the harsh reality of her situation.  Still, when Elijah calls her to obey the voice of God she has heard, she does it.  Could our mission and outreach efforts learn from Elijah?  Should we learn to speak God’s Word with more confidence?  Do we ever simply put the Word of God in our neighbors’ ears, and then call on them to obey it? 

     The Spirit of God leads this woman to obey God’s Word, and then provides her with a minor miracle.  The Provider who causes the grain to grow and the olives to plump with oil took a short cut, skipping over the sowers and reapers and millers.  Day after day she made bread for her son, Elijah and herself, but her jar of flour was not spent, neither did the jug of oil become empty, according to the word of the Lord that he spoke by Elijah. 

     All of us today eat far better than just cakes made of flour and oil.  The variety, quantity and quality of the food that fills our refrigerators and pantries, all the money we have in banks, our homes, our clothes, all our stuff, these material gifts are amazing.  Jesus is asking us to understand that the same LORD who provided miraculous flour and oil to the Widow of Zarephath is also the One providing every good thing we have.  Do we know this?  Do our neighbors outside the Church know this?  Have we ever simply told them this truth of God’s Word?   

     Knowing God as the generous Giver, the Provider of every good thing, is important.  It’s wonderful, really.  Seeing that God can work miracles is also a positive start.  But saving faith is not created by earthly bread, nor by minor miracles.  For true faith in God and His salvation, we must get to the heart of the matter.  So, God kept working in the Widow’s life.  

5 What God ordains is always good: Though I the cup am drinking Which savors now of bitterness, I take it without shrinking. For after grief, God gives relief, My heart with comfort filling And all my sorrow stilling.

6 What God ordains is always good: This truth remains unshaken. Though sorrow, need, or death be mine, I shall not be forsaken.  I fear no harm, For with His arm, He shall embrace and shield me; So to my God I yield me.

     God keeps working in the Widow’s life…     through the death of her son. 

     That’s rough.  A very bitter cup.  The Widow has lost the two best gifts she ever received from God, her husband, and now her only son.  In her sorrow, she maintains her directness and clarity about spiritual realities.  “What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance and to cause the death of my son!”  The wages of sin is death.  For a father or mother, far worse than the experience of their own death is the death of a child.  Before her son fell ill, I assume the Widow had been feeling pretty good about life, with the never depleting jar of flour and jug of oil.  But now, her crash is brutal, hard even to read about. 

     Our Hymn of the Day is true and faithful.  But a little incomplete.  Stanza 4 hints at the reason we should optimistically accept all that God ordains, but it isn’t very explicit. 

     What God ordains is always good: He is my friend and Father; He suffers naught to do me harm, Though many storms may gather. Now I may know, Both joy and woe; Some day I shall see clearly, That He has loved me dearly.  Can you hear the reason for your hope in these lines?  Who is it that we will see clearly, and so finally know just how dearly we are loved, and that we are free from sorrow forever?

     I wish this hymn were more explicit about the reason for our hope.  More like the foreshadowing in the raising of the Widow’s son.  Like Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, Elijah takes the dead body of the only son and hides him away, not in a rocky tomb, but into an upper room.  Elijah’s salvation-seeking ritual is oddly intimate, very physical and human, much like God’s ultimate plan of salvation, when God’s Son took on human flesh and joined it to His divine nature.  Elijah, a mere human, can’t do that.  But he can stretch out his own body over the dead boy, three times.  As he does, Elijah cries out three times, begging the Holy, Holy, Holy Lord for mercy, pleading that life be returned to the only son of the Widow.    

     Not after three days, but after the third time, The LORD listened to the voice of Elijah and returned life to the child.  Mother and son are reunited, and she confesses her faith: “Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.”  Now, come what may, the Widow of Zarephath believes the truth of the Lord’s care for her and her son.  Now, she can rest in His promises.  

     There is only one miracle greater than the resurrection of a lost child.  That is the death and resurrection of the Child who is also the Holy Lord, also the eternal Son of the Father.  Ascended on high, ruling over all things, He now prepares a place for us in His Father’s house.   He intercedes for us, before the heavenly throne.  That resurrected Son is the reason we can accept whatever God ordains for us. 

Let’s look at stanza 4 again. 

  What God ordains is always good: He is my friend and Father.  God is our Father because Jesus became a man to serve us as our best friend.  He got as close to us as possible, taking on our human flesh, and loved us like no one else, by laying down His life for us, so that His Father could be our Father. 

  He suffers naught to do me harm, Though many storms may gather.  There are no storms as bad as the darkness that gathered around Christ Jesus, hanging on the Cross at Golgotha.  But, we need not worry, because in that darkness Jesus has swallowed up all our sin.  And, three days later, the Light of Christ burst forth from the Tomb to reveal forgiveness, life and salvation for us. 

  Now I may know, Both joy and woe; Some day I shall see clearly, that is, on the day when we see Jesus, our Savior and God, face to face in glory, with the Father and the Holy Spirit. 

This is how I know,
  That He has loved me dearly.   I can see the proof in the scars on His hands, feet and side, the scars He still bears in glory as trophies of love and salvation.   

     The Lord’s final Word, to the Widow of Zarephath, and to all people, is through the death of His Son.  Your heavenly Father did not wait for you to be worthy of His love.  He did not ask whether you wanted to be saved.  To have you for His very own, the Father gave His very best, His only begotten Son, given into death, for you.  

     Your loving Savior did not scorn to be born into poverty, to be persecuted and rejected by His own people.  He did not hesitate to give His flesh as the bread from heaven, and to shed His blood to washs away our sin, and so remove our every worry.  His new life guarantees a joyful eternity for all who believe.  Jesus rejoices to share His righteousness with all.   And so, we truly can stop worrying, because our eternal tomorrow is secure, in God’s promises. 

     One last thing:  You are not saved by not worrying.  Neither are you condemned by your anxiousness.  Rather, knowing the sure salvation you have in Christ Jesus gives you hope and confidence.  We should not worry, but we are still sinners, and God knows this.  So, He invites us to return to Him, day after day, to lay our worry, and all our other sins, at His feet, and receive again the blood-bought forgiveness of Jesus. 

     Receiving free forgiveness and Holy Spirit-renewal as a habit is what it means to seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness.  God calls us to gather, so He can take away our sin, and give us the perfect righteousness of Christ.  Making this Great Exchange our habit, we will begin to live with Christ-powered optimism.  The Holy Spirit will shine through our hopefulness, and our neighbors will see it.  Fueled by God’s Word, fed by the miraculous Bread that never runs out, eternally optimistic because of Jesus, God will even use us as His magnet, to draw more souls to Himself.      God grant us hearts that worry less, because they trust in Jesus more deeply.  Truly, sufficient for the day is its own trouble.  God will take care of your tomorrow, and your eternity, in the Name of Jesus, Amen.  

Cleansed Lepers Walking by the Spirit of Christ - Sermon for the 14th Sunday after Trinity

Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity
September 1^st, Year of Our + Lord 2024
Our Savior’s and Our Redeemer Lutheran Churches
Hill City and Custer, South Dakota
Cleansed Lepers Walking by the Spirit of Christ
Luke 17:11 – 19 and Galatians 5:16 - 24

Audio of the Sermon available HERE 

     Shall we talk about leprosy?  Do you know what leprosy is?  In modern times, leprosy is used to refer to a particular bacterial skin disease, also called Hansen’s disease, after the Norwegian physician who isolated the guilty bacteria.  Biblically, leprosy refers to what are likely a number of different skin diseases, characterized by lesions on the skin, dry patches, sores, thickening skin, and numbness. 

   Today, antibiotics and other modern medicines can cure leprosy, and many other skin diseases.  But in the ancient world, there was no reliable cure for these various contagious plagues, which caused great suffering to their victims, and often shortened their lifespans.  So, to safeguard the healthy, the laws of various societies said that lepers must be separated, forced to live apart from others.  This has been a common public health solution since at least the Exodus, and has continued through the centuries.  This practice has ended, for the most part, but only in recent decades.     

 

   Living with leprosy was terrible: a combination of physical discomfort and pain, unsightly sores and discolored patches, and numbness in the extremities that left the victim susceptible to further injuries.  And these problems were made much worse by the exclusion they created.  Lepers were subject to being cut off from family, friends, and community.  The disease was so all-encompassing that if you caught it, you weren’t called a person with leprosy.  Rather, you were simply called a ‘leper.’  Your disease defined you.

 

     The ten lepers in our Gospel reading today stand at a distance, calling out to Jesus, because that was the rule.  Lepers were not allowed in close proximity to healthy people.  A harsh measure, bitter for the suffering leper, to be sure.  But the good of the community outweighed the plight of any one individual.    

     Leprosy is greatly reduced in the world today.  Thanks be to God for modern medicine, which has improved all our lives, so much.  But there is a trade off.  These remarkable improvements in modern medicine can make it harder for us to understand what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.  Modern blessings and the comfortable, well-fed, climate-controlled lives we live make comprehending the Word of God a harder challenge.  Most of us don’t know what it’s like to be truly hungry, let alone threatened with starvation.  We have rarely had to endure extreme heat or cold for long.  And thankfully there hasn’t been a shooting war on U.S. soil since the Civil War, which ended 159 years ago. 

     Thanks be to God for the safe, comfortable, blessed reality we mostly live in.  But this means we moderns need to work harder to understand the Bible, which is full of stories of leprosy, and suffering under blazing sun and freezing nights, of warfare, dangerous waters and hateful enemies.  I pray none of us ever face such horrible things.  But even more, I pray we truly grasp the Truth that the Spirit is seeking to teach us, even through such evils.  

     Many of the worst horrors of life are used by God to teach us about ourselves, and our plight as fallen sinners.  The Spirit also uses them to reveal the Father’s heart to us, to help us see and believe in the Savior, who entered into our broken world to rescue us.  That the Lord uses pain and suffering to teach, correct and save sinners is offensive to many people.  We might prefer to think that God is always “nice.” But God isn’t worried about our sensibilities; He is worried about our eternity.  So, we should not be surprised that along with other sufferings, He used leprosy.  Jesus used leprosy to teach us about sin, and to display His power, to reveal His identity.  Jesus used leprosy, to save sinners. 

     Throughout the Bible, leprosy has served as a visible metaphor for human sin.  Sometimes, a particular sinner was punished with leprosy.  Think of Miriam, Moses’ sister, who rejected God’s choice of her little brother as leader of Israel, and so spent a week as a leper.  God did this, so that all Israel understood Moses was God’s man.  But transferring the case of Miriam to every person with skin lesions is unfair.  The Bible doesn’t say that leprosy in general is a punishment for particular sins.  We humans are the ones who naturally supply this idea.  Leprosy caused true suffering, and left you cut off from family and community.  So, we assume, if you are a leper, God must be particularly mad at you.  You must be a particularly bad sinner. 

   This generalization is not true, but God uses our misperceptions anyway.  God used leprosy, to teach, and to save.  Leprosy became a visible symbol of the sin that plagues all of us.  As leprosy separated people from earthly community, the spiritual leprosy of sin, that infects every descendent of Adam, separates people from God and His heavenly congregation.  Spiritual leprosy isn’t as visible as physical leprosy.  Although Paul helpfully tells us what walking the way of the sinful flesh will eventually look like: sexual immorality, impurity, … idolatry, … strife, jealousy, etc.  The main point to understand is that, while we can, more or less successfully, hide the spiritual lesions on our hearts, sin will cut us off from the community of God, forever, unless we receive the cure.       

     Every human being ever born, except Jesus, has suffered from the leprosy of sin.  So, God used leprosy to drive dying sinners to Jesus.  Naaman the Syrian general in 2^nd Kings chapter 5 is perhaps the best example in the Hebrew Bible.  In the New Testament, Christ Jesus heals lepers many times, to show Himself to be the Savior, God in the flesh, with healing and blessing for everyone, no matter how ugly their disease.   

    Indeed, recognizing Jesus as the only Source of true cleansing and healing is the heart of walking in the Spirit.  Ten lepers called out to Jesus for healing.  It seems they were narrowly focused on their physical problems, and not so much on their spiritual need.  Jesus tells them to go show themselves to the priests, that is, to follow the law, the rules, that Moses had set up to deal with leprosy.  If a leper in ancient Israel was healed of his disease, Moses taught he should be examined by a priest.  If the priest verified He was clean, then the leper was allowed back into the community, back into his family. 

     The ten lepers in our Gospel needed healing.  So, having heard that Jesus’ was a miracle worker, they cried out, hoping against hope to receive healing from Him.  Jesus instructs them to go show themselves to the priests.  With nothing left to lose, they accept Jesus’ Word, and head off on their way, toward the Temple. 

     But while they were walking this way, they were healed.  Their disease doesn’t seem to have gradually get better, they were healed, in an instant.  Sores gone.  Pain gone.  Skin smooth and clean.  Imagine their surprise, their joy!  Something greater than Moses and the Law and the Temple was present!  God in human form had spoken, and healed them.  The Spirit revealed this wonderful truth to the one Samaritan among the 10, and so he stopped following the Law of Moses, and ran in the Spirit back to thank the Lord, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.  He fell on His face before Him, worshiping God, and Jesus accepts His worship.  Your faith has saved you; rise and go your Way.

     The Way on which Jesus sends the Samaritan leper is the Way of the Spirit in which Paul exhorts us to walk.  The way of the nine other lepers, healed by God in the flesh, but still schlumping off to the Temple to get certified by human priests, this ends up to be the Way of the flesh. 

     Now, perhaps you got a different idea from Paul, who describes the Way of the flesh as producing all kinds of manifest evils: sexual immorality, debauchery, spite, etc.  These are works of the flesh, which Paul contrasts with the fruit of the Spirit, which includes love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, etc.  So, how can I suggest that the nine lepers, healed but still piously heading to the Temple to keep the Law, are walking in the flesh?  What are they doing that’s so terrible?

   Well, it is true, Paul makes a radical distinction between the saving Way of the Spirit, and the destructive way of the flesh.  But Paul is describing aftereffects, the things that naturally occur when one is walking in the flesh, or, conversely, walking in the Spirit.  Those who walk in the flesh naturally produce all kinds of evil effects, even though they might be truly seeking to keep the Law.  They are sinners; they cannot help themselves.  If like the nine lepers we seek to keep the Law without the Gospel, without knowing the promise fo the Spirit we will end up in bad places. 

   On the other hand, those who have been sealed by the Spirit and walk in His grace naturally bear all kinds of wonderful fruit.  We need to understand, recognize and pursue this good and right Way.  But, in today’s Epistle, the Apostle isn’t talking about how one gets rescued from the Way of the flesh, and placed on the Way of the Spirit.  This rescue is described earlier in Galatians, for example, in chapter 2 Paul writes: “For through the Law I died to the Law, so that I might live to God. ²⁰ I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me. ²¹ I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness comes through the Law, then Christ died needlessly.”   (Galatians 2:19 – 21)

   The only One who can rescue you and me from our flesh, from the leprosy of our sin, is God’s Son, Jesus of Nazareth.  Moses’ rules for recognizing the physical healing of leprosy were fine, but they didn’t heal anyone.  None of Moses’ rules, none of the Ten Commandments, none of the Temple worship ordinances, none of these things could save.  Not because they weren’t true and right, but because the leprosy of human sin makes us incapable of fulfilling them. 

   Following Moses’ Law, or any other set of rules, can curb our worst excesses and keep us from killing one another, for the most part.  But they cannot return us to the community of God, because they cannot cure our spiritual leprosy.  They cannot cleanse us of our sin. 

     But the rules and laws of Moses do point us to our true cleansing.  The Way of the Law, which is reduced to an ineffective Way of the flesh because of our sinfulness, still helps us.  The Law helps us by revealing our sin, and by pointing us to the New Way, the New Testament, to the Messiah, the Christ, the one and only Savior, Jesus, Mary’s Son.  For He, and He alone, has fulfilled the Way of the Law, and He did it, in our place.

     God in His grace chose to dwell with His people, for a time, in the Jerusalem Temple.  Now, God dwells with His people, forever and ever, in the flesh of Christ Jesus.  The blood of beasts, sacrificed on Jewish altars, did not, in and of itself, have the power to forgive trespasses and cleanse sinful human flesh.  But the blood of God, sacrificed on the Altar of the Cross, has infinite power to forgive and cleanse and rescue.  The Levitical priests, appointed to carry out the functions of the Law in the Temple, did not have the authority to save sinners, once and for all.  But Jesus is our Great High Priest, of the eternal order of Melchizedek, the Priest who made Himself also the Perfect Sacrifice.  He is the One Savior with all Authority in heaven and on earth, who has opened the Way to God for sinners.  This Way is through His own sinless flesh, given into death, for you, and for me, and for all people.  In the resurrected Christ Jesus, we are healed and cleansed, in an instant.  What a surprise!  What joy!  

     It may be hard to accept that God used leprosy to teach and save sinners.  Until we are reminded that our God used crucifixion, an inconceivably horrible form of execution, to win salvation for all of humanity.  We in our comfortable lives may dislike the seriousness and harshness of much of the Biblical witness.  That is, until great suffering, evil and death come into our lives.  And they will come.  In those dark times, God’s habit of bringing the greatest good out of terrible evils suddenly becomes very sweet comfort. 

   So today, let us baptized believers strive to walk in the Spirit.  Let us seek to see His good fruit produced in our lives.  And above all, we pray for the wisdom of the Spirit, the wisdom to run to the feet of Jesus, to receive His cleansing forgiveness, and rejoice in thanksgiving before Him, today by faith, and, one day soon, face to face in heaven, forever and ever, Amen.