180923 Sermon on Luke 14:1-11, September 23, 2018 (Trinity 17)
What a person wants is usually pretty important for what
happens in a person’s life. Some people
want to have a lot of money. That can
determine how they live their life. They
choose to do certain things that will be profitable or prepare them for becoming
more profitable. They do these things
instead of doing other things—like watching TV.
Some people want to live for pleasure.
Gratifying desires, whatever they might be, is the top priority. Living for pleasure is often hard on the bank
account and can be unhealthy depending on what those pleasures are, but living
the way we want to live is a powerful force and most will not be deterred from
what they want.
What should we want to live for as Christians? The answer is wisdom. But the word “wisdom” can conjure up all
kinds of pictures in people’s heads.
Some might think of a bookish professor.
Some might think of an esoteric guru sitting on a mountain top. Most people think that wisdom is something
that is inaccessible to them because they are not smart enough to attain
it. But that is not true of the wisdom
that the Bible teaches. Some people whom
the world thinks are stupid, are wise according to the what the Bible
teaches. Most people whom the world
thinks are wise, are actually foolish as far as God’s Word is concerned.
St. Paul says to the Christians in Corinth:
Consider your callings,
brothers. Not many of you were wise
according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble
birth. But God chose what is foolish in
the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the
strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are
not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no flesh might boast in the
presence of God. And because of him you
are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and
sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “Let the one who
boasts, boast in the Lord.”
That rather lengthy quotation tells it exactly how it is. The wisdom that we are to attain is not
recognized by the world. The world is
looking for power, honor, glory, riches, and whatsoever else might improve a
person’s quality of life. The world has
learned this from our first parents who looked with desire upon the fruit of
the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
They thought that this fruit might be useful to them. They thought it would help them to get ahead
in life. They thought it would make them
wise.
But what is happening at the exact same time that they are
having these contemplations within themselves?
God is receding back into the shadows of their consciousness. His Word, “In the day that you eat of it
you will surely die,” no longer held the sway it once did. Now it was being judged and evaluated
alongside the words of the serpent who said, “You won’t surely die.” Instead of God calling the shots, Adam and
Eve were coming into their own. They
felt as though they were getting wiser by the minute, until the temptation gave
birth to sin and they ate.
Adam and Eve’s fall into sin did not take away their powers
of reasoning. They were able to form
ideas and make plans just as they could before.
Adam and Eve were able to seek out possessions and pleasures just as
competently as they could before. In
fact, maybe they were even better at it now.
They were no longer preoccupied with thinking about their Creator. In fact, they didn’t enjoy thinking about him
at all anymore. Now they were free (but
really enslaved) to live for themselves, and more than anything, they
determined to love themselves instead of loving God or loving each other. They became greedy and self-centered, looking
out only for their own advantage and whatever progress they could make in this
world. With the fall into sin, the
wisdom of the world first came into existence.
The wisdom of the world is always looking out for numero uno, and
if something doesn’t hold out promise for bettering one’s own quality of life,
then the world, sinful Man, is not interested in it.
The Word of God has a different kind of wisdom to teach
us. As we heard earlier, in the
quotation from 1st Corinthians, St. Paul says that Christ is the
wisdom that has come from God. Just as
the wisdom of the world goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden, so also
the wisdom of God goes all the way back to the very beginning. Adam and Eve had destroyed their relationship
with God and the immutable Law of God cried out mercilessly for their death. But God promised them and gave them his
beloved Son who would be born of the woman in the fullness of time. Although the Son of God knew no sin, he
became sin for us, so that we may be redeemed from the curse of the Law and
have our righteousness in Christ by faith.
God enables us to live a godly and holy life through faith in Jesus
Christ and the forgiveness of sins and perfect righteousness that belong to him,
but he shares it completely with us.
Jesus Christ is true wisdom—indeed, he is the only wisdom
that there is. He is the only wisdom
that there is, because only his wisdom will endure forever. No matter how clever or wise people might be
in managing their affairs in this life, none of it will last. No matter how much money a person makes, or
how smart and successful they are, or how wonderful their children are, none of
these things matter in the end. We
cannot take our money or property or whatever else we might enjoy about this
life with us. Only our resurrected
bodies and souls will endure. And while
most people think that being reconciled to God and justified before him is not
a very big deal, it will be clear at that point that that is not the case. It is only because we have not yet
experienced God’s full judgment that even we Christians do not know the
surpassing worth of Christ’s holy, innocent, bitter sufferings and death on our
behalf. This precious work of Christ for
us is just that—precious. And we should
grow in the knowledge of Christ’s cross and the blood he shed for our
salvation. That is wisdom. Growth as a Christian is comprehending this
love more and more, so that when you have died and are judged by God, you will experience
what you were always reaching for in this life: the fullness of joy in our
crucified and resurrected Lord Jesus.
And this wisdom is accessible to all people. The super smart people have no advantage over
the child. In fact, if anything, it
appears that the child has the advantage over the strong and powerful, for
Jesus says that unless we receive the Kingdom of God like a little child, we
will by no means enter it. The Christian
message is incredibly simple. Jesus is
the Savior. He will help you. Jesus is the Good Shepherd. You are his sheep. He will protect and save you from the wolf—so
stick close to him and to no one or nothing else. Jesus is the name that is above every name,
and you are wise if you remember it in every time of trouble, no matter how bad
the trouble is. Even if you are wracked
with pain and dying and there’s no hope of getting better, call on Jesus’s
name. He will guide you through the
gloomy portal of death into eternal life.
Nobody else can go with you in death.
Each is alone, except those who die together with Jesus.
So what do you want out of life? It’s remarkable how people are able to get what
they want, but nobody wants what’s actually good for them unless they have been
enlightened by the Holy Spirit. To speak
in the broadest and most general way, sinful Man wants to make a paradise out
of this world in one way or another.
You, however, are living with your eyes scanning the horizon, looking
for the coming of the Lord Jesus, and anticipating the life of the world to
come. Where your treasure is, there your
heart will be also. Where your treasure
is, there your head will be also, and you will fill it with the wisdom that is
necessary to bring about your desires.
The world has all kinds of wisdom that it teaches about living a good
life. The Bible has its own wisdom, and
the name of that wisdom is Jesus Christ.
Many thinkers in the Christian Church have tried to prove
that the wisdom of the world and the wisdom that is Jesus Christ are not
opposed to one another. But that is not
true. They oppose one another because
they are directed towards different ends.
The wisdom of the world is always looking for its own advantage, but the
Christian has renounced the god of this world and is looking ahead to the
things that are above. And this is not
just theory. It has implications even
for everyday life.
Consider our Gospel reading today. Jesus has his finger on the way that the
world’s selfish, self-aggrandizing thinking even enters into the Church and
corrupts it. He is at a dinner party
that is being given by a leader in the church that is attended by several other
important people. He sees how they are
all jockeying for position, and wanting to be at the forefront. They each want to be thought of as the
greatest, and are quite willing to ignore the man who suffers from dropsy—a kind
of disfiguring and painful water retention—rather than having him helped. Or they might even fight against Jesus’s
healing of this man as a breaking of the Sabbath Law, because by being a
stickler they can show how orthodox and pious they are in front of all the
others. But Jesus sees right through
their hypocrisy. He knows that they
would all help their son get out of a well even if he fell in on the
Sabbath. They’d even help an animal in
dire straits on the Sabbath. Why can’t
Jesus do good to this man who is suffering on the Sabbath?
And Jesus notes how they are all trying to get seated in the
good spots, with all the right people—again, so that they can be thought of as
the big shot. This is a silly thing that
people do, and yet there is nothing more common. Nobody wants to be with the losers. Everybody wants to be with the cool
kids. I suppose it is because if you sit
with the losers, people will think that you are a loser, but if you sit with
the cool kids, then you are probably one of them.
This is something that people do their whole lives, but there’s
no place that is so cruel in this regard as our K-12 schools. People wonder why some of these kids go crazy
and shoot their fellow students. I don’t
pretend to understand it all, or even mostly, but I will tell you one thing
that all of intuitively also know to be true: all of them were mocked as
losers. They were not loved by their
fellow students. They were totally
rejected, because our Old Adam believes that it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there
and everybody has to look out for themselves and their own interests.
Not so with you. Put
your Christian wisdom to work: You are a son or daughter of the King. You have a dignity bestowed upon you by God
as an heir to the inestimable riches of eternal life. You don’t need everybody to say wonderful
things about you or believe that you are one of the cool kids to have your worth. You are not living for fame or being a cool
kid in this life, and so you are not harmed by associating with the lowly. You can be friends and do good things for
those whom others reject. Might you get
a besmirched reputation by the people at the top? Maybe.
So what? While they are living as
though God does not exist, you know that he does exist. And while they don’t give a rip about what
happens to others so long as they are benefited, you know that God cares for the
lowly, and wants you to care for them too.
God befriended you when you were a loser and had no hope whatsoever of
moving up higher, and so you also should befriend those who need your love and
support. This is the mind of Christ, and
it is the mind of Christ that will endure forever, while the backbiting and
evilness of this present age will be finally be put away forever in hell. “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled,
but whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”
I think a lot of people are kind of at a loss for why they
should study the Word of God. They know
that they are supposed to do it, because they’ve been told to do it, but they
don’t realize that the Bible teaches us a whole different way of living
compared to the unbelieving world around us.
The Bible doesn’t teach us that we are different in any external
way—that we eat a certain way or dress a certain way. The difference is internal. It is fear, love, and trust in God. It’s a recognition of the fleeting nature of
this life and all the things our flesh craves.
It’s the example of Christ, and how we learn more and more as his
disciples.
And so the Bible is good for you, not because it will help
you earn your way into heaven or because it is a burdensome obligation, but
because it makes you wise. And being
wise is always a good thing. It is
always helpful.
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