Sermon manuscript:
The shortest creed in Christendom is this: I believe that
Jesus Christ is my Lord. Jesus being our Lord is a wonderful thing. He is King
of kings and Lord of lords, but he is so different than all these other lords.
All these other lords are very eager to “lord it over us.” That is to say,
they’d like to sit at the head of the table. They’d like tributes and praises
brought to them. They’d like to skim as much cream off the top as they can get
away with.
When we come to learn about Christ being our Lord we somewhat
have to unlearn what we otherwise know about the word “Lord,” because Jesus is
so different. As he himself says, “I did not come to be served, but to
serve, and give my life as a ransom for many.” Luther, in his Small
Catechism, penned perhaps the most beautiful words he ever wrote as he spoke
about Jesus being our Lord in the second article of the Creed:
I believe that Jesus Christ is my Lord, who has redeemed me,
a lost and condemned person, purchased and won me from all sin, from death, and
from the power of the devil; not with gold or silver, but with his holy,
precious blood and his innocent suffering and death. Why did Jesus do this? So
that I may be his own. He purchased and won me so that I may be his own.
“No greater love has any man than this: that he lay down
his life for his friends.” “God demonstrates his own love for us in
this, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for the ungodly.” In
order to lift us out of all our futile idolatry, in order to save us from the
corruption and rottenness that must come for every person, Christ redeemed us.
Christ purchased us so that we may be his own.
By Christ making us his own we are lifted above all the
things of this world. When Jesus is your Lord you can sweat the small stuff. Simply
being able to identify the things of this world as being “small stuff” shows
that a person has made a lot of progress in their understanding as a Christian.
What we are to understand as being “small stuff” is what other people would
take to be “big stuff”—“huge stuff” even—where you can hardly get any huger.
Take, for example, Joseph, that wonderful man. Joseph was
his father’s favorite son. That wasn’t Joseph’s fault. Nonetheless, that didn’t
prevent his other brothers from being jealous of him. One day, when his
brothers see him coming to check up on them according to their father’s wishes,
their hatred for him burns white hot. They hate him so much that they start to
plan to murder him. Joseph’s oldest brother, Rueben, barely saved his life, but
the end result was nothing to write home about. The brothers sold Joseph to
some passing traders. He ended up being a slave in Egypt.
We’ll fast forward through all the twists and turns that
happened to Joseph while he was in Egypt. You can read about that for yourself.
Let’s talk about our reading this morning. This is many years later. Joseph is
with his brothers again, but, my, how the tables have turned! Joseph has come
to be second in command in Egypt. He is rich and powerful. His brothers are
poor and destitute. How does Joseph treat them? Unbelievably graciously. Joseph
had every option available to him for payback. If nothing else he could have
thrown them into prison to rot there for the rest of their days. And they would
have deserved that.
But instead of hurting them like they had hurt him Joseph
comforts them. His brothers brought about unimaginable misery to him, but this
wonderful man says, “Don’t be upset or angry with yourselves.” Note what
has been made into “small stuff” for Joseph: attempted murder, kidnapping,
false imprisonment. Joseph doesn’t wait for his brothers to be sorry. He
doesn’t wait for them to ask for forgiveness. He is lord. He is the one who is
working. He’s working at comforting his brothers: “Don’t be upset or angry
with yourselves. God sent me ahead of you in order to preserve life. You
weren’t the ones who sent me down here. God sent me down here so that good may
come.”
This is so unusual that Joseph’s brothers never seem to have
been completely convinced that he was being genuine. It sounded too good to be
true. Nobody’s that gracious. Nobody’s that forgiving. They were prepared for
the hammer to drop after their father died. But Joseph meant every word he
said.
He let go of a grudge that you would think he had every
right to nurse and grow until it became fully grown into a fit of wrath. That
grudge ended up starving to death because Joseph didn’t nurse it. The result is
that God’s love had its way. It is extremely beautiful. Joseph, like Christ,
does not give people what they deserve. He gives and gives like a limitless
fountain.
Here you should notice another aspect to Jesus Christ being
your Lord. We’ve already talked about how this strange Lord Jesus slaves away
and serves. He does this so that you may be his own. He just wants you to be
with him. He wants to be with you. But there’s more to this gift. He doesn’t
redeem you so that you can go right back to serving the devil. He doesn’t die
for you so that you can nurse grudges and let people “have it” whenever the
opportunity arises to do so. He has redeemed you so that you may become like
him.
Luther’s explanation that I referred to earlier goes on:
Jesus Christ is my Lord who has redeemed me so that I may be his own. Then it
continues: “so that I may be his own and live under him in his kingdom and
serve him in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness; just as he
is risen from the dead and lives and reigns to all eternity.”
We are Jesus’s own. He wants us to live in his kingdom and
serve him in everlasting righteousness, innocence and blessedness. Why does he
want this? Simply because it is good.
It is so unbelievably, surpassingly good! Look at the goodness in Joseph’s
actions towards his brothers. How can he treat them that way? It is, without a
shadow of a doubt, the Holy Spirit’s working. It is a miracle. It is no less of
a miracle than splitting the Red Sea in two or the feeding of the 5,000. Flesh
and blood wants payback. The Holy Spirit makes us sweat the “small stuff,”
which, in the eyes of the world is anything but “small.”
This is how Jesus’s words in our Gospel reading must be
understood also. Jesus says: “Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate
you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you. If someone
strikes you on the one cheek, offer the other too. If someone takes away your
coat, do not withhold your shirt. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone
takes away your things, do not demand them back.”
When we hear these words we pretty much think, “Uh oh. What
am I in for now? What am I being asked to do? What’s going to happen to me and
to all my stuff?” There’s a part of us—it’s our Old Adam, the way we were born
by nature—that thinks this all sounds perfectly dreadful. We don’t want to be
troubled. We want to be comfortable. Jesus’s words simply can’t be understood
as anything but irrational and impossible with this frame of mind.
How you should think about these things, however, is that
they are opportunities for goodness to flow down from God, through us, to
others. You must see how what happened with Joseph was good. Of course the
kidnapping, enslavement, imprisonment, lies, and so on and so forth were not
good. These are extremely sinful and harmful. None of us have endured anything
close to this kind of harm. But Joseph overcame all these evils with good.
Other options were available for Joseph. He would have been
within his rights, so to speak, if he were no Christian, to hate his brothers.
The damage that his brothers inflicted upon him was too great to ever be
repaid. Joseph could never get back those many, many years that he was removed
from his beloved father. With the money and power that he acquired in Egypt he
had enough resources to make life miserable for his foul, unlovable brothers.
The way that the devil likes us all to be is continuously stirred
up against one another. But he likes it even better when we have ironclad,
unassailably good motives behind our acts of revenge. Hurt is caused by one
person. Then the other person has the full and complete license to take back
eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. Revenge sometimes masquerading and justice
goes round and round until the fires of hatred burn white hot. One party blows
on the fire from one side. The other blows on it from the other. And when they
both feel good and righteous about their hatred, I don’t see how it can ever
stop except through death—death of the individuals or the death of the
relationship.
Otherwise the only way that this tit for tat kind of thing
can stop is when one or the other party quits throwing fuel on the fire. That
is to say, the one party allows itself to be defrauded, or hurt, or shamed, or
what have you. If one cheek is struck, the other is not withheld.
Our Old Adam really hates this kind of thing. Our Old Adam
might be willing to do this sort of thing with our kids or someone that is
really close to us (but even there I’m not so sure). Our Old Adam would sooner
die than do this with one of our enemies. Here’s why: Because this would mean
that the other party would win! They’d get what they want. We’d lose. And from
a certain point of view this reasoning is ironclad and irrefutable.
Do you know that there are still a great many people who
think this very same thing about Jesus Christ our Lord? He lost. He didn’t free
the Jews from their enslavement to the Romans. He didn’t reform the Jewish
church by kicking out all those evildoers who put him to death. There is a way
of looking at Jesus where he is extremely weak and passive. He was beaten,
mocked, spit upon, crucified and died. And he just took it. What a waste!
But, of course, this was the way that Jesus overcame evil.
He was like a sponge. He sucked up all that evil into himself so that he “became
sin,” as Paul shockingly says of him. He didn’t return evil for evil. He
took evil into himself and gave blessings in return. Joseph is a chip off the
old block in this regard. He also absorbed evil and gave blessing.
This is good, beautiful, and at the very heart of Christ’s
kingdom into which we have been brought. This is the way of life that overcomes
the devil, shuts down his white hot forges and furnaces of hatred, and brings
balm and healing to our sore and inflamed relationships. This is glorious, just
as our crucified and risen Lord Jesus is glorious. It radiates with the love of
God the Father. We are to be merciful, just as he is merciful.
The shortest creed in Christendom is: I believe that Jesus
Christ is my Lord. There are two parts to that lordship. First he purchases and
wins me so that I may be his own. Then he would have us live and serve in his
kingdom. Living in Christ’s kingdom is hard on our Old Adam, to say the least.
In fact, as the Bible itself days, there’s a crucifixion that takes place. But
there is also the promise of the resurrection. What is resurrected is holy,
good, and beautiful.
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