190825 Sermon on Jeremiah 7:1-11 Romans 9:30-10:4 Luke 19:41-48 (Trinity 10), August 25, 2019

190825 Sermon on Jeremiah 7:1-11 Romans 9:30-10:4 Luke 19:41-48 (Trinity 10), August 25, 2019

Wherever the Word of God is, there is a paradise, an oasis in the desert. This is because the Word of God brings to us the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ. If ever we have missed a friend, if ever we have loved a child, then let that serve as the way to start to measure the goodness of being together with Jesus. Knowing God as our friend and champion is the highest and best thing that can possibly be hoped for.

But we must also watch our step here. On the other hand, knowing God as our enemy is the most terrifying and awful thing that anybody can experience. So let’s not paint God as an impotent, doting grandma. There is a burning and consuming fire in the relations between God and man. This fire is inspiring, enlivening, and exhilarating for those who believe in his mercy. But to those who do not know him this fire is hellish.

How can we know and believe in the God of mercy? It is the Word of God. Wherever the Word of God is, there is a paradise, an oasis in the desert.

Those who have the Word of God, therefore, are so richly blessed that no comparison can do it justice. Suppose that you don’t own just a few hundred acres of land, or ten thousand acres of land, let’s say that you own the whole world. Everybody has to pay you rent. Let’s say that you are the devil himself, the prince of this world!

That’s not good enough. You have something infinitely more with the baptism with which you have been baptized. That baptism has communicated to you God himself. God’s own child, say it gladly, you are baptized into Christ. The fiery yet good relationship with the eternal Creator is yours through this Word of God that has been poured onto your head—poured onto your head, I say, together with the water, lest you think that it couldn’t be for you, but has to be for somebody else.

What happens, though, when we are in this paradise of possessing the Word of God and we start to be disobedient to him? We know what happened to Adam and Eve when they were disobedient to God in their paradise. Adam and Eve’s sin changed everything. Their minds were darkened and they were hostile to God. But God sought them out. God is longsuffering, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. He does not take delight in the death of the sinner, but desires that all should reach repentance. That is what he did with Adam and Eve. Because God came to them with his message, they turned from their sin and believed in the promise of the Messiah.

That is how it usually is. To those who have God’s Word, but are faltering, God will send yet more messengers of his Word. The messengers will reprove, rebuke, and exhort the wayward people so that they may turn from their evil ways. If God is gracious he might also send along some plagues to give that Word impressive power, for people often will not be moved by words alone. It is only when their checkbook or their body or their family has been touched with disaster that they will sober up.

Where things turn out well the people will put on sackcloth and ashes. They will call a sacred assembly with all the people—young and old, even those who have just gotten married and are supposed to be going on their honeymoon. Together the people will call upon God to have mercy on them, which always brings God to his knees. He turns from his disaster and relents. Then the people are blessed with God’s Word again for a season and a time. That is when things turn out well.

When things do not turn out well people reject the messenger together with the message and the one who has sent it. The particulars of what people might do is extremely variable. They might say that the messenger is not understanding God’s Word correctly. They might say that times have changed. Who does the messenger think he or she is? I say he or she because the messenger doesn’t have to be a pastor. It could be Mom or Dad. It could be a member of the congregation rightly contending against the pastor with the truth of God’s Word. It is not just pastors who can be the messengers of God’s truth. It can and it should also be you.

Now if the messenger is insistent and the hearer is stubborn then the tension will build. It’s like the tectonic plates that get stuck together for a time. But eventually something gives and you have an earthquake. So it is also when God is contending with his people through whatever messenger or messengers he has been sending them. If they resist, the pressure builds, until something happens.  

When the Word of God is opposed, there will be violence and trouble. Controversies! Look at all the controversies in the Old and New Testaments. Violence and trouble are bad. Nobody wants them. But there is one thing that is still worse than violence and trouble—it is the stillness that can come when God is totally fed up. He quits sending messengers. He leaves the people be. He says, “He who is a sinner, let him be a sinner still.” Have it your way. The Word of God, if it remains at all, no longer works towards the softening of people’s hearts, but it works for the hardening of people’s hearts. The more the people hear it, the worse they become. They’d be better off not hearing it at all.

In the end, God will move on to a different people. God is going to have his banquet. We know that from the parable where the master of the house says, “Go out and bring in the lame and blind. Go out and bring in the losers.” And the servants say to him, “We’ve already done that and there is still room.” And so the master says to them, “Go out into highways and byways. Beat the bushes. Force them to come in!” Wherever the Word of God is, there is a paradise, and oasis in the desert. There is where Jesus is, and being together with God in his fiery glory, knowing that he is well pleased with you, is the best thing that can ever happen to anybody. God desires this and so he is going to make it happen. If one people won’t suffer him to be among them anymore, then he will move on to others.

What we have laid out here today is what our scripture readings teach. From the time of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Jews were the possessors of God’s Word. They lived in paradise, the oasis in the desert. They were the only people who knew the one true God. But they were disobedient to the Lord. They were greedy and lied. They turned the Church into a worldly institution—a goose that laid golden eggs for the clergy. So long as people were coming to the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, then all was well. God had to bless them—it was part of their rules. They honored God with their lips, but their hearts were far from him. They were much more concerned with their day to day living. Their great ambition was not to meet God. It was not to be filled with love for God and for their neighbor. They did not want God to be glorified. They wanted to be glorified.

The outward trappings of the Word of God were still around while this rebellion of the heart took place. They were still having worship services and teaching and preaching. But the teachers wouldn’t tackle real topics. They played it safe. If ever any preacher did take a bite into real life with his message from God, it was dismissed. The people’s hopes and dreams were on their technology and their diplomacy and the fact that they were the greatest nation and the greatest people on earth. Because they had the Word of God it should have produced faith and the fruits of faith, but all that was coming up was thorns and thistles—no grapes or figs.

And so God sent one last great calamity to this people to wake them up from their stupor. He destroyed Jerusalem in Jeremiah’s time, almost 600 years before Christ was born. Then he destroyed it again about 70 years after Jesus was born. Both times the suffering and sadness was beyond our ability to describe it. No doubt, with these extreme measures, a few finally repented and asked Jesus to remember them, like the thief on the cross asked Jesus to remember him when he came into his kingdom. Today, these folks are with Jesus in paradise. But the second time was different than the first time God destroyed Jerusalem. After the second time, the Holy Spirit moved on to another people..

St. Paul speaks of this in our Epistle reading. The Jews rejected Jesus. They stumbled over the stone of offence. They did not believe that the righteousness of God is in Christ and him crucified. Instead they thought that it could be brought about by their own efforts. But this has never been the hope of God’s people. God’s people have always been waiting for the fulfillment of the promise in the Garden of Eden—that we should be redeemed from the serpent by the seed of the woman. That woman was the virgin Mary. Her seed is our Lord Jesus Christ. He is the one who makes for forgiveness and peace, but this was hidden from the eyes of the Jews. It was hidden because God himself hardened their hearts which they had already hardened for themselves.

Therefore, now God’s light and his truth was going to go to the other nations of the world—the Gentiles—those who are not the blood descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. To them the Word of God was given and paradises sprang up wherever the Gospel was preached. Those who had been dead and lost in their trespasses and sins became aware of their terrible plight under their false gods, who can offer no real hope (only fake hope), and the true God was held out to them. New ambitions were formed—new hope and new dreams. Now these Gentiles wanted to see Jesus. They wanted to be with him. They wanted to be healed and made whole. They prayed, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from Thy presence and take not Thy Holy Spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of Thy salvation and uphold me with Thy free Spirit.”

But just as God was with his Old Testament people, so also he is with his New Testament people. There are vast sections of the globe that were once populated by devout and energetic Christians. The Word of God provided lush, green pastures. But now in these same places there are no Christians to be found. North Africa and the Middle East used to be Christian. Now it is Muslim. Europe used to be Christian. Now it is unbelieving. Many believers in Christ, our ancestors, traveled from Europe to America. How do things stand with us? What is in our heart? What are our hopes and dreams? What are we teaching our children and our grandchildren?

God most certainly would be within his rights to take our paradise away from us because of our thanklessness and our hankering after false gods. If we will not learn and change from the preaching of God’s Word, then he will remove his grace entirely just like he did with his beloved Jews. It may be that the religious trappings remain, the way it is with some of the Jews to this very day, but the trappings will not be effective. They will be like the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, because the Gospel will not be received by faith. The Jews still have the Scriptures, but without the Holy Spirit’s blessing they cannot see or believe the Gospel.

But the Scriptures are consistent in the message that God gives to his wayward people. So long as the message is still going out for repentance, there is still hope. Jesus says, “Work while it is day before the night comes, when no one can work.” We are still in the time of grace. We can still go to the sellers to get oil for our lamps. We can still hate the lives that we have been leading and ask Jesus to have mercy on us—to heal our blindness, to open our ears, to unleash our tongue that it may sing God’s praises. Contrary to what we might think, when we are weak and filthy and impotent in our own eyes, that is precisely when we are strong, for then Christ is our strength. Christ is our strength, I say, and let me tell you, he is pretty strong.

But if we will just continue to go on our merry way and won’t change, then the Word of God is going to fall silent among us. God is already showing us how he will move on to another people who will actually listen to him, since we have not. Let the example of the Jews and of Jerusalem be a warning to us. Let us not go on carelessly while our paradise is going away and our oasis is drying up.