200524 Easter 7 Order of Service
Sermon manuscript:
The people of Israel were specifically chosen by God to be
his own. They were the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They were led
out of Egypt by God’s powerful hand. They cleansed the polluted land of Canaan,
putting its idolatrous inhabitants to death, in order that they may live there eating
milk and honey. Everyone had his own vine and his own fig tree. But what was
more important than any earthly treasures (which were never as great could be
found in other lands) was the fact that they knew the Lord God. They had the
Word of God that went all the way back to creation. They were given judges and
prophets and kings to make known the will of God so that they would fear, love,
and trust in him, calling upon him in every trouble, praying, praising, and
giving thanks.
There was no other nation like Israel on the earth. No other
nation named their children with such faithful and pious names. Samuel, Daniel,
Michael, Ezekiel—the “el” at the end of these names is Hebrew for “God.” They
all say something about God. The same is true for those names that have a “Jah”
or “Yah” in them. That’s another way to say God’s name. John, Jonathan, Joshua,
Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hezekiah, Zechariah—all these names are saying something
about the Lord. They are saying that he is gracious or that he remembers, and
so on.
And so there was a tremendous relationship in Israel. God
loved this people. This people loved God. It did not last, though. God did not
change, but this people did. Their love grew cold for God. Their love for other
things grew hot. And so they somewhat left behind the Lord God for other gods.
They did not leave the Lord God behind entirely. In fact, they continued to
name their kids with these very pious names. But they came to believe that the way
you get ahead in life is by copying what the more powerful people around you
do. And that is just what they did. The began to believe that the ways of the
Canaanites or the Egyptians or the Phoenicians or the Assyrians were better
than the life that God had given to them. They had milk and honey, but now they
wanted gold and a life of convenience and leisure.
God, again, for his part, continued
to be faithful. The prophets he sent to his people were no joke. They denounced
and warned and threatened so that the people didn’t take God’s grace for
granted. Those who heard and were frightened, they also comforted: “The Lord
is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.”
God was patient and sent prophets for centuries—amazing, wonderful men like
Elijah and Isaiah, but the people resented having their sins pointed out to
them. They wanted to do what they wanted to do, and they weren’t going to let
some preacher get in the way of their plans. If those prophets stuck to their
posts and stuck to their guns, then they would have to be forcibly
removed. And so it came to pass that
God’s people ended up killing God’s prophets.
What can God do with a people who
will no longer listen to the ones whom he sends to preach his Word? God, in his
anger, took up blunter instruments and punished his people with them. Whenever
trouble befalls us we do well to ignore what the world and our own flesh say
about it. The world and our flesh are comforted with the thought that it is
just happenstance and fate that brings tragedy, not the heavy hand of the Lord.
But we do well to fear God when we are judged by him, so that we repent and do
not plunge headlong into eternal disaster.
When God finally smashed the
northern and southern kingdoms of Israel with blood and violence and pandemics
and the death of loved ones, I guarantee you (knowing human nature) that most
of them said that this was just a stretch of bad luck, but don’t worry, the sun
will come out tomorrow. Therefore, God did not relent and spare them. He pushed
harder, but they would not repent. Finally, they were scattered to the
wind—sent away from their homeland. No more milk, and no more honey; but what’s
vastly more important is no more instruction in God’s Word, no more prophets.
They became strangers and aliens to God. They melted into the unbelieving
population, just thinking like everybody around them thinks. This is the worst
thing that can ever happen to a believer. When hearts are hardened against the
Word of God being spoken, God will finally take that Word away altogether. Then there is no hope of salvation.
This introduction that I’ve given
helps set the scene for our Old Testament reading this morning from the prophet
Ezekiel. After humbling his people with an incredible amount of violence and
heartache, God had mercy on those who would listen by raising up Ezekiel and
sending him to speak. Ezekiel is one of the last prophets. He lived during the
time that the Jews were conquered by the Babylonians and had to live in exile
in Babylon. He spoke to a people who used to be great, but now had been brought
low. They didn’t even have a temple to worship in anymore. The Babylonians had
leveled it to the ground and taken all their money away. All the hankering
after gold and success was impossible with this basically enslaved people. They
didn’t have anything left.
But they did have God. It is better
to have everything taken away from you, and to still have God, than to be on
top of the world without him. The bitter experience that the people of God had
just been through taught at least some of them this hard lesson. It is to these
humbled and frightened people that God speaks through the prophet Ezekiel.
We heard in our reading: “Therefore,
say this to the house of Israel, ‘This is what the Lord God says. I’m about to
act, O house of Israel, not for your sake, but for the sake of my holy name,
which you have profaned among the nations to which you came.’”
There are two things I’d like to point
out here. First, how good it had to have sounded to these God-forsaken people
to hear God say, “I am about to act.” That had to have been music to
their ears. But then, notice, secondly, that God also says, “I’m not doing it
because you have earned it.” In fact, the people hadn’t learned their lesson.
As they were driven out they became worse not worse. God said that they had profaned
the name of God among those people to whom they were driven.
The Bible, and the Bible alone,
teaches us what people really are like. The world gets fooled into thinking
that we are pretty good people after all. We’re able to learn our lesson. No.
Not even with the best teacher of what’s right and wrong—namely, God—we still
can’t become a lick better by our own reason or strength.
So God says that he is going to act
because his name is holy—not because the people have kept his name holy. Then
he says, “I will take you from among the nations. I will gather you from all
the lands, and I will bring you to your own land. I will sprinkle clean water
on you, and you will be clean. I will cleanse you from all your impurities and
from all your filthy idols.” God does not flatter these people. He does not
tell them that they are good little boys and girls. Because he won’t like this with
flattery, it can make him seem harsh. That is totally wrong. He speaks truth.
The truth is that he is gracious. He couldn’t have said anything kinder to
these people who were so miserable. He tells them that he will gather them to
himself and be their God. He will bless them and protect them. He will sprinkle
them with clean water so that they don’t stink anymore with the filth they
rolled themselves in while worshipping the devil.
This speaks to what we are about in
the new Israel—the Christian Church. When God is gracious, when he raises up
Christians to speak, what these Christians have to say is the same as what God
says through Ezekiel here. We say to those who are lost in perversions, in
excesses, in hatred of themselves, “Come, be sprinkled with clean water. Be
baptized. Be set free from the devil’s bondage that you are otherwise under.”
This speaking, done by Christians, is God’s way of gathering together the
people whom he has chosen. Or another word you could use is “congregation.” God
congregates people into congregations. There God himself cares for them by
feeding their souls with his Word, washing them with baptism, feeding them with
Holy Communion. In this way those who formerly did not know God, come to know
him—that he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast
love.
But this is not the end of the story.
God has more gracious words to speak to us through the prophet Ezekiel today.
He says, “Then I will give you a new heart and put a new Spirit within you.
I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh.
I will put my Spirit within you and lead you so that you will walk in my
statutes, and you will be careful to observe my judgments. Then you will live
in the land I gave your forefathers. You will be my people, and I will be your
God.”
Here God speaks about what is known
in the Church’s vocabulary as “sanctification.” To sanctify means “to make
holy.” And so sanctification is the process of being made holy. As it seems to
be with all the parts of our Christian faith, the devil loves to confuse what’s
true. He does it with sanctification too. All too often sanctification is seen
as the part that we now need to play in order to pay God back for saving us
from hell. Jesus did his part. He died on the cross. Now we need to do our part
of being good boys and girls.
Theoretically this seems like it
should work out fine—I think that’s why our reason likes this notion. But anybody
with any experience at all of trying to be a Christian knows that theories are
one thing, real life is another. Anybody who tries to live a holy life will
soon bitterly learn what Paul says in Romans chapter 7: “The good that I want
to do, I don’t do, and that which I don’t want to do is the very thing that I
end up doing! Who will deliver me from this body of death!?” Theoretically it
would be nice if we could give God tit for tat. We’d feel a whole lot better
about ourselves if we could do our part and pay back God. But then we would
come to love and believe in ourselves more than we ought. God, therefore, may
very well allow us to fall into sin so that we learn the bitter lesson that we
aren’t as good and faithful as we hoped we were. Then we are turned away from
ourselves as the source of blessing (which will totally disappoint us) and
turned toward God as the fount of every blessing. (He will not disappoint).
And so instead of seeing
sanctification as payback, as an obligation, as a debt we have to pay, we
should see it as a gift on top of a gift. It is a continuation of what God does
when he sprinkles us with that clean water, washing away all the filth. The new
heart of flesh (that is to say, the heart that loves) is better than the old
heart of stone. The heart that follows after the will of God is joyful. The one
who follows after the will of the devil is filled with self-loathing. God works
on the hearts of his people, sanctifying them by his Word and Holy Spirit. As
he does this, day in, day out, we are fed and built up. It is just like sheep
who are brought into good pasture. They are nourished and grow and become
healthy and strong. It is a good thing that God does in his Christians. He reworks
us, conforming us to the image of his Son. This is something wonderful that God
does already in this life, in part. He will finish this work with the death of our
old sinful flesh, and our resurrection with purified, that is, sanctified
bodies.
God speaks to us today through the prophet Ezekiel. Our
times and circumstances are different than those of his time, but not nearly as
much as you might think. The story of our existence has been basically the same
from the beginning. The devil’s on one side. God is on the other. The devil
wants us to never think of God at all, to be filthy, to hate ourselves. God
wants us to believe and trust in him, to be clean, and to live together with
him. Therefore, hear what God is saying to you today and rejoice in it.
God is gather you to himself, even though you have been and
are a sinner. He who has begun a good work in you will bring it to completion
in the Day of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who has called you is faithful. He will
surely do it.
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