1.
Please pray with
me. May the words of my mouth and the
meditation of our hearts be pleasing in Your sight, O Lord, our Rock, and our
Redeemer. Amen. The message from God’s Word for our Third
Advent Midweek Service is taken from 1 John 4:15-21, it’s entitled, “Stir Up the Power of Love,” dear
brothers and sisters in Christ.
2.
Did you ever hear
of “cement overshoes”? That’s a term
used to describe the Mafia’s way of getting rid of someone. Since a corpse
floats, the victim’s feet are chained to cinder blocks or placed in buckets of
cement. He’s dumped in the ocean, never to be found again. Some suggest that’s
what happened to Jimmy Hoffa. In fact,
there’s no evidence that any Mafia victim was disposed of in this way. That
leads one to think cement overshoes might be a creation of Hollywood. But
you’ve got to admit, if you’re wearing a pair of cement overshoes, it’s pretty
hard to move. Or more to the point, you’re not going anywhere.
3.
That’s the effect
of sin in our lives. It’s like cement overshoes. Sin weighs us down, but God’s
grace and mercy free us to love. So that’s what we pray for in the Collect for
the Fourth Sunday in Advent, the third and final “stir up” prayer for this
midweek Advent series: “Stir up Your
power, O Lord, and come and help us by Your might, that the sins which weigh us
down may be quickly lifted by Your grace and mercy; for You live and reign with
the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.” God’s Grace and Mercy Lift the Sins That
Weigh Us Down So That We Can Love. And
just who is it that God’s grace and mercy enable us to love?
4.
First, God’s
grace and mercy free us from the weight of our sins so that we can love him. In the old 1950s black-and-white Martin
Luther movie, Luther’s father-confessor exhorts Luther to love God. Luther, a
priest himself, replies that that’s exactly what his sin is: he doesn’t love
God; he hates him. That may sound shocking, but that’s how many people, even Christians,
feel. Luther hated God because he knew God only as an angry judge who
threatened to punish him for his sins. Martin
Luther took God’s Law very seriously. He tried to obey it perfectly. After
years of brutally disciplining himself to do this, even beating himself with a
whip, Luther believed himself a miserable failure. He agreed with St. Paul who
said, “I do not do the good I want, but
the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing” (Rom 7:19).
5.
God had placed an
impossible demand on Luther—that he be perfect in order to be saved. He placed
that demand on St. Paul. He places it on all of us. God’s Word actually says, “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is
perfect” (Mt 5:48). When you and I try to be perfect in thought, word, and
deed, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, we will despair. Because we
can’t do it. And that’s the idea. The
purpose of the Law since the fall of Adam and Eve has never been to save
anyone, but to show sinners that it’s impossible for us to be perfect and save
ourselves. When we come to that realization, we despair. And we cry out to God
with St. Paul, “Wretched man that I am!
Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom 7:24).
6.
That’s when we
discover the comfort of the Gospel, that Jesus has died for our sins and
through faith in him we are saved. Paul cries out with joy at this discovery,
saying, “Thanks be to God through Jesus
Christ our Lord! . . . There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are
in Christ Jesus” (Rom 7:24; 8:1). When
we realize God no longer condemns us but loves us in Jesus, who died for us,
our hatred of God goes away. That weight of sin disappears, and we are free to
love him, sing his praises, and live in thankful joy.
7.
Second, God’s
grace and mercy free us from the weight of our sins so that we can love those
among us who are oppressed. This time of
year, all the Christmas classics are on TV: Home
Alone. White Christmas. It’s a Wonderful Life. A Christmas Story. You can
add others. But the most famous one of all is Charles Dickens’s, “A Christmas Carol.” In it, Ebenezer
Scrooge is such a penny-pinching miser, he’d let his own nephew freeze in his
office for lack of coal. He’d even let disabled Tiny Tim die of starvation. Then one Christmas Eve, Scrooge has a bad dream.
The spirits of Christmas past, present, and future visit Scrooge and scare him
into a conversion experience. He sees himself dead and forgotten. Like the Law
of God, it shocks him into despairing of his refusal to love. He wakes up
Christmas morning a new man, freed from his old hateful ways, freed to be a
generous and caring neighbor and uncle.
8.
That’s what God’s
mercy and grace do for us. They free us from our sins so that we love God. But
they also free us to love our neighbor. That’s what we see over and over in the
Old Testament. That’s what we see in the Gospels and the Epistles in the New
Testament. When God’s grace and mercy free us from sin to love God, we change
and begin caring about what God cares about.
9.
We don’t wait for
the Last Day, when Jesus comes again and every wrong is righted and Eden is
restored. We start doing it now. Through God’s Word and Sacrament, and with our
time and talent and treasure, we become instruments of the Lord, “who executes justice for the oppressed, who
gives food to the hungry,” and “sets
the prisoners free.” We become instruments of the Lord, who “opens the eyes of the blind” and “lifts up
those who are bowed down,” who “watches over the sojourners” and “upholds the
widow and the fatherless” (Ps 146:7–9).
10.
When I say we do
that through Word and Sacrament and with our time, talent, and treasure, I’m
recognizing there are two levels of meaning here. Sin imprisons, blinds, and
weighs us all down. It breaks our spirits. But the Gospel—the Word and
Sacrament—frees us from sin. It restores our sight, enabling us to see God in
Christ, and it uplifts our hearts. Thankful and rejoicing, we carry to others
these same powerful Means of Grace that saved us. And often they respond as we
have, with faith toward God and tangible acts of love.
11.
This isn’t just
metaphor. Freed from the burden of sin, we become caring people. We help
prisoners, the blind, the bowed down, the sojourner, the widow and the
fatherless. We give to outreach and mercy organizations such as LWML or LCMS
Disaster Response or other worthy charities.
But it’s not just with money that we help. If we have the health and
strength, we can jump and work shoulder-to-shoulder with other Christians and
neighbors in our community or somewhere else in the world. Or we can do it privately, one-on-one with
people who need our care and the love of Christ. We don’t have to look far to
find them. We just have to lift up our heads and open our eyes.
12.
Nothing but our
own sinful selfishness is stopping us from reaching out to them. And
selfishness is only a problem if we let it be, because Jesus has freed us from
the weight of sin by taking it to the cross. Freedom has a purpose, and that’s
so you and I can care about the same things God cares about.
13.
Finally, God’s
grace and mercy free us from the weight of our sins so that we can love those
among us who are unlovable. Every one of us knows somebody we don’t
particularly like. It could be a neighbor, a loud-mouth uncle, an irritating
co-worker, a fellow church member. But God’s Word doesn’t say we have to be
best buds with everyone. It says we are to love them. These are John’s words from the Epistle: “And this commandment we have from him:
whoever loves God must also love his brother” (1 Jn 4:21).
14.
I think we all
accept that theoretically. It’s putting it into practice that’s the problem.
Maybe you’ve heard this old joke: “I love
my fellow man; it’s people I can’t stand.” Here’s one I heard in the store.
“Retail would be great if it wasn’t for
the customers.” You get the idea. We accept loving our brother in
principle. It’s just that sometimes we have a hard time doing it. What God calls us to, of course, is the kind
of love expressed by that Greek word agape—as compared to either the Greek
philia, brotherly love, or eros, romantic love. We choose our friends because
there’s something we like about them. We have things in common. We enjoy our
time with them. We choose the person we marry for a variety of reasons.
15.
But the Christian
faith has its own unique concept of love that in the Greek is called agape. Agape
love loves someone who is unlovable. There’s nothing about the objects of agape
love that makes them worthy. They are unworthy. Yet we love them, care for
them, sacrifice for them, and forgive them. That is the kind of love Jesus has
for sinners—like us, who are by our nature unlovable. That’s the kind of love
God’s grace and mercy free us to have for others.
16.
So that’s what we
do. It has nothing to do with feelings or attraction. Instead, it’s defined by
these words of St. Paul: “God
demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were yet sinners, Christ died
for us” (Rom 5:8). That’s the love of caregivers for sick and dying
patients. That’s the love of counselors and therapists for the mentally ill. That’s
the love of those who work with the mentally and physically disabled. If Jesus can love sinners like us, he can
free us to love other sinners we don’t like at all. And he does. He does as we
pray with believing hearts the Collect for the Fourth Sunday in Advent. I’ll pray
it as our closing prayer. “Stir up Your power, O Lord, and come and
help us by Your might, that the sins which weigh us down may be quickly lifted
by Your grace and mercy; for You live and reign with the Father and the Holy
Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.”
No comments:
Post a Comment