“People Who Don’t Belong” Matt. 2.1–12, Epiphany Jan. ’24

 

1.      Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Heavenly Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, in our text from Matthew chapter 2 for this Epiphany of Our Lord, Matthew shows us a Gospel filled with “people who do not belong” in the places they’re found.

2.      We think first of the Magi. They were from “the East”—not from Jerusalem, not even from Israel. But of greater significance than their country of origin was that the Magi were Gentiles; they were not heirs to the messianic promise made to Israel’s patriarchs. Even worse, these Gentile outsiders, these Magi, were magicians! Now we’re not talking magicians like Harry Houdini, David Copperfield, or Penn & Teller. No! These Magi were spiritual magicians with whom the king could consult, men such as Jannes and Jambres, who served under the Egyptian Pharaoh in the days of Moses, or the court magicians who served Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon (Daniel 5). The Magi were probably not pure worshipers of Yahweh. They likely had some sort of mixed faith in which they had some knowledge of the God of Israel. No, the Magi did not belong in Jerusalem; they did not belong bowing before the King of the Jews.

3.      But as we consider this, we find, too, that Herod was in a place where he did not belong. Herod was an Idumean—a descendant of Esau—who was seated on the throne of Israel not by a royal lineage back to David, but by the proclamation of the Roman Senate. Herod had no rightful claim to sit on the throne of David . . . but thanks to political posturing and strategic wedding vows, that was where Herod was found. And thanks to his ruthless and paranoid nature (along with the executions of any person who had legitimate claim to the throne), there he stayed.

4.      So the Magi made a terrible mistake when they sought the newly born king in the palace of Herod—a mistake that made Jerusalem tremble. Herod’s wrath and jealousy would be stirred by such an error, and then heaven help them all. In fact, Jerusalem was right to tremble in fear, as Herod’s jealousy would soon produce great weeping and mourning among her daughters, the mothers of all the baby boys around Bethlehem.

5.      But the King for whom the Magi searched wasn’t in the palace. He wasn’t even in Jerusalem. He was in Bethlehem, small among the clans of Judah. He was under the care of a carpenter and a young virgin whose husband was not his father. No, the King of the Jews was not where he should have been. He should have been in a mansion full of every comfort, dressed in fine clothing, and attended by servants on all sides. Instead, the King of the Jews was laid in a manger at his birth, without any kingly comfort, with shepherds as his only attendants. Later, the Magi attended to him as well, presumably in a simple house in Bethlehem.

6.      This was not the last time that the King of the Jews would be found in unexpected places and in places where he did not belong: He was found in the waters of the Jordan, baptized among sinners, for sinners. John the Baptist noticed. This was not where the King of the Jews belonged. The King of the Jews was found eating and drinking with tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners—hardly the people of high moral fiber or impeccable pedigree who should make up a royal court. The Pharisees noticed. This was not where the King of the Jews belonged. And who would have thought to look for the King of the Jews on a cross, enthroned and executed between two criminals? No, no one expected that. These were hardly the places to seek and find the King of the Jews, the heir of David’s throne, the Messiah. So, the star had to guide the Magi to the Virgin’s house in Bethlehem; the Spirit had to descend, and the Father had to speak at the Jordan; the prophets had to describe the work of the Christ as being for transgressors, the workers of iniquity; Pilate’s sign had to be written. All of this was not just for the Jews but also for the Gentile nations, so that all of humanity may be guided to Jesus, King of the Jews, expectation of the prophets, the crucified Savior, forgiver of sins.

7.      Dear friends, Matthew shows us a Gospel filled with people who do not belong in the places where they are found. And in this we rejoice, for it does not take too much honest self-examination to realize that we do not belong in the presence of God. We have unclean hearts, and we live among a people of unclean hearts (Is 6:5).

8.      Yet we come into the presence of God by his precious invitation, guided not by a star but by the Holy Spirit, working in many and various ways to bring us to the life-giving water of new birth. We come into the presence of God trusting in his promise that our bodies have been washed with pure water and our hearts cleansed by that sprinkling of Jesus’ blood (Heb 9:14; 10:22). We come into the presence of God knowing that our Lord has bid us come as his very own children, not to punish us but to give us his grace and blessing.

9.      No, we don’t belong here among God’s chosen people or in this royal priesthood, this holy nation, in which we now stand. But here we are, drawn by God’s cruciform goodness and mercy (Jn 12:32), crowned with forgiveness and salvation so that we may be his own and live under him in his kingdom forevermore.

10.   None of us merits this honor, but having been so called, gathered, and enlightened, we now go into the world as light for the world (Mt 5:14), proclaiming the excellencies of him who called us out of darkness into his wonderful light (1 Pet 2:9). The people of the world live in the darkness of unbelief and continue to search for salvation in places where it is not found. So like the star that led the Magi to Jesus, you serve as the Lord’s chosen instruments to lighten others’ paths and guide them in the way of Holy Scripture (1 Pet 3:15) so that those who walk in darkness, too, may see his great light (Is 9:2) and kneel before Christ and worship with outstretched hands, being given his precious gifts for the forgiveness of all their sin.

11.   The people being drawn by the Holy Spirit from the darkness will not always “get things right.” They will often lean upon their own understanding (even as the Magi did when they stopped in Jerusalem, not Bethlehem; even as we do too). But the Spirit will continue to guide us truthfully and faithfully to Jesus, so that we may repent of our errant footsteps and, in the end, be found with Christ in his kingdom of glory. Amen. Now the peace of God that passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, until life everlasting. Amen.

 

“Christmas, as John Writes It” John 1.1–14 Xmas Dec. ‘23

 

“Christmas, as John Writes It” John 1.1–14 Xmas Dec. ‘23

1.                  Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Heavenly Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. A very Merry Christmas to all of you this day as we celebrate our Savior’s birth! Last night, we feasted together on many words of the Word of God, but especially on the words of St. Luke from Luke chapter 2. Those words about the nativity of Jesus are most familiar. There is much humanity in Luke’s writing. Proper names of real people: Joseph. Mary. Quirinius. Real places on the map: Syria. Nazareth. Bethlehem. Passionate emotions expressed by those real people: Joy. Fear. Relief. Our message from God’s Word today is taken from John 1:1-14, it’s entitled, “Christmas, as John Writes It,” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.

2.                  This morning we feast upon the words of St. John. Less human interest, but just as important. These words of John focus upon the divinity of Jesus. Nothing here about the trip to Bethlehem, the swaddling cloths, or the quaking shepherds. Still, John reports as accurately as Luke did, even as John is focusing on the glory of the person of the Word made flesh. In our text today, St. John Prepares a Divine Feast of the Word.

3.                  John confesses that it is God in the flesh who makes that night stand out in history. We already know God didn’t need reporters or a book contract to make that night holy. He could have brought that night forth even without the shepherds, angels, and manger. God made that night holy because of himself. God came to earth. He became flesh. Incarnate, we say. And though many historians, scientists, politicians, and even theologians miss the significance, God’s holy people don’t. Life was manifested. In Jesus. His is the light of men.

4.                  We need to be cautioned on this joyous Christmas morn. We need to be warned that the world is already past the point of believing what John has written. The world warms up to a human interest story as reported by Luke, loving all the details—the names, the places, the emotions—whether coming from the lips of a pastor in a stole at a lectern or coming from the lips of Linus holding his blanket in A Charlie Brown Christmas, running now every year for almost six decades. The world can become sentimental to Luke’s Gospel, but the Gospel according to St. John is hardly considered on an equal level.

5.                  John writes in John 1:1 & 14, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . And the Word became flesh.” That is John’s truth about Christmas. But that’s not truth according to Harvard University, MIT, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or The New Yorker. For those sources, “in the beginning” there were molecules or gasses or nothing at all or “we’re not sure.” But John is sure! He says that it is better to be a child of God than to be a citizen of the world. So, John starts with the Word, the preincarnate Christ. He was in the beginning. He was with God. He was God. He made all things.

6.                  But does one have to believe John in order to believe that Jesus was a cuddly baby born in a manger? Isn’t it possible to believe that Jesus was born in Bethlehem without believing that Jesus also created all the heavens and all the earth (Ps 33:6)? Why not? Why are baby Jesus and his existence as the Son of God before Bethlehem inextricable from one another?

7.                  Why? The Church has always needed to answer that question. Even before the Bible was written, believers had to answer the question of whether the God who created the world was also the God who would redeem the world. Same God? Different Gods? No relationship? What exactly? Those pre-Bible believers couldn’t say, “The Bible tells me so.” There was no Bible in Adam and Eve’s day, nor in pre-Pentateuch of Moses’ day. So, why does the Babe of Bethlehem need to be God the Lord, the God who made all things? Couldn’t Jesus simply be human, not God?

8.                  Couldn’t Jesus just teach all men and women a better way to live, how to get along, how to be nice to one another, how to be at peace on earth? Couldn’t Jesus just be a good guy, a best friend, a great teacher? The world answers that Jesus doesn’t need to be God, your God. Your God can be anyone or anything. You. Your friend. Your dog. Your inner thoughts. The entire universe. A god can be anything from which you get help, comfort, pleasure, good vibes, or reassurances. The world does not know the true God because the world does not know its sin, its wickedness, its evil. The world, writes John, is in darkness. John insists that the world was made by God, made by the One who is light, made by Jesus, but the world did not know him. Not then. Not now. Why? Because darkness envelops the world. That darkness is sin.

9.                  But John also confesses that some are not in the darkness. They believe. They believe that Jesus is God. They believe not because they are morally better or because they are above average IQ or because they had an inner light already burning in them. John says it best in John 1:13, These “were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God”.

10.               Truly, they have been born from above, from on high. The Lord has done the work. Being born of God is Holy Baptism’s work. Holy Baptism is God’s work. Baptism is “of God.” These words of Paul are refreshing, like cool water upon the face in the morning. Paul wrote to Titus: “[God] saved us . . . by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior” (Titus 3:5–6). Baptism is a bathing in Jesus.

11.               The faithful love the language of God, of John’s Gospel, and of God’s work. This feast. “The Word was God” (Jn 1:1). “All things were made through him” (John 1:3). “The Word became flesh . . . and we have seen his glory” (John 1:14). This is salvation talk. It’s talk of the Savior. It’s talk that “the people who walked in darkness” (Is 9:2), the darkness of death and sin, understand. Martin Luther says that a five- or six- or seven-year-old child can understand this talk.

12.               Those who are still in darkness hate this talk of John. They refuse to confess sin and death and thus cannot confess Jesus as Savior over sin and death. Those in the light, the baptized, love this talk. Their sin is covered by the glorious Savior, Jesus.

13.               When Thomas confessed Jesus as “my Lord and my God” (Jn 20:28), he was making a statement about the connection between creation and redemption. You can’t have one without the other. They go together, like cold and winter, like Christmas and presents, like sunshine and light. This Lord standing alive before him, Thomas knew, is the one who had just so recently died. Were he not man, he could never have died in our place. But unless he is also God, he could never have conquered death for us. God’s Son, Jesus, has brought redemption to the world in his flesh by the forgiveness of sin, and he was also the Word creating at the creation of the world. Two natures in one. You can’t have one without the other. Lord and God.

14.               What St. John wrote in his Gospel about the nativity of Jesus was “written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (Jn 20:31). Don’t expect the miracle of faith outside of the Gospels. Don’t expect the themes of the Word as Creator and the Word as Redeemer to be explained or photographed magnificently in a National Geographic article this month or to be broached in the inaugural address by the US president next month.

15.               But you can expect those themes to be covered here at this pulpit, weekly, in this congregation. Expect them to be preached here in this church in liturgy and hymns where the darkness of your sin is covered by the light of Jesus’ work. Expect them to be delivered to you in this building in the ordinary and in the supernatural. Yes, in an ordinary six-day period, our Lord did the supernatural: he created the heavens and the earth. Yes, the Lord of all became an ordinary male, born in a stall, via the supernatural birth to a virgin. Yes, the Lord’s supernatural body and blood are in ordinary bread and wine. Yes, simple water plus the extraordinary Word of God poured upon the head of an infant forgives that child’s sin.

16.               The Word of God made the world and the Word of God became flesh. The Word of God dripped his blood from the cross and the Word of God rose from the dead. The Word of God has overcome your darkness and the Word of God brings you into his light. That’s the Feast of Christmas. Merry Christmas. Amen. Now the peace of God that passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, until life everlasting. Amen.

 

“To God Alone Be Glory” Rom. 16.25-27, Advent 4B Dec. ‘23

 

1.      Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Heavenly Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. The message from God’s Word on this 4^th Sunday in Advent is taken from Romans 16:25-27, it’s entitled, “To God Alone Be Glory,” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.

2.      Soli Deo Gloria. That’s Latin for “To God alone be glory.” That was a powerful message during the Reformation. The reformers wanted to make sure that God received all the glory for the work of his Gospel. We see a similar emphasis in Paul’s concluding doxology in his Letter to the Romans. A fitting response to the revelation of the mystery of God’s plan of salvation. And a fitting word for the final Sunday of Advent as we look ahead to the mystery of centuries being revealed in the event of Christ’s birth we’ll celebrate so soon, in fact this evening and tomorrow morning! To God Alone Be Glory—both for His mystery and for revealing It.

3.      To God alone be glory—because his kind of glory is so great it would always be a mystery to us (Romans 16:25, 27). There’s a reason God’s glory was a mystery for long ages. Human beings trying to understand God’s glory would always envision something very different from what it really is. We think of glory as might, power, honor that serves the glorious one. Glory is all about the one who has it and always makes others look weak, humble, inferior. It’s an athlete’s glory to win—which means he beats someone else. It’s an entrepreneur’s glory to make the cover of Fortune magazine—which calls further attention to himself. An actor glories when he goes onstage at the Oscars and thanks all the “little people.” Thank you very much.

4.      Left to our own to understand God’s glory, we wouldn’t understand it any other way. And then we’d give him glory grudgingly, gritting our teeth to honor him because it would humiliate us. But if that were the way we understood God’s glory, it would still be a mystery to us. We would not yet understand God’s glory at all, because God’s glory is of an entirely different kind.

5.      God’s glory is an attitude toward us that we could never fathom on our own. Figure this out: Our natural attitude toward God is rebellion, resentment, revulsion. And yet God delights to favor us. He glories to honor his rebellious creatures!

6.      God’s glory is gracious action for us. Who could guess?: We break God’s Commandments, go our own sinful ways. And he takes the punishment for us—death and the pains of hell. Really?!

7.      God’s glory is to declare us righteous. Does that make sense? We shame him by ignoring him, cheating on him, having other gods before him, acting as though he doesn’t matter. And he declares us innocent because Jesus was declared guilty in our place. Go figure!

8.      God considers it his glory to give us a gift. We are credited with a righteousness from outside ourselves—namely, Christ’s righteousness. And we receive this gift simply by believing it’s already been given to us—“the obedience of faith” (Romans 16:26). Who would ever know all this was God’s idea of glory? Psalm 113:4-7 says, "The Lord is high above all nations, and his glory above the heavens! Who is like the Lord our God, who is seated on high, who looks far down on the heavens and the earth? He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap." No one would know, except that God has revealed it.

9.      To God alone be glory—because he did not keep it a secret from us (Romans 16:25–27). God’s kind of glory became clear when he sent his Son. The mystery of God’s glory was revealed in the “preaching of Jesus”—both the preaching by Jesus and the preaching about Jesus (Romans 16:25). This is what we’re about to celebrate, what this Advent season has been looking forward to all along! Now in these last days, the author of Hebrews says, God “has spoken to us by his Son” (Heb 1:2).

10.   Jesus is the full and final revelation of the mystery because he is the mystery made flesh. Some translations of Romans 16:26 say the mystery is now made “manifest.” This is precisely what Jesus himself is, “God in man made manifest” (LSB 394). Jesus is the incarnate Word.

11.   To us 2000 years later, God has also revealed the mystery of his glory in Christ through the written Word. The “prophetic writings’’ (Romans 16:26), the Old Testament, actually always spoke of Christ, even long before he came. “God spoke to our fathers by the prophets” (Heb 1:1). The prophetic writings, though preparatory, are not disconnected from Jesus’ teachings and those of the apostles. In fact, they were the texts the apostles and even Jesus himself used for their preaching.

12.   Now those prophetic writings, along with the word of their fulfillment in the New Testament Scriptures, make the mystery of God’s glory known to all nations. The apostles carried and wrote the message of the Scriptures to distant lands. And the same message has come down to us. We ourselves have heard and read the solution to the mystery of God’s glory: his glory is to save us through Christ Jesus! It’s no secret anymore!

13.   To God alone be glory—in the praise we bring. We say, “Thank you!” Here is where Paul concludes his entire magnificent Letter to the Romans: with thanksgiving “to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages” (Romans 16:25). The whole letter has unveiled God’s plan of the Gospel. Paul has taken us from a clear declaration of what we were—helpless, hopeless sinners, enemies of God—to what God has declared us to be—forgiven, justified saints, who live with him and live for him. A plan so gracious, so loving, it would always have been a mystery to us. But now that Paul has revealed the mystery, what can he and the Romans do but say thanks?

14.   Now that we know it, now that we have been brought to that faith, now that God’s gracious glory is no longer a mystery to us, how can we not pour out thanks? The all-glorious God has made it his glory to save us sinners. We have eternal life, infinite glory ourselves. Thank God!

15.   Say “Soli Deo Gloria.” Yes, say it with me: “Soli Deo Gloria.” To God alone be glory. And then let us say it in everything we say and do. God considers it his glory to save us. When that’s the way he sees things, there’s no reason to claim any glory for ourselves! “To the only wise God be glory forevermore through Jesus Christ!” Because of Jesus, his glorious death, his glorious resurrection, this is what we’ll say forevermore. Glory to God!

16.   For long ages, it was a secret. God’s people waited. Now our much shorter wait is nearly over. God has revealed the mystery of the Gospel in the incarnation of his Son, and very soon, we celebrate. The mystery has been revealed so that we might be saved and so that we might give him glory. “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow; Praise him, all creatures here below; Praise him above, ye heav’nly host: Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen” (LSB 805). Now the peace of God that passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus until life everlasting. Amen.