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 today as we observe LWML Sunday is taken from Galatians 2:7-10 and Mark 10:45, it’s entitled, “Eagerly Supporting the Mission of Christ,” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2. In August of 1941, in the starvation bunker of Auschwitz, a Polish prisoner named Franciszek Gajowniczek was selected for execution — ten men chosen to die by slow starvation as punishment for another prisoner's escape. As the guards led the condemned away, Gajowniczek cried out that he had a wife and children. From the ranks stepped a Franciscan priest, Maximilian Kolbe, a man under no obligation and with nothing to gain, who asked simply to take the man's place. The guards, astonished but indifferent, allowed the exchange. Kolbe went to the starvation cell; Gajowniczek went home to his family, and lived another fifty-three years. There is no way to make that story anything less than staggering — a man laying down his own life so that a stranger might keep his. And yet, dear friends, even that astonishing act of love is only a faint shadow, compared to what our Lord Jesus has done for you.
3. Our Lord Himself tells us plainly what He came to do. In Mark's Gospel, James and John had just asked Jesus for the seats of highest honor in His coming kingdom, and the other ten disciples, hearing this, became indignant — not because ambition offended them, but because they wanted those seats too. It is the oldest sin in the book: we want to be served, honored, first. Jesus gathers them and says, "You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them... But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant... For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Mark 10:42–45).
4. A ransom is a price paid to free someone who cannot free himself. And that, beloved, is exactly your condition and mine before God. We are not merely prisoners who need a substitute to take our place in a starvation cell for a few weeks; we are captives to sin, death, and the devil, under a sentence we could never pay off ourselves, no matter how much starving, suffering, or striving we offered. This is the hard truth of the Law: left to ourselves, we are the disciples arguing over honor, not the servant laying down His life. We look at the needs around us — in our families, our congregations, in the mission field, in the LWML's work across eighty-five countries — and too easily we ask, "What's in it for me?" rather than, "Whom can I serve?"
5. But where the Law shows us our captivity, the Gospel shows us Who has ransomed us, Jesus Christ, true God and true man. He did not merely step forward to take one man's place for a season. He stepped down from heaven's glory into our flesh, walked to a Roman cross, and there gave His own life — not to spare one prisoner for one lifetime, but to pay, in full, the debt of every sinner for eternity. "You were ransomed... not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ" (1 Peter 1:18–19). This is theologia crucis — the theology of the cross — God's strength hidden under weakness, His glory hidden under a crown of thorns, His victory won not by conquering but by dying. Martin Luther put the shape of this Christian life memorably in his treatise The Freedom of a Christian: "A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none... a Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all." Free, because Christ has already paid your ransom in full — nothing left for you to add. And precisely because you are that free, you are now free to serve, with nothing to prove and nothing to lose.
6. This is exactly what we see in St. Paul. In Galatians 2, Paul recounts meeting with James, Cephas (Peter), and John in Jerusalem — the pillars of the church. They recognized the grace given to him, that he had been entrusted with the Gospel to the Gentiles just as Peter had been entrusted with it to the circumcised (Galatians 2:7–8). And having agreed on this, extending to Paul and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship, they asked one thing more: "only, that we should remember the poor" — Paul writes, "the very thing I was eager to do" (Galatians 2:9–10). Notice the order. First, the Gospel — the ransom won by Christ, freely proclaimed. Then, flowing out of that same grace, a genuine eagerness to care for bodily need. Not law laid on top of Gospel, but mercy received becoming mercy given.
7. That is precisely the spirit in which we give thanks today for the Lutheran Women's Missionary League. Their mite boxes, their grants, their hands and hearts poured out in disaster response, in literacy and Braille ministries, in clean water and maternal health and missionary support across the globe — none of it is mere philanthropy. It is Paul's eagerness in Galatians 2 lived out generation after generation, always insisting that the Gospel remain the center, because a well fed body without Jesus, the Bread of Life is still a captive. The LWML does not simply help the poor; like Paul, they are eager that the poor — and the comfortable, and you, and I — hear that Christ has already paid the ransom for the forgiveness of our sins.
8. So hear this good news again, dear baptized children of God: you are not standing before your Judge on the strength of your own service. In the waters of Holy Baptism, you were united to the very death and resurrection of the One who gave His life as a ransom for many (Romans 6:3–4). You wear His righteousness, not your own. And because that ransom is finished — paid, sealed, and delivered — you are set free to stop grasping for the seats of honor and start looking, like Paul, like the LWML, like your Savior Himself, for someone to serve. Not to earn what is already yours, but because it is already yours. Christ came not to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for you. Amen. Now the peace of God that passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, until life everlasting. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment