February 9, 2011 - Wednesday of Epiphany 5 - Genesis 18:20-33

We need to learn to pray like Abraham! The Lord planned on wiping Sodom and Gomorrah off the map and so Abraham pleads for his nephew Lot who lives there. Will you destroy the city if there are 50 righteous? No, it will be spared. Destroy it if there's 45? Nope. 30? No. 20? Nope. Just ten? Still no. It's like Abraham is bargaining at a car lot or something! But look at what's going on! Abraham in faith trusts that the Lord won't destroy the righteous with the wicked. So even if it means letting the whole evil city survive for the sake of Lot and his family, Abraham asks that. We need to learn to pray like Abraham! For one thing, we're so quick to pray and ask for something from the Lord and then give up when it doesn't seem our prayer is answered! See how Abraham presses God and why? He tells Him: You are the righteous Judge. You can't kill the righteous with the wicked. So we need to grab hold of God's promises in Christ and drum them in His ears with no fear, beseeching Him, pleading with Him, interceding for others based on what He has done for us in His Son.

Now here's the thing. God DOES destroy the righteous with the wicked. But He doesn't do it at Sodom. He does it on Calvary. Who is more righteous than the Son of God? Who is more innocent and holy than Jesus? And yet, who is more evil and wicked than that Lamb who is covered in our sins? When The Son of God dies for us on the cross, there is the judgment of God on the righteous and the wicked together. Christ is perfect and holy and yet He's covered with our sins and is guilty of them there. That is our salvation. That God does not deal with us WE deserve but deals with Christ as we deserve. When the Lord came to Sodom, He rescued Lot from that evil city. But when His Son comes to earth, the Lord allows His Son to be taken by wicked men and tortured and killed for the sake of the whole world. Always the Lord constantly rescues His people but when it came to the rescue of His own Son, He gave Him up into death as our sacrifice.

But Jesus rose from the dead. His righteousness overcame our sin and death and the grave were left behind on Easter. Now the Bible tells us that Jesus is at the right hand of the Father always INTERCEDING for us. What is interceding? It means doing what Abraham did: praying for the Lord to spare the wicked for the sake of the righteous. Jesus is righteous and has accomplished our salvation so He prays to the Father: “For my sake, spare them, Father and forgive their sins.” Think about it. We do all kinds of things every day that ought to rouse God's anger and have Him throw us into eternal judgment. But you are baptized. You are righteous with the righteousness of Jesus. When we sin, if the Father were ever to say, “I'm going to wipe that one out,” the Son intercedes, “No, Father. For my sake. Because I paid that price. Because I am righteous and have taken their sins away. You can't.” Jesus speaks to the Father even more boldly than Abraham for standing behind His prayers is all He did as the Father commanded to save us from our sins! Know this: because Jesus goes to bat for you, the Father will never destroy you along with the wicked. Your sins are taken care of and they can't cause God's judgment and punishment against you ever. As long as Jesus intercedes for us before the Father, our sins can never cause our doom.

There's something in there for us to learn too then for our neighbor's sake. Just as Jesus told His disciples not to go pulling up the weeds and so damage the wheat, and just as Abraham prayed even for wicked Sodom for Lot's sake, so we can learn to pray the Lord to spare those who are evil around us for the sake of His holy ones. Every day the Lord puts up with us for the sake of His Son even though we thoughtlessly sin against Him and others. So we ought to learn to pray for those who sin against us and trouble us. When we see the people around us sinning our first reaction ought to be Abraham's: Spare them, Lord, for the sake of the righteous. Since your Son has died for them too, don't hold their sins against them. Rather rescue them from their sins too and bring or keep them safely in your holy church. It is tempting to be offended at others and pray that they will just go away or leave us alone. It is much harder but more godly to throw the Lord's promises in His ear to have mercy upon them for Jesus' sake just as He has had mercy on us!

So what happened to Sodom? Well, I don't think there WERE ten righteous people there, ten people who trusted in God's promises. But the Lord was faithful. He led Lot and his family away from Sodom before He blasted it into ashes, never to be seen again. It's a reminder there WILL come a day when the Lord condemns and punishes those who oppose Him, who love wickedness more than righteousness and who persecute His holy church. Jesus says that day will come when the holy angels will gather up the weeds and burn them. But until that day, we live in the mercy of Jesus and we pray for the wicked as Abraham did, for the sake of the righteous. Always remember that your Lord stands before the Father, ever pleading for you, ever protecting you from judgment and wrath. And by His Word and gifts He will continue to keep you in the faith and remind you that He pleads for you and that for His sake the Father is always pleased with you. In the Name of Jesus. Amen.

February 6, 2011 - The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany - St. Matthew 13:24-43

There's an old saying that goes “Whenever the Lord builds a church, the devil builds a chapel next door.” That means that wherever God's Word is preached, the devil will be right there with a false word. Jesus tells us this in the parable of the wheat and the weeds. Christ has planted His people all over the world through His Word and the devil is right there to plant false believers, his evil children. Just look around. Look at all the religions out there. Surrounding the Christian church are Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists and pagans and atheists (almost like their own religion!) and so many more, many of whom actively persecute and attack Christ's church. But then if you look at Christianity, you see so many denomiations: Lutherans and Roman Catholics and Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Pentecsostals, Non-denominationals and on and on. And you could pick any one of those groups and see that they are further subdivided. Just think of all the churches claiming the name Lutheran: the ELCA, LCMS, ELS, WELS, and tons more. The world is full of religions and denominations all clamoring for attention, most thinking they're right and others are wrong. It's a huge mess that could easily lead one to throw up their hands in despair and say, “Why bother!” And that's exactly what the devil wants you to do. He wants you to see all these different churches and religions and figure they're probably just all the same and it's not worth worrying about.

But if that were true, Jesus wouldn't have told us this parable! Just think. Farmers are always looking for the next best fertilizer that will help the crops grow while cutting down the number of weeds that grow up. Weeds are bad. They mess up the crops. They can ruin the harvest. So they try to prevent them. But here comes the devil sowing weeds to ruin the Lord's kingdom if He can. But He can't. Jesus tells us this parable to rescue us from despair. He wants us to be aware that where His Word is preached, it will be surrounded by false teachers and false religions and false believers, the children of the devil. The true sons of the kingdom, Christians, are sown by the Lord Himself who has shed His blood for sinners. Jesus knows that left to ourselves we'd just be confused and give it all up. So He comes to save us from our sins and make us His own people. You were sown in His field, made a part of His church when you were baptized. There you were planted as a son of Christ's kingdom and made His own. Now the Lord teaches us this parable to rescue us form the devil's lies and the danger of the weeds around us that want us to trust in something other than Jesus Christ.

St. Paul says to the Corinthians who had all kinds of divisions and splits in their church, that there MUST be divisions so that we can tell right from wrong, those who have God's Word and those who don't. So how do you identify the Christian church? How do you tell which is the wheat and what are the weeds? Simply apply this test: Jesus sent His apostles out to preach repentance and forgiveness of sins in His name. Is the preaching of a church about Christ dying and rising for sinners? Or is it focused on something else. Does the teaching of the church point us to Christ or to ourselves. Are Christ's gifts of Baptism, Absolution and Holy Communion the big deal or is it something else? Is God's Word of Law and Gospel properly distinguished and proclaimed? Or is the Bible made into whatever people want it to be? The center of the Christian faith is Christ crucified for sinners and sinners justified through faith in Jesus Christ. If He is not the center, if His gifts aren't faithfully given, then whatever is going on is the devil's work. It is the enemy sowing bad weeds.

Jesus tells us this parable so we don't get all worked up over these devil weeds all around us, so that we don't look at our little church and despair that we're surrounded by false teaching in the world. But He also tells us the parable so that we don't become some kinds of zealots trying to go and purge the world of what is false. “Master, do you want us to go and pull up the weeds?” “No! You'll pull up the wheat too. Let the angels sort it out on the last day.” Muslims do this. They think they have to physically destroy those who will not convert. The church of Jesus has no such command. Rather we are to bear patiently with confessing the faith in this world and life until the Lord takes care of it on the Last Day. On the other hand, we are not to ignore that there WILL be a Last Day. The world loves to skip along, saying that all religions are the same, all faiths lead to the same place. We confess, from Jesus' own teaching, that on the Last Day, those who denied Him and taught their false religions and denied His Word will be taken away and removed from being around God's holy flock. So on the one hand, don't think it's your job to take down the enemy weeds. On the other hand, don't deny that there will come a day when those enemies will be taken care of.

So how then do we live? How SHOULD we react to these weeds all around us, to false teaching and all these denominations and religions. We should pray like Abraham. He knew His nephew Lot would be doomed if the Lord destroyed Sodom so He prayed the Lord to spare that wicked city even if He only found a few righteous living in it. Rather than rejoice in the destruction that the Lord was going to bring on Sodom, Abraham kept praying that the Lord wouldn't do it for even a few righteous people. We can look around the world and hope that the Lord will destroy those places where wicked and false religions run rampant but then what would happen to our brothers and sisters in Christ? We should pray for those places that the Lord would preserve His church and keep it from being torn apart, either by the enemy or by over zealous Christians. In short, as Christians, the Lord would have us praying for this world, putting up with those around us who hate us, and having our trust and hope in the Lord to make all things right when He comes again, and to preserve us in the true and pure faith until that Day. That's also what His parable is teaching us: to trust not in our own ability to get rid of evil but that He will do it while granting us grace to distinguish the false from the true.

Christ died and rose for sinners and sent His preachers into the world to deliver that Good News. Wherever that Good News is preached you can be sure the devil will be running alongside to try to establish some teaching that takes people away from Christ and His salvation. Jesus tells us this parable of the weeds and the wheat to protect us from the despair the devil would try to bring by confusing everything and ruining what Christ has done. He teaches us so that we might identify His true church and Word which rescue us from the devil. He teaches us so that we long for the Last Day when He removes all things which are against us and establishes His kingdom of righteousness and peace forever. You, dear Christians, are the sons of the kingdom. And when our Lord comes again, He promises to take away all of your enemies and you will shine like the sun in the kingdom of your Father forever. In the Name of Jesus. Amen.