Rev. Charles Lehmann + Trinity 18 + Matthew 22:34-46

In the Name of + Jesus.  Amen.

In the church, we are always trying to speak when we should be listening.  This is nothing new.  When the Israelites were on their way out of Egypt and faced Pharaoh’s army on one side and the Red Sea on the other, they thought they were doomed.  In their terror, they asked Moses why he had brought them out of Egypt so they could be killed in the wilderness.  Moses’ reply couldn’t have been more pointed than it was.  “The Lord Himself will fight for you.  You need only to keep silent.”

God the Father has sent Jesus to the cross to suffer in our place.  He has done all that is necessary for our salvation.  After our fall into sin, God’s action to save us was immediate and unequivocal.  He promised that the seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent.  In Christ this was accomplished once and for all.  But how is it delivered?  It is delivered with words.  Simple, plain words are the means by which God gives out the salvation that He has won for us.

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Rev. Charles Lehmann + Trinity 16 + Luke 7:11-17

In the Name of + Jesus.  Amen.

Lots of folks want to find God, and they look for him in the strangest of places.  In some churches, they look for Him in some sort of emotional experience.  They think that if church doesn’t make them feel good every week, then something is wrong.  Their version of spirituality is moving from one emotional mountaintop to another.  For those who think of God in this way, church is a happy pill that is expected to last until you come back next week for another dose.

But if you want to have an emotional experience, there are lots of ways that are far more reliable than listening to the Word of God, singing to the Holy and Blessed Trinity, and receiving His gifts of life and salvation through Word and Sacrament.  Heroin can make you feel better than a thousand church services.  Marijuana can wash all of your cares away.  Alcohol can bring an immediate sense of peace that you’ll never get from listening to one of my sermons.

But drugs and alcohol aren’t the only way to get those feel-good chemicals into your system.  Some of us find it through reading a good book, watching a certain TV show, playing a video game, or going to a movie.  Some of us feel the flood of those endorphins when we work hard at physical labor or get a good hour of exercise in.  Sometimes there’s no better feeling than eating a good meal with someone we love.

If feeling good is the essence of Christianity, then God has is merely one option among thousands.  Drugs, alcohol, exercise, work, and family can all make us feel great.  In this scenario, God simply becomes one option among many.

But not everyone tries to find God by going from one feel-good experience to another.  Some see God as a path to self-improvement.  They see the Scriptures as God’s instruction manual on how to live our day to day lives.  You can go to all sorts of seminars at churches these days.  You can learn about personal finance.  You can get principles on how to raise your kids.  You can learn ten steps to a happier marriage.  There’s nothing wrong with those things, but if we see them as what the church is for, then we are again making the mistake of forcing God to compete with all sorts of other paths to financial independence and a good family life.  Dr. Phil, Laura Schlesinger, or Dave Ramsey can do as good of a job in these areas as the church can… probably better.

God offers something in the church that is absolutely unique.  Though science works toward it, it will never achieve it.  Though the world wants us to think it can do anything, it can’t do this.  Drugs, alcohol, books, movies, TV shows, video games, hard work, exercise, Dr. Phil, Dr. Laura, and Dave Ramsey can’t do it.  No created thing can or ever will.  Only God can raise the dead.  Only God can “Young man, I say to you, arise” to a dead man and be obeyed.

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Rev. Charles Lehmann + Trinity 14 + Galatians 5:16-24

            In the Name of + Jesus.  Amen.

            Sometimes it’s just hard to pay attention to what you’re supposed to be listening to.  Your thoughts wander.  You start thinking about what you’re having for lunch.  You debate in your mind what you’re going to grill for the Labor Day barbeque.  You might start feeling the weight of your own head.  It might start bobbing back and forth.  In a few moments you might feel a sharp poke in the ribs when the person sitting next to you throws an elbow your way.  Some of you probably had that experience when you were listening to the epistle reading.  Some of you are probably having that experience right now.

            When it comes to the epistle, I can certainly relate.  Who wouldn’t have trouble paying attention to it?  It’s just a list of sins, and fifteen sins are listed without even a pause, it’s hard to be attentive to them.  One blends in quite easily with the next.  Our minds tend to focus on what we consider the “big ones.”  Sexual immorality, sorcery, drunkenness, orgies.  Those are big.  Those are serious.  These are the big headliner sins that get you on Oprah or an episode of Cops.

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Rev. Charles Lehmann + Trinity 13 + Luke 10:23-37, 3rd Article

            In the Name of + Jesus.  Amen.

            The lawyer in today’s Gospel text gets everything wrong.  First he asks a ridiculous question, “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?”  What shall you do to inherit eternal life?  Surely he must be joking.  We do not earn what we inherit.  An inheritance is not a wage paid for a job well done.  Though the children of a rich man might do all sorts of things to try to earn their father’s favor, there is no guarantee that they will receive anything when the will is read.  An inheritance is not earned.  It is a gift.  It is promised in life and delivered in death.

            As wrong-headed as the question is, Jesus is willing to play along.  He asks the lawyer about the commandments, and after he summarizes them, Jesus says, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”  Our Lord isn’t kidding.  If we want to earn our salvation, there is only one way to do it.  Keep the commandments.  Do it perfectly.  Do that, and you will live.

            But we can’t do it.  We can’t keep them perfectly.  Apart from the faith that the Holy Spirit gives, we can’t keep them at all.  But the lawyer still doesn’t get it.  He’s trying to find a way to keep the commandment manageable so that he can convince himself that he has a chance at accomplishing it.  He asks, “Who is my neighbor?”

            This is where Jesus stops playing the game.  He turns the entire question on its head.  He tells a story about a man who is robbed and left half dead in a ditch.  Without help, the man is doomed.  He’ll bleed to death and die destitute.  A priest and a Levite pass by and ignore the man in need.  But the Samaritan stops, uses oil and wine to bind up the man’s wounds, and takes him to an inn.  He gives the innkeeper two days’ wages, asks him to care for the man, and promises to pay the rest of the bill when he comes back.

            At this point in the story we and the lawyer are thinking the same thing.  The man in the ditch is the neighbor and we are to take care of anyone whom we find in need.  That’s just what Jesus wants us to think at that point in the story.  But the question our Lord asks at the end changes everything.

            Jesus asks, “Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the one who fell among thieves?”  The man in the ditch isn’t the neighbor.  He’s not even given to us as one of the options.  The neighbor is the one who cares for the man in the ditch.

            If we think about Jesus’ question and its answer, we also learn what the answer is to the lawyer’s question.  Jesus is the lawyer’s neighbor, and the lawyer is the one in the ditch.  The lawyer is the one who has been set upon by thieves and left in the ditch to die.  The lawyer is the one who will surely die unless he is saved.  The lawyer is in exactly the same situation that all of us would be in without Jesus: half-dead and headed for eternal death.

            The point of the story of the good Samaritan is not so that you will be guilted into helping those in need.  It’s not that helping those in need isn’t a good thing.  It is.  It’s a wonderful thing.  It’s a thing that we are commanded to do throughout the Scriptures.  It’s just not what we are commanded to do in the parable of the good Samaritan.

            The point of this story is to show how desperate your situation is.  The point of this story is to demonstrate just horribly sin has hurt you.  You cannot save yourself.  You cannot bind up your own wounds.  You cannot pull yourself up by your bootstraps and turn your life around.  You can’t follow biblical principles and start living your best life now.  You need a Savior. You need Jesus.  You need all that He has won for you on the cross.

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It is absolutely impossible to overstate the role of a father in the spiritual life of his family.  Paul tells us in Ephesians 5 that marriage is a picture of Christ’s relationship to the church.  In the church we gather together to hear the words of Christ so that we can be strengthened and nourished by them.  At home, it is the father to whom God has given the responsibility of giving spiritual care and nourishment to his household.

There are, of course, times in our sinful world that the spiritual upbringing of a child cannot take place at home in the way the Lord intends it.  Some families do not have Christian fathers.  Some families do not have fathers at all.  In these situations, it is given to the mother to fulfill the role that the father would normally have.  Such faithful women should always be supported and encouraged by the church.

But it is not only when there is no Christian father that the mother should take a role in the spiritual lives of her children.  Though the spiritual care of the family is ultimately the father’s responsibility, he doesn’t have to do it alone nor should he need to.  A Christian mother has many important things to offer her children.  Working with her husband, a Christian mother can and should play an important role in bringing her children up in the Christian faith.  The Scriptures put it quite simply and directly, “a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised” (Proverbs 30:31).

No pastor, no matter how faithful he is, can fulfill the role of a Christian father for the members of his congregation, and more to the point:  he shouldn’t even try.  It is not the pastor’s responsibility to raise the children of the congregation in the Christian faith.  It is also not the congregation’s responsibility to raise its children in the Christian faith.  This responsibility belongs to the children’s parents and no one else.

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