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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Two prominent United States politicians yesterday told the Human Rights Campaign, an influential gay-rights group, that they would continue to advance lesbian, gay, bisexual, and, especially, transgendered rights, what one called “the civil rights issue of our time”. This morning we heard Jesus, citing the Old Testament say, “from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female’ (Genesis 1:27). Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh’ (Genesis 2:24). So they are no longer two but one flesh.’” What could be more counter‑cultural than that? How different God’s intentions are from how we in society live them out (Weedon, 25). Jesus denies a human right to sexual freedom (Hauck, TDNT 4:733-734), and “attempts to alter or get around God’s good intentions bring condemnation, not greater liberty” (TLSB, 1678). Not only is Jesus’s teaching about human sexuality that shows us our sin counter-cultural, but so also is His teaching about our entering the Kingdom of God counter‑cultural. Thus, as we this morning reflect on today’s Gospel Reading, our theme is “Countercultural Law and Gospel”.
To be sure, the law Jesus taught was countercultural already then. Last week’s Gospel Reading ended with Jesus telling His followers to be at peace with one another (Mark 9:50). Almost immediately following is today’s Gospel Reading that begins with a question about divorce, arguably the lack of peace in the most‑intimate of relationships. Jesus had moved on to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan (Mark 10:1), into the territory of Herod Antipas, who beheaded John the Baptizer essentially for saying that it was not lawful for Herod to have divorced his first wife and married his brother’s ex-wife (Mark 6:14-29). There, in that territory, as we heard in today’s Gospel Reading, Pharisees came up to Jesus and, in order to tempt Him, asked if it was lawful for a husband to divorce his wife, largely assuming the resulting right to marry someone else afterwards. The culture of Jesus’s day, even likely that of the most conservative Jew, generally agreed that divorce was lawful for the husband, based on their reading of Deuteronomy 24 (vv.1-4), though they disagreed on the acceptable grounds for such a divorce (CSSB, 1521). Counter to that cultural understanding and boldly affirming what John the Baptizer had said at the risk of His own life, Jesus taught that God’s created human sexuality for one man and one woman to leave their individual families and be joined to one another for eternal life—for, of course, marriage preceded the first man and woman’s fall into sin that brought death. Apparently even Jesus’s disciples were shocked by His teaching, as St. Mark uniquely tells us about their asking Jesus about this matter in a house, but Jesus did not back down from His teaching: explaining further that no divorce declaration can release a husband or a wife from the one‑flesh union God creates or from its resulting moral obligations not to adulterate that one‑flesh union by his or her attempting to “marry” another person.
The law Jesus taught was not only counter‑cultural then, but it is also counter‑cultural now, even if we hear about these matters seemingly only once in our three‑year series of Gospel Readings (if the Gospel Reading is not given up for LWML Sunday!). Jesus says that since the beginning of creation God has made and still makes some people male and other people female; God does not make people across the two genders, although sin’s corruption may put them there. Jesus says that people shall leave their families and be joined to a single spouse of the opposite sex, not multiple partners of the same sex or both sexes. After God creates the first one‑flesh union, even if the spouses have to legally separate for any number of valid reasons, Jesus says that any subsequent attempt to “marry” is committing adultery—the old “certificate of divorce” perhaps was as valid for a second marriage in God’s eyes as a modern “marriage license” for same‑sex couples. God certainly recognized the need to protect women’s rights among those who were outside of His Kingdom, on account of their hard‑heartedness that shatters His good creation (Stauffer, TDNT 1:649-650).
By nature, that is where all of us are: outside of God’s Kingdom on account of our hard‑heartedness. Even those of us whom the Holy Spirit has at one time led to repentance and faith nevertheless still sin in matters of human sexuality (crude jokes, sexual release outside of marriage, internet or other pornography), as we nevertheless still sin in other matters, too. And, we run the risk that sin such as living in adultery or any other willful or unrepented sin can drive the Holy Spirit from us and leave us in need of being reconverted to the faith. How different from God we fallen people are: full of evil and deserving of death (Jeremias, TDNT 1:364)! As we heard in today’s Epistle Reading (Hebrews 2:1-13), God’s law is reliable, and every transgression or disobedience receives a just retribution. Yet, God in His mercy and grace calls and enables us to repent of our sin and to trust Him to forgive our sin, whatever it might be, for the sake of His Son Jesus Christ. That same Epistle Reading also referred to His suffering and death so that by the grace of God He might taste death for everyone.
As Jesus’s teaching of the law was counter‑cultural then and is counter‑cultural now, so also was and is Jesus’s teaching of the Gospel counter‑cultural. The Pharisees came to Jesus with a question that, typical of Jewish legalism (Foerster, TDNT 2:561), presumes eternal life with God is earned on the basis of works. Jesus’s teaching of the Law shows just how impossible earning eternal life by works is! God’s Law is absolute, but, after that absolute Law has done its work, showing us our sin, God’s absolute Gospel does its work: freely forgiving sins for the sake of Jesus’s suffering and death on the cross for all people, including you and me. As sinful as we are—from sexual sin or any other sin—so much greater is God’s mercy and grace for us in Jesus Christ. As we heard in the Epistle Reading, Jesus was made perfect through suffering and now brings many others to glory, calling us His brothers and God’s children—children who, the Gospel Reading said, receive God’s Kingdom simply by faith as a gift (Grundmann, TDNT 2:54).
The Gospel that was counter‑cultural then and is counter‑cultural now works in ways that were then and are still today counter‑cultural. In the Gospel Reading Jesus’s disciples, who we heard last week tried to hinder an exorcist (Mark 9:38-39), at first rebuked those bringing to Jesus to touch and bless the littlest of children, even infants (Luke 18:15), perhaps thinking the children were not important (perhaps akin to today’s society’s avoiding children or disposing of them before birth [Weedon, 25]). But Jesus was then and is now righteously angry over people’s keeping children away from Him; He told His disciples to let the little children come to Him and not hinder or prevent them, for of such is the Kingdom of God; He said that whoever does not receive the Kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it; and He took the little children in His arms and, laying His hands on them, fervently blessed them—St. Mark’s description of Jesus’s blessing is the most graphic of all the Gospel accounts, and it is St. Mark’s account that we hear in the Baptismal rite (Scaer, CLD XI:139).
Then and now no one enters the Kingdom of God apart from the blessing of being born of water and the Holy Spirit working the Word in Holy Baptism (John 3:3, 5). Nothing should prevent anyone from being so baptized (Acts 8:36; confer Scaer, CLD XI:138). And, nothing should prevent anyone, who has been baptized and who repents and believes, from, in the Sacrament of the Altar, eating Jesus’s Body with bread and drinking Jesus’s Blood with wine, so that they have life in them (John 6:53). Marriage properly refers to Christ and the Church, as He the Bridegroom cleanses His Bride by the washing of water and the Word (Ephesians 5:32, 26) and blesses those who partake of His marriage feast (Revelation 19:7-9). Here He pours into us more forgiveness than we have sin; here He pours into us more life than we have death (Weedon, 27).
I enjoyed hearing from the family of our former member Paul Kuehn, who is now with the Lord, about how Paul worked to build physical houses, such as with Habitat for Humanity. Of course, God worked through Paul and Arlene to build a family like that described in today’s Introit from Psalm 127 (vv.3-5; antiphon v.1a). In one way or another, God places all of us in families (Psalm 68:6). And, regardless of our ages, we remain children and students of the Catechism (Large Catechism, longer Preface, paragraphs 7-8, cited by TLSB, 1678), as we heard in the Epistle Reading, paying closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it. We risk any consequence in our time proclaiming God’s truth that married people are forbidden to be divorced and “remarried” (confer Large Catechism I:306). We recognize that Christians should not be joined in marriage to someone of another religion (2 Corinthians 6:14) and that divorce with or without “remarriage” can create problems for children, the “incarnations” of marriage’s one‑flesh union, coming to Jesus as Godly offspring (Malachi 2:15; confer Weedon, 26, 27).
As we this morning have reflected on today’s Gospel Reading, we have realized that Jesus gives us “Countercultural Law and Gospel”: Law that condemns not only sins related to human sexuality but all sins, and Gospel that, by grace through faith, forgives all sins for the sake of Jesus Christ, Who suffered that He might bring us to glory. That Law and Gospel may be counter to the culture outside the Church, but it should not be counter to the culture inside the Church. Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod parents and workers Dorothy and Ralph Schultz understood that concept of the Church’s culture; for their daughter Debra’s wedding to Kevin Cook in July of 1978 (Precht, #376, 395, 761-762) they wrote the words and music the hymn that closes today’s Divine Service (Lutheran Service Book 706). I close this sermon with the words of its final stanza, paraphrasing First Corinthians 13 and emphasizing the love God has for us in Christ that enables human sexuality to be as He intends:
“Love in Christ abides forever, / Fainting not when ills attend;
Love, forgiving and forgiven, / Shall endure until life’s end.”
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +