Listen to the sermon with the player below, or, download the audio.
+ + + 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.
We need look no further than the presidential debate or fund-raising stages to find current examples of the kind of thinking that our Lord Jesus associates with the Pharisee in the Temple in the parable of today’s Gospel Reading. The two major‑party candidates certainly trust in themselves—at least that they are worthy candidates, if not also that in themselves they are righteous—and each major-party candidate certainly treats others—at least the other major-party candidate—with contempt. In all likelihood one or the other of the two candidates come January will be president of the country, but, if they so exalt themselves before God as they do before the voters, neither candidate ever will go home justified or receive the Kingdom of God. As the Holy Spirit leads us to realize in considering today’s Gospel Reading, faith in God expressed in contempt for self is necessary to go home justified and to receive the Kingdom.
Last week’s Gospel Reading (Luke 18:1-8), with its parable about always praying and not losing heart, ended with Jesus’s asking the question, “When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on earth?” In a sense, today’s Gospel Reading provides an immediate answer: Yes, He will find faith on earth, and He will find faith in the most unlikely places: in tax collectors and infants (Just, ad loc Lk 18:15-17, 687). Unique to St. Luke’s Divinely‑inspired Gospel account, today’s Parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector uses the examples of the best and the worst, as the people of Jesus’s day would have granted, to contrast trust in one’s own righteousness and the resulting contempt for others with faith in God and contempt for one’s self, which result in being justified and receiving the Kingdom.
We need look no further than the presidential debate or fund-raising stages to find current examples of the kind of thinking our Lord Jesus associates with the Pharisee in today’s Gospel Reading, but we dare not look only to the presidential debate or fund‑raising stages, for, even as we do so, in a sense we ourselves become examples of such thinking. We may not trust in ourselves that we are righteous before God, but we may well hypocritically think ourselves to be more‑righteous than others and so treat others with contempt. In today’s Gospel Reading, not only did the Pharisee think himself to be more‑righteous than the tax collector, but also the disciples treated those bringing infants to Jesus. and so also the infants themselves, with contempt. In today’s Old Testament Reading (Genesis 4:1-15), Cain ignores his own sin and despises his brother Abel (confer Luther, AE 75:378), a sinner righteous by faith evident by his more‑acceptable sacrifice (Hebrews 11:4). We may treat with contempt our pastor or our congregational officers and board and committee members. Other people may even wrongly agree with our despising those people or others, but before God we all are equally despicable. Our own unrighteousness, including our contempt for others, is the result of original sin (confer Luther, AE 67:214), for which original sin alone (not to mention all the actual sins we commit), apart from faith in Jesus Christ, we deserve both death here in time and torment in hell for eternity.
Yet, in today’s Gospel Reading, Jesus says that, as the tax collector did before God, the one who humbles himself will be exalted. Likewise, the apostle James writes by Divine‑inspiration, “Humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will exalt you” (James 4:10). Thus, we sang in today’s Psalm (5) that the boastful will not stand before the Lord’s eyes but that we bow down in His holy place in fear of Him. Called and enabled by the Holy Spirit, we turn in sorrow from our sin, trust God to forgive our sin, and want to do better than to keep on sinning. When we so repent, then God forgives our sin: all our sin, whatever our sin may be, for Jesus’s sake.
The perfect God-man Jesus truly was better than all other people. Jesus fasted 40 days in the wilderness, often lifted His eyes to heaven, gave not just a tithe of but all He had, was beaten, and, though He had no sin of His own, became sin for us, that in Him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21). In the Gospel Reading, the tax collector prayed that God would, the English Standard Version read said, “be merciful” to him, but a better translation may be “be propitiated” towards him. We who repent of our sin likewise pray the Father to have mercy on us and be gracious to us on account of Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross, which sacrifice satisfied the Father’s holy wrath towards us on account of our sin. The Father answers the prayers of those who so repent and believe. By faith like Abel’s, we are justified, that is declared and made righteous, or graciously forgiven of our sin, our sin of contempt for others or whatever our sin might be, through faith in Jesus Christ. Through faith in Jesus Christ, which is itself a gift, we, like the tax collector in today’s Gospel Reading are justified and receive the Kingdom.
The tax collector in today’s Gospel Reading, like Peter and John and other Christians later, went up into the Temple Courts to pray (Acts 3:1). Of course, those Temple Courts were destroyed in the year 70 A-D, and Jewish and Christian prayers on the site of the Temple have long since been forbidden, even before a United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s action this week continuing more‑recent efforts to deny Jewish and Christian connections to what became and presently is a Muslim site. Yet, we do not need to go to the destroyed Temple Courts or to their site to be justified and receive the Kingdom, for God today offers and gives His gifts here, in this place, through His Word and Sacraments. Infants being baptized are perhaps the best examples of our humbly receiving the Kingdom of God, and today’s Gospel Reading makes clear that they can believe, for they have the benefit of faith. None of us, young or old, are able to decide, but, whether we are young or old, God at the Baptismal Font gives birth to us of water and the Spirit, so that we are able to enter the Kingdom of God (John 3:5).
The Pharisee in today’s Gospel Reading said that he was thanking God but really admired, congratulated, and praised himself for what he did. In telling of that self-thanking, St. Luke used a Greek word that gives our English word “Eucharist”, and it is in the Eucharist, the Sacrament of the Altar, that we rightly thank God for what He has done and is doing for us in Jesus Christ. Here, Jesus’s Body and blood are present in bread and wine, distributed, and received, thereby giving forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. Fasting before receiving the Lord’s Supper is fine outward training, but the truly worthy and well‑prepared are those who have faith in Jesus’s words “Given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins”. Unlike the Pharisees whom St. Luke reports elsewhere rejected Baptism and table fellowship with Jesus and other sinners (Luke 7:29-30; 15:1-2), in the Divine Service we receive God’s gifts in the ways He has given for us to receive them, set in the context of the historic liturgy and hymns, whether or not we might like the particular hymn tunes that are sung on any given Sunday.
Whether or not we humble ourselves and so will be exalted is reflected in our approach to God in the Divine Service, whether we trust in ourselves or have faith in Him, whether we are conscious of our sin and desire His grace, not for our own merit but for Jesus’s sake. Good works will follow such faith in God. We confess our sin, as the tax collector in the Gospel Reading did, and we may give tithes (or more!) of all that we receive from God. We thank God and our pastors for their faithful proclamation of the Gospel and administration of the Sacraments, and we thank God and those who are willing to serve as congregational officers and board and committee members for their service. When we have concerns about their work, as appropriate, we do not gossip to others but talk privately with them or others responsible for their oversight, and then, with daily repentance and faith, we all live together in God’s forgiveness of sins, forgiving one another for all the times we fail each other. In such ways, God reigns in us, as we, like St. Paul in today’s Epistle Reading (2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18), await our final and full entrance into God’s Kingdom.
Two major‑party presidential candidates went up on the debate and fund‑raising stages, and one will come down as president. In the Gospel Reading, two men went up into the Temple to pray, and one came down justified and receiving the Kingdom. We—who, enabled by God, humble ourselves—are by Him exalted: we, too, are “Justified and Receiving the Kingdom”. As we did in the Hymn of the Day (Lutheran Service Book 745:4-5), so we pray again now:
O Jesus Christ, my Lord, / So meek in deed and word,
You suffered death to save us / Because Your love would have us
Be heirs of heav’nly gladness / When ends this life of sadness.
“So be it,” then, I say / With all my heart each day.
Dear Lord we all adore You, / We sing for joy before You.
Guide us while here we wander / Until we praise You yonder.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +