Our Savior Lynchburg
Trinity 6 AD 2024
"In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." What Jesus describes here in our gospel is the most beautiful, the most praiseworthy, the most good. The very order that God has built into the world, so we desire to love God, to order our days in His peace, to structure our lives according to His Word. Many outside the Church chafe at this order, they don't like the notion of a God who would impose His order on the world and upon their lives. They want the freedom to live as they wish, to exercise their passions in whatever way they find fulfilling, and they eagerly follow that wide way that leads to their eternal destruction. But it is not so with you. You are not given license to hate God's law or to despise His Word, nor has He authorized you to be embarrassed by what He commands. You don't have permission to choose and decide what parts you will like. Being ashamed of some of God's Word often rapidly leads to denying all of it. God defines Himself. You cannot tell God how to be God or what He should really say or how He could say it better. So we stick tightly to the Word. Maybe that will get you called a fundamentalist or a legalist. But if you are to have true life, it must be life by and according to God's Word. The law of God is good and wise, as we sang earlier, but oftentimes you'd rather go without that law. You don't want to feel its stinging accusation or to let it cut too deep. You only want its effects to be known superficially, so that you can appear to have its righteousness without having to make any painful changes. You want at least a little more freedom than what the law gives. You misuse the law by applying it to your neighbor while using it to excuse your own misdeeds, like we heard a couple weeks ago when we heard about logs and SPACs. Maybe you choose to become the administrator of the law yourself, calling your weaponization of the law holy and loving, but when you go your own way, when you ignore what God has commanded, it often becomes quite evident how much you need God's law. Living against the order that God has put into the world doesn't go well. You need his law to curb your gross outbursts of sin and those of society. You need his law that shows you your sin. You need his law to direct you when you desire to do what is good. The first and primary use of the law is that it accuses you. It shows that you have not merited your Lord's favor. And even as one who is redeemed by Christ, the crucified and baptized into his name, you still sin. You oppose the second commandment. You despise God's word and break his commandments. Instead of looking at those God has placed near you with God's pure love, you're happy to receive God's love for yourself and then use his love to love yourself above all else. But a love of self above all else is not truly a fruit of God's love. The love of self above all else is a disordered love. That person is unable to rightly receive God's love. This so-called self-love is merely an excuse to indulge your passions and you sometimes indulge them even eagerly. Even fully aware that they will lead to your own temporal and eternal destruction. Left to yourself, you will stray from this word of God and you will drive the Holy Spirit out of your hearts. So Jesus brings out the mirror of God's law. It has gotten rather dusty sitting in the back closets of the Pharisees' houses. When he cleans off this mirror and polishes it as bright as it has ever been, and then he sets that law right in front of you, directing you to behold what you have become. Look into that mirror and you will see the shame and guilt of your sin. The ugly ways you have despised God harmed your neighbor and hurt yourself. You will see the wounds that you have brought on yourself by your sin and the injuries you have sustained from others' sins against you. It's not a pretty sight. Especially in the mirror of Jesus preaching today, you see your sin of anger. The Lord's commandment regarding anger is not only broken or capped in the hands, but also in the mouth. Not only by outward action or inaction, but inwardly, in your heart, by your emotions, in your mind, by your thoughts. Jesus speaks this as the only one who is never untostly angry. His hands and mouth are clean. His every thought and emotion is pure. He is also the author of the law. So he alone is authorized to establish its true interpretation. You have gotten angry. You have seen anger at work in yourself and others. Angry thoughts enter the mind. Bitterness rises in the heart. And even as you try to hide your anger, even as you try to hide that anger, the sin has been committed. The commandment has been broken. And even if it's only in your heart, your brother has been murdered. This is not to say that every instance of anger is sinful. Now, God authorizes anger in one's office for the sake of justice. Jesus was authorized to be angry at those who turned his house of prayer into a den of robbers. Parents are authorized to be angry when their children sinned to discipline evil conduct. And when Moses came down from Mount Sinai, carrying those ten commandments he had just received from God, he was authorized to be angry at the Israelites for worshiping that golden calf. When it comes to our use of anger, and as we see even there with Moses, we do not use our anger properly. And this is what Jesus is speaking against, the misuse of our anger. But one of the ways that anger is misused is when it's retained in the conscience. Now that initial reason for anger might have been completely justified. But because we're sinners, that just anger quickly spoils into self-justifying anger. We like the way that anger makes us feel in control. So we hold on to it. We stay angry. And then that anger turns into resentment. So that when Jesus says, reconcile with your brother, you refuse. Because you've come to like your anger, you want to keep it. And you know that if you forgive your brother for making you angry, then the reason for your anger is now removed. Your anger is no longer justified. You either need to find a new reason to be angry, or you'll have to start living life without your anger. Sometimes you refuse to forgive the one who has caused you to become angry. Because you've lived with it for so long that you're afraid of what life might be like without it. Your anger has become a shield to protect you from your brother's sins, and you can't bear to have that protection removed. In this way, you make anger your God. It's the thing that you look to for all help and protection. You begin to believe that your anger will protect you better than the true God can. Over time, that resentment now hardens into a grudge. Maybe you end up carrying it around for a long time, maybe even decades. But can you imagine what a grudge would be like if it was a real physical weight? If your grudge was a backpack full of heavy weights that you willingly and eagerly put on, and every time you thought of your anger or the other person's sins against you, you'd just drop in a little more weight. Over time, you'd become very practiced at adding that extra weight to your pack. But over time, your back would bend out of shape, your knees would ache, and you'd find it harder and harder to stand up and walk around. You'd stumble this way and that, and eventually, like an overstuffed backpack, that pack would become so heavy and so full that you wouldn't have the strength to remove it even if you wanted to. As you carry around your anger, it tends to burst out. You can't keep it in forever. Often anger results in a loss of self-control. Maybe you snap at someone you previously thought of as a friend. Maybe you direct your anger at someone who had nothing to do with making you angry in the first place. And in this way, your fifth commandment sins spread. And you murder more neighbors in your heart by your words or with your hands. This is why you want to excuse your sin. You want to deny its severity. It's why you want to accuse even God because he has the audacity to show you that you are wrong. You're tempted to call that mirror of his law evil because you can't bear to see what it has revealed. Even more you hear this, God threatened to punish all who break these commandments. Do you see what you are before God? Before the perfect mirror of his divine law, all of this is not merely to show you what harm and misery you have wrought, but also to convince you that you cannot help yourself. You are unable to free yourself from your miserable condition. Your works will not save you. Justifying your anger will not justify you. You need the mercy of Christ Jesus. This is true for you even as a Christian, even as one of the baptized. Yes, you have faith in Christ Jesus, your Savior. He has declared you his own beloved heir. And by his cross and passion and through the means he instituted, he makes you righteous and holy, lame-less without any shame or wrinkle or spot. But in this life you still have your old Adam. And therefore as the baptized the Lord bidged that the old Adam in you should by daily contrition and repentance be drowned and die with all sins and evil desires, and that a new man should daily emerge and arise, to live before God in righteousness and purity forever. State drowned and daily dead, daily raised and daily renewed in life. Raising and renewal sound pleasant enough, but I have never found someone eager for drowning and death. So you want the raising without the dying. You want to partake of the life-giving water, but without it drowning and killing your sin and evil desires because at least part of you likes those sins and evil desires. This repentance is uncomfortable, perhaps even painful, but it is also entirely worthwhile and beneficial because it's realizing that you cannot save yourself, that Christ alone must save you. The truth is that God's word cannot be broken, God's word will break you, either it will be now by the preaching of his law that leads you to repentance in this life, or it will be when he comes again on the last day and judges the living and the dead and sends you to everlasting torment, it really is that serious, but all is not yet lost. For even as you see the effects of sin controlling your outward members, in your inner man you know and believe that God's law is good. You love what God commands, you desire what he promises. You see that the life that he has instituted for you is the good life, the true life, the beautiful life, you see that his word has judged you rightly, that his order for the world is the proper one, so you acknowledge that it is better to live at peace with your brother than to be angry with him, peace is better for your brother, peace is better for you, God has called you to be at peace with your brother. He knows that a heart filled with self justifying anger won't heal itself, he knows that you need his healing, so even though God had every right to destroy you and his anger, in his righteous anger because of your sin, instead Jesus died for you, he bore the burden and the pain of your sin, he paid its cost, so the punishment for your sins does not fall on you by your baptism into Christ Jesus, you are given his righteousness, all your sin and anger are washed away, so this gift now becomes the motivation to begin to live as God's law describes, to begin to love your neighbor without malice or self righteousness, Christ Jesus, you are free from slavery to sin, you receive his word by faith, his promise and his gift are yours, the Lord bears no grudge against you, now some hear this call then to live this new life, and they believe that God's law is now dismissed, they think that being free from the accusations of the law means you are also free from the order of the law, but that makes no sense, are we to say that God's forgiveness of your anger and sinful thoughts now makes you free to be angry and sinful, into murder your brother, or does his forgiveness of your anger now lead you to desire to love your neighbor, to begin to carry it out, yes your keeping of the law and this life will be imperfect, but that doesn't mean you don't strive to keep it, you will not fully and perfectly live according to God's order in this life, but that does not mean you despise it, Jesus has not come to abolish but to fulfill, just so the forgiveness of your sins does not lead you to now be lawless into freely hate and despise your neighbor, nor are you embarrassed by what God describes as good and proper, so if the offering plate is being passed, or you are preparing to go to the altar of God, then remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go, first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift, first be reconciled to Jesus, come to peaceful terms with your accuser, sometimes peace is pretty hard to find, if you have lived in this world for more than a few minutes you know the pain of being sinned against, perhaps you have been sinned against in a very profound way, the wounds caught deep, sometimes it seems like those wounds are just too deep, so you want to hold on to your anger, to harbor resentment, to nurse your grudge, but as we said holding on to anger makes it a tool of self-justification, a way that you reject Christ's justification for you, rejection of God's judgment upon Christ in your place, so if you do not believe in God's judgment upon Christ in your stead, then the judgment of God will be laid upon you, and as a pastor I've dealt with people who have gotten angry with each other, I've lived in this world and I know that reconciliation is not easy, but even more than what your pastor knows, the Lord Jesus knows, he knows how difficult reconciliation is, because reconciliation with you cost him his life, his life was the hardest reconciliation of all, it cost him agony and bloody sweat, it cost him immense suffering and anguish, it cost him being abandoned by his father and dying alone, but in this all your anger against him is paid for, all your sins of anger against your brother have been covered with Christ blood and all those sins committed against you too, every resentment and grudge, every bit of unjust anger, they are all forgiven in Jesus, this is how your brother has been reconciled to you, now this bloody forgiveness and the act of divine reconciliation is handed over to you in the cup of this altar, the father has given you his only son to reconcile you to him, so in the same way you are to be reconciled one to another, as he pours out his forgiveness and reconciliation into you, it overflows to your brothers, it takes away your self justifying anger and replaces it with the true righteousness and the love of Jesus, so that armed with these you have plenty of forgiveness for your brother, and though you can never perfectly fulfill the fifth commandment or any of them as long as you live in this world, but do not let the Lord's divine judgment of you be proclaimed in vain, don't wait for your brother to come grovelling to you, go to him, extend the hand of reconciliation, give him the word and promise that you have received from the altar, I know that it is hard, so does Jesus, because maybe you will extend your hand and it will be ignored, maybe your phone call won't get returned, maybe your letter or email will go unanswered, maybe that brother will respond and declare that he never wants to see you again or speak to you again, and though you offer forgiveness, the other person will have none of it, when that happens anger and bitterness often come roaring back, sinful emotions flood your heart, evil thoughts overwhelm your mind, what do you do then? Well first here again what Jesus has done for you, how he has removed your sin from you and he does not hold your sin against you, and second pray, ask God for faith to believe what Jesus has done for you, pray for the Lord to remove the anger from your heart, pray that God would not take his Holy Spirit away from you, for he will hear these prayers, and he will grant you his Holy Spirit, and so as a temple of God's Holy Spirit he inspires you and motivates you to love what God has commanded, to fight against sin, to begin to do God's will, as a Christian you cooperate with him, you love God the Father as dear children, love their dear Father, and so you desire to please him and to not dishonor the family name, in this way you also love and honor your fellow Christians, you also love all that God says, both his commands and his promises, and you hold them up together as good gifts from your Father in heaven, you see the good in what God commands, how life is better when lived according to God's order, yes it is painful when reconciliation is refused, but God knows that pain too, he knows what it is to have his gracious word rejected, so pray also that God would soften your brother's heart to receive the word of forgiveness, you never know what other opportunities for reconciliation the Lord may give to you, right now today come and receive your Lord's reconciliation in the holy name of Jesus, the peace of God keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.