The Tenth Sunday after Trinity - August 28, 2011

The Church Season of Trinity
The Tenth Sunday after Trinity, One Year Series
Our Savior Lutheran Church, Midland, MI (August 28, 2011)

Readings:   
    Psalm 92
    Jeremiah 7:1-11
    1 Corinthians 12:1-11

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Grace, mercy and peace be to you from the Father
and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen

The text for today is as recorded in the New Testament Lesson from 19th chapter of St. Luke, especially the following verse:

Luke 19:41-48 (NIV)

41 As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it 42 and said, “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes. 43 The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. 44 They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.” 45 Then he entered the temple area and began driving out those who were selling. 46 “It is written,” he said to them, “ ‘My house will be a house of prayer’; but you have made it ‘a den of robbers.’” 47 Every day he was teaching at the temple. But the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the leaders among the people were trying to kill him. 48 Yet they could not find any way to do it, because all the people hung on his words.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit

Christ our Lord could see the destruction coming.  His heart was not unfeeling.  As He had lamented in sorrow when He brought the cataclysm upon Noah's world, so He wept over Jerusalem.  As the holy prophet Jeremiah had wept over Jerusalem, so the holiest prophet of all, Jesus Christ, shed tears at the oncoming bloodshed.

Christ shows us that He deeply regrets the sins of men and their punishment.  He takes no pleasure in the death of the godless, but that the godless convert from their evil ways and live.  He finds no joy in the damnation of those who reject His Word.  He would much rather give life and salvation. Here we see Christ's tears rebuke those who think that God desires the death of some, or that He keeps them from being saved.  Our Lord is not such a God who delights in the death of anyone.  He is not hardened and cold against the sins and impenitence of unbelievers.

On the contrary, He desires that we take warning from His tears, so that we might also repent.  He wants us to follow the example of the Ninevites who repented and were rescued from downfall and ruin. But so many of the Jews rejected God's will for them and resisted the Holy Spirit.  In the same way, so many people today have contradicted and blasphemed God's Word.  So many have rejected the Word, making themselves unworthy of it.  Therefore, as both temporal and eternal punishment fell on the Jews, so it will fall upon any of us who treat this Word with disdain.

For Christ was not only lamenting the physical, earthly misfortune of the Jews that would happen when the city was destroyed.  Much more, He saw the eternal punishment that would fall upon them.  In spite of His preaching and teaching, those who would not repent would have to face the visitation of His wrath.  For when Christ comes to men, He visits them with grace.  But if they will not receive it, He gives them instead His punishment.

So you must be diligent today to listen and heed this Word.  Today is also the visitation of Christ among you.  Here He is offering you His own deeds that give you the forgiveness of sins.  Here is grace and justification and eternal life.  Therefore, sincerely repent, rejecting your sins and life as worthless to earn salvation, and cling instead in trust to the precious work of Christ for you.  For the same tears of Christ should move you to repentance.

What terrible agonies the damned will experience when they realize that the Lord God so passionately called them to repentance and life, and how Christ worked mightily to earn their salvation - only to have them reject the precious gift!  The Lord keep you from that fate, as instead you seize Christ and His Cross as your only salvation.

No one naturally has the right kind of heart to repent.  As Christ said, "Now it is hidden from your eyes."  That is, the natural man does not receive the things of God.  The human heart is most crooked and deceitful, as in the time of Noah.  Our heart does not sympathize as it should with our neighbor.  Too many times, we do not see a brother's distress and mourn over his condition, as Christ did.  Too often, we also push away from ourselves the sacred Word, thinking that we have enough and need no more, as if we sinners could ever have too much.

So Christ comes riding into your hearts as He did into Jerusalem.  He comes in a humble way, in His Word.  He has snatched you from the jaws of sin and brought you to repentance and reconciliation with God.  For the Word gives you Christ Himself, and He is the only medicine for your sick souls.  He is the food for your starving spirit.

But if you reject this medicine and this food, how will you escape death?  He has sent down to you manna from heaven.  If you despise the Bread of Life, how will you escape His wrath?  The Lord will not treat kindly those who reject His mercy.  Therefore repent, since the kingdom of heaven is here.

Where repentance receives this Word, it is the sword of the Spirit that protects against the devil, the world, and the flesh.  For the Word gives Christ and Him crucified.  The Word sprinkles upon you the Blood of Atonement, shed for you.  If you are covered with the holy Blood, how can satan or anyone destroy you?

But where a soul refuses to repent, there the devil will build fortifications around him and besiege him with a vast army of sins to invade that soul, until it is utterly destroyed.  That person will think that he is safe upon the foundation of his good works.  Yet those works will be cast down, so that what was thought to be a strong wall will have not one stone left upon another. 

But for you, Christ has come.  He has visited you with His grace and His Spirit.  He has poured out His forgiveness upon you and soothed your soul with the medicine of salvation.  So God has done all things for you.  Nothing is left.  All is accomplished.  Rest secure in Him and in the sufferings and death of His Son for you. Amen.

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