Proper 11 (July 17-23)
Texts: Romans 8:12-25;
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
YouTube version: https://www.youtube.com/live/ttZA9OF7Ya0?feature=share&t=1263
Sermon Take-Home Notes
GOD IS LOVE . . . FULL STOP
I ask your patience for a few minutes. Especially anticipating some of the weighty readings we have this morning. If I’m to effectively lay out a revitalized Gospel message, then I need to make an argument unfamiliar to us. And I need to do so in not my best ‘packaging,’ so to speak. But this is super important to simply get out there, so here we go. Please put your thinking caps on for a couple minutes.
We’re used to God-talk at church, otherwise known as theology. Not so much anthropology. We talk a lot about one part of our human story, our anthropology, namely, religion. But has anyone here this morning heard much at church about anthropology before I arrived? Yes, it’s big for me, and I’d like to take a few moments to explain why. I believe that we simply cannot possibly get our theology right unless we first understand our anthropology. We cannot get our God-talk right until we first understand how our sinful nature corrupts everything we are as human beings, including our cultures and, yes, even our religions.
This should make sense since a crucial aspect of Christian doctrine is that Jesus is both truly divine and truly human. He came to reveal both to us. And I’m suggesting to you this morning that they’re integrally related. We cannot understand who God truly is without first understanding our full story as human beings. I believe that a lot of that story is there in Scripture for us — there in the teachings of Jesus and his Passion story — but it’s ongoing. Especially now that we have the gift of a more global understanding of anthropology, of who we are as human beings.
Like I said, we talk a lot about religion at church, but do we understand that one of the most important things Jesus came to reveal to us is this: that Sin has corrupted all our religions? That’s probably not too hard for us to accept these days when we look over two thousand more years of religious violence, even since Jesus. Many of our children and grandchildren see this, and they’re not so sure they want to be part of this religion thing. And so I think it becomes even more urgent for us, if we are to revitalize the Good News we have in Jesus Christ, to understand how it is that Jesus came to reveal the corruption of our religions, and to help us understand how they might be redeemed.
That’s what I firmly believe St. Paul has been talking about quite a bit in the letter to the Romans which we’ve been reading all summer. Not just this morning’s reading, but the bigger picture in the whole first part of the letter. He flat out says that sin has even corrupted the law. Now, the word law in English is a translation of what for Paul would have been the Hebrew word Torah. When a good Jew like Paul talks about Torah, he is talking about the law, but he is also talking about the heart and soul of his religion. It was their religion. Yet Paul knows firsthand, as himself a persecutor of the early church, how even Torah has been corrupted by sin such that it is used to justify violence against others.
This was clearly Jesus’ understanding as well, the very reason why he had to go to the cross. He has to submit himself to the law, to our religions, and to be declared guilty and executed in the name of those religious cultures (both Jewish and Roman), in order to reveal how big this is.
So, returning to Paul, he is vehemently arguing against fellow Jews who believe that Gentile followers of Jesus must convert their religion to Torah. Most vehemently in Galatians, but also arguing a similar point in the first part of Romans. How does Paul answer their demand for Gentiles to be converted to Judaism in order to be Christians? No!!, says Paul, No, No, No, No. Sin is so powerful that it has even corrupted Torah! Torah is not free of sin’s influence, so what’s the point of having Gentiles convert to it?
And I’m sad to say that I believe our current versions of Christianity — the Gospel included — to have also succumbed to sin. I don’t even think that Jesus came to start a new religion called Christianity. You never hear either Jesus or Paul talk about that in so many words. No, what replaces or redeems Torah, or any religion, is faith. And our understanding of the word faith has been lacking. I believe that Paul uses the word faith to talk about faithfulness — to encompass our entire way of being human. Some ways of being human are more faithful than others.
Jesus came to show us a way of being human which is more faithful to who God is. Borrowing some of Paul’s language, we might say that human beings, including our religions, evolved “in the flesh.” Now, through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah, we are being given the chance to re-evolve “in the Spirit.” In short, it’s not a matter of changing religions. It’s a matter of becoming more truly and faithfully human as the true God intended, in the first place, so that whatever our religion may be, it is redeemed along with us.
And here’s the bottom line about true anthropology helping us to get our theology right: if sin has even corrupted even our religions, then it has also corrupted who God is for us. We are often wrong about God! Or, using the language of today’s Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds: there are some good ideas and experiences about who God is for us, a God of love, that we’ve learned through Jesus Christ, but over two thousand years it’s become mixed in with the weeds. With some of the hold-over ideas about God from our evolution as human beings with false gods. From the perspective of a 21st century these things have evolved over many millennia and all over the face of the earth. So our first task as followers of Jesus is to take a long journey for those ancient false ways of understanding God to the new ways revealed through Jesus of God as nonviolent love.
And we can do this in whatever religion we’re in. We don’t need a new religion called Christianity. Jesus and Paul and the other apostles applied it to their Jewish religion. I believe a modern example of this is someone like Gandhi, who remained Hindu, but he focused especially on the Sermon on the Mount to refresh or redeem his sense of who God is as a Hindu.
We are learning, then, that the gods we evolved with are merely false projections of our own needs and desires. We evolved with gods who simply rubber stamp both our cultures and our cultural leaders. The age-old idea of the divine right of kingship, that God sets the king to be in charge and rule over us, illustrates this. (An idea that Thomas Paine mocked in his tract Common Sense.) We recently watched the coronation of Prince Charles, and the idea of God being behind the whole thing was still alive and well, right? God is who Caesar says god is, and of course the gods agree with whatever Caesar proclaims. That’s how it worked in the first century. Isn’t that how it often works in the 21st century, too, especially when we intertwine our religion with our patriotism? Is that, for example, what the current movement of Christian Nationalism is about? It is only by the grace of the true God, that Jesus was sent into the world to help reveal to us both true humanity and true divinity. And we can only come to understand these truths by first understanding how we come to dwell in falsehood.
Let’s check this our with our readings the last two weeks from Matthew 13 — or what’s been missing from those readings, to be more accurate. I just proposed to you that we human beings and our cultures typically dwell in falsehood. I just came right out and said it, knowing that it’s not easy for anyone to hear and accept, including myself. Jesus chose a little bit different tactic. Instead of always coming right out and bluntly saying it — which he also did, too — he also spoke more guardedly and cryptically in parables. Even his disciples were puzzled about that. In fact, that’s been the missing verses between telling the parable to everyone and then later interpreting it to his disciples alone. Last week, for example, here’s the verses we skipped over between the Parable of the Sower and its interpretation:
Then the disciples came and asked Jesus, “Why do you speak to them in parables?” He answered, “The reason I speak to them in parables is that ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.’ With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah that says: ‘You will indeed listen, but never understand, and you will indeed look, but never perceive. For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes; so that they might not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and understand with their heart and turn — and I would heal them.’ — Matthew 13:10-11a, 13-15
Isn’t that amazing? Jesus understands how extremely difficult it is for us hear and understand just how badly wrong our cultures and religions have gone. How difficult it is to hear that much of what we believe about God is false. This is even amplified by the verses skipped over in today’s Gospel Reading. The Evangelist Matthew underscores Jesus’ quote from Isaiah with one of his own, telling us, “Jesus told the crowds all these things in parables; without a parable he told them nothing. This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet: ‘I will open my mouth to speak in parables; I will proclaim what has been hidden since the foundation of the world’” (Matthew 13:34-35).
These things about ourselves, that even our cultures and religions are corrupted by sin, are things that we just don’t want to hear or see. Things, for example, like racism. What I believe this Gospel anthropology we’ve talked about is revealing to us is precisely about these things deeply rooted in our cultures and religion that only the cross and resurrection could begin to reveal. The new spirit, the new way, of being human unleashed by Jesus required his submission to our cultures of law and religion. Jesus let himself be condemned and executed on the cross, so that in the resurrection God might vindicate him, saying, in effect, “No, folks, I think you got it wrong. You better look again at why you condemned and executed this one. You might need to see what’s rotten at the core.” It took us killing Jesus for what he was trying to teach us, and then God raising him, for us to have any chance of finally seeing and listening and understanding. Even then, it’s been extremely difficult. We regularly fall back into our evolution “in the flesh,” letting the offer of a re-evolution “in the Spirit” slip from our grasp. We hear the voices of the old, false gods.
Understanding how we have fallen backwards in our understanding of God and religion will of course be the key to understanding how it is we need to revitalize our basic Gospel message for the sake of the world. I’ll be unpacking it a bit each week. We’ll spend some time extending these insights into conversations during the Gospel Talks between the services (see the Sermon Notes).
Today, we celebrate the new spirit of being human poured out on us in baptism. This morning, as I baptized ——-, I prayed, “Sustain ——- with the gift of your Holy Spirit: the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord, the spirit of joy in your presence, both now and forever. Amen.” This is what it takes for us to be able to see and hear and understand. The promise of God’s spirit.
I’d like to offer an example of persisting false gods. As a pastor, I have this honor of walking with people through joyful times — like this morning, a baptism — and also some very difficult times. Times like receiving a diagnosis of cancer, or suffering the devastating loss of someone you love. I still hear at these times things like, “God must have a plan. We might not be able to say what it is, but there must be one.” I’d like for us to entertain the notion that that’s the voice of the old gods, who promise what they can’t really deliver. This is the voice of a god who’s like an emperor, the person in charge, who thinks they’re in control of everything that happens. We might ask if we push this a bit further, Does that mean God gave you cancer, or suddenly took that person out of your life?
Or is God a God of love who allows these things? Because what if God is Love? What if the only power God wields is the power of love? Can love ever force itself and still be love? And so must love always allow freedom within the creation because of love? What if God is more like what St. Paul talks about in our reading today as one who has subjected the creation to futility — things like cancer — in order to allow for true freedom? The freedom of the children of God, he says. What if God is like what Jesus says in this morning’s parable: like a landowner who allows an enemy to sow weeds into creation? As I talked about in my weekly newsletter column, that enemy has largely been us, as we’ve used our false notions of God to justify dominating other people and our earth home instead of lovingly caring for them.
But the really Good News, too, is that God is Love — so God is incredibly patient and kind, God is forgiving, God never gives up on us. And, as Paul proclaims at the end of Romans 8, there exists nothing whatsoever in all of the universe which can ever separate us from the creating and saving power of God’s love. The promise to each of us. Amen.
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Lutheran Church of the Resurrection,
Racine, WI, July 23, 2023
YouTube version: https://www.youtube.com/live/ttZA9OF7Ya0?feature=share&t=1263
Sermon Take-Home Notes
