First Reading: Exodus 19:2-8
2{The people of Israel} set out from Rephidim and came into the wilderness of Sinai, and they encamped in the wilderness. There Israel encamped before the mountain, 3while Moses went up to God. The Lord called to him out of the mountain, saying, “Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the people of Israel: 4‘You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. 5Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; 6and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ These are the words that you shall speak to the people of Israel.” 7So Moses came and called the elders of the people and set before them all these words that the Lord had commanded him. 8All the people answered together and said, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do.” And Moses reported the words of the people to the Lord.
Psalm 100
1Be joyful in the Lord, all you lands; serve the Lord with gladness and come before his presence with a song. 2Know this: The Lord himself is God; he himself has made us, and we are his; we are his people and the sheep of his pasture. 3Enter his gates with thanksgiving; go into his courts with praise; give thanks to him and call upon his Name. 4For the Lord is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his faithfulness endures from age to age.
Second Reading: Romans 5:6-15
6For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7For one will scarcely die for a righteous person — though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die — 8but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. 9Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. 10For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. 11More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. 12Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned — 13for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. 14Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come. 15But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many.
Gospel: Matthew 9:35-10:20
935Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction. 36When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. 37Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; 38therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”
101And he called to him his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every disease and every affliction. 2The names of the twelve apostles are these: first, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother; James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother; 3Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; 4Simon the Zealot, and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him. 5These twelve Jesus sent out, instructing them, “Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, 6but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. 7And proclaim as you go, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ 8Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. You received without paying; give without pay.” 9Acquire “Acquire no gold or silver or copper for your belts, 10no bag for your journey, or two tunics or sandals or a staff, for the laborer deserves his food. 11And whatever town or village you enter, find out who is worthy in it and stay there until you depart. 12As you enter the house, greet it. 13And if the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it, but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. 14And if anyone will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet when you leave that house or town. 15Truly, I say to you, it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town. 16Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. 17Beware of men, for they will deliver you over to courts and flog you in their synagogues, 18and you will be dragged before governors and kings for my sake, to bear witness before them and the Gentiles. 19When they deliver you over, do not be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say, for what you are to say will be given to you in that hour. 20For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.”
It’s about Grace
On All Hallows Eve, more than 500 years ago, Martin Luther began what came to be known as the Protestant Reformation with the posting of the 95 Thesis. Like anything that happened over ½ of a century ago, much of the Reformation seems outdated and we may not always see it as interesting or helpful. People will argue that the questions being addressed in the 16th century are not necessarily our questions. Arguments over the authority of the Pope, corruption within the church, Holy Communion, and the language of the Mass seem silly to our American ears. But these were foundational issues that have shaped the way we worship and live today.
There is, however, one lasting contribution that Luther made for all of us, and that was to emphasize that salvation is about grace through faith. Our eternal fate isn’t about following certain rules or requirements, it’s all about grace; God’s love, mercy, and kindness. St. Paul stated this clearly when he penned, “Since, therefore, we have now been justified by His blood, much more shall we be saved by Him from the wrath of God” (vs. 9). And in the next chapter of Romans, St. Paul wrote, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (6:23). And in 2 Corinthians 5:18 he wrote, “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.” What amazing revelations! Jesus paid the price that you and I cannot pay and in doing so, reconciled us to God the Father.
It was while studying St. Paul’s letters, especially the letters to the Romans and to the Galatians, that Luther finally understood God’s grace. It’s in this passage, and others from Romans, that have become the benchmark in our Protestant understanding of who we are. Backing up to verse 1 we read, “Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have obtained access to this grace….” What Jesus revealed to us, according to St. Paul, is God’s overwhelming love. And Paul talked about this amazing grace in several ways.
St. Paul defined grace as love, forgiveness, and reconciliation. He would also define it as adoption. We are adopted as sons and daughters of God. In each instance what he’s talking about is grace. In verse 15 he went even further in his explanation by calling grace “the free gift.” It’s a free gift, it’s grace, because it’s undeserved, it’s given freely, without price. It’s free because we cannot, nor could we ever, buy it or earn it. But we must actively receive it. God’s grace does us no good if we do nothing with it. For Luther, a Catholic Monk, a priest, and college professor, that taught about Purgatory, the necessity of pilgrimages, and the ability to buy mercy through indulgences, this was the most amazing thing to understand.
It was the most astounding thing to Luther that God took the initiative in coming to us: God came to us, we don’t go to Him! This was contrary to what the Roman Catholic church of the time taught; they forwarded that one could reach God by striving for perfection. They taught that if one worked hard enough to become perfect, followed all the rules, went on enough pilgrimages, or paid a certain price, one would then be acceptable to God. But what Luther discovered, while reading Paul’s letters, was an amazing paradox.
God’s mercy isn’t received by our efforts, it’s received when we admit that we’re not perfect, that we human beings are sinful by nature, and we depend on God alone for forgiveness; then and only then do we receive God’s grace, and through that saving grace, we have access to God. It’s from this revelation that a major battle cry of the Reformation came; “We are saved by our faith in God’s grace, and not in our own efforts.” Sadly, this message isn’t embraced by everyone.
There are those who want me to preach and teach that we don’t have to do anything to receive God’s grace. That furthermore, since we cannot earn God’s mercy, we can simply languish in our sin and laziness all our life. But what does St. Paul say to this thinking? In the opening verses of the very next chapter Paul answers this by saying, “What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? Certainly not!” (6:1-2). This is why this teaching about grace alone through faith alone is so important. As I’ve mentioned before, this message is counter cultural.
America, and more importantly satan, wants us to believe that if we work hard, we’ll be rewarded with success. We’re given models of perfection to live up to, and if we live up to those standards, we’re a success; if you don’t, you’re considered a failure. But this isn’t what Paul is saying here about God’s mercy. “We are saved by grace, and not by anything that we do.” Sola gratia, sola fide; grace alone by faith alone. Initially, earning God’s favor through perfection was Paul’s understanding.
As a Pharisee, Paul relied on the exhaustive rules that governed Jewish society and culture. He taught and believed that it was possible to reach perfection because God had given us His Law to follow. All one had to do was work hard and meticulously follow the Law. Now it meant that you had to live a disciplined life, work hard, and make sacrifices, but if you were careful and followed all the rules, you can earn God’s favor. Remember the question of the Jewish ruler; “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Luke 18:18).
The Jewish ruler wanted a list of things he could check off. But what was Jesus’ answer, “Follow me” (vs. 22). The problem is, we want salvation on our terms, on our schedule. But the truth is, we find it difficult, if not impossible to follow the two greatest commandments, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Jesus was clear, “All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matthew 22:37-40). If we could only follow the Law as God handed down, then I might be preaching a different sermon.
We’re more like the Hebrew people in our Old Testament reading than we’d like to admit. We hear the commands and statutes that God has given, and often we respond as the Jews did, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do (Exodus 19:8). But within days, we’re back to our old ways. It had only been a few weeks since the Jewish people had witnessed God sending the final plague and the destruction of the Egyptian Army in the Red Sea. It made sense that they would respond as they did. Yet within a matter of a few more weeks, they were dancing around a golden calf that they forced Aaron to cast. 40 days Moses was up on the mountain getting the law, and the people had already forgot all that God had done.
6 weeks was all it took for the people to forget their promise to do all God instructed. The problem is, we enjoy sinning and we want eternal life on our terms. This is why Jesus had to come. This is why we needs God’s grace and mercy. We cannot follow the law. We are sinful creatures bent in on ourselves. As the 3rd century Christian author Tertullian wrote, our problem is we become dissatisfied with all God has done and we look to ourselves for the answer. We want more, and we want to achieve more in our own way. Without God’s mercy, we can’t do anything to achieve God’s grace. Jesus is the only way to receive God’s favor.
Another thing we struggle with is “self-righteousness” and “hypocrisy.” We often work hard to follow the rules, we look at our Christian walk and say, we’re good people, we tithe faithfully, we give to the poor and needy, we read our Bibles and daily devotions and pray daily. Then we look at others and compare our achievements to someone else and pride fills our hearts. We’re like the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable recorded in Luke 18. “To [those] who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’ “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted” (vss. 9-14).
There’s a reason that pride is first on the list of the 7 deadly sins. We are by nature sinful and self-centered and we need to take Solomon’s warning to heart, “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall (Proverbs 16:18). Pride tells us that we have high standards for ourselves and then we look at others’ failures and tell ourselves, “look at how righteous I am compared to that person. Surely God loves me more than them.”
Jesus constantly encountered self-righteous people as He traveled. And these pompous people expected Jesus to condemn those who failed to follow the law to their standards. Remember how Jesus answered the Religious Leaders who complained when He ate with Tax Collectors and sinners? Jesus replied, “But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’” (Matthew 9:13). None of us can live up to the law perfectly, it might be the sins of pride, envy, laziness, anger, greed or simple self-centeredness. The point St. Paul is making is that without God’s mercy, none of us can achieve God’s forgiveness on our own.
In Paul’s culture the way you get to God was through the Law. The Jewish Leaders taught that if you obey the rules, you will be perfect. The reasoning was this. Since God is perfect, then we must be perfect if we’re going to approach God. If we’re going to be acceptable to God, then we must be perfect. The Law is God’s gift to us so that we can do that. It is a gift to us for our salvation. If we would only follow it, we would be acceptable to God, we would be saved. But Paul said, it doesn’t work.
The problem was that there were 613 commandments in the Torah, 248 positive commandments and 365 prohibitions. If we can’t even keep the two greatest commandments, love God, love others, then how can we expect to observe all 613? The Law alone instead of saving us, condemns us. Instead of freeing us, the Law binds us. Instead of blessing us, it gives us a curse. And most of all, Paul tells us that instead of allowing us to love, the Law leads us to hate ourselves and to be separated from our neighbors. Trying to achieve God’s favor by our own efforts only leads to pride and self-righteousness. This was Saul’s problem before he encountered Jesus on the road to Damascus.
St. Paul described himself as a “Pharisee of the Pharisees.” In Philippians 3:4-6 Paul writes, “If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless.” But he went on to say, “But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith” (vss. 7-9).
St. Paul came to realize that without Jesus, he could do nothing. In the very next chapter Paul would declare, “I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength” (4:13). Saul was led to Damascus and ironically, housed with Christians, the very people that he was hunting. The Damascus Christians loved him, because Jesus said, “Love your enemies.” When he asked them, “Why do you do this?”, they told him about Jesus. And Saul became Paul, and for the first time, experienced grace in his life. He felt he had been given access to God, through grace. He couldn’t do it on his own. It happened when he was loved.
Paul couldn’t get over that. He couldn’t get over that God had come to him. He had done nothing to earn this. In fact, what he had done probably should have prevented him from receiving God’s forgiveness. But God didn’t turn His back on Paul. Jesus came to him. That’s why he wrote in our text for this morning, “While we were still weak, at the proper time Christ died for the ungodly. Why, one will hardly die for a righteous man….But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (vss. 6-8). And this is important for us to understand: How did Paul experience this grace? First, he was told about it. Second, he trusted it. The gospel was proclaimed, he believed in faith and God gave him the strength to live boldly for God.
Paul said it was God who tripped him up on the Damascus Road, so that God could tell Saul who he really was. Saul couldn’t hear that before, because he was preoccupied with climbing the ladder of perfection, trying to be somebody. So God knocked him down. When he got up again, he was blinded to everything he thought was right. That’s when God told the Christians at Damascus, “You tell him who he is.” So God sent Paul to the Christians, and they told him, “Saul, you are a child of God. You are loved by God so much that God sent His Son just for you.” Saul quit relying on his own righteousness and became Paul, one saved by God’s endless mercy and grace through faith.
St. Paul writes, “Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have obtained access to this grace” (Romans 5:1-2). He would later write to Ephesians, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do (Ephesians 2:8-10). Sola Fida, Sola Gratia; faith alone, grace alone. God came to us and did for us what we ourselves could not do. This is the good news for us today!
Amen