Epiphany 3 Sermon: St. Matthew 8:1-13 The audio for this sermon can be found at: https://soundcloud/james-braun-1/epiphany-3-sermon-st-matthew-8 INI Prayer: O almighty and everlasting God, mercifully look upon our infirmities, and in all dangers and necessities stretch forth Your mighty hand to defend us against our enemies; through Jesus Christ, Your Son, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one true God, now and forever. Amen. Text: The Holy Ghost has caused to be recorded in St. Matthew 8,1/13. This morning in our Bible Class we are going to be taking a look at the book of Ruth. Ruth was a woman who was married to a Jewish man, but she was of another nation…the nation of Moab, and was most certainly not Jewish. Her husband died, as did his brother and his father, and so her mother-in-law – Naomi – decided to go back home to Bethlehem to live out the rest of her life. The one daughter-in-law decided to stay with her own people; the other – Ruth – made the choice to go to Bethlehem and stay with Naomi, saying: Entreat me not to leave you, Or to turn back from following after you; For wherever you go, I will go; And wherever you lodge, I will lodge; Your people shall be my people, And your God, my God. Where you die, I will die, And there will I be buried. The LORD do so to me, and more also, If anything but death parts you and me. An extraordinary story; made even more extraordinary when we learn that Ruth would actually become one of the ancestresses of Jesus the Christ! Thus, mingled in the Savior’s veins is the blood of both Jew and Gentile, of both the accepted ones and the outcasts, of both you and me and all people. Let’s look at our Gospel for today to see just how this plays out in the real world. First, we have the leper whom Jesus encounters. He cried out: Lord, if You are willing, You can make me clean.” Though this man was a Jew, he was at the same time an outcast. His disease separated him from his family, from his friends, from the people of his own town and even from his whole nation. He couldn’t go into any homes, he couldn’t hear God’s Word in the synagogue, he couldn’t even worship at the temple. He was someone who was untouchable and nothing he could do would ever let him back into the community or even his close family. In Leviticus 13 we hear: Now the leper on whom the sore is, his clothes shall be torn and his head bare; and he shall cover his mustache, and cry, “Unclean! Unclean!” This was so that people knew to stay away from them and reminded him of what he was. Notice how the man asked Jesus to be healed. Lord, if You are willing, he said. He didn’t demand. He didn’t declare: “I’m a child of Abraham and I deserve to be healed!” No, He asked, “Thy will be done.” He knew he had nothing in his rotten hands to bring. They were sore-covered along with much of the rest of his body. Being a descendant of Abraham, he knew, was meaningless. So is your pedigree. Whether you were born into a Christian family, whether you have come to church nearly ever day of your life, whether you have just recently come to learn of what God has done for you by living and dying for you…where you are, from where you came is absolutely meaningless. Nothing in your past, nothing that you have done or not done matters with regards to God’s will. Instead, your healing, your forgiveness, the love God the Father has for you is entirely about Jesus, His only Son, our Lord. It’s all about from where He came…His past…what He has done. Your hope is found in Him alone no matter who you are; because, no matter who you are, He came to live and die for you. This is what the leper understood. This is in what the leper hoped which is why he said, Lord, if you are willing. He understood from the Word of God that, as Paul wrote in Romans 14 (8): For if we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. Therefore, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s. He knew this Jesus loved him, had come to save him. So if he were healed or not, it was all the same as far as his real hope was concerned. This was Naomi’s hope, too. The mother-in-law of Ruth was Jewish. Though she had been attacked by so many miseries, she went back home hoping, though not expecting, to be taken care of…which, with God’s intervention, she was. Listen to what Jesus did after this man called out to Him: Then Jesus put out His hand and touched him, saying, “I am willing; be cleansed.” Immediately his leprosy was cleansed. He touched Him! This man who was unclean was touched by the clean, the holy Lord God. Not, though, to be punished for having the nerve to come near Him. No, but to be cleansed. To be healed. To be put back into his place among the people of Israel. To restore him again to society and family. To enjoy his life again free from pain and loneliness. Here Jesus shows that He is in fact truly God as well as true man. No, not just by healing this man with His Word, but also by His mercy to touch the unclean, to join with them in their place of being shut off from humanity…just as we heard last week. Then we have the centurion who, like Ruth, was not Jewish, but who declared the same thing she did as we heard earlier. In effect he was saying to the leper – a Roman saying this to a Jewish leper!! - Your people shall be my people, And your God, my God. Where you die, I will die, And there will I be buried. The LORD do so to me, and more also, If anything but death parts you and me. By confessing his own faith in Jesus the Messiah, He was saying that he was part of the same family as the leper. He saw his own sin, he saw that he, too, was lost and condemned, separated from God and from his fellow man by his sin. And so he cried out to Jesus for help for his servant. Lord, I am not worthy that You should come under my roof. But only speak a word, and my servant will be healed. What Paul said to you today is what he thought of himself: Be of the same mind toward one another. Do not set your mind on high things, but associate with the humble. Do not be wise in your own opinion. Repay no on evil for evil. Have regard for good things in the sight of all men. If it is possible, as much as depends on you, live peaceable with all men. Your sinful human nature, though, doesn’t want to associate with the humble. You maybe look to who you are, what you do, and cry out to God: “I deserve better than I have! Come, show Yourself to me and I will believe.” This is just what the Jews of Jesus’ day were demanding. They wanted to see before they believed. They wanted proof before they would come near to Jesus let alone touch Him. They saw the leper…the saw the Roman soldier…and they looked down on them because they didn’t see what they really were. But, as God shows in His Word, it is His choice, not yours, that decides to where His grace and love ought extend. If it were left up to you, then you would be among the lost, because you don’t even live up to your own expectations. You delude yourself into thinking you do not have the leprosy of sin infecting your body and soul. But if you took an honest look at yourself, as the leper and this soldier must have done, you would be forced to admit that you are not only unworthy to have Jesus come under the roof of our house…or even here, but also that you are completely unworthy to have Jesus take up residence in your heart that is so filled with the sickness of sin. But now…now… look back to the time when your God made you His child and rejoice. Why? As He did with the leper and the servant of this soldier, with a word – His Word - He instantly healed you of the disease of your sin, He loosed the bonds with which death had you tied up, and you are reborn -- each day -- into a new life, one which has at its center the peace with God purchased by Jesus Christ by living and dying for the world’s sins. All these blessings come from outside of you. They are mysteries that you can’t figure out because there’s no reasonable explanation for God’s love for you. Yet you rejoice,. You rejoice, because, even though you don’t understand it, you are given the same love shown to the leper, to the centurion, to Naomi, to Ruth regardless of who they were, because of who Jesus is for you! Listen again to some of the words that the Prophet Jeremiah spoke to you earlier: Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, Behold, I will bring Jerusalem health and healing; I will heal them and reveal to them the abundance of peace and truth. And I will cause the captives of Judah and the captives of Israel to return, and will rebuild those places as at the first. I will cleanse them from all their iniquity by which they have sinned against Me, and I will pardon all their iniquities by which they have sinned and by which they have transgressed against Me. Then it shall be to Me a name of joy, a praise, and an honor before all nations of the earth, who shall hear all the good that I do to them; they shall fear and tremble for all the goodness and all the prosperity that I provide for it. This is not prosperity as the accountants and false preachers of the world count up. No, it is the prosperity, the riches of having your sins forgiven you for the sake of the crucified Jesus! It is in this Jesus that Ruth was trusting when she confessed that Naomi’s God would be her God. She was saying that, even though she was from a race of people who even were enemies of the people of Israel, she was confident that God’s promise was even greater than covering only the Jews. She had inwardly digested what the God the Father said to His Son through the prophet Isaiah even before He said it because – from her husband and his family – she had heard the word of promise that came into her home from far away in the land of Israel. Far away from where God’s visible presence was at His tabernacle. We heard these words on Epiphany Sunday, a Sunday we celebrated the Light of Jesus that brings true light to the Gentiles, that brought the true Light to Ruth and the Centurion (49,6): It is too small a thing that You should be My Servant To raise up (only) the tribes of Jacob, And to restore (only) the preserved ones of Israel; I will also give You as a light to the Gentiles, That You should be My salvation to the ends of the earth. His salvation was declared to Ruth and the soldier, and by His grace they believed. Now, Jesus doesn’t have to be here in order for you to be given this same salvation. As with the healing of the centurion’s servant, He can speak from heaven and His powerful Word can come into this room, into your heart to heal you, to join you together to Him and all the Church. The even better news, though, is that your Jesus has come to this place, He does speak His Word right to you – into your ears, into your very heart. And by speaking His Word that forgives you your sins, that forgives your arrogance, that forgives how you think that you deserve the blessings of God, He heals you, along with the leper and the centurion’s servant. He tells you this very morning: Go your way; and as you have believed, so let it be done for you. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. Forevermore. Amen. SOLI DEO GLORIA!
Posted on: Sun, 26 Jan 2014 20:06:09 +0000
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