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THE SIXTH SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY February 16, 2025 Pastor Tom Steers Christ the Saviour Lutheran Church, Toronto Our Opening Hymn is: “Blessed Jesus, at Your Word” Lutheran Service Book, 904 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhbTXFHv5Uc 1 Blessed Jesus, at Your Word We are gathered all to hear You. Let our hearts and souls be stirred Now to seek and love and fear You, By Your teachings, sweet and holy, Drawn from earth to love You solely. 2 All our knowledge, sense, and sight Lie in deepest darkness shrouded Till Your Spirit breaks our night With the beams of truth unclouded. You alone to God can win us; You must work all good within us. 3 Gracious Savior, good and kind, Light of Light, from God proceeding, Open now our heart and mind; Help us by Your Spirit’s pleading. Hear the cry Your Church now raises; Hear and bless our prayers and praises. 4 Father, Son, and Spirit, Lord, Praise to You and adoration! Grant that we may trust Your Word, Confident of our salvation, While we here below must wander, Till we sing Your praises yonder. We begin our service with the Invocation: In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Confession and Absolution – L.S.B. p. 184 The Introit – Psalm 119: 1-2, 4-5; antiphon: verse 7 I will praise you with an upright heart, when I learn your righteous rules. Blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord! Blessed are those who keep his testimonies, who seek him with their whole heart. You have commanded your precepts to be kept diligently. Oh that my ways may be steadfast in keeping your statutes! Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen. I will praise you with an upright heart, when I learn your righteous rules. Our Collect Prayer of the Day: O Lord, graciously hear the prayers of Your people that we who justly suffer the consequences of our sin may be mercifully delivered by Your goodness to the glory of Your name; through Jesus Christ, Your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen. Our Bible Readings: Old Testament – Jeremiah 17:5-8 Psalm 1 Epistle – 1st Corinthians 15:1-20 Gospel – Luke 6:17-26 The Apostles’ Creed – I believe in God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, And in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried. He descended into hell. The third day he rose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God the Father almighty. From there he will come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Christian Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen. Our Hymn of the Day is: “Songs of Thankfulness and Praise” Lutheran Service Book, 394 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOwiBa4EVdI The Sermon – In the Church season of Epiphany our Bible passages reveal Christ. They tell us who He is, and why He came to earth. For you, for me. The scriptural narrative is action-packed. There were the Magi, gentiles who followed the star to Bethlehem to worship Jesus as their Saviour. (Matthew 2:1-12) The heavens opened, God spoke, and the Holy Spirit descended at Jesus’ baptism. (Luke 3:15-22) Then Christ miraculously saved a wedding from disaster in Cana (John 2:1-11), escaped murder by his neighbours in Nazareth (Luke 4:16-30), and filled Peter’s nets with fish (Luke 5:1-11). With Epiphany’s emphasis on Christ’s power to perform miracles, to heal and provide, we might get the wrong impression. We may be tempted to believe that if you follow Jesus all the problems in your life will suddenly disappear. That every difficulty will be solved and need satisfied. That your life as a disciple will be one of unbroken happiness and joy. You might falsely conclude if those things aren’t true for you, that your faith isn’t strong enough, that Jesus doesn’t love you, or worst of all that Jesus isn’t really God and your Saviour. So today, in Luke’s account of the Sermon on the Plain, Jesus reveals the stark truth about this life, and true life. It’s not what you may think. Christ tells us in this life it may be better to have poverty than wealth; hunger than satisfaction; weeping than laughter; persecution than popularity. And let’s be honest, this can be a hard message to hear. It’s as though Jesus is describing an alternate universe. Then again, you may have noticed that much of what we say and do here as Christians in the Church is what the world considers “nonsense.” We see living unbelievers and say they are dead in sin. (Psalm 51:5) We stand before caskets and urns of the dead and declare they are only sleeping and will rise again through Christ. (Matthew 9:24) We pour water into a bowl, and through the power of God’s Word in Baptism, call it the fountain of life (Titus 3:5-6). We eat and drink bread and wine and confess it to be the very body and blood of Christ. (Matthew 26:26-27) You believe that your sins are forgiven before God in Heaven when a Pastor says so here on earth. (Matthew 16:19) The point is that it’s not about what human beings or popular opinion thinks. It’s about what God’s Word says. God tells us that unbelievers are dead, and dead believers are alive. God says that the water of Baptism and His Word give life, that the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper bring believers forgiveness of sin and salvation. God says that confessed sinners are justified, made right with Him, and that self-righteous hypocrites are damned. What God says – that’s reality. Not what a lost human being, a film celebrity or a rock star thinks or feels. And as Job in the Bible realized, who are we to argue? When God in Genesis said, ‘let there be,’ the universe and everything in it came into being! When God sent His Son to earth to make the blind see, the dead come alive, and free those possessed by demons – that’s what happened. Fine, you might say, but in this Sermon on the Plain, Jesus is speaking about things that hit really close to home. He’s talking about our wealth, health, our happiness, and social status. So, what is Christ driving at? Let’s consider the context. People had flocked from all over Israel to see Jesus. Why? To hear him and be healed of their diseases. But Luke makes it clear that not all these people were disciples, believers. Some were coming simply to benefit from His divine power, to have their temporary needs satisfied, and be sent on their happy way. Jesus knew his disciples might get the wrong idea about the Christian life from these miracles. So, He presses pause on the healing, and explains how the blessings of this life relate to true, and everlasting life. The Bible is painfully clear that God didn’t send his only Son into the world to make us financially rich, slaphappy, or popular. He didn’t come to establish a utopia – a perfect paradise – on earth. Why? For the very same reason that God turned Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden in the first place. Sin. The only way to understand life now is to remember what happened in the Garden in the beginning. God gave Adam and Eve one simple command: “ . . . of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (Genesis 2:17) Eve and Adam ate, and the death they earned by their disobedience wasn’t just the separation of body and soul – it was separation from God. From the moment our first parents sunk their teeth into the forbidden fruit they forfeited perfection, and lost a perfect relationship with God that He established. This sin had consequences. “Then the Lord God said ‘Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever –’ therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.” (Genesis 3:22-24) God kicked Adam and Eve out of the perfect bliss of Eden so they wouldn’t have to endure the curse of sin, of separation from Him, forever. The thorns and thistles, the pain in childbirth, the murderous hatred between human beings, would remind them that the world wasn’t the problem; they were. In other words, God threw them out of paradise to lead them to repentance – He did it out of love. Why doesn’t Jesus just give us everything we think we might want for happiness in this life? Why doesn’t He just snap His fingers and turn this world into paradise once again? Because even if Jesus recreated the paradise on earth we think we want – we would still be a broken humanity under God’s curse. And this is because we have violated and continue to break God’s Law. (Galatians 3:10) He could cause us to live forever. But it would be an awful existence; we wouldn’t be forgiven, we wouldn’t be justified, we wouldn’t be saved. Worse than the living dead, we would be the living damned. It would be hell on earth. The very life God wanted to spare us from by driving Adam and Eve out of the Garden would be our eternity. The Bible tells us, “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins.” (Ephesians 2:1) So, we have an even more pressing matter to deal with than physical demise, and that’s eternal spiritual death. We were born dead spiritually. Sin is an inherited disease from our first parents who rebelled against God. We wanted to just live out our fleshly desires at any cost. All our hearts longed for was sin. (Matthew 15:18-19) And that is why Jesus says that in this life poverty is better than wealth, hunger than satisfaction, weeping than laughter, and persecution than popularity: because that’s the reality of our standing with God. The broken world around us, the consequences of sin that touch our lives are vivid reminders that the world is not the problem, we are. Repentance, realization of our spiritual poverty, and hunger for God’s grace and mercy are the only proper response – because only then will we appreciate the real reason Jesus came to earth. Christ didn’t come to renovate a broken world – He came to get rid of sin, death, and God’s curse. God sent Jesus to gather up the pieces of the Commandments we’ve broken, and carry the weight of our sins. He came to take our sin and rebellion upon Himself, so that when God looked at earth on Good Friday, the only sinner He saw was Jesus. (2 Corinthians 5:21) When Christ was nailed to the cross, God unleashed all His wrath over sin. All of His curses meant for sinners were on Jesus. Then, and only then, was God’s justice satisfied, His wrath quenched, His curse removed. By His perfect life and hellish death, Jesus won true life for you; life in an eternal kingdom filled with riches beyond imagination, an endless feast hosted by Jesus Himself, a place of unbroken joy where God Himself calls us His beloved children. And when the Holy Spirit works on your heart to see, understand, and believe that this is true life, then you will see the reality of our earthly existence. Martin Luther describes this awakening beautifully in The Bondage of the Will: “Scripture represents man as one who is not only bound, wretched, captive, sick, and dead, but in addition to his other miseries is afflicted, through the agency of satan his prince, with this misery of blindness, so that he believes himself to be free, happy, unfettered, able, well, and alive. For satan knows that if men were aware of their misery, he would not be able to keep a single one of them in his kingdom, because God would at once pity and help them in their misery and cries for help.” The devil either wants to fill you so full of wealth, food, and happiness now that you don’t see or feel the real misery of your sin, or wants you to see Jesus as nothing more than a cosmic genie who came to give or deny you these things. The devil would have you believe you’re rich in ‘good works,’ would have you not confess your spiritual poverty, and be satisfied in self-righteousness. Satan doesn’t want you to hunger for God’s righteousness; he’d rather you laugh at your sin or deny it, not weep over it; to value what other people say about you more than what God tells you. The awful reality is that if we believe, because of earthly pleasure or self-righteousness, that everything is fine between us and God – then the devil has won, then we truly are lost. Because that’s a delusion. Popularity and riches are mirages that are gone almost as soon as you have them. We may eat at the best restaurant this morning – but we’ll have to eat again later tonight. Money can’t buy everything – especially the most important things. And, sooner or later, we die, and it’s all gone. Most importantly – and this is Jesus’ main point here: our circumstances in life now are not an accurate measure of our standing with God. Only the cross is. We deserved to hang there – because we are all poor, miserable sinners; but Jesus hung there in our place. That’s the truth the devil doesn’t want you to see, or witness to others. And that’s why Christ preaches this shocking sermon, wakes us up to the truth, and turns the world upside down here. He lets us in on the secret that what made Eden paradise was not the climate, the cuisine, or the fact that men and women got along. What made Eden paradise was the fact that Adam and Eve were perfect and had a perfect relationship with God. That’s what Jesus came to restore. And He has. He kept all the Commandments for you – and gives believers the benefits. He suffered the death your sins deserved – and your record is wiped clean. In Christ, when God looks at you Christian, He’s as pleased as He was when He first created Adam and Eve, and called them very good. (Genesis 1:31) Now, if you were all-powerful, if you could give your child anything, would you just give them riches, happiness, and popularity in a world that’s infested with sin and sickness, and ends in death? Of course not. If you could give someone you love anything at all – it would be a one-way fare out of this world to a place where there is no sin, death, or the devil. And that’s exactly what God has given us in Jesus – a one-way ticket from this life to true and everlasting life with God. That is why Christ came. In Luther’s day, when plagues, famine, and death were everyday realities, people would say, “In the midst of life we are surrounded by death.” That’s what the devil would like you to think, that this is THE life. This is as good as it gets. Eat, drink and be as merry for tomorrow you die and life will be over. Martin Luther turned that saying around. “In the midst of death we are surrounded by life.” This place – where sin, death and the devil stalk us, hurt us, kill us and our loved ones – this is not true life. True life is with God, and He gives us signs of this life even in a world of death. He gave you new life in the waters of Baptism. He gives you His life-giving Word found in the Bible. He restores you day after day with His forgiveness. He gives you the body and blood of His Son which preserves you to life everlasting. It’s not what we think; it’s even better. Amen. The Benediction – The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make His face shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace. Amen. Our Closing Hymn is: “May God Bestow on Us His Grace” Lutheran Service Book, 824 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4AhYdwW4t4 Written by Martin Luther (1483-1546) 1 May God bestow on us his grace, with blessings rich provide us; and may the brightness of his face to life eternal guide us, that we his saving health may know, his gracious will and pleasure, and also to the heathen show Christ's riches without measure and unto God convert them. 2 Thine over all shall be the praise and thanks of every nation; and all the world with joy shall raise the voice of exultation. For you will judge the earth, O Lord, forbidding sin to flourish; your people's pasture is your Word, their souls to feed and nourish, in righteous paths to keep them. 3 O let the people praise your worth, in all good works increasing; the land shall plenteous fruit bring forth, your Word is rich in blessing. May God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit bless us! Let all the world praise him alone; let solemn awe possess us. Now let our hearts say, "Amen!"