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INJ
St Luke 6:36-45
'As Your Father in Heaven is Merciful'
Divine Service
The 4th Sunday after Trinity Sunday | July 1st, 2007
Dear Saints,
You have a merciful Father in heaven. That's what Jesus says, “Be merciful as your Father in heaven is merciful.” Our Father might be a lot of other things: powerful, just, righteous, glorious, angry about sin, and all of these other things, but our theology, our knowledge of God, and our lives as Christians begins here, where Jesus begins: “Your Father in heaven is merciful.”
Mercy. It's a beautiful word. It speaks of the Lord's generosity, His compassion and love and tenderness and and His sending His Son into a bloody death and providing for us every good thing. It is by God's mercy that we live and have our being, that we have life and salvation and the forgiveness of all of our sins. It is by God's mercy that we are not dropped, right now, into the fiery pit of hell; it is by His mercy that we take every breath. and His mercy carries us further, it is of the Father's mercy that the Son is born of the virgin Mary, lived and then died on the cross for you and your sins.
This is why we pray, every time we are gathered together, pray for the Lord's mercy: “Lord, have mercy upon us. Christ, have mercy upon us. Lord, have mercy upon us.” The Kyrie Eleison, that's Greek for “Lord, mercy me; have mercy upon me.”
And the Lord answers this prayer, He does have mercy, He does love and forgive. And this makes a difference. Look at the difference it makes. Jesus says, “Be merciful as your Father in heaven is merciful.” His mercy is such that it rubs off, that what is His is ours. So we, the children of the heavenly Father, are to show forth our Father's name in our being merciful.
And to help us better know what this means, Jesus gives us four commands about what being merciful is: Judge not, Condemn not, Forgive and Give. This is the outline of the Christian life, of our loving our neighbor. These four imperatives, commands, stand before us by our Lord Jesus, we are to judge not, condemn not, forgive and give.
How are we to understand these commands? Simply this: we treat others as the Lord treats us. With the Lord Jesus' cross ever before our eyes, and our hearts beating with His promise of forgiveness, we do unto others as our merciful Father has done unto us. We live in our absolution.
Tertulian, early church father, who later turned heretic, speaks of Christians like little fish. “But we, little fishes, after the example of our ICXUS Jesus Christ, are born in water, nor have we safety in any other way than by permanently abiding in water.” [Tertullian, On Baptism, I. ANF 3.669] We never leave the font; the water is deep. So we don't say, “I was baptized,” but rather “I am baptized.” We live in our baptism, in the name given to us there, and the forgiveness of all of our sins proclaimed and spoken over us. The enemy, Tertullian goes on to say, is trying to destroy us by getting us out of the water, drawing us away from our baptism and the life the Lord has given there, and this is the life that Jesus is telling us about, the life of mercy.
Let me ask you a question: what wrong has been do to you that you have not done much worse to our Father in heaven?
Has someone spoken ill of you, poorly of you? Have you not used the Lord's name in vain? Or stood by as others did the same? Have you, bearing the name “Christian”, lived in such a way that the Lord's name is defamed?
Has someone stolen something from you? Have you not, much more, stolen from God the worship that is due His name, the honor that is His as God's? All things are His, and yet we act like they are ours, is this not stealing for God?
Has someone wronged you? Is it not your sin that laid the whip on Jesus' back, pressed the thorns onto His brow, pounded the nails through His flesh and bone?
Do you not see that the sins committed against us pail in comparison to the sins which we have committed against God? That's what Jesus is talking about in the parable at the end of our text. “How can you say to your brother, 'Brother, let me remove the speck that is in your eye,' when you yourself do not see the plank that is in your own eye?” Planks in our eyes: that's a 2x4 sticking out of our eye socket. The image is ridiculous. If you have a 2x4 in your eye you can't do anything. Far from walking around picking the dust out of our neighbor's eyes, the only thing that would concern someone with a plank in their eye is getting the plank out.
So it ought to be with us sinners. If it is true that each of us is a poor miserable sinner and that we deserve the Lord's temporal and eternal punishment, if that is true, if that is really what we deserve, if we are standing of the brink of destruction, then the thing that matters most to each of us is being rescued from our own sin and destruction, getting that plank out of the eye, finding our own forgiveness. We have enough of our own sin to deal with that it is utter foolishness to be busy trying to pick at our neighbor's sin.
If you've fallen and broken your leg, you don't go around with band aids looking for people with scratches, no. You go the emergency room. That's what church is, the Lord's emergency room with a specialty in plank removal, sin forgiveness, bring dead people back to life, giving out, in generous doses, the heavenly Father's mercy. That is why we've been gathered here, and it is what Jesus has done for us.
Your sins are wiped away, covered, atoned, suffered for and died for, forgiven. The plank that was your destruction has been removed from your eye, you are no longer blind but you can see. And now that Jesus has done this eye surgery you see differently, you look at things differently. We do not look on our neighbor with the glasses of judgment and condemnation, but with eyes of forgiveness and generosity.
When we see the sins of our neighbor, and when those sins are against us, we say, “Yes, I too am a sinner, and have sinned against heaven and my neighbor. If it were not for the Lord's mercy I would be finished. And so from the mercy that my heavenly Father has shown to me, I forgive you your sins.” So we forgive one another and bear with on another and love one another, just as we are loved and forgiven by our heavenly Father.
Dear Little Fish, Baptized Ones,
Your Father in heaven is merciful to you. Live in His mercy and rejoice that He has put away all your sins. Amen.
And the peace of God which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
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Pastor Bryan Wolfmueller
Hope Lutheran Church | Aurora, CO
