Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ.
Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!
Text: (John 16:16-22)
Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy… You have sorrow now, but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.
Ɛpuc ɛpuc, ɣän la̱rä jɛ yɛ, bia wiee, kä bia pa̱r, kä bi ji̱ ɣɔaa lo̱ckiɛn tɛɛth. Bia tekɛ bɛ̈c lɔaac, kä bi bɛ̈c lɔaacdun rɔ̱ loc ni tɛ̈th lɔaac... Ta̱yɛ kɛ jiath lɔaac täämɛ, duundɛ ɣöö bä yɛ nyɔk kɛ nën, kä bi lo̱ckun tɛɛth, kä thilɛ ram mi bi tɛ̈th lɔaacdun ka̱n kä yɛ.
Prayer: Sanctify us with the truth, Lord. Your word is truth. Amen.
Each one of us has a place in life. We are placed by God in a particular circumstance, at a particular time, in a particular place. This is called our “station”. It’s the place where we stand. And in that place we have a particular calling from God: this is called our “vocation”.
Now have a think about it: where are you placed by God? In the Small Catechism, when Luther teaches people to examine themselves before confessing their sins, he says, “Consider your place in life according to the Ten Commandments?” Consider your place in life. And Luther says: “Are you a father, mother, son, daughter, husband, wife, or worker?”
There’s your place. So when I think about my place in life, my station if you like, I say: I’m a father, I’m a husband, I’m a pastor. That’s my basic place in life. I’m also a son, a grandson, a citizen of Australia, and things like that.
Think about your place in life. Think about your family relationships, and think about your place of work. That’s where God has put you, and that’s where God has promised that you will flourish as a Christian. Some people will have stronger responsibilities in one thing than in another. But that’s where God has given us our calling, our vocation.
It is always a great temptation to want to escape from those places, to escape from that place where God has put us in life. That is always the great temptation. It’s a temptation for husbands to escape from their wife and children, and it’s a temptation for wives to escape from their husbands and children, it’s a temptation for children to want escape from their parents, it’s a temptation for workers to want to escape from their work. It’s a temptation for us to want to escape from the confines of the body: when people want drugs, or alcohol to dull themselves, or even religious practices to escape the boring old realities of life. Pretty much every serious temptation for us is the temptation to want to escape from where God has placed us. But God hasn’t placed us in a prison: he hasn’t stuck us on a chain, but St Paul says:
For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
Isn’t that a strange text? He says we are free. And then he says: Stand. Stand still, stand firm where God has placed you. Where God has placed you, that is where you will find true freedom.
I often think about the horse in the back paddock over my back fence. That horse is free, but there’s a fence around it. It’s not restrained just because it lives within a fence, but what would happen if someone went and demolished the fence? It would go galloping off into the great sunset, and probably be hit by a car halfway to Morwell. It’s not slavery that there’s a fence around the horse, it’s freedom. Freedom within the fence. It would slavery if the horse’s hooves were chained in one spot, but they’re not. But if there were no fence, he wouldn’t be free either, he’d be lost.
We’re not lost, either – we’re free and God has put us in a place. He’s given us a station, a place in life – and he’s given us a calling to fulfil in that place, a vocation.
All our sins are committed there within that fence, and everything is forgiven within that fence.
For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
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The same goes for us in our private, inward spiritual life.
From the mediaeval times, there was such a thing called “Lectio Divina”. This was the way in which monks and nuns read the bible, and in the Roman Catholic Church it still happens, and it’s become quite popular in other denominations too.
So this was the way in which monks and nuns read the bible, and many Christians did it like this. And there were four basic things that people were encouraged to do.
First of all, they read the bible. This was called “lectio” (which means reading). Then they meditated on the passage, taking a few words and thinking them over. This was called “meditatio” (which means mediation). Then they prayed about what they had read. This part was called “Oratio” (which means prayer). And the last thing was “contemplatio” (contemplation) which was where they simply focussed on the loving presence of God, with no words.
So you had these four things: Reading, Mediation, Prayer and Contemplation.
Sounds quite good, don’t you think? But there’s a little problem. It encourages you to escape. You start with the bible, then you put the bible down, and you pray, then you transcend into the lofty, mystic heights.
Luther challenged this way of reading scripture. And he came to a different understanding of this after reading Psalm 119. Instead, he suggested three things which make a theologian, which train a person in the Christian faith: “prayer, meditation, and temptation.”
Instead of putting reading first, he put prayer first. This was prayer for the Holy Spirit to give enlightenment. Then the second thing was meditation. Notice that he didn’t have “reading the bible” as a separate category. This was because reading the bible is meditating on it. Meditation is not a response to reading the word of God. Meditation is the actual working of the word of God on you. Jesus says: “My words are Spirit and life.” Meditation is the Holy Spirit working on you as you read the bible, and as you think over it. Then the third one, temptation.
Instead of making people escape from life, Luther puts people right back into the middle of it. This is because now that we have prayed and read the bible, the devil wants to take it away from us and destroy us. But then when we’re tempted and when we receive spiritual attack, and when we receive hardship and suffering, where are we led? Back to prayer! Back to meditating on the Scripture! So it’s a cycle. And that’s how we live our lives.
And we live our lives, praying, meditating, and receiving attack in our places in life. In our stations. We’re standing in our places, and then the arrows are fired, the spears are thrown. And the arrows are destroyed through prayer, and through the sword of the Spirit, the bible. Prayer and meditation.
Even now, in church, we experience these things. We pray, we begin our service with prayer. In fact, everything in the beginning of the service, all the things we sing and say lead up to the prayer of the day as we prepare to hear the word of God. Then we listen to the word of God in the bible and in the sermon. We think about it, we churn it over. We meditate, even day-dream about it. And then we are tempted. We are convicted of sin, or we think about what we we’re doing during the week that we didn’t like. We’re thrown back into our lives being tempted all the time. But we do it, having received the body and blood of Christ, and Christ’s blessing on everything we do. “The Lord bless you and keep you.”
Now you might have realised by this point in the sermon, that I haven’t even mentioned anything to do with our text today, yet!
One more story. There’s an interesting story about a boy who was scared about an evil spirit or a ghost or something that he wanted to run away from home. People came to Martin Luther to ask his advice about it. What do you think he said? He said, “Tell that boy to go home, because the devil wants to take us away from our calling, our place in life. And if the boy is harassed by the devil, he should say, ‘You can’t scare me, because this is where God has placed me.’”
It was so important for Martin Luther that the boy stay in the place where God had placed him.
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In our text today, Jesus gives us one of the most comforting passages in the whole of Scripture.
He says: “A little while and you will not see me, and again a little while you will see me.”
The first thing this is referring to is that Jesus dies and is buried, and disciples don’t see Jesus. And then they see him again when he is raised from the dead.
He says: “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy.”
Listen to those words again: Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament.
You might think, “Those words aren’t comforting at all!” But they are! Because what it means that every piece of suffering that you experience, Jesus has prophesied in advance. He has given it to you, and he is with you.
The most comforting thing Jesus ever did was to lay his life down on the cross for us. And when suffering comes to us as well, when we weep and lament, when we are sorrowful, we know that we are with Jesus. In fact, when times are good, we often forget to give thanks to God, and we become lazy. Australia has it very good, and Christianity isn’t exactly our national religion!
When we are in our day-to-day lives and we’re living life, normal life, doing our normal thing, and we suffer a bit, we find our work hard, we find our work boring, we find our situation tiresome, or heavy, or exhausting, then we can say: “Jesus has prophesied this would happen. He has said: “Truly truly, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice.” He has said: “You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy.” This bit of suffering, hardship, poverty, sickness, whatever, is a down-payment for the joy of heaven that will never be taken away. Thank God for every time you have some hardship and say with St Paul: I rejoice in my suffering. I boast of my suffering. Every time you realise that you have sinned, thank God that the Holy Spirit has been sent to you to lead you to trust that forgiveness of sins even more than you did beforehand. Even sometimes in our vocations, in the places where God has put us, we might think that we’re even in a prison: St Paul says: “We felt that we received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.”
Jesus says: “When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world. So also you have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”
And so, as we leave the church today, we will go back to where God has placed us, and there will be temptation. But the words “The Lord bless you and keep you” will be written all over it. The body and blood of Christ which you have received for the forgiveness of sins will be strengthening you all the way through it.
There will be temptations, there will be hindrances, but God promises to roll away every stone from the door of the tomb by his holy angels, if we only keep standing firm where we are placed. When we suffer, we think we’re going to do nothing but anoint the dead body of Jesus with a whole heap of spices. But remember that those women when they went to the tomb found the tomb empty, the body gone, and their risen Lord calling them by name.
And so Jesus says to us: Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy… You do have sorrow now, I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.
Amen.
In you is gladness in all our sadness, Jesus, joy of every heart; by you are given blessings from heaven, true Redeemer, our delight. Our sins you've taken, our bonds you've broken; trusting you surely, we build securely, we stand for ever. Hallelujah! Our hearts are turning to you with yearning, on you relying, living or dying, we're yours for ever. Hallelujah! Amen.
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