Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ.
Text: (Matthew 6:24-34)
Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
Prayer: Heavenly Father, we come to you in boldness and confidence as your dear children, calling on you, our dear Father. Let your Word be taught in its truth and purity, and help us to lead holy lives according to it, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Our Gospel reading today is a great favourite of many people. People often think of this reading when they are in the great outdoors. Jesus tells us to “look at the birds of the air” and “consider the lilies of the field”.
But what’s so special about the birds? And what’s so special about the lilies?
Our reading today begins with these words: “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.” – or in Greek, it uses the Hebrew expression “mammon”: You cannot serve God and mammon.
What’s significant about the birds and the lilies is that they only serve one master. We might think that birds and lilies don’t have masters at all. But that’s not how the bible speaks about them.
Psalm 148 says: “Mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars! Beasts and all livestock, creeping things and flying birds!... Let them praise the name of the Lord!”
The birds have a kind of instinct where they are not taught how to live—but somehow they seem to know what to do: they know how to feed themselves, they know how to reproduce, they know how to look after their young and build a nest, and generally they do a pretty good job, sometimes even a bit better than many people! And when they do this according to God’s order, they praise the name of the Lord.
The lilies have been given great beauty, together with all the flowers throughout the world, which they didn’t have to earn and they didn’t have to work for. They simply blossom and flourish by pure grace alone, and everybody all throughout the world agrees that they are beautiful.
And human beings are created in the image of God! We should know how to feed ourselves infinitely better than the birds. We should know how to clothe ourselves infinitely better than the lilies!
And many people today think that people should just be left to themselves to do whatever they like and we would have a fair and equal society. But unfortunately, this simply doesn’t happen. There’s always someone who abuses the system.
Now why is this? Why can’t human beings live a peaceful life just like the birds and the flowers? Why can’t we all just live in harmony with nature?
There are many people who call themselves “environmentalists” today, who do a lot of looking around at the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. They notice that these things are beautiful and that we should preserve them for future generations. And many of these people also come to the conclusion that the problem with our planet is human beings, and so they are in favour of preservation of the forests and wildlife, but they are against human procreation and human life, and promote abortion and euthanasia, and such like.
Now why is this the case?
The problem with our planet is not human beings: the problem is sin. Human beings are created in the image of God, but they have also fallen into sin. Human life is precious, it is valuable, it is beautiful: so beautiful that our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ chose to take on our human flesh and to be born of a virgin.
The human race is a rich garden of flowers that God creates afresh and anew, day after day. Mother Teresa said: “How can people say that there are too many children in the world: that’s like saying there are too many flowers.” Adam got it right when he looked at God’s final creation, the jewel in creation’s crown, the woman, and he said: “This at last is flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone!” These is the first recorded words of Adam.
Jesus says to “love your neighbour as yourself”. If we want to understand what it is to love our neighbour, we need firstly to understand what it is to love ourselves. Adam sees the woman, his neighbour, his wife, his companion, and he loves her, but he also loves himself because she is just like him!
But for some reason, human beings hate themselves and always want to self-destruct. What we don’t understand is that God created us good, but we have fallen into sin. So it is a good thing to hate the sin we see in ourselves, and that our most burning desire be to be rid of it and done with it. God hates the sin in us too, but he does not hate sinners—on the contrary, he loves sinners. God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. And we are called to love our neighbour (our fellow sinners) just as we ourselves love the wonderful existence for which God has created us, under the cross, under the blood of Christ, under the forgiveness of all our sins.
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Jesus shows us our sin in our reading today, when he says: “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.”
Jesus is not telling you here anything that you can’t basically work out for yourself. He is not talking about so-called “spiritual” matters first; he is simply talking about having a master, having a boss.
Many of you either work, or have worked in your life. Most of us know what it’s like to be in a workplace. What would it be like if you had two bosses that had completely different ideas? As an employee, you had it signed into your contract that you needed to follow to the letter everything that your two bosses said, even though they disagreed. Can you imagine what would happen?
Could you imagine this in the army? Could you imagine a platoon of soldiers, with two lieutenants, who were equally in charge, and had two completely different battle plans? Each soldier, as normal, would be required to obey both of these equally superior officers, and would have to follow their orders precisely, even though they were always receiving two completely different set of orders. Could you imagine what would happen on the battlefield? The platoon would be destroyed by the enemy, hands down! There’s no way that they could win the battle.
In the same way, Jesus says: No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.
Each person in the world is set under authority. We all have masters we need to serve and respect, and we also have people under our authority. And God commands us to submit to authority when he says: “Honour your father and your mother.”
And Luther writes his explanation: “We should fear and love God so that we do not despise or anger our parents and other authorities, but honour them, serve and obey them, love and cherish them.”
Also in the back of the Small Catechism we have the Table of Duties, where Luther writes out bible passages for us, which have to do with different structures of authority. Firstly, it says what bishops, pastors and preachers should do for their hearers, and what hearers owe their pastors. It says what civil government should do for their nation, and how citizens should act towards the government. It says how husbands should treat their wives, and how wives should treat their husbands. It says how parents should treat their children, and children their parents, how workers should treat their bosses and how employers should treat their workers, and how youth should respect older people, and how widows should behave.
So how many masters do you have? I know that in my life there’s all sorts of people that I owe a certain respect to, and sometimes these different people pull me in different directions. Sometimes a person’s parents tell them different things, some old people give young people bad advice.
So how should we as Christians behave towards those who are in authority over us? The fourth commandment says: “honour them”. Honour your father and your mother. In fact, if you read carefully the Book of Proverbs, we can see there that God gives us authority for the precise reason so that He Himself can speak his word and his will to us. Proverbs says: “My son, hear your father’s instruction.”
Jesus also commands people in authority to lead through serving. Jesus gives us this example through the feet-washing. So pastors should carry out their duties faithfully, governments should rule fairly and justly, husbands should love their wives and not be harsh with them, parents should bring up their children in the training and discipline of the Lord, bosses should treat their employees well, and so on. This is the way people in authority wash the feet of those who are placed under their care.
And so, Ephesians says: “Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not men, because you know that the Lord will reward everyone forever good he does.” We should take everything that is said to us in authority as the word of God, and recognise that through earthly authorities it is God himself who is ruling his world, even through people who don’t believe that he exists.
But sometimes, in our various vocations and callings, we have a situation where the people who are put in authority abuse the authority and disobey the word of God in their calling. And this is wrong.
In these situations, we need to disobey the person in authority, and correct them and tell them what’s right. When we do this, we serve them with the truth, and we speak the truth in love. Of course, this might mean that we receive some abuse: children who rightly correct their parents might be treated wrongly by them, lay-people who rightly correct their pastors might be treated wrongly by them, and employees who rightly correct their bosses might very well lose their jobs.
This sort of heartache for us should not deter us from speaking the truth in love, and suffering for the sake of Jesus’ name. It is our duty, it is our mission to speak the truth, and it is the way of God increases and the church grows, it is the way the word of God goes out into all the world.
Often we think that it’s easier to keep quiet and shut up. But then we start to despise those who are in authority over us: we start to grumble against our pastors, our parents, our government. It’s not our duty to grumble—it is a sin to grumble. It is our duty to speak—and to speak the truth in love, no matter what the cost.
In Acts 4, we see an example of this in the apostles, when they are commanded by the Jewish high priests not to speak in the name of Jesus. And they say, “We must obey God rather than man”. What happens? They are thrown in prison. And when they are released, they go out and speak in the name of Jesus again. It says: “They left the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonour for the name.”
So don’t worry about the future suffering, don’t worry about the money you might lose. Just do what’s right.
And so, Jesus says in our reading today: “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money. Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air.”
Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
We are gathered here to listen to the word of God and to receive the Holy Sacraments. And we pray to our heavenly Father than he would send us the Holy Spirit so that we may believe the words that we have heard. When God sends us the Holy Spirit through these means, through the preaching of the word and the administration of the sacrament, he gives us the grace to believe his word, so that we can lead holy lives here on earth and also in eternity.
That’s what it means to seek God’s kingdom. It means to listen to the preaching of the word of God. Because, as St Paul says, faith comes through hearing, and hearing comes through the word of Christ.
It is Christ who speaks to us, and it is Christ who feeds us, and it is Christ who clothes us, and is Christ who forgives us right from the depths of his wounds. Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
Amen.
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