Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our Father, and
from our Lord Jesus Christ.
Text: (Isaiah
53:4-6)
Surely
he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions; he
was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us
peace, and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the
iniquity of us all.
Prayer: May
the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your
sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
When we come together for funeral such as this one today,
we come face to face with a hard fact of life: that with every friendship that
we have, we always know that one of us is going to die first. Which one’s it
going to be?
It’s one thing for us to know this in our heads, but it’s
another thing for us to experience it. When we experience this, grief comes
upon us and sorrow comes upon us. Tears come to us in a way that they would
never have come to us the day before.
And we might think that with someone like Willy that we’re
kind of pleased that he went in such a way that he didn’t suffer too much, that
things weren’t drawn out, and all that sort of thing. But it’s still a shock,
that one day he’s here and next day he’s not.
In the Christian faith, we don’t believe that death and
grief and sorrow were part of God’s original creation. If we don’t understand
this, then people start to think that all this business—death, suffering,
sadness—it’s all God’s fault. But this isn’t the case. We read in the beginning
of the bible: God saw everything that he
had made and behold, it was very good.
So where did all this stuff come from? Many people in
western countries today, like Australia, Europe and America, don’t believe that
the devil exists. And this is a very serious thing. The devil is not equal to
God in any way. In fact, we believe that he is a creation of God—though God
also didn’t create the devil evil. Satan fell into sin, and wanted to be like
God. And so the devil wants to look at all the good things that God has
created, and he wants to corrupt them. He wants to twist everything, to turn
everything around, to make everything rotten.
He wants to look at the obedience of people, and he wants
to corrupt them and twist them around into disobedience. He wants to turn love
into hate, he wants to turn life into death, joy into sadness.
And so, here we are, living our everyday human existence
on this earth. And we have days of sadness, and days of happiness. Our life is
such a mixed bag, and a lot of the time we don’t know what one day will bring after
another.
But there’s one thing that God can do that the devil
cannot do. The devil can’t create anything, he only corrupts stuff and messes
things up. But just as God can create things in the first place, he creates
things again. He can bring about a new creation, and he can bring good things again
out of the bad things. He can bring joy out of sorrow, life out of death. Just
as in the beginning the world was such a wonderful, painless, happy place, so
also at the end of the bible, St John writes: I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first
earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city coming
down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I
heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God
is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God
himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their
eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying,
nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”
So the bible teaches, and the Christian faith believes
that death and sadness and sorrow and tears are not things that God built into
the world. But they were added in later, through the devil’s corruption, and
finally, in the end, they will be removed by God himself.
+++
In the passage we just read before it says: God himself will be with them as their God.
Even now, in this life, God himself comes to be with us as
our God. The Christian faith believes in the Holy Trinity: the Father, the Son
and the Holy Spirit. And each Christian is baptised in the name of the Father,
the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy
Spirit is God, and yet there are not three gods but one God.
And when we are baptised, we go to be with God, and God
comes to be with us. We are united with God, though it’s not seen.
But God also comes to be with us, in that God the Son,
Jesus Christ, took human flesh and became a true human being, a real living and
breathing man with flesh and blood, and came and lived among us. He died on the
cross and rose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven and sits at God’s
right hand. He prays for us all the time. Even now, in his human flesh, he
comes and he walks with us. He speaks to us through his Word in his church. He
makes us part of his body in holy baptism, and feeds us with his body and blood
in the Lord’s Supper.
Jesus is always with us as Christians, not simply in a
spiritual way, but in his body, though we can’t see it. So every time we come
together as Christians, we are coming together into the presence of the living,
resurrected Jesus.
At Christmas time, the angel called Jesus, Immanuel, which is Hebrew for “God with us”. When Jesus had risen from
the dead, Thomas called him: My Lord and
my God. And before Jesus ascended into heaven, he said, I will be with you always to the end of the
age. Do you see, that even now, Jesus is with us? He comes to be with his
church and with his people in their time of need. He comes to be with you in
your time of need.
In Isaiah chapter 53, our sermon text for today, it says: Surely he has borne our griefs and carried
our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted. But he
was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him
was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
This is the passage I read at the very beginning of our
sermon today. And for many Christians it is a very well-known passage. It
speaks very clearly about Jesus—there is no-one else who has ever lived whom it
could be talking about—and yet it was written 700 years earlier. Jesus died
around the year 30 AD and Isaiah lived around 700 BC.
And he writes: Surely
he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. Jesus is not so aloof that
he doesn’t come and share our griefs and sorrows with us. In fact, he bears them, he carries them. Before Jesus was crucified, he prayed and cried in
the garden. When his friend Lazarus had died, and he went to go and raise him
up from the dead, we read in John’s gospel: Jesus wept. (This is the shortest verse in the bible, and perhaps
the most profound.) At this time of sadness at our funeral today, he lets us
share a little bit of his sadness with him, not to push us away from him, but
to draw us nearer. Jesus comes to make a new creation out of our tears, and to
bring us comfort in our sadness. And not only does he let us share his sorrow
with him, but he comes and shares our sorrow with us. Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows.
Then Isaiah paints us a picture of Jesus’ suffering and
crucifixion: Yet we esteemed him
stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our
transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the
chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed.
And this is very appropriate for us at this time, as we
come together for this funeral today only a couple of weeks before Good Friday
and Easter. Everything that Jesus did he did for us and for our benefit. In the
end, he did everything for our salvation, which we look forward to and which we
even participate in now through holy baptism and the Word of God. But for our
life now, everything Jesus did he did for our comfort here as we look forward
to the next life with him. The chastisement,
that means when he was flogged, brought
us peace, and with his stripes we
are healed.
And finally, Isaiah says: All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own
way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
We are coming together today to farewell our father, our
grandfather, our husband, our good friend, Willy. We come as friends to
farewell a friend! And we come as fellow battlers to farewell another battler.
We even come as fellow sinners to farewell another sinner! The text says: We have turned—every one—to his own way.
We don’t need to be afraid to call a dead person a sinner, as if that means
that he’s not acceptable to God, and not worthy of heaven. No-one is. People
are saved simply and purely by God’s grace, and because of his love and his
forgiveness. Holy Baptism is God’s work on us, not our work for God. If all of
us were so perfect and pure then Jesus’ death isn’t worth anything.
And so Isaiah says: The
LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. God the Father placed on Jesus
the sin of not just some people, but us
all, it says. And even now, he places upon the Lord Jesus who is risen from
the dead all our cares, our worries, our griefs and our sorrows, and let’s
Jesus share them with us. But also he comes and shares his forgiveness, his
joy, his peace with us. This is what it means when it says: I will be with you always to the end of the
age.
And so let’s finish this sermon and our meditation on
God’s word today with the words of Jesus: I
have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you
will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.
Blessed are those who
mourn for they will be comforted. Amen.
Lord Jesus Christ, come and bear our griefs and carry our
sorrows today. We thank you for this opportunity to give thanks to you for
Willy, and we entrust him into your care, your love and your grace. Comfort us
with your Word and with your Holy Spirit. Amen.
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