This sermon was preached at St Mark's Lutheran Church, Mt Barker (8.30am, 10.30am).
Grace,
mercy and peace be to you from God our Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ.
The sermon
text for today was inspired by the Holy Spirit through the apostle St Matthew. And
we read from his gospel:
Come to me,
all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon
you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly of heart, and you will find
rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
Prayer: Heavenly
Father, send to all of us your Holy Spirit, to me that I may preach well, and
to all of us that we may hear well, in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
Christians over the centuries
have always given each other very helpful advice when reading the bible of
praying to the Holy Spirit for his help to interpret it. And this is very
simply advice, but wonderful, profound advice. Sometimes someone might send us
a letter or an email, and we’re not quite sure what the person means by
something that he or she wrote. So what do we do? We write back to the person,
or we ring them or talk to them face to face and we ask them, “What did you
mean?” We ask the person who wrote the letter, because only the person who
wrote it knows what it means and how to interpret the words.
So also, with the bible, the
author is the Holy Spirit. In 2 Timothy, St Paul writes: All scripture is
breathed out by God. And St Peter writes: men spoke from God as they
were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
St Matthew is dead, and we believe
that his soul is kept safe with Jesus in heaven together with all Christians
who have died in the faith. So we can’t ask him to show us what he meant. But
the Holy Spirit is still alive, still exists, and will always exist, together
with the Father and the Son, Jesus Christ, and so we can always ask the Holy
Spirit for help, because he also is the author of the Scripture and knows what
he’s talking about even more than St Matthew. And when we ask for the Holy
Spirit’s help, he promises to lead and guide us and explain to us exactly what
these words mean.
However, the words of the bible
are clear. In some sense, we shouldn’t really need any help, because we should
just take everything at face value, not needing any help to explain what the
bible says. We need all the help of the Holy Spirit that we can get, not
because the words of the bible are unclear, but because we the readers—who are
corrupted by sin—are so completely unable to fathom the power and the majesty
of all the words that we read in the bible.
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In our reading today, Jesus says:
I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these
things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children;
yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.
These words are such a wonderful,
powerful mystery! There are two mysteries here: the first, that God the Father
has revealed his judgments and his gracious will to little children. But
second, he has hidden these things from the wise and understanding.
First, let’s listen to these
words in Jesus’ prayer and meditate on them: You have hidden these things
from the wise and understanding.
Some people say to pastors:
“Listen pastor, I’m a simple person. I know that Jesus loves me and that’s all
I need to know.” Often this is a big fat excuse for people not to read the
bible, not to pray, and not to learn anything new. When a person thinks it’s
time to stop learning something new from the bible and from Jesus, they’re
probably on their way to hell, because only the devil wants us to stop learning
the words of Jesus.
On the other hand, there are some
people who think they are so educated, that they always try to put the
Christian faith out of other people’s reach. And they say, “Yes, Jesus died for
you, but there are many aspects to the Christian faith that are difficult for
you to understand, and simple people like you won’t know.” St Paul has a thing
or two to say about that. He says: Since we are justified by faith, we have access
by faith into God’s grace. If we try to make the faith inaccessible, then
people can’t have God’s grace and access to God.
I knew someone who once said that
a person should try to educate themselves in the faith at least according to
their level of education in other areas. And it’s true: I’ve met many people
with Master’s Degrees and PhDs who have never learnt anything about Jesus since
Sunday School. All those brains wasted on earthly things and worldly hypocrisy and
never used for the service of God and for the church!
Jesus says: You have hidden
these things from the wise and understanding. Often it has happened in
Christian mission fields that missionaries have translated the bible into a new
language, and this is the first time that this language has ever been written
down. This happened a lot with aboriginal languages in Australia. The
missionaries, before they translated the bible, had to invent an alphabet, and
then teach it to the people so that could read it.
For many, many Christians around
the world, there is only one book that is published in their language: the
bible. So they want their children to go to school and to learn how to read.
Why? For only one reason—so that they can read the bible.
And here we are in the English-speaking
world, with so many books, so many magazines, so much trash, so much rubbish,
to read. Ask yourself: can you read? Are you able to read a sentence and work
out what it means? OK—have you ever read the entire bible? More than once? In
the last 5 years? Have you a good prayer book or a good devotional book to
read?
Remember: there are all kinds of
people all throughout the world who have no magazines—no comic books, no
Women’s Weekly, no Mills and Boon, no biographies of their favourite sports’
stars—and yet here we have all these things, we have the education coveted by
the rest of the world who are desperate to hear the good news of Jesus, and
yet, we who are perfectly capable won’t read the bible.
And so, here we are in one of the
most affluent countries in the world, in one of the most literate countries in
the world, we who can afford to buy a bible in 500 different versions and we
who have the ability to read them all, and yet here we are in one of the most
godless countries of the world, a country which daily rejects anew its
Christian heritage and laws. And all at the same time, we think we know
everything. We think we’ve got something to give to the rest of the world. And
yet there are people now in our country who are missing out on even hearing the
story of Christmas anytime during their childhood.
And Jesus knew and prophesied that
this would happen. And he said: You have hidden these things from the wise
and understanding.
And yet, Jesus says: And you
have revealed them to little children.
Here is a passage in the bible
that teaches us to value children, and every single child in the world, and all
the little people in God’s kingdom. Mother Teresa once said: “How can there be too
many children? That’s like saying there are too many flowers.”
Let the little children come to
me, says Jesus, and do not stop them, for the kingdom of God
belongs to such as these.
Think about the things you
believed from the bible when you were a child. Do you believe in angels,
miracles, in heaven and hell? Do you believe that you are Jesus’ little lamb?
Would you thank God for your wings if you were a butterfly? What about the
atoning power of Jesus’ blood? What about the resurrection of Jesus Christ? Do
you still believe in that like a little child? Or have you grown up? Have you
become a bored, rebellious spiritual teenager? Do you say, “Well, obviously
Jesus didn’t actually mean that, or say that”?
You must become a child again.
And through the forgiveness of each and every single one of your sins through
the blood of our Lord Jesus, our Father in heaven restores our innocence, and
gives to us that pure, beautiful innocence of his forgiveness that is even more
perfect that the tiniest newborn child.
Isn’t it wonderful what deep,
profound lessons we learn as they are blurted out by little children in such
simplicity? Isn’t it amazing how the tiniest child can break the pride of all
of us and make into fools we who think we are so important?
But also, remember those other
little people around the place: the disabled, the handicapped, the mentally
ill, the sick, the abandoned, the poor. Why does God allow these things to
happen? They are all a reminder to all of us that we are all disabled, handicapped,
mentally ill, sick, poor, much more than we realise, and we need these people
to remind us that we will be completely able-bodied, without blemish, clothed
and in our right minds, completely healthy, completely at home, completely
rich, in Paradise, in Jesus’ eternal heavenly kingdom. When I am old, I hope
there are still some people with Down-Syndrome in the world left to teach love
to us who think we have some kind of Up-Syndrome. If only we knew the depths of
our neediness before God. We can’t shut God’s little ones out—they must be our
teachers.
The church is not a club for
like-minded, wise and intelligent people. It is God’s crèche for infants,
baptised babies, broken sinners whom God looks after and saves and raises from
death. And when we are risen from death, then for the first time we will
realise what it really means to be an adult, to be a grown-up, because we will
be God’s children, God’s infants, the lambs in the arms of Jesus, the Lamb of
God who was slain.
Will you sit in Jesus’ lap, and
learn from him, like a little child? Will you learn your spiritual alphabet and
your spiritual times-tables from scratch, one word at a time?
Jesus says: All things have
been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father,
and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses
to reveal him. Choose us, Jesus, as you have promised, and reveal your
Father to us!
You know, the closer you come to
Jesus, and learn from him, the more the world will want to wear you out, and
burden you. Because those people outside the faith, outside of salvation, those
people without the Holy Spirit, will entice you and seduce you to be “wise and
understanding” like them. They want you to have a Master’s Degree in Jesus-hating
and call it “love”, a PhD in teenage rebellion and call it “progress”.
Beware—if you can read and write, then this temptation is very much on your
doorstep. Just like the devil tempted Adam and Eve in the garden, he wants us
to eat the world’s fruit and use all of our book smarts, all of our education, against
Jesus. The devil says: You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of
it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. And
so Jesus says: When the world hates you, remember that it hated me first. In
Acts 14, it says that St Paul was strengthening the souls of the disciples,
encouraging them to continue in the faith, and saying that through many
tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God.
And so Jesus also in our reading
wants to encourage us, because he doesn’t want us to be put off. He wants to
show us all the hatred of the world, all the apathy, all the indifference, all
the people who hear the news of Jesus’ resurrection and are bored by it, and then
encourage us and say: My yoke is easy, and my burden is light. It is a yoke
fit only for a little child, a burden heavy enough only for a baby to carry.
Martin Luther wrote: If we
will approach Scripture with earnestness, we will find to our heart’s great joy
that we perceive Christ rightly, how he bore our sins, and how we shall live
everlastingly with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, if only we remain simple students
and fools… There’s no room, therefore, for a smart intellectual and disputer
when it comes to this book, the Holy Scripture. God gave other
disciplines—grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, philosophy, jurisprudence,
medicine—in which we can be judicious, dispute, dig, and question as to what is
right and what is not. But here with Holy Scripture, the Word of God, let
disputing and questioning cease, and say, God has spoken; therefore, I believe.
And so, little children, little
lambs, little babies, listen to Jesus’ encouragement to you: Come to me, all
who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon
you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find
rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
Amen.
Lord Jesus, there are so many
things in your word that are hidden from us because we are so arrogant and
filled with pride, and we think that we are wise and understanding. Send us
your Holy Spirit, and teach us to repent, and the value and treasure each word
in the Scripture like a little child collecting stickers. Give us rest in your
word, Lord Jesus, we who are weary. Forgive us, strengthen us, and purify us,
and give us pure, heavenly rest for our souls. Amen.
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