Law Used Correctly

We know that the law is good when used correctly. ⁹ For the law was not intended for people who do what is right. It is for people who are lawless and rebellious, who are ungodly and sinful, who consider nothing sacred and defile what is holy, who kill their father or mother or commit other murders. ¹⁰ The law is for people who are sexually immoral, or who practice homosexuality, or are slave traders, liars, promise breakers, or who do anything else that contradicts the wholesome teaching ¹¹ that comes from the glorious Good News entrusted to me by our blessed God. (1 Tim. 1:8-11 NLT)

The biblical books of 1&2 Timothy and Titus are called the pastoral epistles. They are called that because they are a basic church order book. What is the purpose of the pastoral office? Who should be placed in it? How does it carry out its purpose? How should the members of the body of Christ understand if the call is being done? (Cross reference God’s complaints in Ezekiel 34, the Old Testament lesson of the day.) The Apostle Paul makes an assertion right up front, “Certain persons, desiring to be teachers of the law, without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions, have wondered into vain discussions, by swerving from a pure heart, a good conscience and a sincere faith.” I’ve rearranged the clauses there for a purpose.

There are those who simply want to be known as teachers of law. Jesus points these people out as those who “who like to walk around in long robes, and love greetings in the marketplaces and the best seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at feasts (Lk. 20:46 ESV).” They like the trapping of the office, the job of the office less so. Liking the trappings of the office but not the job, they never really learn what they are saying. They don’t put in the work. They will say it very confidently, but they don’t understand what they are saying. And the inevitable path when you put such people in leadership positions is “vain discussions.”

What are “vain discussions?” They can come in a variety of shapes. We probably jump immediately to the caricature of “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” Of course the answer is as many as God wants. The deeper answers are simply “I don’t know” and “how does this effect how we are live?” But there are other vain discussions. When someone is arguing in bad faith that is a vain discussion. When they refuse to use words as commonly defined that is a vain discussion. You think you agree, but later on find out that yes means no to them. When you don’t care about the person you are talking to as an end, but only as a means to getting something else, maybe the good seats at the table. I’m sure you have had many vain discussions in your days.

How does the called and ordained servant of the word wind up there? By swerving from a pure heart, a good conscience and a sincere faith. The holders of the office can probably often come off overly earnest. But at the root of the entire office is being willing to look personally stupid because you are preaching one thing: Christ crucified and risen. And that is not a vain discussion where resurrection means some metaphor. If it’s a metaphor, to hell with it all. I want to know the power of His resurrection (Phil 3:10).

And what do those things allow one to do? To use the law correctly. The law isn’t for a people who do what is right. If you are doing what is right, you don’t need a law. The law is for us sinners. It is a curb. Those who are in temporal offices need to arrest and punish murderers. Their job is to protect sinners from the worst of each other. The law tells us that we need a savior. It is a mirror we can look in and see our rebellious and ungodly heart. And the law is a lamp to our feet. This is the way our savior trod. This is the glorious Good News. You have a savior, Jesus Christ. And these are the good works he has laid out in advance for us to walk in following his steps.

If the office is justifying jumping the curb or those who might level it. If it is refusing to hold up the mirror. If it puts the lamp under a bushel. You might be in vain discussion. The good shepherd is honest.

Temporal Blessing of the Land

“The distinction between law and gospel is the highest art in Christendom.” – Martin Luther

When modern Lutherans have thought about Law and Gospel they have tended to do so in two ways. The first is as an individual. The law condemns me; the gospel proclaims my salvation. And that is fine…as far as it goes. The second way is more troubling. We have tended to put law and gospel in contradiction to each other. Because the law condemns me we label it “bad,” while the gospel is “good” because it saves me. And anytime someone brings up the law we dismiss it because we are free in the gospel. Those two ways of pondering the distinction of law and gospel have at least been debated. There are minority reports on the 20^th and 21^st century handling of this highest art which take them to task. There is a third part that just floats under the surface like an iceberg. Everything in law and gospel has been focused upon salvation. And don’t get me wrong, salvation is important. You might even say ultimate. But we are not taken immediately out of this world (John 17:15, 1 Cor 5:10). “How then shall we live” is important. And how we shall live together is also important.

The Old Testament lesson for this week (Deuteronomy 30:15-20) comes from Moses’ final words to Israel after 40 years in the wilderness before they take the promised land. Moses’ worlds are clear law. “If you obey the commandments of the LORD you God that I command you today, by loving the LORD your God, by walking in his ways and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his rules…”. There are some interesting distinctions made like the gradations in the law – commandments, statutes and rules – which we might think of as the moral law, the civil law and the kosher laws of religious cleanliness. But it is the law which demands that our hearts follow it, but that law has no ability within itself to compel hearts. Israel was always a stubborn and stiff-necked people, like all sinners. But the promise that is attached to this law is neither an individual promise nor a salvation promise. If you keep it…“you shall live and multiply, and the LORD will bless you in the land that you are entering to take possession of it.” The promise, at least this one of the law, is about the here and now, and it is more about the collective.

God in his grace is giving Isreal the land. That is the gospel. God promised that to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and God keeps his promises. Ultimately that gospel promise of the land is fulfilled in the New Jerusalem and the life of the world to come. But the law of God is good and wise. If the society one lives in is one that respects the 10 commandments (commandments), and if that society has civil laws that are both upheld and respected (statutes), and if that society has folk ways that are shared (rules), things will go better. That is not a promise of a rose garden for every individual, but collectively, that is a place where people can live. They are not worried every day about murder and theft and calumny. That is a place where people would desire to have children (multiply). That is a place where “the mandate of heaven” has fallenjoyfully – “the LORD will bless you.” These are not the blessings of the gospel which come to us by grace. No amount of doing these things earns us heaven. But the way the LORD has created this world, these things are part of that natural law.

Sin of course runs in us and we are always looking for ways to take advantage. If everyone else walks in those ways, but I defect from them, I can get all kinds of private benefits. But as everyone defects, it all falls apart. “If your heart turns away, and you will not hear, but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, I declare to you today, that you shall surely perish. You shall not live long in the land.”

The law has no ability to enforce itself. But by grace God has given us the land. God has given us the world to come, and God has also given to us this place. He has both given us salvation and everything we need to support this body and life. And our lot has fallen in a blessed place. As Moses said to Israel, “choose life, that you and your offspring may live.” That you may live in eternity, but also that God might bless our native land and firm may she ever stand.

You Get What You Need

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Biblical Text: Luke 10:25-37

Note: The recording is a re-recording after the fact. We had a recording error real time.

Wants and needs are two different things. We want to justify ourselves, or maybe better put we want to be able to “do this and you will live.” There are lots of ways of being dishonest with ourselves to justify doing evil, but Paul’s “elementary spirits” (Galatians 4, call it the natural law) usually call us out. It is really hard to lie to yourself all the time. It is easier to justify leaving things left undone. That’s the lawyers tactic. “Who is my neighbor?” Who can I exclude from the circle of love and still satisfy the law. The sermon notes a recent cultural conversation stumbled into by the Vice President. And like all our cultural conversations these days, it was completely warped by our polarization. Because there is a way that the VP was correct in quoting the order of love. We are limited creatures. And call it the other ditch, we can often be sinful in helping out abstract far away neighbor while those in our direct care – on our daily roads – lie beaten and half dead. There is also a way that he could be wrong which is this lawyer’s question. Can I exclude people as too far away to care about? This is the very cutting edge of the law. It always convicts. All humanity is our neighbor.

But the biggest reason all humanity is our neighbor is because Christ has crossed the road and embraced all of humanity. Christ has bound our wounds, and placed us in care and promises to return and repay anything. We want to be able to talk our way in; we’ve been given mercy. You can’t always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need. And then you go and show mercy to those in your walk.

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Love and the Law

How does one love God? How does one love their neighbor?

There are lots of sayings that Jesus is unique on, but in regards to the law, Jesus was shocking in his clarity, but not in his innovation. The shock of Jesus on the law is that he took it seriously and would not accept the lawyerly loopholes. He came not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it (Matthew 5:17). His innovative summary of that law of God is at the end of his re-upping of the 10 commandments in that Sermon on the Mount, “you must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48).” But Jesus also nods assent to the more standard summaries of the law as seen in the introduction to our Gospel Lesson (Luke 10:25-37). “Love the Lord with all your heart…and your neighbor as yourself.” The lawyer is probing Jesus for what loopholes he will support. And by the end he realizes that Jesus’ answer is “none.”

All of that is so much the second use of the law – religious or mirror use of it. Looking in the zero loophole law of Jesus shined to a perfectly smooth finish with full silvering on the back we can see every single moral flaw on our face. And in doing that there are one of two reactions. Either Jesus is an overly scrupulous nutcase in which case we can just walk away. Nothing that he says is “reasonable”. Or, Jesus is the one who loves us enough to tell us the truth. Being a “good person” is not going to save you. For salvation – and the lawyer’s initial question is “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” – for salvation you must look outside of the law.

But that does not mean the law is useless. The promise of the law – “You shall therefore keep my statutes and my rules; if a person does them, he shall live by them. (Leviticus 18:5)” – is a false misleading dream. We cannot keep it. We have not kept it. We are not perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect. But the law does tell us what true love of our neighbor looks like.

I always chuckle at what gets left out of the lectionary readings. Leviticus 18 and 19 are an enlargement of the 10 commandments. The way Luther answers “what does this mean?” in the catechism with “we should fear and love God so that we don’t do X, but we do Y” can be seen in these chapters. The lectionary picks up the “fear and love God” introduction. “Speak to the people of Israel and say to them I am the LORD your God…I am the LORD (Lev 18:1-5).” But what is the first law that is expanded upon that the selected reading completely skips? The sixth commandment. Do not commit adultery. The entirety of chapter 18 is given over to a laundry list of things that God through Moses says, “stop doing that.” And it covers everything from peeping-toms, to incest, to homosexual acts, to child sacrifice. And it comes with a warning. Doing these things makes the land unclean. That is why the Canaanites are being driven out. “The land became unclean, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants (Lev 18:25).” True love of the neighbor means not using them sexually.

What else does the chosen reading skip? The first table of the commandments which is in Lev 19:1-8. True love of the neighbor includes worshipping God rightly and honoring your parents.

The lectionary reading picks up the 5^th commandment (don’t kill). That is the point of not harvesting to the edge or stripping the vineyard bare. As Luther would say keeping the 5^th commandment includes “help and support him in every physical need.” The poor and the sojourner don’t have land, but they need a way to feed themselves. True love of the neighbor is ensuring they have that way.

The lectionary reading continues with commandments 7 through 10. And it calls out the various ways we steal from our neighbors or create injustice through the well-placed lie or knowing how the system works. And notice that the way the system works include bias both to the poor and the great. “You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great (Lev 19:15).” True love of the neighbor is honest justice.

How does one love their neighbor? By faithfully living the commandments. Do we do this perfectly? No. Does that mean they are meaningless? Absolutely not. This is how we love our neighbor. So how do we love God? By loving our neighbor. God needs nothing from us. In fact he gives us all that we need to support this body and life. We love God by walking in his statutes, not the statutes of Egypt or Canaan we ourselves sojourn in the midst of.

Endless Summers

I suppose it has slipped into a Brown family inside joke. Some celebrity name will come up and I guess I’ve asked – “didn’t they die?” – enough that Ellen makes fun of me because they are not usually dead. The flip side of this is Ellen coming home and informing me that so and so died, and me asking “who is so and so?” I’ll do the same thing with “so and so from a completely different cause of celebrity” and Ellen will ask back, “Who?” I guess we keep different death pool lists. But the death of Brian Wilson was the rare common celebrity.

Now if you care, you have probably read or heard enough about Brian Wilson in the time since. And if you don’t care, you’ve heard too much. I’m hope not going to add to the pile. Honestly I was too young for the Beach Boys to be a thing while I was growing up. They were on the “oldies station” already. (I know, stab me again. When did Motley Crue become classic rock?) Any time it would come on you were instantly transported to 1960’s Southern California. Even if you had never been there, as this prairie son had never been, those songs made it real. But you also realized that those early songs about girls, cars and surfing were about a California that no longer existed, and which now is even further away. Summer isn’t eternal. Wilson was the rare artist that while never really changing his style – all his songs are a blissed out melancholy summer – they grew in maturity and depth. But Brian Wilson was first under his abusive father, and then under an abusive shrink, and at one point he wondered if he needed the abuse to be creative. His story doesn’t really have a second creative act. When the muse is gone, it is gone. But he does have a second act of love. His 2^nd wife more or less rescued him and together they adopted and raised five kids. If you have never seen the movie Love and Mercy it is well worth a couple of hours.

Brian Wilson’s story came to mind while I was reading the epistle lesson for this week – Galatians 3:23-4:7. Paul reflects on the law throughout the passage as being “our guardian” or “being held captive under the law” or “when we were children, we were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world.” The reflection on the law becoming more severe: guardian to enslaver. And if one is raised in a certain way, the law can inspire great acts. And I suppose I should expand that, everyone has some type of law. You can’t escape it. Which is why Paul calls it the “elementary principles of the world.” The only difference is if you have a revealed law, or just the intuitive one. And for each type, there are always kids who will run through brick walls if the Father figure tells them to. Brian Wilson seemed to have been one of those. But if our salvation is by the law, when we can no longer run through brick walls, when the muse no longer stops by, where are we? Brian’s Dad owned those early songs and sold them for pennies because he thought his son was washed up. What surely started out as appropriate instruction becomes abuse. “We are enslaved to the elementary principles of the world.” Instead of having a love of the law of God which is a lamp for our feet and a guide to our path, we learn to hate it, and are defeated by it. Our guardian becomes our tormentor. Especially if we have come of age.

“But we are no longer under a guardian.” The law is not our means of salvation. “The law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith.” Because in faith we are not slaves, but we are sons. Like Brian meeting his second wife who created a secure place of love for him, in Christ we have that place of love. In Christ we can know the Father rightly. Not as a slave driver, but as “Abba! Father!” who gives us his Spirit freely. And we no longer have to worry about being turned out or used up. Because in Christ by faith we are heirs, heirs of the promise. God only know what we’d be without.

The One About a Three Legged Pig

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Biblical Text: Acts 11:1-18; (Revelation 21:1-7)

The text of the sermon is largely Peter’s vision of the heavenly tablecloth descending which ended up at Gentile Pentecost. It’s a story about ceremonial laws – clean and unclean – and how they play no role in the Kingod of God. Now most of us probably don’t think we have ceremonial laws which is crazy. Because we are constantly making clean and unclean distinctions. And constantly making new ones. They are much easier to render judgement upon. What this sermon does is two things. It attempts to teach some distinctions in the law: moral, civil and ceremonial. And then it proclaims like Jesus to Peter, “what God has made clean, do not call common.” For God made all things good. And Christ is remaking all things. Our clean and unclean distinctions, our ceremonial laws, better not get in the way of the Work of God.

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Good Measure, Pressed Down…

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Biblical Text: Luke 6:27-38

Luke’s sermon on the plain – this text is the 2nd part of that – is his version of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. And I know that it is the favorite part of the Bible of lots of preachers, but I think they like it for the wrong reasons. It gets used for all the wrong reasons. People quote it either thinking they are being encouraging, or to use it as a heat shield to keep on doing what they shouldn’t be doing. The first is preaching the law to the drowned man. The second is simply bad faith, or lack of faith. Luke’s version to me is turning the volume up to 11. And it does this for two reasons. The first should be as law applied against ourselves. Luke’s Jesus spells out how even sinners act. And we do. We also if we are being honest act worse. Jesus makes clear the meets minimum requirements of sinners. And we fall short. The second is the gospel reason. It makes clear the God we have. And the God we have does not act like us. The God we have is merciful. He loves his enemies, us.

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Foxes and Hedgehogs

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Biblical Text: Mark 10:17-22

I think this text is a hard one for us to hear because we are so far at an extreme. The key verse that jumps out is that “Jesus loved the Rich Young Rule.” The key question to ask is how did Jesus love him? What I mean by that is how did the love of Jesus manifest itself. And the answers is rather straight forward. Jesus was a good teacher. And in this man’s case that meant holding up the mirror of the law. First he hold’s up the 2nd table, what we might call the basis of ethics. But the man’s problem, the man’s idol, is not ethics. The man’s problem is God. He does not love God above all things, and he is still looking for what he must do. Man has two typical solutions to this. We either create a false law that we can keep, or we excuse ourselves from the law because we are so special and God loves us. But the love of God, what Jesus shows this man, is to hold the clear mirror of the law up. And then we can learn that we cannot free ourselves from our sinful condition. That we cannot do anything. But that Christ has done it.

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Love & Money

In Wednesday morning Bible Study this week we studied Matthew 19 which I like to call the love and money chapter. Jesus’ teaching on both motives for murder compressed into one chapter. Even Jesus on these topics gives a little wiggle room saying things like “not everyone can receive this saying” and “let the one who is able to receive this receive it” and “with God all things are possible.” Jesus doesn’t lie. He is asked legal questions. “Is it lawful to divorce?” and “What good works must I do?” And He does give the legal answers. It is just that these legal answers are typically beyond us. The law is good and wise, and our lives would be better if we followed them. But as Jesus says to one of the questions “because of the hardness of your hearts…”. The ultimate answer is not to be found in the law. The ultimate answer is sandwiched in the middle of those two great motives. The Kingdom belongs to the little children. Which is not so much a literal statement as a picture written on the heart. The Kingdom belongs to those humble enough to accept the touch of Jesus. We break the world. We find ourselves in the ditch. And we need the touch of God to save us and give us hope.

To me that is the law and gospel of love and money. But thinking about it further there is something more that needs to be said in our day. Author Tom Holland, an excellent popular historian of the ancient world, wrote a book recently called Dominion. And his thesis of this book is true, but dramatically unpopular in academic haunts. He captured it perfectly in the subtitle: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. The Historian of the ancient would, against what he wanted to believe as he was enamored with glory that was Rome and the grandeur that was Greece, detailed how a crucified Jew in a backwater of the empire changed the entire world. And because of that change, even today the world is much more “Christian” than we might think. Let me explain.

In the ancient world, you got what you deserved. If you were crucified you were obviously guilty. The idea that an innocent man could be on the tree was just not possible. But that thinking is really derived from a deeper pagan idea. Fortune, the Gods, had their favorites. And those the gods favored were rewarded with money, power, fame, glory. And the reward of the gods was righteousness. The acts of the powerful, because they were powerful, were righteous and ordained by God. The desires of money were always just. If you had enough money to bribe enough people that wasn’t corruption. That was simply the outworking of the right. For Jesus to say, “Only with difficulty will a rich person enter the Kingdom of heaven. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle” was earth changing even to his Jewish disciples. When the gospel says “when they heard this, they were greatly astonished, saying ‘who then can be saved?’” It is because this is a direct refutation of everything they thought about God. Even the Jews. Yes, the prophets warned about taking care of the widowed and the fatherless, but even that could find gentile parallels in Stoic thought about fortune. The wheel turns. If you are generous when you are up, karma will help you when you are down. God still rewarded the righteous with power, money, fame, glory.

Our civilization, apparently at the end of this Dominion, is at an interesting point. It is still “Christian” is the sense that we know the innocent can suffer and that we think it is incumbent on a just society to rectify. It is still “Christian” to the extent that it doesn’t equate power with righteousness. But to the extent that it has rejected both the gospel – let’s put it here as the meek shall inherit the earth – and the law – that the 10 commandments represent how we should live, how long does that Dominion’s conclusions which were built on the proclamation of the law and gospel hold? We already see the secular replacements (“human rights”, “rule of law”, “philanthropy”) breaking and the demands of power and money returning stronger. How long until those demands are again simply asserted at the righteous judgements of god? There are already such assertions in the cults of many current figures in the papers everyday.

If we will not hear the law. I’m not saying live it perfectly, but merely hear it. Neither do we get the world it orders. That harsher pagan false law returns. And we should not be as surprised as the disciples this time. We know the difference the gospel made. When presented with the King like on Palm Sunday, if we ultimately reject his rule, we should not be surprised when other lords return.

The Law – Fear, Love and Trust

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This is the Wednesday Lenten Mid-Week. My general theme this year is “The Word.” We will be walking through the first three parts of the Small Catechism, giving the most time to the Creed, taking each article of the creed individually. But, the catechism starts with the 10 commandments, otherwise known as the law. And all the commandments are captured in the first commandment to have not other Gods. The question really is “What does it mean to have a God?” Luther’s answer is deep, because it is existential. Whatever you fear, love and trust about all things is your God. This homily examines two things about the law and that answer. First how one can have an external keeping of the law – driven by fear or by wisdom – that is not necessarily bad, but not sufficient. The keeping of the law due to love is a true keeping. The second examination is how we so easily give our love away to things other than God. And it is in those realizations that the law has done it’s work which is pointing out that the law cannot save us. We need a perfect source of love.