Wages or no wages

 “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”[1]

 

Let us pray.  “May the meditations of my heart and the words of my mouth be pleasing unto you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.”[2]  Amen.

 

To begin, I want to take you through a bit of this past week for me and the Backus’ family at May Road in Potsdam.  As you all probably know I keep myself rather busy, perhaps industrious, at work.  This week was one where balancing work and family and volunteering was very challenging.  You see at work, in addition to regular duties as a faculty member doing research, class prep for next year, and managing the construction program at Clarkson (inclusive of the oversight of a number of interns), I have two “big projects” that made this an especially busy time:  1) helping with our program self-study for accreditation as well as, 2) helping the senior leadership determine the path forward for our capital project investments.  It is a lot to be done, all before the start of the new fiscal year next Wednesday.  But this was coupled with the fact that this was the last week of Kindergarten for Emily with a series of half days starting on Tuesdays, meaning Jackie and I had to figure out how to cover things in the afternoons Tuesday through Friday; I took the brunt on Thursday and Friday with Jackie taking earlier in the week.  Emily, of course has swimming lessons at 4 pm that have to be factored into the plans.  And then comes the volunteer/service part of the week.  I was recently notified that I had come up for jury duty and had to report Tuesday afternoon for processing and possible selection; I was not selected so that made for a slightly easier Thursday.  But then there was also two information sessions for the Rock Charitable Fund that happened on Wednesday and Thursday evening that took me across the county in an effort to help churches, cemeteries, historic places, and veterans groups with their needs.  Yea, in a phrase, that is a whirlwind of activity for the week.  One could say, and many often do tell me this, “you have earned your pay this week.”  That is certainly a way to look at it, but in thinking about the lessons this week, I am rather reminded that there is a very different way to look at things.

 

One of the great challenges that those that regularly preach encounter is how to discern the message that is the right one for any given Sunday (for us Saturday) service.  Thanks to the common lectionary, we are given three lessons and a psalm to reflect on and figure out where they are speaking to us: as a collection of texts having a theme or through line, as a voice from the past with something to tell our present, and as something that asks us to ask deeper questions as to what the scriptures mean, not just what they say, and what they mean to us and how we live our lives.  In hearing about “wages” and “sin” and “obedience” and “welcome” and “slaves” and “grace”, I was drawn into thinking about Luther and his take on economics and how we ought to live our lives.

 

As most of us Lutherans know, Luther did not shy away from having an opinion.  Whether we hear of these through his many table-talks, or from letters to his various correspondents, or from his formal writings and sermons, Luther was willing to more or less talk about anything.  As offered in one paper, “Martin Luther has, in the modern economic as well as historian’s literature, often been portrayed as a mediaeval ignoramus helplessly shouting against the forces of modern capitalism, with little meaningful economic insight or contribution made to modern economic reasoning.”[3]  But, as the same author notes, “… to fully understand Luther’s economics also means we have to engage with the origins of his theology, not only because his economics and theology were intrinsically related and built upon one another, but because in a historical context it makes little sense to analytically disentangle theology from economics.”[4]  Thus, the lessons today might better be understood if we see them through the things that Luther had to say about God’s economy.  As one author notes, “the principle of benevolence is at the root of Martin Luther’s thinking on society, the economy, and business ethics.”[5]  As the same author indicates, “Luther had two different economic systems in his thinking: The temporal tamed market economy and the coming eschatological economic system of Christ.”  Whether it is in works like the “Bondage of the Will” or the “Freedom of the Christian,” or in “On Trading and Usury”, Luther comes again and again to the spiritual reality that God had, from our origins in creation, a very different economy in mind.  And where I might differ with the second author is in the fact that not only is that economy a “coming eschatological economic system of Christ” it is a present economic system that is essential to understanding the Kingdom of God that has come near to us.

 

Today’s lessons point to this in the way that God illustrates how we ought to live out our calling in this world.  In the gospel lesson today it is “[w]hoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.”[6]  God is calling us to a welcome that:  a) is without reservation, b) is an explicit invitation to be in relationship with God himself, and c) is accomplished in the welcoming of each and every one of us in our daily lives.  In Paul’s letter to the Romans, it is “[d]o you not know that, if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that you who were slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted and that you, having been set free from sin, have become enslaved to righteousness.”[7]  Here God is inviting us fully into the paradox that it is in becoming slaves to, or being fully obedient to, God’s grace, or by giving up trying to be in charge, giving up trying to possess everything, we become fully free and enriched.  Paul reminds us of this explicitly by stating clearly that “… the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”[8]  This is true now and forever more because of what God first did for us.  Jeremiah points us to the way we know this in the first lesson when he says that “[a]s for the prophet who prophesies peace, when the word of that prophet comes true, then it will be known that the Lord has truly sent the prophet.”[9]  Jesus, in his resurrection, proved that he was indeed the Word, the Word that came true and has established God’s kingdome on earth now and always.  And because of that, as Paul offers, sin will have not have dominion over us, since we are not under the law but under grace.”[10]

 

Part of why this has come to me as a bit of a revelation is from my listening to the Bible Project podcast over the last several weeks.  Starting in late March, Tim Mackie and Jon Collins, have been doing a week by week look at the 10 commandments, or as they have articulated them “the 10 words”.  For me this has been like a deep dive into the small catechism, returning to not just reading the commands but understanding “what does this mean” as Luther repeatedly calls us to know.  There is a lot I can share about the 10 commandments, and there are volumes of texts that can be read.  But related to todays lessons was the most recent episode where Tim and Jon explored the final commandments around “coveting”.  For those needing a reminder:

 

“Neither shall you covet your neighbor’s wife.” “Neither shall you desire your neighbor’s house, or field, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”[11]

 

In contemplating these commands, what I appreciated most was how they looked at it.  Tim being a Hebrew scholar, went back to the actual words in Hebrew, as is his habit, and drew out how “coveting” was nothing more than “desiring”.  And what they drew out from their conversation is how what God is constantly revealing to us is that our who desire ought to be on Him and our relationship with him.  To desire other things, to place other things above God, really is at the heart of what sin is about.  Our fall in the Garden, the Genesis 3 moment, was, at its core, about desiring something other than God.  To use a phrase, we chose “not-God” over God.  As written, when our first parents “… saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise …”[12] we chose to imbibe in the fruit of that tree instead of remaining in the fullness of grace that was how the world was supposed to work.  Tim and Jon highlight that repeatedly, here in the decalogue and throughout all of scripture, God over and over seeks for us to return again to centering our desires on him and his grace.

 

For me then, that is what I am gleaning from these lessons.  They are a call, especially in the light of Jesus as our savior Lord, to give in and let go to the things in this world that are hindering our relationship with Him.  And this should be a joy not a chore.  As Martin Marty says, living into God’s grace allows us to do the things we need to do, not because we have to, but because we get to.  The economics of God’s Kingdom are such that we recognize and become dumbfounded by the fact that everything we are and everything we have is first and always from God the Creator.  We are mere stewards, we really own nothing.  And with that we should and deserve no wages.  No we are merely doing what is the right response, if we are being righteous, for what we have already received.  Regardless, however, God, in his mercy and unjust justice, heaps on us His grace, His blessings and His love, without reservation and with the fullest welcoming embrace.  May we learn to do likewise, out in His world.

 

“Now may the piece of God that surpasses all understanding, keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.”[13]  Amen.

[1] 2 Corinthians 1:2

[2] Psalm 19:14

[3] Rössner, “Martin Luther and the Making of the Modern Economic Mind.”

[4] Ibid.

[5] Mangeloja, Martin Luther’s Business Ethics and the Economic Utopia.

[6] Matthew 10:42

[7] Romans 6:16-18

[8] Romans 6:23

[9] Jeremiah 28:9

[10] Cf. Romans 6:14

[11] Deuteronomy 5:21

[12] Genesis 3:6

[13] Philippians 4:7

Repentance and Forgiveness of Sins is to be Proclaimed

 Sermon for the Third Sunday of Easter

13 April 2024

Key Verses:

 

Acts 3:19 - “Repent therefore, and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out, …”

 

1 John 3:4-7 - “Everyone who commits sin is guilty of lawlessness; sin is lawlessness. You know that he was revealed to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him. Little children, let no one deceive you. Everyone who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous.”

 

Luke 24: 46-48 - “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.”

 

Message

 

“Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”[1]

 

He is Risen!

 

R:  He is Risen Indeed.

 

Let us pray.

 

“May the meditations of my heart and the words of my mouth be pleasing unto you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.”[2]

 

Amen.

 

Good evening.  Today we continue our celebration of the Easter season as we carry along our way.  We encounter again in the gospel lesson this week, a scene of the risen Lord coming into the very presence of the disciples and apostles.  Last week it was about Thomas Didymus, this week is a collective meeting with instructions and confirmation, but also a core lesson to be brought out.  But before I get into more on the particulars of the lessons, let me get into the thread that I think weaves them together.

 

To me this is two words:  Repentance and Forgiveness

 

We hear these words specifically in the reading from Acts and in the Gospel lesson, but it is also indirectly within the epistle from John and in the Psalm.  But do we understand these words?  I ask this because I too many times and in too many places see them misused or abused.  Perhaps we ought to know what these words actually mean before we presume to understand what the lessons are telling us this week.

 

Let’s start with the first word:  repentance.  For me I always like going back to the original language of the scripture to get a sense of the word being used.  Luke, being a Greco-Roman physician was most likely writing in Greek, and we have solid manuscripts in Greek for both his gospel and for his book on the Acts of the Apostles.[3]  So what is the actual word we render “repentance” or “repent”, in Greek?  Well in the gospel for “repentance” the Greek word is metanoian and in Acts, it is rendered as metanosoate.  The root of both, is simply metanoia, often simply stated as “changing one’s mind” or “to change one’s mind”.[4]  This is a word that is not entirely unfamiliar for us in English and is used occasionally in such publications as Rolling Stone or Forbes.[5]  According to dictionary.com this word means, “a profound, usually spiritual, transformation; conversion.”[6]  A common analogy used for the meaning of this concept is taken directly out of nature/creation in what happens when a caterpillar is transformed in to a butterfly or a moth, called in biology metamorphosis, which is drawn from the same root word.  So, when Christ in the gospel lesson, and Peter in the lesson from Acts, are speaking they are calling for a “changing of mind, that results in a fundamental transformation of our way of life”.  That is what repenting and repentance is about.

 

The other word here is forgiveness.  Again, let’s return to the Greek.  Here for the gospel lesson the Greek that is translated as “forgiveness of sins” is aphesin amartion.  Literally translated is “leave of sins”, but perhaps better verbs might be “remission” [7] or “release”.  So, forgiveness is at its core about a release, remission, a “leaving” of sins.  If you think a bit more on this, you will soon come to realize that “repentance” and “forgiveness” are a bit redundant.  Because, what are we to “repent” from?  What are we to be forgiven of?  Answer:  our sins.  Both of these concepts are all about how we deal with sin.  Thus, we now have third word we need to make sure we have a clear understanding of:  sin.

 

What, then, is sin?  Now this seems like I am going down a rabbit hole of things that you probably thought you had a good handle on, but please bear with me.  Again, let’s go to the Greek in all three of our New Testament lessons today.  We’ve already addressed it in the gospel lesson, but in John’s first epistle it is again amartion and in Acts it is amartias.  From the root of this, you might gather that this has something to do with being “marred” as in “damaged or spoiled to a certain extent; made less perfect, attractive, useful, etc.” or “disfigured or defaced, as by scratches, nicks, scars, or discoloration.”[8]  And to an extent that is getting at it.  But to get a true sense of this, we probably need to go back to our Psalm, which was written in Hebrew, and try to understand this concept that is “sin”.  Now while I can have a chance at navigating Greek, thanks to being an engineer that has seen a math equation with a few Phis or Omegas thrown in for good measure, Hebrew escapes me.  That said, a Methodist pastor that I met in DC, Jason Micheli, provides a detailed analysis of this concept drawing from the Hebrew as well as numerous preeminent theologians such as Karl Barth, Robert Jenson, Reinhold Niebuhr, and others.  As he offers in a recent post, “As a seventeen-year-old convert to the faith, I was taught that sin is ‘missing the mark.’  It was not until much later I realized how problematic it is that such a definition leaves God invisibly assumed.”[9]  He goes on to say that, “[a]ccording to Karl Barth, the only possible definition of sin is that it is what God does not want done.”  “… but the scriptures attest quite thoroughly that there are a good many deeds God does not want done.”[10]  He boils it all down to the reality that “sin is idolatry.”[11]  It’s taking other things as more important than God, in direct violation of the first commandment.  As Jason puts it “[t]o say that to sin is to ‘miss the mark’, misses the mark.  All sin is unbelief and idolatry; it’s a turning away from what the true and living God wants, to whatever else might make us more than a mere creature over and against our fellow creatures.”[12]  He goes on to say that, “[j]ust as sin is not an ethical category [(it’s a theological category)], sin’s opposite is not morality but faith.”[13]

 

So, what does all this have to do with today’s lessons, or more importantly, the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ (aka the season of Easter)?  Well, it is smack dab in the center of things.  As stated in our gospel lesson today, “[t]hus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.  You are witnesses of these things.”[14]  Jesus himself makes it clear that sin, our repentance, and forgiveness are at the very essence of his big “G” gospel in the world.  This thing we call the Church, which is called to witness Christ, is not supposed to be a shiny city on a hill, nor a perfect court of kings and queens, emperors and empresses, or presidents or other civic leaders, nor is it a place of those that self-justify themselves as “saved” and “having a personal relationship with Jesus” as if that is a badge of honor.  No, the Church, is first and foremost a hospital, a place where we are laid out plainly, our wounds for all to see.  It’s a place where we first and always reckon with the fact we are idolaters and false, and rank with unbelief so that we can be the vessels ready to receive Christ and his grace and hope through faith.  The Church needs to be a place to enable metnoia to happen on God’s terms, not ours.  And where we are quicker to forgive before we are forgiven.  We are to follow Christ’s example so that we do “what is right ([forgiving ourselves and those around us]) … just as he is righteous.”[15]  We are people who lean into faith, not just mere morality, even as we must do both.  We know that we must “metanoia therefore, and turn to God so that [our] amartion may be wiped out.”[16]

 

How do we do this?  As Jason offers in his post, borrowing from Karl Barth, this is an “impossible possibility” that “does not lie in the possible possibility of the law, but in the impossible possibility of faith.”[17]  It relies on the thing that is given to us to thwart our sin, to enable us to repent and receive our leave from our sins:  faith.  And this is the heart of the paradox that we must come to in our journeys with God.  His call to us, his utter wooing of us, is for us to give up and give in to him and his love for us.  That is what faith is about.  It is about God and his righteousness over and against any self-righteousness we might pretend to have in this life, whether as a person or as a people or even as a nation.

 

This, then, brings me to a dialogue that I had this week as I prepared today’s sermon.  A bible study partner friend posited on a social media site, the following question:  “Isaiah 26:2 ‘Open the gates that the righteous nation that keeps faith may enter in.’  So, who is this righteous nation?”

 

Here was my response, which may require some after service reading/consideration on your part, but seems utterly relevant to both today’s lessons as well as the time and place we are living in:  “…, this set of verses from Romans comes to mind in response to your post: ‘For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith.  He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus.’[18]  The ‘righteous nation’ is the one which humbles itself through, with, and in Christ:  his life, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension.  That ‘nation’ is what Jesus called ‘the kingdom of God.’  For those of us who abide by the two kingdoms principle, we are both citizens (here, now, and always) of our earthly dominion (in this case the USA, NYS, St. Lawrence County, etc.) as well as this heavenly kingdom.  It is this [latter, preeminent] kingdom, the one that is God, that we pray for in the Lord’s Prayer: ‘thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’[19] 

 

We will not have, anywhere, a fully ‘righteous nation’ or much more of a shadow of one, until the work of his grace, as described in the latter two chapters of Revelation come to pass, here on earth, as a redemption and renewal of creation for all times and all places.[20]  Could we and should we do more in the meantime?  Certainly.  Do we in the US have particular and weighty sins to bear?  Absolutely.  Does that mean that all is lost, or that there are not also redemptive aspects of who we are as an earthly domain?  No, not at all.  There is much good we can and often do in the world, even as the headlines sell you on us at our worst.  It doesn’t mean we get off the hook for our worst, but we need to be careful to not go too far and forget who established things like the liberal international order in the first place, or the reality that we have a society that is so hyper-critical that makes it exceptionally hard to hide or screen us at our worst, or that while imperfect, we’ve aided in the development of numerous democratic, justice, and rule of law efforts in countries throughout the world.  We are lost, no question, but that being lost doesn’t mean we don’t do anything good.  But we can’t and shouldn’t get a messiah complex over our earthly goodness, to the degree we have it, because we cannot and will never be the ‘righteous nation’ of our own doing.”

 

To conclude, may we recognize and recompense with the realty that we need repentance, we need forgiveness and we need “leave from” our sins.  This is true no more or less for ourselves as individuals, ourselves as neighbors and communities, ourselves as states and nations, and ourselves as a species on Earth.  May we earnestly, as a result of a metanoia, do as Christ asks us to do today, through our mind, voices, and actions, to proclaim “repentance and forgiveness of our sins.”[21]

 

Amen.

 

---

[1] 1 Corinthians 1:3

[2] Psalm 19:14

[3] While we do not have originals, we have early papyri that are attributable to Luke in the second century AD/CE.

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metanoia_(theology), accessed on 12 April 2024

[5] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/metanoia, accessed on 12 April 2024; Cassady Rosenblum, Rolling Stone, 28 June 2022 and Elizabeth Edwards, Forbes, 12 October 2021

[6] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/metanoia, accessed on 12 April 2024

[7] https://biblicalprospector.blogspot.com/2010/04/remission-of-sins.html

[8] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/marred, accessed on 12 April 2024

[9] https://jasonmicheli.substack.com/p/christians-do-not-sin, accessed on 12 April 2024

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Luke 24: 46-48

[15] Cf. 1 John 3:7

[16] Cf. Acts 3:19

[17] https://jasonmicheli.substack.com/p/christians-do-not-sin, accessed on 12 April 2024

[18] Romans 3:22b-26

[19] Matthew 6:10

[20] Cf. Revelation 21:1-22:4

[21] Luke 24:47