Sermon for 12/11/11 "This for That - Trade You!"

SERMON “This for That – Trade You!” audio link http://dl.dropbox.com/u/23575548/111211.mp3 (1 Cor. 1:3) Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. We often want to make trades, don’t we? I know when people do something nice for me I want to do something for them in return. Sometimes there’s an obligation involved, of course. I want groceries, the grocery store wants money. You want piano lessons, the teacher expects you to pay. And there are non-cash expectations sometimes as well. They happen all the time in our families. I do the cooking, you get to do the cleaning up. I mow the yard, you get to vacuum the carpet. And sometimes these obligations are good and right. Granted, we can carry them too far, making demands on one another without considering the good of the other person. But when we enter into service to one another and we consider the good of the other person as more important than our own good, and especially when all the people involved in the relationship do that, we find we have teamwork, cooperation, and good will. But so far I have been talking in terms of our human relationships. I’ve been bringing up purely earthly examples. I have one thing and I give it to you because it would be good for your to have it. And you do something that you can do in return. But what of the relationship of our Lord and his Church? What about what Jesus has done? As we look eagerly to the Christmas season, starting in just under two weeks, we are begging for the coming of the Savior of the world. What is it that Jesus does in his coming? What do we bring? What does he bring? What kind of trade does he make with us? I want to remind you of just the first four verses from Isaiah 61. “1 The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, 2 to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, 3 and provide for those who grieve in Zion— to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the LORD for the display of his splendor. 4 They will rebuild the ancient ruins and restore the places long devastated; they will renew the ruined cities that have been devastated for generations.” So what did we bring? We have brought poverty, brokenheartedness, captivity, darkness, mourning, grieving, despair, and ruins. Some gifts that we bring our Lord and Savior! Yet those are the gifts that our sinful hearts and lives can bring. We are poor before our Lord, the one who created all things, who governs them by his mighty hand, who has redeemed them all by coming to claim them as his own. What do we have to give back to the eternal, almighty, all-wise Lord? We have a little time, a little money, some praise and worship, and some service to our neighbors. Yet it is God who has created all these things and has granted that we can have some of them to use. Though we may seem rich, though we live in the country that possesses more wealth than most of the rest of the world, we are all poverty-stricken before our Lord. What has our Lord done for us? He who sees our poverty has granted us good news. We consider our lives to be precious. We even say that soldiers who have died in action have paid the ultimate price for their country. Yet what price has Jesus paid for our lives? He has given his life, a life unstained by sin, a life unbroken by evil, in order to redeem our broken and poverty-stricken lives. Jesus has given a priceless life for our lives which, despite our best efforts, are cursed and ruined. This is his good news, the Gospel of the Lord, that he has given himself to redeem us from the curse of the Law. He has purchased us out of our sin, bringing us into his righteousness. Thanks be to God. We give him poverty. He gives us riches. What else do we bring? We bring brokenheartedness. Have you been disappointed? Have you had desires that are not fulfilled? Maybe you see a lot of the work in your life as thankless. Maybe your children have rebelled and departed from the faith. Maybe you have lived with a husband or wife who has rejected the Lord and has even abandoned you. Maybe you have had a relative who has fallen into dementia and no longer recognizes you. Maybe that person whom you loved for years and years is now hostile toward you. We find that those people who are closest to us are able to harm us the most. They are able to break our hearts. They know our weaknesses. Do you wonder about that? I’ll give you some news, if you’ve never thought about it before. There are many people in this congregation who could do things which are hurtful to me. A pastor always wants to have good relationships with the flock. And some of you would have the power to do things which could hurt rather a lot. Yet there is only one person in this room who knows how to devastate me instantly. That’s my dear wife, who would never choose to do so. The one who is closest to us is the one who knows our weakest places. Some of you have been broken. Your hearts have been crushed. They may have been crushed by those most dear to you. We bring broken hearts before our Lord. What does he do with those broken hearts? Like the good doctor he binds up our broken hearts. He brings healing. He heals us and restores us. He stops the bleeding. He puts what is broken back together. Jesus Christ has come to bring forgiveness and healing. The sun of righteousness has arisen with healing in his wings. And he promises to bind up the brokenhearted. This our Lord brings to us. He brings us the gospel in exchange for our poverty. He brings healing in exchange for our broken hearts. What else do we bring? What would we like to trade to our Lord? We confess that we are captives to sin. In our poverty, in our broken state, we enter boldly into sin. Quite a few great theologians of the past have observed that part of the curse of sin is that we sin more. We find we are captives, we are prisoners, we are in the darkness of sin and we are actively trying to shut off the lights. When we see the light of the Gospel we refuse the light. We turn to the darkness. We prefer the captivity of sin to the freedom of the Gospel. We glimpse the light and cover our eyes. We prefer salvation made by ourselves to salvation made by God. Do you doubt me? Think about the kind of books that we find in Christian bookstores and in the inspirational section of other bookstores. A few years ago when the whole Forty Days of Purpose craze was going on I borrowed that book from the library. I’d heard a good deal about what the author, Rick Warren, was doing. So I thought I’d give the book a read. It claims to be all about the gospel, about what God is doing for you. Then day after day it tells you what you are supposed to do. Warren insists that Christ for you is not enough. He insists that though Jesus gives forgiveness, life, and salvation, the quality of forgiveness we receive is directly tied to the quality of our repentance, that our life and salvation is tied to how many good works we do. The book ends up being not about what God is doing but about what we must do to be pleasing to God. It’s all about the law. It’s all about making ourselves righteous by works. This kind of teaching is counter to all the Scripture says about our salvation. It says that we earn our own salvation and that we are able to clean ourselves up and present ourselves as holy offerings before the Lord. This we cannot do. This teaching brings either self-righteousness or despair. It may bring both. It’s dangerous and untrue. We are not free to have a purpose-filled life. We are not free to live our best life now or any day. We are not captivating, we are captives. We are wild at heart and not in a good way. We are in darkness. And the more we try to earn our salvation the more we plunge ourselves into captivity and darkness. There, I’ve told you what I think about the ideas of several popular Christian authors. I should get plenty of chances to defend myself as you spend the next six months asking me about other best-sellers that I think should never have been published. But in place of that captivity and darkness what does our Lord give us? He gives us freedom. He gives us his light. And that freedom, that light, is that we no longer have to try to earn our righteousness. We no longer wander around in the dark trying to mediate our salvation but unable to see the depth of our need. In place of that, Jesus, the light of the world, has come. He shines in the darkness. He proclaims freedom for us captives. He proclaims that we are released. In response we no longer try to earn our salvation. Rather, we try to get used to the fact that he has saved us. We try to walk as free people, no longer as prisoners. He whom the Son has set free is free indeed. There’s more to this story, though. Not only has Jesus traded his good news for our poverty, not only has he traded his healing for our broken hearts, not only has he traded freedom for our captivity, not only has he traded release for our imprisonment, he has taken our mourning, our grieving, our despair and he has provided us comfort, a crown of beauty, a garment of praise. When we see in the light of the gospel that we have been redeemed from the curse, then we find ourselves mourning for our poverty. We find ourselves grieving for our brokenness, our missed opportunities, our sin against our neighbors. We look at our obedience in light of God’s commands. And we see that we have no hope to live according to his righteousness. We may well despair if we depend upon ourselves. What is God’s reaction to that mourning, that grieving, that despair? Jesus himself has come to dwell with us. He is Emmanuel, God with us. He has come to bear all our sorrows. He has come to place his crown of glory on our heads, taking for himself a crown of thorns and a coronation of shame in his death on our behalf. He has taken on the mocking and ridicule which belongs to us and he has given us praise in the heavenly realms, rejoicing in heaven. He has called us kings and priests before God. This is what our Lord trades for our failings. In short, he takes the ruins of our lives and builds his temple, a temple of the Holy Spirit. He builds his Church upon Jesus the rock of salvation. This all comes from God’s good favor. It is his good pleasure to send Jesus, the Savior of the World, coming to live a perfect life of righteousness, to suffer and die in our place, to rise again in victory over death, and to ascend to heaven, living forever, making intercession for the saints. This is the great exchange. This is the trade that our Lord makes for us. He takes us as we are. And he changes us into his image, from sorrow to glory. Come, Lord Jesus. Show yourself to us. Create us anew, giving us yourself, according to your promise. Amen.