Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost (B) 2015

+ In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti + Amen.

Text: Mark 7:24-37
Theme: Deafness, Dumbness and Demons

Dear friends in Christ Jesus,

The goodness of God is extravagant. But humans are deficient in every capacity to receive what He desires to lavish on us. Therefore, God Himself must prepare us to be receptacles of His love. God’s favour does not rest upon us because we are lovable. Rather, the meticulous mercy of God in Christ makes us His cherished people. He tunes us in to the frequency of His grace.

Today Christ dealt with deafness, dumbness, and demons. He freed a little girl from Satan’s tyranny and restored to a man his hearing and speech. Both were miracles giving evidence that He was the Messiah. They were freed from sin’s grip on their physical frames. But something more enduring is going on here. This is not just a passing encounter with a traveling physician. When ears are opened and hearts are circumcised the kingdom of God comes. This is the work of the Holy Spirit. Remember Luther’s simple but penetrating explanation of that petition of the Lord’s Prayer, “God’s kingdom comes when our heavenly Father gives us His Holy Spirit, so that by His grace we believe His holy Word and lead godly lives here in time and there in eternity.”1

Dear friends, it is only through continual contact with God’s Word that His kingdom keeps coming to us. This is a great challenge in an age when regard for the efficiency of truth is in serious decline. There is a growing disconnect between people’s perception of their spirituality, their morality and their actual confession of truth. They are coasting along with momentum- the moral and spiritual capital of previous generations. But they are driving with their foot on the clutch, and momentum can only carry you so far. Gravity and friction exert their influence. When you disengage the engine from the driveshaft there is no longer any power transferred to turn the wheels. Christ is the engine. The word of God is the power. A Christian cannot keep coasting through life with the transmission in neutral. We cannot disconnect from biblical truth, from the source of our strength- which is Christ as He is present to us in word and sacrament- and expect to still be safely traveling the narrow road.

Your house may have a Bible, your child may have a catechism, your family may have a church, but does that mean these things are powering your life? Are you coasting along with your foot on the clutch? More are those who wander from the faith gradually, over time, than those who go abruptly off the rails. The wax builds up in their ears. Spiritual sight degenerates and no remedy is sought. Satan gets his foot in the door and is soon trying to run the house. The seriousness of sin is soft-soaped. The desire for forgiveness wanes. Repentance becomes merely a religious exercise of hollow piety or just a fading memory.

But God’s baptized and forgiven people receive the assurance and understanding of faith. God has united Himself to us. In baptism God gives. The sacrament of baptism is God’s mechanism by which we become receptive of divine benevolence. The gospel is the unequivocal message that God has spared no effort or expense to qualify us to live with Him forever. The Bible says He, “has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light.”2 And again, “God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them.”3 And again, “Now [God] has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in His sight, without blemish and free from accusation.”4

Jesus Christ descended from the celestial community to our earthly community that we might be freed from earthly bondage and joined with the heavenly communion. Your sins are forgiven. You are restored to the Father’s favor, through the Son’s love. When you hear the pastor say, “As a called and ordained servant of the Word I therefore forgive you all your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” you are receiving the declaration of pardon from Calvary. When you are given His body and blood, you are receiving the life of Him who is the Living One, whom you will be in heaven with forevermore.

Dear friends, the Gospel is the story of divine compassion and it is inexplicable in the world’s eyes. Maybe in terms of human empathy we can say we have been where some others have been. But Christ went where others could never go. Only He was qualified. Think of what the Son of God endured. The piercing nails, the stinging crown, the agonizing pain, the suffocating air, the parched throat, the mocking crowds, the absent followers, the silent Father, and yet the words, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”5 That is compassion beyond understanding. His is not a sentimental sympathy but a sacrificial self-denial. Christ became the very substitute for sinners. He destroys in Himself the cause of corruption in us. He does not merely direct us because we are drifting; He resurrects us because we are ruined. He does not merely pity us because we are pathetic; He sanctifies us because we are sinners. His compassion is displayed in His condescension.

On this Father’s Day we could hardly site a more appropriate biblical image than the story of the Father who receives back his wayward child. The forgiving heavenly Father graciously welcomes back all the prodigal sons. Christ dealt with deafness, dumbness, and demons. He healed the ailing, the injured, and the anemic. He forgave Pharisees, priests and peasants. He humbled the arrogant, enlightened the ignorant, and calmed the belligerent. He gives eyes to the heart and ears to the soul. Today the Gentile woman was satisfied with crumbs. She was rewarded for her faith. Her soul was fed and that feeding was directly tied to her daughter being freed from Satan’s power.

The compassion of God, then, involves actual substance. How marvelous that when we are called upon to show compassion to others, to those who are suffering and hurting and those seeking fulfillment through other means; how marvelous that we can offer something and someone not fleeting or temporary, but the eternal word of God and the incarnate Jesus Christ! This substance fortifies us with a strength of incomparable greatness in this life; something not temporal, but eternal.

We should perhaps not then be surprised that when St. Paul asks the rhetorical question, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ,” he includes hunger. “Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine…“No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”6 Deafness and demons are no threat. May God give us the spiritual hearing and sight to perceive these truths! Amen.
+ In nomine Jesu +

Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost
6 September, 2015
Reverend Darrin L. Kohrt

1 Luther’s Small Catechism
2 Colossians 1:12
3 2 Corinthians 5:19
4 Colossians 1:22
5 Luke 23:34
6 Romans 8:35-39