Grace Evangelical-Lutheran: 1. Peter 4,7-11. 9. Sunday after Trinity

✠ One Message: Christ crucified and risen for you ✠

The Word of the Lord Endures Forever

Verbum Domini Manet in Aeternum

1. Peter 4,7-11 4314

9. Sonntag nach Trinitatis 054

Liberatus and his companions, Martyrs 483

Johann Gerhard, Theologian, ✠ 1637

17. August 2014

1. O God the Father, who risked Your Only Son in order to redeem the world, help us to count our Divine blessings and give thanks to You for all You have done and still do for us so that our faith is strengthened in Your steadfast Providence (VELKD, Prayer for the 9. Sunday after Trinity ¶ 1). Amen.

2. »The end of all things is at hand; therefore be self-controlled and sober-minded for the sake of your prayers. Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins. Show hospitality to one another without grumbling. As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace: whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength that God supplies—in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To Him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.«

3. In today’s Gospel Lection, Jesus tells a parable about a unscrupulous manager who is dismissed for wasting his lord’s possessions, but before he leaves he edits the financial books and calls in some of the debts at a 50% and 20% discount to the borrowers so when he is finally jobless they will be hospital to him for the mercy he showed them in lowering the debt they had owed to the lord. Instead of punishing the dishonest manager for one last scheme that causes him to lose even more money, the lord praises the fired manager’s shrewdness in making friends with those who had owed the lord money. This crooked manager had a keen wit and a shrewd mind that he put to good use to earn him favor among the townspeople, and he used that talent to benefit his life.

4. How do we use the talents Jesus has given us? The Apostle Peter lists a number of talents that God has given us as Christians: self-control, sober-mindedness, loving our neighbors, showing hospitality and many other virtues that he does not list. He then tells us how to use these talents: »As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of Gods’s varied grace in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ.« As the Holy Gospels point out: God loves to pour out His blessings without calculation, equalization or quantification (Nagel 252).

5. Such blessing is hard to bear for sinners who won’t be given to but who insist on taking over and getting control (Nagel 252). „Part of controlling is a measuring of quantities that is based on comparison of sizes. Instead of receiving gifts from Him, I measure what I have as my own. If it is more than somebody else’s, I am pleased and proud. That is why it is so important to have some people around who are clearly, by some yardstick or other, inferior to me. Or the yardstick we use may show that we have received a raw deal“ (Nagel 252). Then we either feel sorry for ourselves or point out who’s fault it really is that we have less than someone else: our parents, society or maybe even God. At first we may be loathe to blame God for our perceived lack of blessings, but deep down we know that if it is God who gives, then it is God who we must blame. That person is good at so many things, but I am only good at one thing! That’s not fair! Why is that, God? Why don’t You bless me like all my neighbors? Such questioning is the dangerous path of accusing God as a „hard man“ (Matthew 25,24). „If you make Him into a hard man who infringes your rights, who demands what He has the right to demand, then that is how you will get it from Him. You will get your rights. We make God our enemy when we clutch what we have as our own for ourselves. Then He is a threat to us. Others are, too, against whom we must protect ourselves and what we have. That is the way of losing even what we do have and finally ourselves too“ (Nagel 253).

6. But that is not what Jesus wants (Nagel 253). Jesus wants to be giving gifts and talents, and pouring them out upon us in great abundance. Faith receives these gifts. Faith receives the gifts of self-control, sober-mindedness, loving our neighbors and showing hospitality. Jesus intends that we use these gifts to benefit ourselves and our neighbors, thus He sends us the Holy Spirit who works in us to do what we cannot do. By the power of the Holy Spirit working in and through us we exhibit self-control in more and more tense situations, we remain sober-minded when others are responding without thinking things through, we love our neighbors by finding more ways to be of help to them and we show hospitality to those in need.

7. Jesus exhorts us to be shrewd like the sons of this world. Jesus is not encouraging us to be deceitful or dishonest, but to be creative in how we use the blessings He gives us through the Holy Spirit. We should find new ways to show love to our neighbors and ingenious ways to be hospitable to them. In doing so we are learning how to be faithful in what Jesus has given us to be stewards of. Our Lord tells us: »One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much, and one who is dishonest in a very little is also dishonest in much. If then you have not been faithful in the unrighteous wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches?« Jesus is speaking about the heavenly riches that will be ours as our eternal inheritance. The talents and riches we are stewards over now are meant to teach us how to be responsible stewards.

8. There once was a kindly grandfather who gave his only granddaughter a fake pearl necklace on her fifth birthday. She thought this was the greatest gift in all the world, and she did not know they were fake pearls; she thought they were pretty and happy that her grandfather had given her such a precious gift. He told her to take good care of her necklace, and she did. As she grew older she made sure she cleaned the necklace when it got dingy. She wore it with care and made sure she took it off before taking a bath and always put it away in its gift box before going to sleep. Then on her sixteenth birthday, her grandfather asked her for the necklace back. His granddaughter was aghast: why would pop-pop want the gift back? She cherished it with all her heart as a loving gift from her dear grandfather. Grudgingly and with sadness she unclasped her necklace and handed it to her grandfather, who in return presented her with a new gift. When she opened the gift box she was amazed to see another pearl necklace, but she was now old enough to realize that this necklace was the real deal and they were costly pearls. Her grandfather explained that the gift he had given her eleven years ago was meant to teach her how to treat something important so when she became a young woman she would appreciate and take care of a pearl necklace of great price. In the same manner, this is how the Holy Spirit teaches us. During our earthly life He gives us gifts and talents, exhorts us to use them and care for them, because He is preparing us to receive and be stewards of even more costly treasures in our eternal life. What those treasures might be no one knows. God is keeping that a secret to be revealed on the last day when He gives us our inheritance.

9. The greatest gift God has given us is His very own Son who redeemed us back to His Heavenly Father by dying and rising again. On account of Jesus we receive the good gifts of this earthly life, and on account of Jesus we will receive the greater gifts of the eternal life yet to arrive. All that we do in this life: how we use the gifts God has given us and how we help our neighbor is ultimately done »in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ, for to Him belong glory and dominion forever and ever!«

10. The Apostle Paul writes in his Epistle to the Ephesians: »In Christ Jesus we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace, which God the Father lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight. In Him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of Christ who works all things according to the counsel of His will, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of His glory. You now have the eyes of your hearts enlightened, so that you may know what is the hope to which God the Father has called you, what are the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His great might that He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places« (Ephesians 1,7-8.11.14.18-20).

11. And also the Apostle Peter in his first epistle: »Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to His great mercy, He has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith, which is more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Though you have not seen Him, you love Him. Though you do not now see Him, you believe in Him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your bodies and souls« (1. Peter 1,3-9).

12. Christ Jesus is God the Father’s costly gift that He has given to us, and Jesus has redeemed us unto everlasting life. In turn, we now are Christ’s gifts to our neighbors so that they may see and know that God loves them, forgives them and is merciful to them. In all our stewardship of the gifts the Holy Spirit has given us, we glorify Christ who is the True Gift. Amen.

15. Let us pray. O Lord Jesus, the Gift of salvation unto fallen men and women, we rejoice and say: „Great is Christ the Lord!“ so that all the world may bear witness to our faith, hear the gospel and also believe. Amen.

To God alone be the Glory

Soli Deo Gloria

✠

All Scriptural quotations are translations done by The Rev. Peter A. Bauernfeind using the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, 4. Edition © 1990 by the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, Stuttgart, and the Novum Testamentum Graece, Nestle-Aland 27. Edition © 1993 by Deutsch Bibelgesellschaft, Stuttgart.

Grace Evangelical-Lutheran

Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church

Monday, August 25, 2014

1. Peter 4,7-11. 9. Sunday after Trinity

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