The following are representative samples of the sermons preached at Immanuel by our Pastor, Rev. Christopher Esget. You can read the latest sermon, as well as archives, by clicking here (this will take you away from Immanuel's web site).
Sermon for the Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Trinity
6 November 2005 St. Matthew 9.18-26
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
“Suddenly, a woman who had a flow of blood for twelve years came from behind and touched the hem of His garment.”
It’s easy to feel sorry for yourself when things go wrong. To imagine yourself innocent, wronged by another person or just cursed by fate. When your bones are broken; when your car is smashed up; when you look at your own bizarre, dysfunctional family; or when you look at someone else who seems to have it made – and you wonder, Why me? It isn’t fair. Why don’t things go my way?
Or maybe the physician confirms your worst fears. Or the unthinkable happens, and suddenly you are without your father, or your wife, or your son. The reality is, your CDs, DVDs, iPods, and MP3s, the trips you take, the games you watch, the books you read, the politics you obsess over, the sex you long for, the alcohol you guzzle, the food you stuff yourself with – are all finally meaningless distractions that drive from our minds the hopelessness of our situation – we are dying, and we will lose everything we have acquired, inherited, or earned in this world.
For most of us here, it is easy to accept—at least in the abstract—that the wages of sin is death. Yes, Adam and Eve sinned and now were all stuck with the consequences of their disobedience. Yes, we are all sinners. Yet still, there is a part of us that clings to the law, takes comfort in our own obedience, and if you were shaken awake having no time to think, and you were asked to describe yourself at your most existential core, would you not look to your own good intentions, how you tried to be a decent person, that for most of the sins you committed you can give a good explanation?
Part of becoming grown-up in this life is declaring a certain independence from your parents while maintaining a relationship with them that honors and respects them. We would like, I think, to do this with God as well – acknowledge Him as Creator and thank Him for helping us out with the whole sin-and-death thing, but still, we want to have our own way, keep our independence, and set the terms of our relationship with Him. After all, we have money to make, places to go, shows to watch, and families to keep happy.
But the Law is not a box to check or a general guideline to follow. It is all-encompassing. “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The LORD your God is a jealous God. What God requires in the Law is not a good-faith attempt, not your best try. “Whoever shall keep the whole law,” says St. James the brother of the Lord, “and yet stumble in one point, he is guilty of all.” So how is it that you imagine that your chattering about your neighbor, your criticisms of the people around you, even the disparaging things you say about your fellow Christians, is somehow no big deal? A star football player once famously quipped, “I play when I want to play.” He was criticized and finally traded for that kind of attitude. But what about your own life? Change “play” to “pray,” and isn’t that something that you say, at least by your actions? “I pray when I want to pray.” And it’s usually only when the going has gotten really rough.
And what about the sixth commandment? Do you look at others lustfully? Do you sleep around? Do you treat your wife or husband with complete love and respect all the time, with no selfishness?
What the Word says about you is true. You have held back your tithes and offerings and made up excuses for it, spending it on your own amusements. Your worship and prayers have faltered. God’s love has not filled you, and so your love for others has failed. You are not fit to be called a Christian.
In the days when the Gospels were written, a symbol of obedience to the Law was in the tassels on the outer garments prescribed in the Old Testament. Numbers 15 says, “Again the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, ‘Speak to the children of Israel: Tell them to make tassels on the corners of their garments throughout their generations.… And you shall have the tassel, that you may look upon it and remember all the commandments of the LORD and do them, and that you may not follow the harlotry to which your own heart and your own eyes are inclined, and that you may remember and do all My commandments, and be holy for your God’” [37-40]. Jesus condemned the scribes and Pharisees for making these tassels very large, so that other people would see and be impressed by their obedience to the Law. Their error was in looking to themselves, being proud of their accomplishments, their godliness. Yes, we must try and do the things written in the commandments – but finally we must conclude that it can never be enough, never do enough, be holy enough, be “purpose-driven” enough. This is why those moments—and sometimes a lifetime—of despair and anguish come – to drive us to the dirt. Only there – in the dust and dirt out of which we were created, in the dust and dirt to which we shall return – only there can we gain the proper perspective, recognizing who we are and who God is.
It’s in the dirt where this woman in our Gospel is. The words “a flow of blood” don’t do justice in describing her wretched state. St. Mark tells us that this woman “had suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse.” She’s ritually unclean, meaning she couldn’t go to worship, and has to sneak up behind Jesus because she doesn’t think there’s any other way she’ll be allowed to touch or be touched by Him.
It is no mistake that what she grabs for is one of His tassels, the tassels prescribed in the Law. Our English Bible says that she “touched the hem of His garment,” but that word “hem” means the distinctive Jewish tassel. What is this? Remember what we learned earlier: the tassel is a sign of one’s obedience to the Law, a reminder of the requirement to be holy and perform all of the Commandments. Only one Man in the history of mankind has been fit to wear it. Only one Man has fulfilled what those tassels symbolized. Only one Man has kept the Law perfectly, has fulfilled the Commandments to their uttermost: our Lord Jesus Christ.
When this poor woman reaches up from the dust to grasp His tassel, she touches the obedient One, the One in whom the Father is well-pleased, the One who does all things well, the only One who loved God with all His heart, soul, strength, and mind, and who loved His neighbor as Himself. She grasps hold of an obedience to the Law that she could never accomplish herself, that you could never accomplish yourself.
What is more, this poor woman grasps the tassel of the cloak in which is wrapped the enfleshed God, the God who has wrapped Himself in our poor flesh and bone, the living God who dies, the Great Physician who helps where no physician could, the Creator who has come to rescue his suffering creatures, the One whose flow of blood from His pierced side was able to stop the flow of blood in this woman that had made her life a living hell.
She touches the tassel, but out of it flowed to her the power of God, because the garment was wrapped around God Himself. Oh, if only we could touch such a garment! If only Christ could put His hand upon our dying relatives, if only He could come among us, then we would be healed, then we too could be of good cheer, then we too could tell everyone the good news about such a wonderful Savior.
Well, just what do you think you get when you chew the bread and imbibe the wine? Our senses of taste and sight perceive bread and wine, yet the bread is the body of Christ, the wine is the blood of Christ, and we touch Him just a surely as the woman touched the tassel of His cloak.
But this
Sacrament is given to us not for the temporary healing of a sickness,
or for a quick fix to our temporal problems. No, His body and blood
is medicine for the sickness that pervades our entire human nature,
the sickness of a sinful heart, the sickness unto death that will
bring all of us unto dust. Some of you have already experienced the
anguish of the man in this gospel whose child has died. Some of you
deal with ongoing physical problems. No one here is untouched by the
damage sin does in our families and our own personal lives. Being
brought down to the dirt is a gift. Despairing of everything that we
do and are, losing everything that we thought we could be, we are
left with nothing except a faint grasp at a tassel – the tassel
of the perfect obedience of our Lord Jesus, who has kept all of God’s
commands and gives us His righteousness, His life, His salvation.
Grab hold of that single thread and do not let go. That grabbing hold
is what we do when we say, “Lord, have mercy,” or,
“Jesus, help!” He will never let you go, but on the
strength of the Sacrament which you are about to receive, the power
of the divine nature that has come into the human nature of His body
and blood, that power that you receive now in the humble tassels of
bread and wine will carry you through even death, and raise you up
from the dust into the resurrection of the body and the life of the
world to come. +INJ+
Jesu Juva
Sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity
St. Luke 7.11-17 + 5 October 2003
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
“When the Lord saw her, He had compassion on her and said to her, ‘Do not weep.’ Then He came and touched the open coffin, and those who carried him stood still.” +inj+
He was a young man, not yet fully grown. Yet he had had the responsibilities of manhood thrust open him from an early age; for he was his mother’s only son, and his father was dead. This boy who ran and played was now still. The laughter and shouts that had filled the house were now silenced – the linen cloths that covered his lifeless corpse wrapped even ‘round his head.
Many years earlier, his mother had felt the agony of the curse laid upon the woman so shortly after the beginning of time; for it was unto the first woman that the Lord had said, “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children” [Gen. 3.16a]. Her anguish had been forgotten, though, “for joy that a man is born into the world” [Jn. 16.21] – her son. Joy had he brought to her, but now all she had was sorrow, and the former anguish of childbirth is overshadowed by the more brutal anguish of death. With gladness would she endure the pains of childbirth a thousand times, if only to have her only-begotten son with her again.
Yet onward they march. On and on the feet pound the dusty road, through the gate of the city, closer and closer to that place where the body of her son will be returned to the earth; for dust he was, and to dust he shall return. They shall cover him over with dirt, next to the already-decomposed body of the boy’s father. Is this not more than any mother should have to endure? Yet these are the wages of sin.
So on they press, carrying the dead man. Yet he was not the only dead man in this procession. For in truth, all of them were dead, only in various stages of dying. You and I come to Divine Service this morning as dead men. And we must learn to see death not only in mortuaries and cemeteries. We must learn to say, paraphrasing the prophet, “Woe is me, for I am a sinner, and dwell in the midst of sinners. Woe is me, for I am a dead man, and I dwell in the midst of a people of death.” Death is not something that happens to us at the end of our brief span upon this globe – death overtakes us in our sins. Like the dead man being carried on the pallet, we also are being carried to burial, carried by our “unclean desires, or the seductions of evil company” [Bede].
It is the sin that we do and the sin that we are that causes death; this funeral procession in Nain is merely the final stage of that death that was present in the boy even from birth. A city called Nain is where this widow lived; Nain, which means “beautiful meadow.” The beautiful meadow has become a foul swamp, reeking with the stench of death. This orb on which we dwell, created to be a glorious paradise, God’s gift to the man and his wife, has become by sin the valley of the shadow of death.
But on this beautiful meadow now covered with the shadow of death, Christ looks with compassion. Jesus is moved to pity for this woman. Should we not draw comfort from this as well? As it says in Hebrews, We have a High Priest who is able to have compassion on us. His compassion does not begin when He sees this widow weeping. The incarnation itself—when the Son of God becomes man and is born of the virgin Mary—there Christ is already showing compassion upon us all. He is the destroyer of death and corruption. He is the seed, the offspring of that first woman, come to crush the head of the serpent, come to trample down death by His own death. He becomes flesh in order to restore our flesh. He takes on our human nature in order to redeem human nature from death. Therefore He says to the woman, “Do not weep.”
Others have spoken such words. When others have lost a spouse, child, or parent, we struggle with appropriate words to say. We resort to platitudes. Well-meaning are our words, yet they cannot truly console. Christ utters no empty cliché. When He says, “Do not weep,” the power to remove the cause of her suffering undergirds His Word.
When Our Lord Jesus says, “Do not weep,” He is saying, “Cease to weep for him as dead whom in a moment you shall see rise living” [Bede]. Christ the Living One meets death head on, and the coffin’s procession to the grave is stopped in its tracks.
How we do take this for granted, in this age where death is hidden away in hospitals and nursing homes, and the dead in funeral homes are made to look alive! Our society gives us so little contact with death, we forget its terrible reality. Yet die we shall.
However, what was true for the young man in the Gospel shall be true for all who believe and are baptized, as Jesus says, “The hour will come when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live” [Jn. 5.25]. And so, the stinging words of Jesus from last week still bite: “Why do you worry, O you of little faith?” To them now is added this week: “Why do you still weep, O you of little faith?” and, “Why do you fail to call upon Me in every trouble, O you of little faith?” for if Christ Jesus was so moved by the earthly tears of one widow that He came to meet her, “to dry the tears of grief falling from her eyes,” to strike down death and raise this young man’s body, to transform weeping into joy and turn a solemn burial into a festival of life, to restore to his mother alive this one being carried to the grave – if all this He will do, what will He not do for us, He who has conquered Satan and removed the guilt of our sin? What will He not do in answering the unceasing prayers of His Church? [St. Peter Chrysologos] But are they unceasing?
This day we sing in the Psalms, “I cry to You all day long” [Introit]. Yet do you? It seems that we cry to our Lord only as a last resort, when all else has failed. Cry out to Him, not only when you suffer grief and trouble, but daily, on account of your sins. Cry out to Him, and implore His mercy. And recall what the choir sang before the Gospel: “You who fear the Lord, trust in the Lord” [Verse]. For if He hesitates not even at raising the dead and drying the tears of the grieving mother, will He not come to your aid, whom He has blessed with Baptism, making you His own brother?
Truly the wages of sin is death. So we ought not only rejoice and marvel at the raising of a dead body; let us rejoice in the raising up of a dead soul, out of sin, which was the cause of death in the first place. Let us not only find hope in that part of the Creed which says, “I look for the resurrection of the body”; let us also find joy in the “one Baptism for the remission of sins.” Paul writes to the Christians of Ephesus: “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them…. [For the Scripture says,] ‘Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.’ Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil” [ch. 5].
Rise up, then, from the death of your sin. Wake up, and live no more in the death of this evil world. Christ touched this boy’s coffin to demonstrate that not only His Word had power, but also His body has power to save. His flesh is life-giving; His body banishes death. That flesh you now receive, that you might rise again from death on the last day, but also that you might walk even now not in sorrow or sin, but in righteousness and rejoicing. +INJ+
Jesu Juva
Sermon for the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity, on Pride and Humility
St. Luke 14.1-11 + 12 October 2003
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
“Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.” +inj+
To exalt yourself is to measure everything by what pleases you. To exalt yourself is to be proud.
Pride is seeking everything—including heaven, and God Himself—on your own terms.
Humility is seeking everything—especially heaven, and God Himself—on His own terms.
Pride glorifies the self: the rugged individual, the achiever, the self-made man.
Humility glorifies God, and abandons every personal claim to righteousness.
The world rejoices in the self-made man.
The angels rejoice in a self-despairing man: “one sinner who repents.”
“Now it happened, as [Jesus] went into the house of one of the rulers of the Pharisees to eat bread on the Sabbath, that they watched Him closely.” Pride watches others closely. They watched Jesus carefully, hoping to find some fault in Him who committed no fault, in Whom there was no sin, nor was guile found in His mouth. Pride watches others closely, with scrutiny, hoping to find something blameworthy. Do you do the same?
How easy it is to find fault in others! And when we do not see a sin plain enough to accuse the brother publicly, then we condemn his motives, ever assuming the worst. When Jesus tells us to take the lowest couch, this also means that should you see your brother or sister in Christ commit a sin, think not only of the sin; consider also what he or she has done well. In doing this, “you will oftentimes find that he is better than you are; when you consider all he has done, and not [merely] a part” [St. Basil the Great].
Why do you think on what is evil? Why do you seek to find fault? Hear the Word of God: “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things” [Phil. 4.8].
Therefore, whereas the one full of pride watches others closely, the one full of humility watches the self closely. Instead of scrutinizing others, to find fault with them, condemn them, and so justify ourselves, the life we should be watching is our own. “Let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread and drink of that cup” [1 Cor. 11.28]. How is it that you dare recline at Sabbath here for an ever-so-brief time, only to depart clucking your tongue at others and continue your habit of grumbling and self-absorption?
Humble yourself and confess your sin. But what about when the devil comes to accuse your conscience? Or when another person attacks you and maligns you? When we have heeded the words of Jesus—which we can never fully do—then if we have taken the lowest place, we will have nowhere further to fall. So when you are convicted by the law, or when another attacks you, respond like this: “Do you insult me? Well do I deserve it, for I am unworthy of the least of God’s kindnesses. Do you treat me as a beggar or a bum? Indeed I know that I am poor, and stand utterly in need, and must seek God’s help each day. Do you look on me as insignificant and of no importance? This I already know—for I was made from dirt.” Do not then be hurt by the world’s pride, or angered, or filled with bitterness and resentment. Rather, rejoice – for so did they treat our Lord.
The whole world is overcome with pride and is constantly tempting us to be prideful. Some of you, the devil tempts with prosperity, in order to make you arrogant and conceited. Thus you imagine you are self-reliant, and exult in having a high seat at society’s banquet. Others of you, the devil sends difficulties, to drive you to a different kind of pride—the pride of rebellion and lack of contentment. In either case, we look for and take joy in the pomps of this world.
Perhaps the most dangerous is the subtle, sinister pride of the outwardly-pious Christian. It is not in your doing, your works, not even in your believing, that you have anything to be proud of. The prideful person looks at himself and sees good works, what he has tried to do, how he has tried to “help” and “be nice” and “give something back.” The humble person sees only his evil works; humility finds righteousness in Christ’s work alone.
Do you take pride in your good actions, while giving yourself full pardon for your wicked ones? And how is it that you have so much time to worry about the sins of people in your congregation or Synod, and so much time to study the immorality in our country, yet so little time to devote to prayer and studying the Holy Scriptures? “If you think you have done something good, then give thanks to God,” rather than comparing yourself to your neighbor. [St. Basil the Great]
Do not affliction and suffering also make manifest your pride? For when we face trouble or pain, the heart says, “I do not deserve this! What have I done to God, that He should allow this to happen?” Do you see here, how we blame God, and admit no wrongdoing on our own part? How quickly we turn again to our own efforts! “What have I done, that I must suffer so?” And the Lord says, “Well do you ask, ‘What have you done,’ because for Me you have done nothing. Everything has been done for your own benefit and delight. You have followed your own will, and ignore Me.” And so pride hates suffering, but the humble rejoice in it, seeing even affliction as the work of God for our good.
If the Lord therefore seats you in the lowest place, it is for your own good. He is correcting and disciplining you, that He may lift you up in due time. Struggle not against it, but rather hasten to it. If He has brought you down to one knee, bend the other; if He has put you on both knees, prostrate yourself completely. Cast away every pride and pretension. You are not a good person. Despair of yourself, but cling to Christ.
Jesus took the lowest place. He humbled Himself for you, giving up the glory He had with His Father to become man, be born of a virgin, become mortal for you, suffer spitting and mockery for you, suffer derision and a thorny crown for you, suffer nails through the wrist and a spear through His belly for you, all for your foolish pride. All this He has done for you, giving up His high place and taking the lowest place, where you belong. And now He invites you to His table. How will you approach?
Pride seeks to understand this Supper, to “interpret” it, to rationalize it, to approach it on man’s terms. Pride makes demands of Jesus and His ministers, and argues with the clear and simple words, “This is My body.” Humility says, “Dear Jesus, this is Your Supper. I believe Your Words, even though I do not understand them. I am not worthy even of the lowest place at Your table. Yet You invite me by grace, just as You invited Zacchaeus, and Matthew, and Mary Magdalene. Here, You call me Your friend, even I, who have done nothing but ignore You and live pridefully. You say to me, ‘Friend, go up higher,’ and You give me in Your Sacrament a higher seat than I could ever have imagined, for You give me Your Body, Your Blood, Your very self; I do not deserve it, and my reason cannot comprehend it. I have nothing to offer, nothing to give, nothing to say, except ‘Thank You’ and ‘Amen.’” inj
Sermon for the Twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity
13 November 2005 + St. Matthew 24.15-28
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
St. Paul says, “Comfort one another with these words,” and the Lord Jesus says, “Wherever the carcass is, there the eagles will be gathered together.”
The things that we seek for our comfort cannot last. Our bodies broken, our minds failing, our possessions deteriorating, our money insecure. Comfort sought in food and drink, sex, or a holiday from work is fleeting and sometimes even unhealthy or immoral. St. Paul says we are to comfort one another with words. Words often seem empty. The words we speak to others who have experienced some tragedy seem impotent. We care, but we cannot undo a death, remove suffering, or turn back the clock on a disaster. The words Paul gives us for out comfort are different. They are words putting us in mind of the return of Christ. They set our lives in the perspective of the kingdom of God, not the kingdoms of this earth.
Sometimes among pious Christians the thought of the return of Christ provokes fear. You know you have not kept the Commandments, you know you have lived for yourself first and sought comfort in pleasures and leisure, ignoring what God has given you to do. How can the return of Christ in judgment not evoke great dread? For some of you, on the other hand, it’s really not something you care much about; your religion is a kind of insurance policy for the hereafter, guaranteeing a spot at the table should Christianity turn out to be true – but it means very little in the practice of your life.
To be a Christian is to desire righteousness. It isn’t just a matter of avoiding punishment or making sure you get into heaven. To be a Christian is to wish to be righteous – to want to love God of His own sake, to want to love your neighbor as yourself – and yet to be a Christian is also to recognize that you can never measure up. We cannot even have these desires without somehow making them selfish again, making them all about us, what we will do, what we will inherit, how we will be thought of when the things done in the darkness will be brought to light and the words spoken in secret will be made audible for all to hear.
What does it mean to desire righteousness? Some seek a righteousness that is civic, wishing to make the Church an instrument by which the state will be forced to follow our moral code. The triumph of Christianity in civil law and society is the goal of those who seek this civic righteousness – and the message of Christ crucified is lost in the process. Looking at my own inner life, I am often depressed at my own inability to obtain the righteousness that God demands in the Law. And I have been struggling with how to preach to you that forgiveness is not something to be treated casually, as though your sins are not that serious, without compromising the truth that the gospel is a completely free gift, where no demands of the law come before or after. What needs to be emphasized is this: to be a Christian is to abandon any pretension of your own righteousness and look only to the righteousness that Christ is and that Christ gives. Jeremiah 23 says that the Messiah King will be called THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS. I was filled with great joy when I read again last week this portion of the Formula of Concord, one of the confessions of faith to which we subscribe: “Our righteousness before God consists in this, that God forgives us our sins purely by His grace, without any preceding, present, or subsequent work, merit, or worthiness, and reckons to us the righteousness of Christ’s obedience, on account of which righteousness we are accepted by God into grace and are regarded as righteous.”
That is what we are now being pointed towards—the righteousness of Christ—as we draw near to the close of another church year. The church year follows nature’s cycles. As Easter goes with springtime, when the earth buds forth again in newness of life, as a sign of the resurrection of Jesus and our own coming resurrection in the body, so the apocalyptic portions of the gospel, announcing the coming end of the world and return of Christ in judgment, come in November and December, when everything around us is decaying, and gloom begins descending upon us in the long nights of darkness, everything green and bright turning to brown and gray. The wind biting our faces and the frozen ground destroying life in the soil betokens a kind of forsakenness, as though the Creator is abandoning His creation. It is in this time of year that we are entering when we hear about nations in turmoil, Christians divided from those in their own families, and the earth breaking apart in cataclysm and catastrophe. It sounds like what we see even now, doesn’t it? It is easy to suppose that our age is different from those before, but what we find in these passages in the Bible describing the end of the world is really a picture of the New Testament Church in every age until the return of Christ. Every generation of Christians goes through the tribulation and is told that those who persevere to the end will be saved.
What unites all of these generations of Christians together is their devotion to the Crucified One as their righteousness, their life, and their hope. The Crucified One, Jesus, the enfleshed God, slaughtered in a cruel and vicious way just outside of Jerusalem, the Holy City, the City where the temple of God was – that is the abomination of desolation of which we heard in the Gospel a few moments ago. For Jesus is an abomination to the world, because His preaching condemned the world’s sin and called each of us individually away from being curved in on ourselves. If there is anything we find an abomination it is that which does not feed our egos, our self-righteousness, and our selfish lusts. But Christ is also made an abomination by God, for He who knew no sin was made to be sin for us. Left desolate by the world to die in agony, Jesus was also left desolate by His Father as He atoned for the world’s sin, prompting Him to cry out to His Father asking why He had forsaken Him. There was no greater agony any man could experience then what Jesus endured for you on the cross – not just the physical agony of the scourging and crucifixion, but the agony of bearing the load of the world’s sin and suffering the full wrath of God for it in our place.
So the abomination is not some other single great blasphemy, an act of false worship and defiance against God that will be the sign of the end of the world; the highest act of blasphemy and defiance against God was taking the Son of God, innocent and holy, and killing Him - and that not in a fit of rage or by accident, but with deliberation, with the consent of the High Priest of the LORD’s temple, with the consent of the representative of Caesar, and by the clamoring of the people. What could be a greater abomination?
But yet, at the same time, what could be more wonderful? For in Daniel 9, where the passage concerning the abomination of desolation is found, Daniel also says that this time shall be “to finish the transgression, to make an end of sins, to make reconciliation for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness.… [And] Messiah shall be cut off, but not for Himself.”
The entire age for us then is marked by flight. Flee to the mountains, Jesus says, and do not go down from your rooftops to gather up your possessions or clothing. What did Jesus do on the mountains? He preached, He fed the 5000, He manifested His glory in the transfiguration. And in that preaching, He warned against being caught up in our possessions, filled with anxiety over what we shall eat, what we shall drink, what we shall wear. Seek first the kingdom of God, He said; for God knows that you need your daily bread. Do not go down from the top of the house, that is, do not descend into the lower regions of fleshly desires and earthly pursuits.
What then occupies us Christians in this life? To be sure, you have work, family, and hobbies – but these things are not the goal of your life. Your desire is righteousness, the righteousness that Christ has, is, and gives. That righteousness is in His cross, on which the carcass of the incarnate God hung. The death of Jesus is what is meant by carcass in the end of today’s Gospel: “For wherever the carcass is, there the eagles will be gathered together.” You, O Christians, are the eagles, gathered together around the carcass of Christ, that is, gathered around the preaching of His forgiveness and the giving out of His body and blood. Does not the Psalm describe you as eagles? “[The LORD] satisfies your mouth with good things, so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.”
We eagles [Christians] are gathered around the carcass of Christ, for in His death is our righteousness, and in His Sacrament His carcass is actually given to us to eat, becoming the very source of our life. Gathered around the carcass of Christ, Who died and yet is alive, we also are dead and yet alive. We know that the dead are not really dead, but alive in Christ. We, while we are living, live as though we are already dead, that is, already with God. So comfort one another always with these words, clinging not to your own righteousness, but to the righteousness Christ is and gives.
