Date: July 2, 2023
Festival: 5th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 8)
Text: Matthew 10:34-42
Preaching Occasion: Zion Lutheran Church, Mt. Pleasant, MI, and CTKLC
Appointed Scriptures: Jeremiah 28:5-9; Romans 7:1-13; Matthew 10:34-42
Sermon Hymn: LSB #685 Let Us Ever Walk with Jesus
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Dearly beloved, Jesus says a lot of difficult things for us to grasp. What we heard from Him today is perhaps the hardest because it speaks of division in the family, the most fundamental unit of human society. “I have not come to bring peace,” He says, “but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And whoever does not take up his cross and follow Me is not worthy of Me.” A hard saying, and convicting, but something that needs to be said perhaps even more in our own times. Why would Jesus say something like this? Because when it comes to life and salvation, only Jesus matters. Because when one who is risen from the dead says something like this, we ought to listen to Him.
On the one hand, as we heard from Jesus earlier in the Gospel a couple weeks ago, the harvest is plentiful but the labourers are few, and we need to pray that God send more labourers into the field [Matt. 9:37-38]—more pastors, more Lutheran school teachers, more music directors, and so forth. Yet as we scramble around to bring a balance to this economic disequilibrium between supply and demand in professional church work, it becomes all too easy to raise new pastors and teachers with a dangerous naïveté. Yes, we need more pastors and other labourers in the field, but that will not always yield awesome results. As Jesus said only a few verses earlier, He warned His disciples about wolves among the sheep [10:16]; there might just be antagonists in the church who abuse and manipulate their pastor, gossip about him behind his back, try to spread false doctrine, or try to run him out of the church. Even people in the family of God would cause division, which the disciples would become all too familiar with. And who knows what divisions there might’ve been within their own families? They probably thought they were crazy for giving up their fishing careers to follow a man claiming to be the Messiah.
Jesus also told His disciples to gather “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” [10:6]—inactive members, so to speak. So, when the pastor and other leaders of the church try to bring inactive members back to the fold, and it’s not fruitful, people begin to wonder if the pastor is effective at all. Maybe they should get a new pastor. Maybe a younger pastor to attract young people! Which really shows they don’t understand young people at all. So, when they get that young pastor, and young people aren’t magically attracted to their church like mindless moths after a bug zapper, they begin to wonder about that pastor. They treat him like a new smartphone—toss out the old new pastor and trade him in for an even younger, quicker, and sleeker pastor in skinny jeans. The pastor is also to reach the lost, but unbelievers naturally do not want the salvation Christ has accomplished for them on the cross. So, when there’s no “revival” or “church growth,” people begin to wonder if their church’s ministry is “successful,” and if they should get a pastor with business experience, as if the Church were a corporation run on the greed of capitalism rather than the Body of Christ run on the rivers of His water and blood that poured out from His side, that is, on His Word and Sacraments.
Now, there are many joys in ministry. Just a few days ago was my 2-year anniversary of being your pastor, and I have the pleasure of saying I serve one of the most loving congregations in the LCMS. Your ἀγάπη love just blows me away. And as the campus pastor, the release of God’s grace on the students’ faces when the Lord uses me—stinking bag of worms that I am—to give them the Gospel in its raw truth when they are struggling brings me the greatest joy. Yet as your pastor, I’ve also come to learn of some of your family struggles. When Jesus speaks of this family division, you know exactly what He’s talking about. To make it even worse, Jesus says He came to cause the division! We see it in His own time. The Pharisees, Sadducees, and other Jewish sects didn’t know what to believe about Jesus. A rabbi? Sure, we’ll accept that. A prophet? Maybe. The Messiah? Certainly not! God? Blasphemy! Meanwhile, a remnant of Jews are believing in Jesus, causing them to be excommunicated from the synagogue. Even worse, Gentiles—unclean pagans!—are believing He’s the Jewish Messiah! Unacceptable!
But worse than religious division, Jesus causes division within the family, especially the families of His disciples—those who believe and follow Him. Again, He doesn’t just warn against this type of division; He says this is the dividing He came to do! Sooner or later, in every family, someone will say, “Choose me and my ways or choose Jesus. If you choose to keep following Jesus, you’re dead to me.” Some of you know what this is like. I’ve experienced it in my own family. Maybe it went something like this: Your sister comes out and identifies as non-binary. She gives herself a male name—which is ironic because the name isn’t even non-binary—and she says to you, “Do not call me your sister, because I’m not,” and then demands you call her by her “preferred pronouns,” they/them.
It breaks your heart because you love her, and to this day you pray for her daily. So, you explain to her, “I love you, but I cannot do as you demand. As a Christian, I cannot sacrifice my Christian confession to do what you want. You see, I confess this thing called the Apostles’ Creed, which tells us who God is as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. What I believe about God the Father is that He ‘has made me and all creatures; that He has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my members, my reason and all my senses, and still takes care of them. He also gives me clothing and shoes, food and drink,’ and everything else ‘I need to support this body and life’ [SC, The Creed, The First Article]. So, if I were to do as you demand, I would be rejecting God my Father, the Creator, who has also given you your body and soul just as you were born, all your members, and still takes care of them. I cannot—I will not—deny Him. I love you, and because I love you, I’m telling you, the solution is not to give in to these temptations but to rely on Christ who died and rose again to redeem your body and soul.”
…But she cannot accept that you love Jesus more than her, so she blocks all forms of communication with you and you never hear from her again. The religion that preaches tolerance and diversity cannot tolerate your faith.
Some of you have experienced something like this, just as I have, whatever the issue was. Or maybe you’ve been the cause. The ultimatum is given, “Choose me or Jesus,” which is not a fair choice. If you pick up your cross and follow Jesus, you are shunned, just as Jesus was shunned from the house of Israel when He picked up His cross for them and for you. But it’s either you deny their sin, or Jesus denies you before the Father in Heaven as the cost of denying Him before men, as we heard last week [10:32-33]. Who do you fear more? The wroth of your family member, or the One who can destroy both body and soul in Hell, which we also heard last week [v. 28]? Who do you love more? Them or the God who created you and provides all you need even without your prayer? Who do you trust more? Their intolerance of your faith or our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ who died for the atonement of your sins and rose for your justification? What burden will you carry? Their pride or the cross of Christ?
If this has happened to you, or when it does, you can sing the hymn we just sang {sing}, “Let us suffer here with Jesus / And with patience bear our cross. / Joy will follow all our sadness; / Where He is, there is no loss” [LSB #685, stz. 2]. For that is just what Jesus means when He says, “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for My sake will find it” [v. 39]. You might lose a relationship or some status in the world for picking up your cross and following Jesus—or even die for doing so—but it’s either that or Hell. For in picking up your cross, you find life. How is this possible? It is mirrored after Christs own denial. If Jesus wanted to keep His life—to restore His relationship to the other Jewish rabbis and leaders, to keep His status as a member of the house of Israel in the Jews’ eyes, to save His life from the wrath of Rome—all He had to do was recant His “heresy” that He is the Son of God, and therefore God. All He had to do was bow before Pontius Pilate, say He is not the King of the Jews, and confess that only Caesar is His one true king, just like His fellow Jews did. But He didn’t. Instead, He denied the Jews’ legalism, He denied their rejection of Him as their Messiah and Yahweh incarnate, and He denied Rome, which is to deny the one lord Caesar.
So, He took up His cross, and although He lost His life on the cross, He took it up again on the third day for eternal life. It is as Paul would later write, “We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over Him. For the death He died He died to sin, once for all [once for you], but the life He lives He lives to God” [Rom. 6:9-10]. That is why Jesus could say, “Whoever believes in Me, though He die, yet shall He live” [John 11:25], because the way of the cross is the path of Jesus that dies to the world and lives to God. The way of the cross—of following Jesus—leas to the door of salvation: eternal life. The way of the world and its demands leads to Hell’s abyss.
Jesus brings not peace but a sword for division—yes, He brings peace between us and God the Father, but not peace in the world. In the world, He brings only division. Yet there is and end to this division. The division Jesus causes paradoxically finds its end in Him. Our risen Lord is the one who draws the sword of His Word to divide the sheep from the goats [Matt. 25:31-46], and our Champion of eternal life then turns, sword hand extended, and leads us to His victory! It is Psalm 23 fulfilled, which we can sing as our battle hymn as we march, “Yea, even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies!” [vv. 4-5a]. With his arsenal of lies, the devil wants to lead us into the valley of the shadow of death by rejecting Christ and His ways, but on the hill above the horizon stands our Good Shepherd, full of Grace and Truth, with His rod and staff—His rod, or sword, to thwack the devil upside the head when he’s being a pest, and His staff to lead us to the green pastures of His Word and the still waters of our Baptism until He finally leads us to the Feast {motion the Lord’s Supper}He prepares for us in the presence of our enemies. {sing, DS II version} “This is the feast of victory for our God. Alleluia!” Right? Victory from our enemies: sin, death, and the devil in this holy meal!
Christ has divided us from those who would have us choose death over Christ. Yet Christ leads us to the Table where such division meets unity—where rich and poor, black and white, male an female, single and married, the widowed and youth, high and low are united as a single family in the one, holy, catholic, apostolic Church through Christ’s body and blood. And so, just as God sheltered Noah and his family from the wrath of His flood in the ark, so now we gather as one family in the ark of Christ’s Body, the Church, safeguarded from the judgement that is to come when Christ returns in glory, looking to the bodily resurrection in the new creation—the redemption of our bodies and souls fully realised. To Christ belongs all the glory, now and forever. Amen.
The Lutheran Column 