Sermon on Law and Gospel for the second Sunday of Pentecost, June 7, 2015. Preached as the penultimate sermon of my Lutheran internship year at St. Peter Evangelical Lutheran Church, in Dubuque, Iowa.
This week’s lectionary texts are Mark 3:20-35, Genesis 3:8-15, and Psalm 130. Here’s the video; the text of the sermon is below.
When I started my internship here at St. Peter, almost a year ago, I hoped I’d find the perfect congregation. I hoped you would be perfect people, the best Christians in the world, doing everything exactly right, never doing anything wrong, loving God completely and perfectly serving your neighbors.
And then I got here, and it turns out you’re not that great. You’re nice people and all, but at the very first worship service I came to, everybody said out loud, publicly, that they’re sinners. And, yeah, me too. But right after that, I also heard about forgiveness and grace, and I suppose it’s ok to be honest about how messed up we are when our brokenness is met by God’s loving grace, so I decided I could fit in here.
That experience is one of the core principles of our faith in a nutshell. In the Lutheran flavor of Christianity, one of our fundamentals is reading the Bible as law and gospel. Law tells us what we ought to do, and Gospel tells us what God has given.
The idea is the law establishes we’re all sinful. We hear what we ought to do, commandments, but we don’t do it. We can fight it, and we can do good, and of course we try, but inevitably, we’ll fail. We’ll make bad decisions, take advantage of injustices, put ourselves ahead of others.
The law shows us we can’t ever live up to God. As my favorite confession puts it, “We are captive to sin and cannot free ourselves.” The law tells us we need a savior. Look at the front page of your bulletin and read the first line with me: “God and Father of all, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed.” And then it gives a few examples. We’ve done wrong, and we admit it. We know we’ll continue sinning.
Even Jesus doesn’t make it easy. There’s a really tough passage in the Bible where Jesus goes beyond traditional commands like don’t murder, claiming everyone who’s angry with another is committing murder in their heart.
But the law isn’t all there is. We have great capacity for evil, for sin, and we have the law to point that out, to point to how we ought to do better. In Genesis 3, we heard the story of the man and the woman in the garden, making the choice to deliberately disobey God, their Creator.
They’ve been tempted and they’ve eaten the forbidden fruit. Now they’re in the garden, aware of what they’ve done wrong, knowing their guilt. And what do they do? They blame each other. Adam blames Eve, and Eve blames the serpent. And the serpent doesn’t have a leg to stand on.
They refuse to confess, to take responsibility for their actions. But even though they won’t admit it, they know they’ve sinned. That’s why they hide in the garden, ashamed, afraid to face God.
Ever done something so bad you thought you needed to hide it? I remember being 7 or 8 years old, and I had this loft bed. Laying in bed, right above me, were these ceiling tiles, with lines and grooves in them, and I could sort of trace the lines as I lay there. At some point, I started to pick at the tiles, making my own grooves.
And then, because I was a very honest sort of kid, I felt really guilty. I remember laying there feeling this overwhelming guilt, thinking how upset my parents would be, because I knew better than to pick at the ceiling. I even remember getting out of bed one night and going out into the other room where mom and dad were watching TV and trying to tell them, trying to confess how guilty I was.
If I remember correctly, I couldn’t do it. I kept hiding what I’d done. I couldn’t tell them. Eventually they found out, and I assume I got in trouble, probably didn’t get allowance that week. It really wasn’t a big deal. But I remember how much better I felt once they knew. It was such a relief!
In Lutheran preaching, the idea is to convict with the law – point out how guilty we are, so we realize our need for a savior. But it can’t end with law. We proclaim the hope of the Gospel, the good news that through Jesus, our sins are forgiven. We don’t need to carry guilt, we don’t need to hide, because God, the only one with the right to judge us, has taken away our guilt.
The danger, and it’s all too easy to do, is to overemphasize the law part, focusing on what we’ve done wrong, on how awful we must be, and either not get to the gospel part, or to make it somehow sound like we need to do something to make it right, make up for what we’ve done, to save ourselves.
But I think we already know the law. We live in a world well aware of brokenness. We see how the world’s falling apart, hear about it constantly. Syria, Iraq, ISIS, Ukraine, Nigeria, North Korea. Cancer, hospital visits, funerals. Politics, mental illness, depression, bullying. Crime. I got passed by a police car chase on Wednesday morning on my way to church!
There’s plenty of stuff going wrong in the world, in your life. Maybe some of it’s your fault, or maybe most of it’s the result of living in a sinful, messed up, broken world. You don’t need me to tell you everything that’s going wrong, everything bit of evil in your life.
I’m sure there are some people who think they have it all together, who need to be convicted of their sin to realize they need a savior. I’m sure there are people who don’t think anything going wrong is ever their fault. I’d like to point those people to 1 John 1:8, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.”
But for most of us, though we don’t like to admit it, although we like to present ourselves as having it all together, we know our guilt. Adam and Eve each found someone else to blame, but inside, they knew. They hid. They knew they couldn’t make up for what they’d done. We know we need a savior.
We don’t need to hear more law, more condemnation; we need to hear the gospel, the good news. It’s so sad that so many people’s perception of the church is that we’re here to condemn with law, when our job is to proclaim gospel, to celebrate forgiveness. We need to hear we’re forgiven, because of Jesus.
Often, I think Gospel is the hard part to hear. We need to gather regularly to hear the message of God’s forgiveness, of grace. We need, at least I need, constant reminders that I’ve been forgiven and I don’t need to do anything to make up for whatever I’ve done, because Jesus has already made up for it!
Yes, the world is sinful, messed up, broken. But God loves it. We heard just last week in the reading how God loved the world so much that Jesus came to die for it. In the Genesis reading, we hear about the curse of sin and shame. But let’s not forget a few verses earlier, where God looks at the world and declares the creation good.
This message of grace is controversial. In the gospel reading, we heard some mixed reactions. In this story from Mark 3, Jesus has been going around doing things like healing people, challenging these religious regulations that had become more about rules than their purpose of benefiting God’s people, and sending out people to proclaim the Gospel message. Huge crowds are following him drawn to his revelation of God’s kingdom.
And then Jesus comes home. When he gets home, we learn that his message is too radical for his family, and they come out trying to restrain him, telling people he’s out of his mind. Move along, nothing to see here. Jesus’ own family is embarrassed by him!
For some of the religious authorities, the important scribes all the way from Jerusalem, Jesus’ message is so radical they think it must be from Satan. Sure, he’s casting out demons, but he must be doing it by the devil’s power. They don’t get this picture that God loves people more than laws!
Gospel is harder to understand than law. It’s hard to comprehend God loves you, that God has set you free. Sometimes I think we grasp at straws trying to find a reason to say we’re not forgiven. One of those straws is this idea Jesus talks about of the unforgivable sin.
As he’s explaining to the scribes how ridiculous of an idea it is to accuse him of being possessed by the devil, he says in verses 28-29, “Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.”
An eternal sin sounds pretty bad, right? Isn’t the point to find the gospel, the good news of God forgiving? But it makes sense to me. The Holy Spirit leads us to repentance and forgiveness; we talked about that two weeks ago. We can’t turn to God for forgiveness on our own; we’re in bondage to sin and can’t free ourselves. But God working through the Holy Spirit leads us to grace.
If we argue Jesus is the devil and God’s the enemy, if we reject forgiveness then of course it’s an eternal sin. Rejecting forgiveness is unforgivable.
We’re not puppets. We can choose to reject God’s grace. We’re able to turn from God. We do it all the time! We put ourselves in God’s place, trying to save ourselves. But God pursues us, out of love, no matter what we’ve done. If you’re worried you’re committing the unforgivable sin of going against the Holy Spirit, you’re not doing it.
The law tells us how we ought to live, and shows us how we fail. But the law goes with the Gospel. God comes to us. You are forgiven. You don’t need to be afraid of what you’ve done wrong in the past, whether that’s scratching a ceiling tile or committing a genuine crime, even rejecting God in the past.
The confirmation curriculum we’ve been using with the middle schoolers describes being a Christian not as going through life trying to get God’s forgiveness, but as going through life learning to live as forgiven people. It takes time and effort not to be forgiven, but to let ourselves accept that we’re forgiven, to believe our guilt is gone.
We keep gathering as a church not to get forgiveness, but to be reminded God has forgiven us, that God loves you, that you’ve been adopted children of God. As we heard at the beginning of the service, after we confessed our sins: “In Christ, you are a new creation; your sins are taken away and you are made new.”
Turn to your neighbor and repeat after me: “In Christ, you are a new creation – Your sins are taken away and you’re made new.” We’re freed to share that message of grace by serving, by living the life God calls us to.
This week, you’ll forget God’s grace has set you free. You’ll forget you’ve been claimed as a child of God. But God doesn’t forget. Listen again to the ancient promise in Psalm 130. “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications! If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be revered. I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope.”
Amen.