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Matthew 10:24-39
A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
One day in a seminary class, a student asked the professor: “How can we be relevant and yet respect the belief systems of others?”
The professor answered: “I think you are asking: How can we proclaim the gospel without offending anyone?” Then he added: “It can’t be done.”
And that’s what the gospel text today is about.
It says in Matthew 10:34: “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
This doesn’t mean he came to bring wars with swords. We know that from many things he said. But what he says is: “There is something which is finally decisive.”
It’s not uncommon today to hear someone say: “Family comes first.”
But here it says family does not come first: “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” (Matthew 10:35).
Again, this doesn’t mean he came to divide family members from each other. What it is saying is: “What comes first if you are a Christian, is: What about God? What is your priority? What is decisive?”
To answer what is decisive and why, we move to the second text, Romans 6, and what it says about being a Christian.
To begin with, let’s talk about birthdays. We remember the dates of our birthdays and those of our immediate family. But how many know the date of your Baptism? And yet this is the most important day of our lives; it is the day we were born again, this time into eternal life. It is the day we were adopted and became “children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ” (Romans 8:17).
Luther spoke of Baptism as the big death for each of us. And later yes, there’s the little death, the day you and I die. But as Paul writes here in Romans: “If we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5). In Baptism we die with him to be by him.
In the Large Catechism Luther says that every day I return to my Baptism. That’s where my feet are placed on solid ground.
And yet we wonder: When it comes to Baptism, you do it, but does it make any difference? Is it that important?
In the section before our text today Paul says law came in to increase sin but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more. He then asks in our text today: “Shall we increase in sin in order that we have more grace?” No, that’s not our problem. We don’t take sin that seriously.
Instead, we think: “If you do some good works, you’ll surely go to heaven.”
What is it really about? Paul says: “We were buried with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life . . . if we have died with Christ, we believe we shall also live with him” (Romans 6:4-5, 8).
What’s basic to being a Christian is that we have been buried with him in his death by Baptism; therefore, we are forgiven and we shall live.
That says everything about the seriousness of sin and death.
To be sure, some people will say that death isn’t serious. Then the discussion is over. If that’s what you can live with, then I guess that what you’ll have to die with.
But sin and death are two sides of the same coin. Sin and death are those things which show that in ourselves we’re helpless and hopeless. We can’t beat death. It will get us. And sin is a deeper corruption in us than we can imagine.
The answer given to us is that through the cross alone, we then are given forgiveness and life. The cross alone.
But that doesn’t sell well in our culture, or any other, for that matter.
Consider how people like to celebrate Christmas but not Good Friday. It’s not that we shouldn’t celebrate Christmas, but the importance of it compared with Good Friday should be reversed because the real event, the event that changes everything, is Good Friday and Easter as a package.
That leads once again to the basic question of hell and God’s justice. As you know from last Sunday you can quote Scripture on both sides of that problem. 1 Timothy 2:4 says that God desires all to be saved. And Romans 11:32 says: “God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all.” These verses seem to say that everybody is saved.
But that would mean that God is unjust, that he doesn’t do anything about evil.
And there are other verses, verses like Matthew 25:46 which say that some will go to eternal salvation and others “will go into eternal punishment.”
What do we say to this? We are tempted to say: “It’s difficult; let’s go fishing.” In other words, let’s not deal with this now.
Or more seriously, we may start to say: “Maybe God is behind evil, or maybe God isn’t just.”
If you think back to the temptation story with Adam and Eve in the third chapter of Genesis, the temptation was that you and I then would judge what is good and evil. That’s the great temptation.
And what’s the solution for us personally? The text is plain about this. It says through Baptism he makes us his own. This means Baptism as we do it, so that it is God’s doing and not ours.
If you want to think of it in a way that helps you remember it, just remember that all Baptism is infant Baptism, no matter at what age a person is baptized. The person could be 2 months old or 20 years old. That is to say, all Baptism is that which is from outside of us, in spite of us, a gift, totally God’s doing and not in ourselves.
How can that be? It doesn’t seem to work. We wonder: “Maybe God has not really done it in the cross?” And when we think like that, what we’re really doing is attacking the cross and God’s work there.
Finally, we remember Good Friday and the words of Jesus on the cross: “It is finished” (John 19:30).
We go wrong when we think we’re so smart and start saying: “Either God does evil, or God isn’t just.” No way, no how. Neither of those is possible.
Rather: What God says and does is on the cross, and the cross is the remarkable manner in which he has taken care of what it is all about.
And that it is yours and mine through the promise.
And because it doesn’t depend on us, we can be absolutely certain. We don’t say it’s mainly God’s doing, but we need to add something else. We better do some good works. We’d better accept him, make a decision for him because it’s up to us to receive him rightly, to make it work.
No, it’s not. It’s God’s work, thank God, because we can’t and we don’t.
And from the cross and the sacrament comes the certainty we have that neither life nor death nor anything can separate us from him because of what he has done and being in him forever.
That’s why we can’t preach without offending. It sounds so terribly intolerant because this is the message of salvation.
It’s nothing difficult; it simply that he’s Lord, and he’s done it, and therefore it is also the message of freedom. Amen