Trinity 3, 2024
Rev. Thomas Van Hemert
St. Luke 15:1-32
Trinity 3
June 16, 2024
In the name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit.
When it comes down to it, there are only two religions or two types of religions that mankind has ever known. The first is the religion of men, which is to say, a religion of works: observe these five pillars, fast on certain days, eat or don’t eat certain things, dress a certain way, go on required pilgrimages, and the like. Do this or that, follow these methods and these rules and the better off you will be in the next life. The problem with that sort of religion, obviously, is that it does not and cannot provide any assurance or guarantee that you will be better off in the next life, because how can anyone know he has done the right thing or that he has enough or behaved the right way? The religion of works provides no comfort.
The other religion is our religion. It is the Christian religion, which is the religion of love, that is, the religion of God’s grace, of God’s unconditional, individual, and personal grace that perseveres until the end. God’s grace is unconditional because, as the three parables before us show, God loves us by seeking us out when we have wandered from Him, finding us when we are lost, and restoring us back into fellowship with Him even though we did not love Him. We loved our sins.
The sheep wandered through ignorance; the coin lay in insensibility and unconsciousness; the prodigal initially denied his father, wishing he were dead so that he himself could go waste his father’s own retirement fund. What his father worked so hard to gain, the son spent it all in prodigal living. But none of these were so lost that they couldn’t be found. The sheep strayed aimless, helpless, incapable of return. Every wanderer has a tendency to wander farther. The coin lied there incapable of effort and hidden in dust. The prodigal sat there, covered in the manure of his sin, eating the pods alongside pigs. But God sought out His one lost sheep. He found His coin. He restores His contrite and repentant son back to fellowship with Him.
In this we see that His grace is individualized to each one of us. He does not lose sight of the one sheep out of one hundred or the one coin out of ten. One sheep wanders, one coin is lost, and there is joy in heaven over one sinner who repents. Though God created the whole universe—stars, planets, galaxies—He chooses us, lowly, sinful, unworthy creatures, to become one of us, and to redeem us from our sin so that we may know that we are not outcasts but are the pinnacle of His creation and are loved by Him.
His grace is personal. It is “My sheep,” He says, “My coin,” “My son, your brother was lost and is found. He was dead but is alive.” That little sheep belongs to Him. The coin is His. The Son is His son. The loss is His, but the joy is also His. We don’t rejoice with the sheep, but with the Shepherd. His grace, His love is given and showered upon each of them, even though they did not deserve it. And again, there is joy even in heaven over one sinner who repents.
This is the center of Christianity: God loves us and gives us His grace freely out of His own goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness in us. To be sure, God’s love and grace are not two distinct qualities. Rather, they are one and the same. Love that is manifest bears the name of grace. The Gospel shows the Father’s grace toward us, because by the Gospel, we hear, learn, and come to know, to believe, and to confess that God sent His only-begotten Son in to the world to atone for our sins by dying on the cross and to be raised for our justification.
God in Christ Jesus came to earth to be the atoning sacrifice for us; to exchange His life for ours so that He would suffer death for us and so that we would receive His inheritance. This is how God’s love for sinners manifests itself as grace. And this love, this grace, is received by repentant hearts, who believe that for Christ’s sake, our sins are completely and unequivocally forgiven. By this, we have full assurance and a guarantee of salvation. Salvation, as you all know is deliverance from the devil, death, sin and sin’s consequences. But in in reality, what salvation is, is actually more than that. Salvation is freedom and deliverance from even the threat of eternal death, the devil, sin, and sin’s consequences.
The first hymn we sang today reminds us of this truth. It describes the nature of God in Christ Jesus and how He relates to sinners, “Jesus sinners doth receive,” which is a fancy way of saying, “Despite our sins, God forgives us on account of His Son.” “Jesus sinners doth receive; oh may all this saying ponder. Who in sin’s delusions live and from God and heaven wander! Here is hope for all who grieve: Jesus sinners doth receive.” The hymn calls upon us to think on this, to meditate upon the very truth that God does something that we should never expect Him to do: to redeem us, not with gold or silver, but with His holy and precious blood and with His innocent suffering and death.
When we ponder this saying, when we think on these parables, especially the parable of the Prodigal Son, we may be quick to identify with the Prodigal. After all, all of us have been prodigals, in a sense. We have loved certain pet sins, not wishing to let them go for a time. But then we repent. We come to ourselves. We turn back to God in repentance, knowing that God forgives us for free. But if we ponder these things and think on these things, I think it would also be appropriate to identify with the father and the older son. Of course, in the strict sense, God is the father in the parable Who welcomes back His disgraced son and He rejoices that he is back. But just as God’s love is manifest as grace and is given to us for free on account of Christ, so also do we share in that grace by welcoming back those who have sinned against us. “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” It is our duty to forgive as we have been forgiven. “How many times shall I forgive my brother?” Every time. That’s what Jesus does and Christians want to be like Jesus.
Perhaps most often, though, we act like the older brother. We have been here. We have not left the fold. We have not squandered our inheritance with reckless living, prostitutes, and the like and we often find ourselves comparing our lives and good works with those who do struggle with obvious and public sin. We have not strayed. For the most part, we have been good boys and good girls. “Why do people care so much about that sinner? He’ll probably just slip up, fall of the wagon and back into that sin soon enough.” Now let us repent of that. Let us remember that everyone is dealing with something. Who knows what the person next to you is struggling with. Let us then love as God has loved us. Let us share that grace of God which has been given to us with our neighbors. Let us share true Christian religion with them. Let us visit orphans and widows in their trouble. Let us keep ourselves unspotted from the world. And let us also remember that everything that is our heavenly Father’s is ours. We too were once lost. But we have been found. We too were once dead in our sins, but are now alive in Jesus Christ.
In +Jesus’ name.
