In the Name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today’s Gospel lesson from Matthew chapter 22 gives us an excellent summary of the two main teachings of the Bible. As we all learned in Catechism class, the two main teachings of the Bible are the law and the gospel. The law is God’s Word of command that tells us what to do, and the gospel is God’s Word of grace that tells us what Christ has done in our stead. God uses the law to show us our sins and our need for forgivness, and He uses the gospel to show us our Savior and how in Him we have forgivness. If you don’t understand the difference between the law and the gospel, you won’t be able to understand the Bible. Not only will it confuse you when you read it, but you’ll end up reading it wrong. You’ll assume that the law passages are actually gospel, that the gospel passages are actually law, and get all mixed up about your salvation.

That’s exactly what happened with the Pharisees. They didn’t understand the difference between the law and the gospel. They thought that the reason why God gave us His law was so that we could save ourselves by keeping it. They had reduced God’s law into a list of rules, 613 to be exact, and they taught that as long as you followed the rules you’d be saved. That’s why they asked Jesus about which rule was the most important. They didn’t care about which one He picked. They just wanted Him to pick one of them. Then they could argue with Him about whether or not He was right, just like they argued with each other. Which rule is more important? Is it the rule about keeping the Sabbath day? Is it the rule about tithing, or giving money to the poor? Is it the rule about not taking God’s Name in vain?

But Jesus didn’t pick one of their rules, did He? In fact, He didn’t reduce God’s law into a set of rules at all. Instead, He summarized all of the law at once with two simple commands. First, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind,” and second, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” As Jesus said, “On these two commands depend all the Law and the prophets.”

God’s law is about much more than just following a set of rules. It’s about loving Him above everything else and loving your neighbor as yourself. It’s a lot easier to follow a couple of rules than it is to actually love someone. For example, you can make a rule about how you have to go to church. That’s a good rule. You should go to church. But just because someone comes to church every Sunday, and follows that commandment in an outward way, that doesn’t mean that they’ve actually kept it their heart. What if you only come to church to make your parents happy? What if you come to church, but you hate being there and don’t want to listen to anything? What if you come to church because you think that the very act of showing up gets you some kind credit with God? Is that what it really means to keep the 3rd commandment? Are you really loving God from the bottom of your heart when you do that? No. You’re’ just following a rule.

Or what about a rule like, “you shouldn’t gamble.” That’s a good rule too. You shouldn’t gamble. Gambling is a sin. The only way that you make money when you gamble is by taking it from someone else. There’s no honest labor there. There’s no exchange of goods and services and actually serving your neighbor. And how can you even gamble without being greedy? How can you try and win a bunch of money without coveting something that you don’t already have? Of course, Christians shouldn’t gamble! That should be obvious. But just because you don’t gamble, and you don’t break that rule, it doesn’t mean you’ve actually kept God’s law. Lots of rich people don’t gamble because they know that the house always wins. The reason why they don’t play the slot machines or bet on sports isn’t because they’re concerned with being greedy. It’s precisely because they are greedy. They don’t want to lose their money. So, so what if they don’t gamble? So, what if they follow that rule? That doesn’t mean that they’re loving their neighbor like God wants us to. 

God’s law is more than just a list of rules. What God cares about from us, and what His law demands, goes far beyond what we do on the outside. It goes right to our very heart. God doesn’t just want us to behave in a certain way, He wants us to be a certain way. That’s what His law is about. That’s what His law really is.

When we stop looking at God’s law as a list of rules and start seeing it for what it is, we also start to see something else too. We start to see just how much we fail to keep. We start to recognize just how much we aren’t the way that we’re supposed to be, and how far away from God’s will we’ve actually fallen. Who loves God with their whole heart, soul, and mind? Who is perfectly united with every single desire that God has, and never wants anything different than what He says is good for us in the Bible? And who has loved his neighbor as himself? Who has been just as much concerned all the time with the needs of others as they are their own? Have you ever had an impure thought about another person? Have you ever coveted something that belonged to someone else? Have you ever said something about another person, that you know you’d never want to be said about yourself? If you have, and you know you have, then you haven’t kept God’s law.

The law of God doesn’t show us how to save ourselves. It shows us that we need salvation. It shows us how impossible it is for salvation to come from us and how the only way that we can be saved is if it comes from someplace else. And that’s what Jesus was trying to show the Pharisees with His question. They asked Him about the law and He showed them how they had the law all wrong. Then He asked them about the gospel, and they showed Him that they didn’t have that right either. 

What exactly was the question that Jesus asked the Pharisees? He said, “What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is He.” Then they said back to Him, “the Son of David.” To which Jesus replied, “how is it then that David, in the Spirit, calls him Lord, saying, ‘the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet.”

The point that Jesus was trying to make with his question is that just like the Pharisees didn’t understand the law, because they had reduced it to a set of rules, they didn’t understand the gospel, because they had reduced the Messiah to a mere man. Yes, they were willing to accept that the Messiah was the son of David, but they couldn’t explain why David also called Him his Lord. How could it be that before the Messiah was even born, He had a conversation with God, and they both talked about each other as equals? The answer is obvious, and the implication is obvious too. The Messiah is more than just a man, He is God Himself. And if the Messiah is God Himself, then He must have come to do much more than what the Pharisees thought He would. He must have come not just to set up a worldly kingdom, and return the Jewish people to their political power. He must have come to set up an eternal kingdom where salvation alone is to be found.

That is who the Messiah is. And that is what the gospel is. The gospel is not about what we do for God. It’s about what He does for us. It’s about how we have eternal salvation in Jesus. It’s about how God sent His very own Son to put all of our enemies under His feet. Who are our true enemies? Are they foreign nations that try and attack us? Are they people who make fun of us or treat us poorly as work or school? Can any of those people keep us out of heaven? No! Our true enemies are sin, death, and the devil. That’s what prevents us from being able to be saved on our own, and so that’s what the Messiah has come to save us from.

Your problem is not just that you break a couple of God’s rules now and again. Your problem is that you’re not who you’re supposed to be. Down to your very core, something is very wrong. When you look at God’s law and see it for what it actually requires, you should know it. You should know that you haven’t loved God with your whole heart or your neighbor as yourself. And that’s why you can’t look to God’s law for your salvation. That’s why you have to look to Jesus instead. Jesus is everything that you aren’t, and everything that you should be at the same time. Yes, He is a man, just like you. He’s David’s son. But He’s also David’s Lord. And He’s your Lord too. He is the Savior of sinners. He takes all of your sin, and the sin of the whole world, and bears it as His own so that by grace He can give you His forgivness. He takes all of your law breaking, and through faith He exchanges it for all of His law keeping. 

If you look for salvation in the law, you’ll never find it. If you try and reduce God’s law into a set of rules, that doesn’t mean that you’ve actually kept it. But if you look for salvation in the gospel, if you look for salvation in Jesus and what He’s done for you, then you’ll have real confidence. Then you’ll see someone who does love God with His whole, heart, soul, and mind, and who does love His neighbor as Himself. And when you see Him suffering and dying anyway, like you should have suffered and died, you can be certain that He did it in your place, and that all of your sins have been forgiven. You can rest on the certainly of the gospel, and let the law do its work of condemning you, because you have a Messiah in Jesus. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.

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In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Of all the things from the Bible that people like, I would say that the idea of angels, has to be at the top of the list. Nothing quite fascinates the imagination like the thought of these holy and mysterious creatures out there watching over us. And yet, this is also a very good example of why it’s important not just to believing in something from the Bible, but to actually believe the Bible. Because even though lots of people like the idea of angels, there’s a lot of misconceptions about them that really have no basis in the Word of God. And any time that we believe something that God’s Word doesn’t teach us, or add to it, subtract from it, or change, there is a danger of it harming our faith. It doesn’t matter if it seems small or insignificant to us at the time, as the Bible says elsewhere, a little bit of leaven leavens the whole lump. Meaning, just a little bit of false doctrine here or there can eventually contaminate the whole thing.

So, in this morning’s sermon, as we celebrate the feast of Saint Michael all Angles, we’re going to do so by considering a few basic facts about angels from the Bible, as well as respond to a couple of the most popular misconceptions.

First, what exactly even are the angels? Holy Scripture tells us that angels are spiritual beings created by God to do His will by serving and protecting humanity. As the book of Hebrews says, “Are they not all ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation.” Although angels can appear at times in the form of people, like they did when they visited Abraham and Lot in Genesis, they’re still spiritual in nature, and don’t naturally possess bodies of their own like we do. Just like a frog is a frog, and a duck is a duck. Angels are angels, and people are people.

Now perhaps, you’ve heard it said before that when someone dies, they become and angel. This is especially common when it comes to the death of young children as well as those who die in tragic accidents. For example, I bet you’ve seen if before where a car or a truck has a name on the back of it with a date and pair of wings. This is also a popular thing on Facebook. You might see someone post about the death of loved one and say something like, “heaven got another angel today.” Certainly, we don’t want to be cruel or insensitive here, but we also still need to follow the Word of God. And when we look in God’s word, and study the Scriptures, we don’t see that teaching there at all. In fact, the Bible makes it very clear that we don’t turn into angels when we die. Yes, Jesus does say in Matthew chapter 22 that we will be “like” the angels someday, but as He goes on to explain that is because we won’t marry and procreate in heaven, not because we will literally turn into angels.

Again, angels are non-corporeal beings. That means that they don’t have bodies. But humans do have bodies. And even more than that, God promises that after we die, He will one day raise our bodies back to new life again we’ll live in them forever. So, turning into an angel wouldn’t be an upgrade from what God promises, it would be a downgrade. As amazing as the angles are, as it says in Hebrews chapter 1, “For to which of the angels did God ever say, ‘You are my Son, today I have begotten you.’” Even when it comes to Jesus, He didn’t become an angel after He died, nor did He assume the nature of an angel when He entered into God’s creation to save us. No! He became a man. He became like one of us. And when we die in the faith, we will become more like Him. God won’t change our nature and make us different creatures. He'll restore our nature, and make us perfect humans.

The next thing that the Bible tells us about angles is that God often uses them to bring messages to people. In fact, the word “angel” literally means “messenger.” We, of course, can recall how Gabriel visited Mary and told her about the Christ child as well as how the angels appeared to the women at tomb and proclaimed Jesus’ resurrection to them. But we need to be careful with these examples too, and not interpret them in the wrong way. Just because God has done something in the past, that doesn’t mean that He will do the exact same thing for us necessarily in the future. All over the place, the Bible warns us about being on your guard against so-called “special” messages from God, even if they come from an angel. As Saint Paul writes in Galatians chapter 1, “But even if an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.” In Colossians chapter 2, Paul also specifically warns us about those who go on and on regarding visions they claim to have experienced and to avoid them. Instead, we should be satisfied with the content that God has already given us in the Bible, and evaluate every other supposed revelation through that. Even though God can communicate by using angels, we need to remember that the devil also disguises himself as an angel of light, and uses everything at his disposal to draw us away from the written word. So, we should hold fast to God’s Word and not put stock in extra messages, even from what might look like an angel. We certainly shouldn’t listen to that “angel” at all, if it says something that contradicts the Scriptures. 

Furthermore, we learn from the Bible that as supernatural beings, angels also are sent by God to watch over and protect us. Here we can recall how the angels closed the mouths of lions and when Daniel was thrown into the lions’ den, and saved him from being eaten by them. Angles also ministered to Jesus after His temptation in the wilderness, and came and help Him when He sweat drops of blood in the garden of Gethsemane. In perhaps the most incredible account about angels of all, maybe we remember how Elisha prayed to God that He would open the eyes of his fearful servant at Dothan, when the Assyrian army had them surrounded, and when God did, Elisha’s servant saw that the hills around them we’re filled with angles. As Elisha famously said, “those who are with us are more than those who are with them.”

Even though we cannot always see God’s holy angels around us, or feel their protective care, God promises to use them daily to keep us safe from evil. As we pray in Luther’s morning and evening prayers, “let your holy angel be with me, that the evil foe may have no power over me.” 

And yet, because God’s Word does say that He uses His angles to take care of us, sometimes this has led to the opinion that each person must have their own personal guardian angel. Certainly, this belief isn’t as problematic as becoming angles when we die, but I still think that we need to be careful here. There’s only one verse from the Bible that mentions anything close to this idea, and still it’s not entirely clear. We heard it in our Gospel lesson from Matthew 18. Jesus says in reference to children, and why we shouldn’t lead them into sin, because “their angels always see the face of my Father who is in heaven.” But that doesn’t necessarily prove that we all have one personal guardian angel. It just proves once again that God assigns angels to us to take care of us in general.

So, again, this is about not going beyond what God has revealed to us in the Scriptures. It’s enough to know that He uses angles to help us. Whether or not He does that by using one angel per person, we don’t know, and it isn’t our concern. And we certainly don’t need to try and figure out who our angel is so that we can do something like pray to them or try and communicate with them. The Bible tells us that we should pray to God alone, and go directly to Jesus for help, not bypass Him for an angel. As Jesus says in Matthew 11, “come to Meall who are weary and heaven laden and I will give you rest.” And as Saint Paul reminds us in 1 Timothy 2, “there is one Mediator between God and men, the Man Jesus Christ.” 

And finally, God’s Word tells us that the angels worship God by constantly adorning Him and singing His praises. That’s what the prophet Isaiah saw when God gave Him a vision of heaven in Isaiah chapter 6. He saw the angels surrounding the throne of God singing, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of Hosts.” And remember what the shepherds saw the night that Jesus was born: “And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the of the heavenly host praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom He is pleased.” We don’t worship the angels. But we do learn from the angels how to worship God. The angels are a model to us of what faithful Christian worship should look like and how we do. That’s why in our Liturgy, and specially in Divine Service setting 3, the one that Martin Luther compiled, we sing both the Gloria and the Sanctus, “Glory be to God on High” and “Holy, Holy, Holy.” Those two songs from the angels in Isaiah 6 and Luke chapter 2.

Angels are indeed a wonderful gift from God. The more that we think about them in accordance with God’s Word, the more that it should cause us to we marvel at the love of God. That’s why God tells us about them! These creatures are amazing. They have the ability to do things that we could never dream of. And yet, what do they do with all that strength and power? They use it to serve us. They are glad to do God’s will and take care of others who are less powerful or less magnificent looking than they are.

You are I can learn from that. Don’t ever think that its beneath you to serve others and put their needs before your own. And don’t get bored with worshiping Jesus. And if you do, just look at the angels. Listen to what God’s Word says about them and don’t make up your own opinions. Then the doctrine of angels will do what it’s supposed to do. It will comfort you and build up your faith in Jesus. In Jesus’’ Name. Amen.

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In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I’ve heard people say a lot of questionable things before in the receiving lines at funerals. A really popular one nowadays is the phrase, “I’m sorry,” as if they were somehow responsible what happened. Another one that you’ll hear is something like “how are doing,” as if they don’t already know that you can’t being doing that great because your loved one just died. Sometimes people even panic and ask things like, “how did they die,” which I always want to respond to with, “it was sin.” I can still remember, though, how one time at my mom’s funeral some poor guy accidently asked, “what are you going to do with the house?” And that wasn’t after saying bunch of other stuff beforehand and building up to it. He just sort of blurted it out of his mouth.

But never in my life, and I’ve been to many funerals before, have I ever heard someone say anything close to what Jesus said to the grieving widow in our Gospel lesson from Luke chapter 7. I’ve never heard anyone say, “stop crying.” And yet that’s exactly what Jesus said isn’t it? As our text tells us, “And when the Lord saw her, He had compassion on her and said to her, “Do not weep.” 

So, in this morning’s sermon, I’m going to give a defense for what Jesus said, and explain what He meant by it, what we can learn from it, and why, as always, He was right when He said it.

First, I think it’s important for us to recognize that Jesus certainly didn’t tell the widow at Nain not to cry at the death of her son because death is something good that we should celebrate. That’s not what our Lord was getting at at all. Even Jesus Himself at another time in His life personally wept at the death of His friend Lazarus. I’ve always made a point of sharing that detail with grieving families. If even Jesus, who has a much more mature and informed understanding of death that you do, could weep and be sad at the loss of His loved one, then you’re allowed to shed a few tears at the loss of your loved ones too. It’s not unchristian to cry at a funeral. It’s just that we Christians grieve in a different kind of way. We do not grieve as those who have no hope. 

Regardless, though, this whole modern notion that death is just the circle of life, and that we should treat it as a natural part of being human, is totally foreign to the Biblical witness. God didn’t create us to die. He created us to live! Death isn’t our friend. The Bible says that it’s our enemy. In fact, it says that it’s our last enemy, meaning, our greatest one. The only reason that we at all, is because we bring it upon ourselves as punishment for our sins. I know that lots of people don’t like to hear that nowadays, but that’s what the Word of God says. As Saint Paul writes in Romans chapter 6, “the wages of sin is death.” And as it tells us in Romans chapter 5, “so death spread to all men because all sinned.” 

So, again, when Jesus told the grieving widow not to cry at the death of her son, that wasn’t because He was trying to get her to embrace death and welcome it as something good. It was the opposite. He wasn’t trying to undermine the terribleness of death, as so many people try to do today, He was trying to magnify the salvation from death that only He can bring.

The first reason why He told the woman not to weep was, of course, because of what He was literally about to do for her. Jesus was about to raise her son from the dead. Just like He did with Jairus’ daughter, just like He did with Lazarus, who had been stinking up the tomb for 4 days, and just like He will one day do for all people on the last day, Jesus was going to bring that man back to new life again. 

I love the details that Luke gives us in our text. First, he tells us that our Lord made a point of touching the casket. It’s sort of like when the woman who had the flow of blood touched Jesus’ garment and the Bible says that power went out from Him. Whenever we come into contact with Body of Jesus, there was an exchange. He takes something away from us, and we get something from Him in return. Think about how this happens in Communion. Jesus takes away our sins there, and we get His Body and Blood instead. We get the medicine of immortality, and the antidote to death itself. When our Lord places His healing hand upon us, just like He reached out at touched the casket at Nain, that makes death stop in its tracks. It reverses the effects of our sin, because Christ bears them as His own.

Next, our text says that Jesus talked to the man. That’s an important detail too. He spoke to a guy who literally couldn’t hear anything because his ears didn’t work anymore. But that doesn’t stop the Word of the Lord. God’s Word is living and active, shaper than any two-edged sword. It has the power to create the universe out of nothing, to give us the gift of faith in Christ, and to raise us to new spiritual and physical life. Everything relies on the power of God’s almighty Word. And when we know the promises of God’s Word, we can approach things as difficult as death with a totally different perspective. Like I said earlier, it’s not that we Christians don’t get sad, and aren’t supposed to cry at funerals. Its just that we do it in a totally different way than those who don’t know the Gospel. As Saint Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 4, “But we do not want you to be uniformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you maybe not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep.”

The unbelieving world around us weeps as those who have no hope. They either pretend that death is a good thing, and that they’re happy with in happens, or they despair because they don’t know what will happen next. But we do. God in His mercy has revealed it to us in His Word. We know that because Jesus died and rose, when we die, we will rise again too. We know that because Jesus already paid the full wages for our sin Himself, we won’t have to pay for it eternally. Even when it looks like we pay for it momentarily, that moment doesn’t last very long at all. Through the power of His Word, Christ promises to reverse our death, and bring us to new life once more. In the twinkling of the eye, at the last trumpet, the Bible says, He will raise us, body and soul, and give us back to our loved ones, just as He gave the widow’s son at Nain back to her. That’s the reason why Jesus told her not to weep.

The account of the widow’s son at Nain teaches us Christians how to approach death differently. Yes, we get sad in the face of death because we know that that’s not how God originally designed it to be, and even worse, that we bring death on ourselves due to our sins. But we also know that in Jesus we have the victory over death because of the forgiveness of our sins and that through Him our tears of sadness will one day be transformed into tears of joy.

We can meet death with a smile on our face not because death is our friend, but because Jesus is our friend. Because we have a Savior who suffered and died in our place, and took away death’s power over us for good. He even transformed the horrible event of our dying into doorway and passage to eternal life. That’s one of my favorite lines from the hymnal. We sang in in our hymn of the day today, “Why Should Cross and Trial Grieve me.” The last verse goes like this:

“Now in Christ, death cannot slay me,

Though it might, Day and night

Trouble and dismay me.

Christ has made my death a portal,

From the strife, Of this life

to His joy immortal.”

When someone dies in the faith, they don’t lose anything. “To live is Christ,” Saint Paul says, “but to die is gain.” We don’t lose anything when we die because when you have Jesus and His forgivness you have everything. When you belong to the One who is the Resurrection and the Life, not even death has the power to hurt you. It might sting you, but it can’t destroy you. It might give you some sorrow now, but it cannot end your gladness eternally. Soon, Jesus will command your tears to depart from you for good, just like He did for the woman and Nain. In heaven, He will wipe away every tear from your eyes, when He reunites you will all those who believed in the Lord like you do. He will raise you up, and restore your body back to perfect heath, making it even better than it ever was before, because it will be free from everything that makes it corrupt right now. Your sin will not only be forgiven, it will be gone, and so will all of sins terrible wages.

So, for now, go to where Jesus is. Meet Him in the places where He promises to meet you, in His holy Word and in His Sacraments. Let Him stop you on your way too, and in your mourning over your sin and what it costs you, listen to what He has to say. Receive His healing touch, through His Body and Body, and hear the same words He said to the boy spoken over you, “Young man, I say to, arise.” In Jesus’ Name. Amen.