Clarity in Compassion :: Luke 6:36-42
Brothers and sisters in Christ, your Heavenly Father is compassionate. ... You will not be judged. You will not be condemned. You will be forgiven. It will be given to you. It will be put into your lap. It will be a good measure ... and you will see all of these truths clearly.
This is the Gospel I’ve been given to proclaim to you today from Luke chapter 6.
The first part of that good news is fact: Your Heavenly Father is compassionate. I can’t remind you of this enough. God “is” compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness (Ex 34:6). He doesn’t just do compassionate things; He is compassionate. He doesn’t exist without compassion ... nor does he exist apart from compassion. He doesn’t exist to show compassion only from time to time. He “is” compassion, and therefore, he is always compassionate. He reflects his compassion through steadfast love and faithfulness to his promises. That means he feels pity for us and responds to that emotion with the action of undeserved mercy, which we call grace.
Your Father is compassionate. He forgives you.
As we have been hearing in recent weeks, when we are lost, he is compelled by his compassion to find us (Lk 15:32). When we are far off, he does the unthinkable, running to us in compassion to embrace us. When we are hurting, he speaks compassionate words of peace to comfort us (Ps 138:4, Gen 50:21). And as we continue to hunger and thirst for righteousness, he continuously and compassionately extends his Great Invitation, urging all of us older and younger sons to come and join the unending feast of forgiveness. The Father is compassionate.
The second part of our good news is a future more vivid.
Because of his compassion, your Heavenly Father will enable you to see and hear this good news clearly in the sacraments ... his Gospel imperatives ... when we take the log of sin from our own eyes and recognize how badly we need his forgiveness.
But we struggle to believe that, don’t we? We have a hard time trusting this good news in the sacraments. We are wrapped up too much in ourselves ... in the here and now. Too often we think we aren’t deserving of the Father’s compassion, that we don’t deserve his forgiveness today. Too often we are too consumed with our own passions, our own desire to protect ourselves and our own interests ... that we diminish our compassion for each other.
But your Father is compassionate. He sees us in our sin, takes pity on the situation, and does something about it. Through the faith in Christ that he gave you in the sacrament of baptism, he opens your eyes to see clearly the enormity of your sin and your need for a savior. He leads you to repentance. He opens your ears to hear clearly his sacrament of absolution. And he opens your mouths to receive his body and blood in, with, and under the bread and wine that he continues to deliver in the sacrament of the altar for the forgiveness of sins, life and salvation.
He does that ... because that’s who he is, a compassionate father. As such, He says ...
LOOK AT WHO AND WHAT YOU GET TO BE ... A FORGIVEN CHILD OF YOUR COMPASSIONATE FATHER
Won’t you now embrace the sacraments? Be compassionate, just as your Father is compassionate.
In particular, brothers and sisters in Christ, our Lord Jesus gave these divine imperatives before he died on a cross: These are for the many, for the forgiveness of your sins.
Recognizing their need, the first Christians and Lutherans began doing this every time they met. We can’t go to the cross to see the good news that Jesus has accomplished for us. Instead, the Lord comes to us embodied by the Word in the Sacraments and presented in compassion.
As Luther asks us in the catechism: Why, should we let this treasure be torn from the Sacrament? Instead, embrace our future more vivid! In his compassion, he has set before us the mercies of heaven. Our living Savior, Jesus Christ, is opening your eyes to the reality before us ... that the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation come through the administration of his Sacraments in the Holy Christian Church and the proclamation of his word. Why do you persist in denying yourselves the opportunity to receive these gifts?
Instead, Be compassionate, Jesus declares, just as your Father is compassionate.
Our reading from Luke chapter 6 is part of our Lord’s Sermon on the Plain. During this discourse, Jesus teaches us that we should be genuine Christians who don’t just praise faith and the gospel with empty words ... like the world does ... we should embrace all that he taught and commanded every Lord’s Day. Be compassionate. Don’t judge. Don’t condemn. Eat with sinners. Extend the Great invitation. Come to the Feast of Forgiveness. In our fellowship with each other, we find the true presence of Christ.
People all around you like to talk about Christ in this way, but their actions don’t align with their words. They aren’t reflecting the Father’s compassion. They say they are a Christian, but they don’t live Christian lives. They deny the forgiveness of sins to those around them. They shy away from the word and sacraments that deliver life and salvation. They start thinking they can receive these gifts from God too often. They say things like, this gift from heaven will lose its specialness, if we receive it too often. They even go so far as declaring to their brothers and sisters who know they need them ... that they can’t have them. They regard the sacraments as something we do. And they lose sight that Christ gives us forgiveness in his divine gifts.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, repent every one of you. As Luther asks us in the catechism, Do you think God cares about what we do or believe, as though on that account he should allow his ordinances to be changed (LC V 7)? Instead, Be compassionate, just as your Father is compassionate. Hear the Word of Gospel. Receive the sacraments for your forgiveness.
The Feast of Forgiveness is not something we do. It is something God does for us. It is not our Supper. It is the Lord’s Supper, an unending feast that unites the baptized body of Christ in his compassion. Christ gave us this heavenly gift precisely because he saw us in our need, he saw that we were blind to the truth of our own sin, that our own sin is the biggest burden in our lives, that we can’t do anything about our own sin.
So in his compassion, God was moved to do the unthinkable: He was born to die. In his compassion, our sinless savior lifted the heavy burden of our sin onto his cross, where he suffered for it. He lifted all the burdens of human life ... depression, anxiety, pain, fear, loss ... all the things that weigh people down ... up onto his cross. As scripture says he who knew no sin became heavy and weighed down by our sin; he became sin. He had made sure his body of divine mercy was nailed to his cross so he could not move from it until he had paid the redemption price for you ... his death. He demonstrated just how steadfast in compassion he really is. Your sin died on the cross, and it was buried so you will never hear from it again.
While all of this is history and fact, it is not just pure history and plain fact. It is has purpose so that we proclaim his death in the Supper until he comes. And this purpose gives us living hope of life in the resurrection of Christ. You couldn’t sing God’s praises in Sheol. So he raises you to eternal life, freeing you to be compassionate to one another, forgiving each other’s sins, just as Christ does. What great joy awaits us in the Supper!
Won’t you show that compassion now to your brothers and sisters in Christ, too? There are too many of us longing for God’s gifts of compassion every Lord’s Day. This is not just what we are called to do, this is what we do as Christians! This is who we get to be! Chosen children of God. Baptized. Absolved. Nourished. Forgiven. Men and women of action.
In the church, we call this life an office or vocation. This is the life we are called to live: being compassionate, just as your Father is compassionate. Forgiving and giving.
For me, it is the office of being a pastor and a husband and a father. You have called me to express the compassion of our Lord through the proclamation of the Word and the administration of the sacraments.
For you it is the office of being a Christian mother or father, son or daughter, brother or sister, friend or neighbor. God has called you to be different, to be set apart, to be holy, just as he is holy, hearing his word and receiving his compassion. Christ’s teaching today does not tell you how to get to heaven or earn your Father’s mercy. It tells you who he is and who you are in him. It shows us what life in the kingdom of heaven is like.
Yes, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, your Father is compassionate.
And now we can see clearly who we are: We are chosen to be compassionate to one another, giving and serving. Because all of your sins are forgiven, you are free to help your neighbor ... to treat him as our Lord has treated and continues to treat you ... giving you everything you need for body and soul even though you have done nothing to deserve it and everything to be grounded from it.
This is life in the kingdom of heaven today and forevermore.
Do not fear this life. You won’t be alone.
He is Compassionate. He is with you always.