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Those words, “I lift up my soul,” express the same thing as when we say in the Divine Service, in the Preface to the Holy Communion liturgy, “Lift up your hearts. We lift them up unto the Lord.” These words from the Psalm and from the liturgy call us to set our desire upon God Himself, to long for Him, His Word, His truth. The words from the beginning of this Psalm, and in the liturgy, are our response to the exhortation of St. Paul, “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.”

The “things that are above” are the ways and paths of the LORD, while the “things that are on earth” are the ways and paths of fallen man. This theme persists throughout the Psalm, beginning with the prayer in verse 4, “Make me to know your ways, O LORD; teach me your paths.” What are the ways and paths of the LORD? The Psalm itself explains: “He teaches the humble his way. All the paths of the LORD are steadfast love and faithfulness.” Thus to walk in the way of the LORD is to have the same mind as the LORD – a mind of mercy and compassion.

To these, the Psalm gives this promise: “The friendship of the LORD is for those who fear him, and he makes known to them his covenant.” The word here translated friendship is rendered by the NKJ as secret, but neither really get at the heart of the meaning. The Hebrew word that David uses means council or counsel. The one who fears God, reverences Him, has respect for Him and His Word, receives and benefits from His counsel, exhorting the man of God to trust in the LORD’s mercy and likewise to show mercy to others.

Where do we get that counsel? There is a liturgical, sacrificial meaning to the verse, “My eyes are ever toward the LORD.” That word “ever” frequently indicates the regular sacrifices of the tabernacle, the daily prayers and rituals at the LORD’s altar. When the psalmist says, “My eyes are ever toward the LORD,” he is saying that he keeps on persistently in the appointed worship and prayers of the tabernacle even while he is “trapped,” with his feet in the net. He keeps on and persists because he is confident that the LORD will deliver.

Now the heart of God’s deliverance, the Psalm makes clear, is the forgiveness of sins: “For your name’s sake, O LORD, pardon my guilt, for it is great…. Consider my affliction and my trouble, and forgive all my sins.”

Another important theme in this Psalm is in eyes, looking and seeing. Verses 15, 18, and 19 all go together: v15, My eyes look toward the LORD; and in vv18-19, the word “consider” is actually in Hebrew “look”: Our eyes are toward the LORD where He has promised to be (in the OT, in the sacrifices of the altar; and in the NT, in the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross and the delivery of that sacrifice to us in the sacrament of the altar)—our eyes are toward that, and then we have a prayer for the LORD to put His eyes on us, to look on my affliction and trouble, and forgive all my sins. Then, in v19, we ask the LORD to look at, consider our many enemies, who are assailing us and trying to turn us away from God.

We are constantly in danger, danger even from ourselves, so the next prayer is, “Oh, guard my soul!” We cannot sustain ourselves, we are helpless and hopeless on our own, thus we need God to guard, keep, watch, preserve our souls.

Then finally the psalmist prays what is the heart of the Gospel “Redeem Israel” – redeem, ransom, these are words of the vicarious satisfaction. Everything depends on God’s action to deliver us, for by ourselves, we have our feet in the net, and the sins of our past troubling us and counting against us. Everything, this Psalm makes clear, depends on God’s action for us: He forgives, He guards, He redeems.

So when we die, we want to have these words on our lips: “Remember not the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions; remember me for Your mercy’s sake, O LORD.” Thus we make our dying prayer, where everything rests on the mercy of God. +INJ+

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[The office of school-teacher] belongs … to the “offices of parents” to see to it that their children “are educated in all piety, sciences, and arts.” Bringing up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord is also the parents’ obligation (Eph. 6:4), not that of pastors…. Walther [the first LCMS president] quite naturally regarded the provision of schools as a parental and civil function. “Here in America,” however, he argued, “the congregation takes the place of the government in this matter.”

How then did Walther relate the school-office to the one Gospel office? Walther held that in the apostolate Christ had “instituted only one office in the church, which embraces all others and by which the church of God should be provided for in every respect.” His 8th Thesis states therefore: “The preaching office [Predigtamt] is the highest office in the church, out of which office all other ecclesiastical office [Kirchenämter] flow.” Accordingly, “every other public office in the church is a part of [the preaching office, Predigtamt] or an auxiliary office that supports the Predigtamt, whether it be the office of those elders who do not labor in the Word and doctrine (1 Tim. 5:17) or the ruling office (Rom. 12:8) or the diaconate (office of service in the narrow sense), or whatever offices…” In this context also belongs the office of schoolmaster.

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There is also a blog dealing with issues of depression and mental disorders by the same title: I Trust When Dark My Road – I highly recommend it.

UPDATE: I didn’t want to wait for the physical copy to arrive, and I’m not going to print the thing out. I saved it as a bookmark in Safari (my bookmarks sync with my iPhone), opened up the PDF on the iPhone, and voila! It’s fairly readable in landscape mode. I’d prefer an ebook where I can adjust the font size, but this will do.

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Jesus tells a parable, a story designed to teach us a spiritual reality. God had showered Rich Man with extraordinary wealth. He lived in a mansion, he had all the finest things, but he showed no mercy to Lazarus, a poor sick beggar who had been unceremoniously dumped in the gutter at Rich Man’s gate. Now Rich Man showed no restraint; he treated every day like a holiday, gorging at every meal. But he could spare nothing for Lazarus. Every day it was a mad scramble between Lazarus and the wild dogs for the scraps of discarded food tossed out in the trash.

Rich Man knows who Lazarus is, but he shows no mercy toward him. He wishes mercy for himself, but does not show it to others. This parable has the same message as the parable of the unforgiving servant. There, a man owes the king an enormous sum of money, which he can never repay, and the king is going to sell this man’s wife and children as slaves, and throw the man in jail until the money is repaid. He will die in prison. The man pleads for more time, and instead of just giving him more time, the king forgives the debt.
You would think he would be filled with gratitude at the king’s mercy, and that would spill over into his life; but instead, he goes out and finds another man who owes him a relatively small amount of money, grabs him by the throat and demands payment. This poor fellow says the very same thing: “Please, give me more time, and I will pay you everything,” but instead of showing mercy, he has that man thrown in jail. When the king learns of it, he withdraws his own mercy from that foolish, unforgiving servant.

The same thing is going on in today’s parable. God showered blessings on Rich Man, but he did not share his blessings with others. And so the purpose of this parable is to direct us to the right use of money. The right use of money is for mercy, especially where the opportunity is put right before us, like Lazarus thrown at the gate of the Rich Man.

This is why we as a church must use our corporate goods, our treasury, to show mercy toward others. By this parable, Jesus is teaching us to cast our eyes outward, beyond our gates, to a world in need often lying at our doorstep. This was one of the two main functions of church offerings in the early church: to support the ministry of Word and Sacrament, providing for pastors; and to support the ministry of mercy to people’s temporal needs: food for the poor in their own midst, and sending relief to places of poverty. This past Wednesday night we commemorated St. Barnabas; the book of Acts describes how Barnabas was entrusted with money that the Christians of Antioch sent to Judea to care for the people suffering from a great famine there.

Those early Christians are great examples to us because they reflected God’s mercy in their lives. “Blessed be the Holy Trinity and the Undivided Unity; let us give glory to Him, for He has shown mercy to us!” They confessed the same faith as we do, and then responded to it by showing mercy to others. Isn’t this what we heard from the Word of God earlier? “Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

Now this sounds like a lot of Law, and it can drive us to despair because we’ve never done enough. We could look at today’s parable and ask, “How much would Rich Man have had to give to Lazarus to stay out of Hell?” But that’s asking the wrong question. The love of the Christian is not a work that seeks to fulfill a law or keep a rule; there is no scale by which we can add up the good things and score enough points to get into heaven and stay out of hell. Real Christian love is not a work done to keep a commandment, but a response to the love of God already shown to us, an imitation of the God who is love, an imitation of the God who first loved us.
And so what the Rich Man lacked was not a high enough score on the good works scale; there is no http://freegoodworksreport.com that you can go and check your divine credit report with God. What the Rich Man lacked, he learned too late: he lacked repentance. It is those who refuse to repent who are condemned to hell, a place of everlasting torment where no pity is shown. It is from there that the Rich Man pleads with Abraham to send Lazarus to his five brothers: “If one goes to them from the dead, they will repent.” Repentance was what the Rich Man lacked.

Repentance and faith go together, and repentance and what our Lutheran Confessions call the New Obedience likewise go together. That new obedience is what the Scriptures call “bearing fruits of repentance.” For the Rich Man, bearing fruits of repentance would be to begin showing mercy, begin sharing his goods with those in need. What would it mean for you?

Perhaps we do not really want Christ to come and this world to pass away. We enjoy our vices, we love our possessions, and the thought of sharing them is painful. That’s the weakness of our mortal nature: we are by nature selfish, and even as baptized children of God we struggle with that sinful nature. Because of our weakness, we can, by ourselves, do no good thing.

It is entirely by God’s grace that we are made able to keep the commandments and please God. So we must pray that when Christ comes He will find us His people: people of faith and mercy, the kind of inhabitants He desires to share His kingdom with. There is a little prayer attributed to St. John Chrysostom that I think is fitting for us: “O God, even if I have done nothing good in Thy sight, yet grant me, according to Thy grace, that I may make a start in doing good.”

Now all of this is founded on everything we have heard in the preceding six months: the birth, suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the gift of the Holy Spirit. That’s how we are saved. You cannot possibly work your way into heaven, or work your way out of hell, even if you were the richest man alive, and gave everything you had to the poor. There is only one name by which we are saved from hell and receive life from God: our Lord JESUS Christ.

Today’s Gospel reading, then, doesn’t teach us how we are saved, but how the saved are: God has called us to be people of mercy, just as He is merciful toward us. God calls us to love, just as He is love. That love and mercy is given to us, freely, at His table, where we dogs and beggars are given riches from our merciful Lord.

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Spirit – it seems impossible to grab hold of what that really is. Spirit is something shapeless and ephemeral, usually synonymous with enthusiasm or excitement: like team spirit or school spirit. Precisely because you can’t nail “spirit” down, it’s become popular to reject “religion” in favor of “spirituality.” What does it mean to be “spiritual”?  It is an embracing of mysticism and experience, while rejecting the certainty of doctrine and revealed truth. Ultimately being “spiritual but not religious” means rejecting the Word of God.

But it was not so from the beginning. In the beginning, God breathed into man the breath of life—the Spirit—and He gave man His Word. The Holy Spirit and the Word always go together, and so the life that God gives likewise is present wherever God’s Spirit and Word are. Our first parents rejected the Word of God, and so lost life – not their own life, but the life of God. For man has no life in himself – he lives by the life that God gives. Rejecting the Word of God, man lost the Spirit of God. So what God began in giving His Spirit, His Word, His life to man, man turned into the worst disaster. He fell. He died.

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent His Word, and the Word was made Man. The Word became flesh, conceived by the Holy Spirit. There, in the God-Man Jesus, the Spirit again dwelled in Man. In Him was life, and He came not only to give His life for mankind but also to mankind. On the cross, when our Lord JESUS breathed His last, He handed over His Spirit to His mother and to the beloved disciple, anticipating the gift of the Spirit to all the Church. And then: Death could not hold Him, for He was and is life. So when He rose, He came into the midst of the disciples, breathed again the breath of life that had once graced our first father Adam, and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” And He charged them to forgive sins.

And so today, Pentecost, is not just another day on the calendar. It gathers together Christmas, the Baptism of Jesus, Good Friday, and Easter, and says, “All that is now for you! The life that is in Jesus; the Holy Spirit; communion with God; forgiveness; the love of God—everything that Christ Jesus was and is and gave to His disciples—all that is now given to you.” And that is what Jesus means by that great comforting word “peace”: “Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you.” 

But then we hear those horrible words that bring such shame: Jesus says, “If you loved Me.” Those words told the disciples that they were not loving Jesus as they should. And when you examine your life according to the Ten Commandments, you must realize the same thing. You have not loved Christ, you have not kept His words; you have not loved your neighbor as yourself, but you have measured everything by what pleases you. You have promoted and exulted yourself, and lived as if God’s Word did not apply in every circumstance.

That is precisely the sin we find among the builders of the Tower of Babel. They were disregarding God, seeking to decide their own destiny apart from Him. They wanted to make a name for themselves, and live autonomously. Mankind was united, but it was a united rebellion against their Creator. And so, in order to prevent the horror of a humanity united in will and purpose against Him, God confused their languages.

We suffer for that to this day. It is difficult to learn another language, but it is also difficult simply to communicate clearly in our own tongue. How many arguments arise just from misunderstanding what someone else said or wrote? In politics, in our homes, and certainly in the church, we wage wars over words.

The miraculous event of Pentecost, where the Gospel of Jesus’ death and resurrection was preached in many languages– that was the Holy Spirit’s call to a divided and confused humanity to gather together and unite under the banner of the Crucified One, our Lord Jesus Christ. “In Him,” said that voice ringing out to every nation, “the ancient sin is pardoned; in Him the ancient curse is lifted; you violent world, receive peace from your God!” Every language of man is used so that every race of man, however far off, might know that Christ’s incarnation was for them, Christ’s words and promises were for them, Christ’s death was for them, Christ’s resurrection was for them – and if for them, then for you, every one of you. No one, from the youngest child (such as Mark and Mollie’s daughter Linden) to the person whose life has become a disaster—no one is excluded from that invitation to receive God’s forgiveness.

So now, for Linden and for all the Baptized, we are charged by our Lord JESUS today to keep His Word. What does that mean? It means we guard, treasure, hold onto, meditate upon, pray, believe, seek to live by the words of JESUS. He gave the Apostles a promise that the Holy Spirit would help them remember His words. That special gift means that their writings in the New Testament are true and without error. Those inspired words are the final authority in the Church. 

But the Holy Spirit also works in us to remember the words of Jesus. What kind of remembering do we need? What we need is not just being able to recite Bible passages for a test, but something more: it is in the time of trial when we need the Holy Spirit’s help of remembering, holding onto, keeping and treasuring the Word. When you are tempted to sin—especially those habitual, besetting sins that you struggle against and have trouble stopping—that’s when we need to remember the Word and apply it to our trial. In those moments, we are faced with choices: should I say words that will be hurtful? Should I indulge the desire for sexual immorality? Should I take what does not belong to me? Should I tell a lie or conceal the truth? Should I give in to anger, resentment, the temptation for self-destructive behavior?

And then there is the hour of despair, an hour when we face depression or thoughts of suicide; an hour when we are tempted to throw away our faith; an hour when death visits us – what then will be our trust and hope? In that hour, remember: the Holy Spirit is for good reason called the Helper, which also means Advocate and Comforter. He is your Advocate before the Father: He prays for you, and also inspires you to pray, to call on the name of JESUS for your help. And the Holy Spirit is called the Comforter because He consoles you with the knowledge of pardon for your sins.

Rejoice then, O children of Adam! God has breathed out His Spirit once more! God has brought you, His fallen creatures, back into communion with Himself. In Him is life, and He first breathed that life into you by washing you as He did Linden; and He keeps on giving you that life by forgiving you, by nourishing you at His Table. The Spirit you have breathed in, you breathe out in your prayers and when you live in peace and love and forgiveness with your neighbors. And so that life of being Spirit-filled Christians goes on and on as we grow up in all things into Him who is our Head, Jesus Christ. In Him is your peace. In Him will you live, in Him will you die, and His shall you be forever.

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The statement of John 14:28: “My Father is greater than I,” describes Christ according to His human nature in the state of humiliation, for according to the context Christ is speaking of a condition which ends with His going to the Father. See Luther, St. L. XI:1079 f.

(I don’t have access to the referenced Luther text; if anyone does, I’d be glad if they shared what it says there.)

I have no tendency or interest in limiting the full and completely deity of our Lord JESUS Christ; this seems Pieper’s primary concern in his section, “The True Deity of Christ” (II:59ff). What I have never fully grasped is how this explanation squares with 1 Cor. 15:28, where it is written that “the Son Himself will also be subject to Him who put all things under Him, that God may be all in all.” Gerhard (referenced in Pieper) says this refers to Christ’s mystical body, the union of Christ with His Church. Chemnitz (quoted in Lockwood’s commentary on 1 Corinthians) says this passage also refers to the human nature of Christ:

In 1 Cor. 15:28 Paul also shows that the human nature in Christ is below or less than or inferior to God, not only when in the state of humiliation He says, “My Father is greater than I” [John 14:28], or when after the resurrection He says, “I ascend to My Father and your Father, and to My God and your God” [John 20:17], but even after the Last Day when He will have handed over the kingdom to God and His Father.

This is a great mystery to me. I guess I will have to be content to say with the Athanasian Creed that the Son is equal to the Father with respect to His divinity, less than the Father with respect to His humanity.

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As the mission is the church of God in motion, so the energy of that motion is the Word of God, the apostolic Word. That Word alone is the energy; that Word alone is the uniting center.

Quoted in John T. Pless, “The Contribution of Kenneth Korby to a Renewed Reception of Wilhelm Löhe’s Pastoral Theology,” CTQ 73 (2009): 106

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