The Church is Beautiful. Wednesday of Trinity 16, 2022. Revelation 21

Wednesday of Trinity 16

Emmaus Lutheran Church

Revelation 21:1-14

October 5, 2022

The Church is Beautiful

Jesu juva!

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.

The Church is beautiful!

How foolish we have been so often in our lives!  We have failed to see the beauty of the Church.  When we were bored and disappointed by her humble appearance, by her low estate, like the mother of the Lord. We allowed ourselves to become distant from her, drawn away to other activities and organizations that seemed more attractive.

I speak to myself when I say: “Oh foolish one!”  The Church is beautiful! 

Our Lord is always telling us that the Kingdom of God is a party you really don’t want to miss, a feast, that many people are too busy to come to.  Don’t you remember how there was weeping and gnashing of teeth for the foolish virgins who missed out?

It’s not just those outside the visible Church.  We within as well are drawn away from it!  We despise the little ones of whom is the Kingdom of God (Matthew 18:10, 19:14).  We fail to see that the Kingdom of God is in the midst of us as we serve one another, bear with one another, wash one another’s feet.  We say: “Our master is taking a long time getting back” and begin to get drunk and beat the other servants” (Luke 12:45).  We are walking on the road to Emmaus, moaning to a stranger about our sorry lot as Jesus’ disciples, saying, “We hoped for so much more!”  –not knowing we are talking to Jesus, risen from the dead, with our sins beneath His feet.  “O foolish, and slow of heart to believe all the prophets have spoken!” (Luke 24:25)

Come, says the angel, I will show you the Bride, the wife of the Lamb.  And John shows us the Church coming down from heaven, having the glory of God, her light like a precious gem.

The Church is beautiful.  Our loved ones in heaven are seeing it—this party Jesus invited us to, which we are at now, but don’t recognize how great it is.  We think all the cool people are somewhere else.  But our loved ones in heaven see it clearly.  They see what they didn’t see on earth as they attended Divine Service and Sunday School, went to church meetings, dealt with heartaches, worried about their children—all the things we are doing now.  They didn’t see then that the Kingdom of Heaven was in the midst of them, that in all these things they were more than conquerors through Him who loved them.  But now they see the beauty of the heavenly Jerusalem coming down from heaven from God, that was in the midst of them all along, as it is in the midst of us.

The Church has to be beautiful!  She is the bride of the Lord.  And He is “the most handsome of the sons of men…anointed…with the oil of gladness above [His] companions.”  (Ps. 45:2, 7)  Even though “He had no form or majesty that we should look at Him, and no beauty that we should desire Him.” (Is. 53:2)  The world did not see His beauty, so it is not surprising that His beauty on and in us also escapes our perception. 

But He has made us beautiful by baptizing us into Himself.  “As many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” (Gal. 3:27)  He baptized into His death that “He might present the Church to Himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.”  (Eph. 5:27)  We are, each one of us, as He is.  (1 John 4:17)  He has loved us by giving His life for us and washed us in His love in Baptism.  And we abide in His love. 

The Church is beautiful!  Jesus created her by the water that flowed out of His side in death to be His holy Bride, a helper fit for Him.  And if we are Jesus’ helpmeet, it stands to reason that we would constantly be doing beautiful works.

But just as Jesus’ beauty is invisible to the sinful eye, and the beauty of the Church is only perceived by the divine gift of faith, so the beauty of the works of the Church escapes our reason and senses.  “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing,” (Rom. 7:19) wrote our older brother Paul, inspired by God’s Spirit.  “Wretched man that I am!” (Rom. 7:24) 

Amen, Paul.  We see the evil we keep on doing and seldom rejoice in the beautiful works our Lord is doing in us. We are brought low by apathy or despair when our zeal to serve the Lord runs into the hard wall of people’s indifference.  We become timid because our witness often falls on deaf ears.  We become exhausted by the dullness of our old nature that makes us cold when we try to listen to God’s Word or pray to Him. 

We can’t give ourselves the heavenly beauty we see in the Church John describes, radiant as a polished gem.  Nor by the will of our flesh can we do the beautiful works of His Holy Bride.

But Jesus makes us beautiful in the sight of God.  He doesn’t just clothe us with beauty like a pig in a silk dress.  He recreates us by His Word.  He speaks us holy and righteous. and we stand before God as a new, beautiful creation, washed clean in the blood of the Lamb.  As His Word makes us beautiful, it gives us beautiful works to walk in.  Because we are something new, even in the oldness of this world. Once were born in Adam, bound to produce nothing but ugly works whose fruit is death.  We are loosed from that by God’s forgiveness.  His blood set us free to people of God.  We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for beautiful works.  And we do them as we attend Divine Service, meditate on His Word, call on His name in prayer, and as we give, and as we serve, and as we bear witness to Him.  We do so in a weak and halting way, like a seed putting its first green shoots out of the earth. But don’t discount these small beginnings because they are as beautiful to our Lord as the small beginning of a human life lying in a crib is beautiful to its mother.

You are already doing these works, Emmaus!  Your giving and serving kept this church open when you were troubled for years by vacancy in the pulpit and divisions in the congregation.  You didn’t lose heart when the devil afflicted you.  You held fast to your Bridegroom, who is always faithful.  That was a beautiful work.

And you bore witness to Your beautiful Savior.  You taught your children and invited neighbors to see the beauty of the Lord and hear His gracious words.  That was precious in the Lord’s sight, who said, “Let the little children come to Me, for of such is the Kingdom of God.”  And even if His Gospel was veiled from some, some believed the good news.  They were born, not of flesh, nor of the will of man, but born of God.

The first person I baptized at Emmaus was an old man, near the end of his life, living at a nursing home.  He believed in Jesus near the very end of his life because some of you gave him a Portals of Prayer and bore witness to your Lord’s beautiful work on the cross.  How beautiful were the feet of this congregation that proclaimed to him the good news of salvation!  The Lord sent His angels to carry his soul to the heavenly Jerusalem.  Now he will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.  The Church is beautiful and does beautiful works even when she is lowly and has little strength.

The works you have done didn’t come from your own power.  They came from Christ.  He gave you strength to do them.  He gave you life through His body and blood in the Divine Service.  He strengthened and enlivened you by His Holy Spirit as you read, pondered, and meditated on Holy Scripture.  In response to your desperate cries in prayer, He did mighty works from on high for you.  He heard you and helped you as you lived out your calling as parents, spouses, and hearers of His Word.

The Lord, our Bridegroom has many other beautiful works that He will do through us.  He will keep us in Christ and strengthen us through the Divine Service and Holy Scripture.  He will answer our prayers and do beautiful works through our lowly prayers, giving, serving, and witnessing, and these works will shine like the facets of a gem forever.  Just as the lowly work of Mary at Bethany will be told as long as the Gospel is preached and will never be forgotten in eternity.

“Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines forth.”  (Psalm 50:2) 

The perfection of beauty out of which God shines?  It is you, His Church.

The peace of God keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria

A Beautiful Work–Christ. Trinity 16, 2022

Trinity 16

Emmaus Lutheran Church

St. Mark 14:3-9

October 2, 2022

“A Beautiful Work—Christ”

Jesu juva!

³ And while he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper,^[a] as he was reclining at table, a woman came with an alabaster flask of ointment of pure nard, very costly, and she broke the flask and poured it over his head. ⁴ There were some who said to themselves indignantly, “Why was the ointment wasted like that? ⁵ For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii^[b] and given to the poor.” And they scolded her. ⁶ But Jesus said, “Leave her alone. Why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. ⁷ For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you want, you can do good for them. But you will not always have me. ⁸ She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for burial. ⁹ And truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.” St. Mark 14:3-9

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.  Amen.

1.

Magnum opus means “great work,” and the Latin words are often used to describe the masterpiece of an artist or writer.  The greatest work of an artist’s life is his magnum opus.  To produce a magnum opus, a great work, an artist usually has had to produce many lesser works throughout his life—good works, but not great.

There is a moving story about the Magnum opus of the composer Beethoven, his 9^th symphony, which you may have heard.  It had taken him about two years to write.  He was near the end of his life, in his fifties, and had gone almost completely deaf.  Even so, he composed what many consider to be the greatest work of his career.  He also conducted the orchestra in Berlin at the premiere of the symphony.  The story goes that, because of his deafness, at one point he was several bars off in his conducting.  The orchestra had finished, but he was still directing them with his hands and his baton.  Meanwhile the audience had risen to its feet in cheers and shouts.  One of the singers walked over to him and turned him around so he could see the applauding audience and take his bow.  And the audience, aware that the great composer could no longer hear, waved handkerchiefs, hands, and hats, so that he could see their applause, even if he could no longer hear it.

That was a moving end to the career of a great composer and his great work.

Things are seldom so glorious for most of us.  We don’t produce works of such beauty, and the works we do receive less praise.

I have a memory of my father when I was very young driving to Sears in the yellow Dodge van that he got rid of by the time I was six or seven.  It was a Saturday and it was raining hard, and he stopped at the side of the road to help another man whose car had gone into the ditch.  After what seemed like a million years he got back into the van.  I remember his jeans coated in mud, and him saying, “Well, I guess I did my good deed for the day.” 

It was a good deed, and I was proud of him that day.  And we all have good deeds like that in our lives that we probably don’t even remember anymore.  But one good deed doesn’t make a good life, does it?  You can probably all think of stories of people who did beautiful work on the screen or in politics, on the football field, who did bad work at home, who neglected their families or drank and scarred their children.  On the other hand you also probably know people who never did anything that will go in a history book, and yet they lived a good life, a beautiful life.  Their families knew they loved them; their children remember them fondly.  Their magnum opus was the way they cared for their families and treated the people they worked and lived among.  And in doing that great work they did many good works along the way.  They went to work day in and day out, made meals, helped their kids with their homework, played board games at the kitchen table.

All this leads to a question this morning: what is my great work?  What have I done with my life?  And as you examine your conscience you may find that you have done some things well, even many things.  You may be content with the work of your life.

On the other hand, you may not be.  You may wish you had reached for more, tried to climb higher.  A few of you are very young and you may feel like you haven’t gotten to do anything yet.  But you have.  You have been given works to do, you have them in front of you.  And what you do later in your lives will be shaped by what you do and who you are becoming now.

Then there are those of us in the middle of our lives, and some closer to the end.  And we may be nagged by the sense that we should have or could have done better or more with our lives. 

And the same thing is true not only of our individual lives, but also of our lives together, especially in the Church.  When a congregation closes, the people often feel guilt or regret.  “Why has it come to this?  We should have done more.  What did we do wrong?”  Those are all common questions.  There is the sadness that the congregation which was meant to be a beautiful work of God, bringing life to the world in that place, has fallen short of what it could have been.

2.

But what exactly should we have done?  And is there anything we can do now to make a great work of our lives and our life together?

The reading from St. Mark that you just heard, that is the theme text for the stewardship series this year, shows us a great work, a work Jesus calls beautiful.

In it, as you heard, a woman comes into the house where Jesus is eating a meal.  It is Wednesday in Holy Week.  Tomorrow, on Thursday, He will eat the Passover with His disciples and institute His Supper.  Then He will go to the Garden of Gethsemane, be arrested, and on the day following be crucified and buried.

The woman, whom John tells us is Mary, breaks open an alabaster box of pure spikenard, an expensive, perfumed ointment.  It is worth about three hundred denarii—almost a year’s wages.  She pours it on Jesus’ head while He is reclining at the table.  When others who are there become incensed with her, Jesus rebukes them and says, She has done a beautiful work to me. (Mark 14:6)  The work is so great that Jesus says it will be remembered wherever the good news about Him is proclaimed.

Focus on the words of our Lord: She has done a beautiful work to me.  Imagine if He says that about you!  Then you can rest assured that, whatever your failings have been, you and what you have done are pleasing to the Most High.

Then we want to ask: what made her work beautiful in the eyes of Jesus Christ? 

We note that her gift was costly, extravagant.  To the eyes of human reason it was wasteful.

Then we note that her gift was criticized even by the other disciples of the Lord.  They were incensed with her and basically told her that she had sinned in what she did.  The ointment could have been sold instead and given to the poor rather than being poured out all at once in a showy act of devotion, they said.

Jesus doesn’t deny that giving to the poor is a beautiful work.  So the other disciples are right in thinking that helping other people in need is a great work, rather than doing works that shine in human eyes.  We think that extraordinary achievements are great.  But the Lord is not impressed with human skill.  Beautiful works in His eyes are works of love, not necessarily works of human intelligence or skill.

But the woman did something even more beautiful than selling the ointment to give to the poor.  She did a beautiful work for Jesus.  Moved by the Holy Spirit, she anointed His body for burial.  When Jesus died and was buried a few days later, His disciples didn’t anoint Him. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus took His body away, and they wrapped it in spices.  But Mary and the other women who loved Him were not able to anoint Him.  That was why they went early Sunday morning to buy spices with which to anoint Him.  But here Mary was honoring Jesus’ body that was going to be crucified and buried ahead of time.  And the story of her beautiful work becomes part of the story of the good news.  Her beautiful work is part of the story of Jesus’ death to save sinners, and it is told as long as Jesus’ death is proclaimed.

The beautiful works that Jesus praises are not always understood or praised by the world, or even other Christians.  They may be regarded as foolish or wasteful.

And the beautiful works Jesus praises are not done according to rules, according to human reason about what is valuable.

They are prompted by the Holy Spirit not according to human thinking about what is good or what should be done, but according to the Spirit’s will. 

3.

But there is something even more important to understanding why this work was beautiful and how we may do a beautiful work with our lives and our life together.

This woman’s work was beautiful because of Jesus’ death and burial.  It was Jesus’ death and burial that prompted this work, and it was because of Jesus’ death and burial that it was beautiful.

The great work being done here, the magnum opus, was neither giving to the poor nor even pouring the ointment on Jesus’ body.  The great work belonged to Jesus.  He was giving Himself to die and be buried.

The elders and scribes were already meeting to figure out how they could arrest Jesus by stealth and put Him to death.  And right after this, Judas went to them and took money to hand Jesus over to them.  It was probably this woman’s act that prompted him to do so.  John tells us Judas was the one who criticized her.  He didn’t actually care about the poor, but he stole out of the money bag of Jesus and the twelve.  So when he saw this expensive ointment running down Jesus’ head onto his robes, which could have been money in his pocket, he started to look for another way to enrich himself.

But even though the scribes, elders, and Judas were scheming, Jesus was using their plotting to accomplish His great work.  In it there was no pungent perfume and no alabaster box carrying it.

Instead, similar to Mary’s beautiful work, Jesus was pouring Himself out in love toward you and me.

Instead of an intricately carved box being broken, Jesus was giving His holy body to be opened by the nails and the spear into death.  In this costly vessel is all the fullness of the Godhead.  In His holy body we find all of God, because His flesh and blood is personally united to the person of God the Son.

We have an image of this beautiful work before us in the crucifix.  Like the work of this ointment being poured on Jesus, it is a tragic image in a sense, but nevertheless beautiful.  She was anointing Jesus for burial, but she did it out of great love for Him.  In the same way, the image of Jesus crucified is sorrowful and painful.  But it is beautiful because we see that He loved us and He still loves us, to the very end.

Jesus’ beautiful work was completed when He died and was interred in the tomb.  And even though we can’t see it, He was joining Himself to us in all our bad works and regret and their fruit—corruption and death.  He didn’t leave us alone in them.  He carried them all for us and drank our shame and regret to the bottom of the cup.

And He broke open the old life in which we were trapped, the life of fallen Adam, so that we spring free into new, heavenly life.  The new life in the Spirit, free from sin, in which we are beautiful to God and do beautiful works about which God says, “It is good.  It is beautiful.”

Jesus pours over us not perfume to cover stench but the water that makes us new, water that unites us with His body in His burial and His resurrection from the dead.  In our baptismal water we are washed clean and become spotless and pure, without any stain or wrinkle, but holy and without blemish.

This is the beautiful work of Jesus.  From its beauty Mary’s work, and your works, take their beauty.

4.

How can we do beautiful works as individuals and as a church?  What if my life is filled with regret?  Can everything change now, whether I am at the beginning, middle, and end?

Yes, but not by your doing.  The woman was not thinking of her own work when she received this praise from Jesus.  Probably she knew Jesus was going to die for her.  But even if she didn’t consciously know, she knew Jesus had loved her and taken away al her sins.  And that was what she was thinking about—Jesus and His kindness toward her.  She wasn’t thinking about her works.  She had forgotten about them.  She was only thinking of Jesus and His love toward her.  That was how she did this beautiful work.

Would you do a beautiful work for your Lord Jesus with your money, talents, and time?  This is how that happens: believe in Jesus’ work.  He has done a beautiful work to you.  He has made you beautiful, a new creation, when He poured out His life for you.  Then He poured you into His death and His new life with sin conquered in His resurrection.  He poured you into His death and resurrection in Baptism.

Our wretched old nature resists this, refuses to believe it is true.  But it is crucified with Christ.

As we believe this, we don’t do beautiful works now and again, hoping this will make up for all our ugly words, thoughts, and deeds.  We do them all the time, as the Holy Spirit prompts us to do them, as they are given to us to do.

As we look at Jesus’ beautiful work, we forget about the cost to us, because we see only the cost of Jesus’ gift to us.  The gift of salvation, bought and paid for by the pouring out of His life.

And since we can’t pour expensive oil on Jesus, since He is now exalted to the Father’s right hand, we will pour it on His members.  We will see the poverty of one another and those outside the Church—not to judge, but to pour ourselves out for them.  Because in doing so we are loving Jesus.

Until the end of October we are preaching about stewardship.  Stewardship is doing a beautiful work for the Lord with our lives and in the life of our congregation.

But stewardship is first to receive God’s beautiful work in Christ, believing what God says to us in Him.  That we are His workmanship, His beautiful work, created anew in His death and resurrection.

The peace of God that passes understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

Soli Deo Gloria