As recently mentioned here, this is now the original draft of the sermon Septuagesima Sunday that Mr. Roloff was sent by me. I like this style as it were meditative and, above all, I appreciate it if you can say you have a sermon so well in the 17th Century could have kept. I know the date, the answers to the time etc. etc. but everything is so fleeting, and often banal way.
Lk 17, 7-10
Grace you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Dear community,
us to preach the abandoned section of Luke records a merciless picture of human life. This life is the life as a servant of the Lord in the world in which we have to do what we owe. If we have been working all day and come home at night, then we expected for a long time no rest, but a long list of new tasks. No one tells us: Come, and sit down to dinner. The Lord has need of our still and we have to serve him and not to ask for what we do well liked. If we believe then to be praised for our devotion, or even thanks, then we are wrong. Only when we have done everything that was ordered, then we should talk ". We are unprofitable servants: we have done what we were doing guilty" Who is really listening to? Where is the joy stays alive? Unfolds not exactly the pleasure again mercilessly hostile, joyless Christianity, in which neither danced, even celebrated, in which it is a scowling face to good taste and every action is prayer?
It is a gray unfriendly text that we have to face there, and does not want to go with the Gospel of the day, but even in the ones who worked only one hour, provided a good day's pay.
It is a very special Day in the liturgical year, which includes these lyrics. The Septuagesima Sunday marks the point at which the look of the community around the church, turns. So far we have looked back as it were for Christmas, the manger us the childhood of Jesus, his circumcision, the visit of the king, his baptism, the presentation in the temple and have most recently reminded of the Transfiguration of the Lord. But now we can look forward again and see in the distance the cross, hang and die on the Christ is. We are frightened and begin yet to go his way. The church moved from the wood of the crib down to the wood of the cross. The church looks away from the joy of Christmas and Epiphany in the time of Passion and sorrow. may be so different now these two things and times, they nevertheless point to show us the same truth, namely that man is born to us our Savior and Lord. Christ himself is the one our times, however different they may be, holds together and forms them into a whole and creates.
Our sermon text is now in us the word "servant" a hidden sign of this relationship. The servant of God from ancient times a name for the coming Messiah, suffering for the Messiah. Curiously unconnected to the Jewish idea two very different kinds of expectations were the Messiah. It was the magnificent new king of the chosen people longed for, which should be more so than in his pedigree in his glittering reign a worthy descendant of David, and there was the idea of the suffering servant, who, like Joseph would be thrown into the pit of damnation, by his brothers betrayed by separated from his father, exiled from home, and who therefore should be rightly his descendant. God has now so happened that the world in Jesus the Messiah was given, the two met, he is a son of David and a son of Joseph, he is the new powerful king and the suffering servant, he is the father separated, and yet with the Father. In him everything is met and joined together, is actually in it all whole and healthy.
All this could happen only because Jesus went his way as a servant patiently to the end. He has chosen us as a slave, a slave to him, he took upon himself all evil. He has his own taught and performed, he has healed and comforted, he has dead launched and the blind given the light, he has his family fed and washed their feet, he is for us entered into the death, as a powerful king to take his life again.
We are the ones who have all received. He has done all us. He fills our life with an immeasurable wealth. All we can ever do, be it as it wants, will never do justice, what he has brought us. Therefore, we are unprofitable servants. We can humbly submit to all this and do what we encounter in life, because we were given a gift that outweighs everything and forever.
Thomas Roloff
0 comments:
Post a Comment