“A New Way Of Looking” 2
Corinthians
Intro.: In the movie “Remember the Titans” a new
coach is given the challenge of trying to create a football team in a community
whose school has just been forced into racial integration. As the movie begins the only thing the young
men on the football team, the community, and even some of the coaches can see
is the color of the other person’s skin.
Looking at things in this way made them ugly and ineffective as they
were filled with bitterness, envy and hatred toward one another. In time the new coach was able to offer, not
only to the boys on the team, but to the entire community a new way of looking
at things, at one another, and at life.
In today’s Gospel Jesus attempts
to help the blinded Pharisees, who felt nothing but contempt for those they
considered to be greater sinners than themselves, to look at things in a new
way. One such Pharisee reveals to us in
our epistle that he once looked at things in the wrong way, but Christ who once
struck him blind on the road to
Like Paul and the Pharisees of our Gospel…
I. Our
A. Our old sinful way would view people as
competitors who are either in our way or useful stepping-stones to be used to
achieve our own goals.
Consider the older son of Jesus’
parable, and how he looked at his younger brother. He saw him as competition, as one who competed
with him for his father’s love and inheritance.
When the older son looked at his younger brother all he
saw was a worthless sack of flesh who had fallen into the depths of sin, broken
his father’s heart and squandered his inheritance. And now that sinful brother was back to
receive a love he did not deserve and to take away a portion of the remaining inheritance
that the older son believed himself to have earned. The older son says to his father, “Look, these many
years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave
me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of
yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes,
you killed the fattened calf for him!”
Looking at his brother according to the flesh, the older brother thought
only to get him out of his way and hoard his father’s love and wealth for
himself.
This is the way that we all once did, and at times still do view other
people. Looking through the distorted
lenses of our sinful nature we can have a pretty selfish and negative view of
others who we see as our competition in life.
Think about it: While driving our
car we compete for position. At school
we compete for a place on the team or for class ranking. At work we compete for a promotion or income
by trying to make ourselves look good, even at the expense of others. We value other people and devote our
attention to them in proportion to what we can get out of them or how little
they will take out of us. If they have
nothing to offer then they are deemed worthless.
The fleshly way of looking at other people is on the basis of what they
wear, how they look, and what they do or produce. If they do not meet our approval we are quick
to puff ourselves up and push them down by comparison. If their sin is more obvious than our own,
then we label them sinners and consider them worthless and offensive not only
to us, but to God. Like the older son,
the Pharisees, and the old Paul, we look down upon those worthless sacks of
flesh who have broken our Father’s heart and
squandered his blessings by sinful living.
And if they dare return we make sure that they know they are not welcome
and we will not rejoice over them. No,
we will not speak to them or even sit next to them. Who do those adulterous, drunken, pig-wallowers think they are to just come home and get the love
and heavenly inheritance we believe we have earned through our faithfulness and
hard work. How
quick we are to remind them and God how unworthy they are! Along with this distorted way of looking at
others, there is an old fleshly way of looking at Christ.
B. In the
parable the younger son finally came to his senses. After turning away from his father’s love and
squandering his inheritance, he found himself in the depths. He saw himself just like his older brother
did, a worthless sinful waste of humanity.
He rightly understood that he did not deserve his father’s love or a
place as his son, but lying there with the pigs, wishing he could eat even
their leftovers he remembered that even the slaves of his father’s house were
living better than he was. So he
determined to return and beg to be nothing more than a slave and servant. His view of the man he had hurt and abandoned
was still so small. He saw him as the
master of the house, still only as the man who could give him something and not
as the Father who loved him more than himself.
According to our sinful nature the way we look at God and His Son, Jesus
Christ, is often too small. We view Him
as the bread-giving master who can feed us, the icon of weakness lying as an
infant in the hay, or a moral teacher we can follow and serve in the hopes that
we may have a few of the crumbs from his table.
Like both the younger and older brother we often lose sight of who our
God is, who He became for us, and who He wants to be to us. With a warped view of him as a heartless
miser who must be nagged into giving us what we want, we nag and bargain and do
our best to wrestle from him a measly goat to eat with our friends, the whole
time begrudging the blessings he has given to others.
Through the spectacles of sin we see him as that cute and gentle Jesus
of the stable who would never judge or demand obedience; for that sweet, loving
Jesus nothing we do could ever be considered sinful. The fleshly way of looking at God decides
that any god by any name will do, so long as you believe in something and do
your best as you understand it.
Looking at God’s righteous demands and the life of Christ in the old way
of the flesh leaves us seeing only a moral leader to follow in the hopes that
he will take us in as servants and slaves to his law. This view leaves us asking, “What would Jesus
do?” But then, of course, we can’t
really do what Jesus did, can we? We
cannot live a perfectly sinless life, die as an all sufficient sacrifice on the
cross for the sins of the world, and raise ourselves up again by our divine
power, can we? A sweet little child, a
good man, a moral teacher, a great prophet of an impersonal and distant
master-god, maybe that’s how we used to look at him, but as St. Paul writes “Even though we once regarded Christ
according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer.” (v.16)
Transition: There was once a little girl, bright and
intelligent, who inexplicably struggled with her schoolwork. Daily she would come home with severe
headaches, perhaps, her parents thought, it was from the stress of school. After they met with the little girls
teacher, who mentioned that she seemed to strain and squint a lot in class,
they took her to the eye doctor. After
she received her new glasses, her headaches ended and her grades improved,
because now she could see everything clearly.
Like that little girl life has changed drastically for us, because like
II. Our
New Way Of Looking At Things Is With Divine Clarity.
A.
We can now view Jesus Christ in a godly way as He reveals Himself to us
in scripture. There we see clearly that
He is the only begotten Son of God and the only way of salvation and eternal
life. The vision that once saw a blurred
and distorted image of God, leading us down the path of the younger son’s
despair or the older son’s arrogant, self-righteousness
has been corrected by Christ. We now
perceive that it is only in Christ that we are forgiven, reconciled and made into
a new creation for God’s glory. Through
Christ we can see that our relationship with God has nothing to do with how
sorry we appear or how much we grovel before the cross, nor is it about how
good and faithful we have been. We
understand that it is all about our Heavenly Father’s undeserved love.
In the parable notice that the father did not wait for the younger son
to come and beg; He did not accept the son’s offer to work for him as a servant
or slave, nor did he treat him as he deserved.
We get the impression that every day the Father looked out over that
horizon waiting for the opportunity to reach out and restore his lost child.
And so
it is with our Heavenly Father. His arms
are always open because through His Son, Jesus Christ, He has reconciled us to
Himself. He welcomes us not to be slaves
and servants under the law, but His beloved children and heirs of the heavenly
kingdom. In holy baptism he places his
seal upon us, like the signet ring of the parable, to identifies
us as His children and heirs. By the
Gospel he covers our shame and the filth of our pig-wallowing sin and places
upon us the beautiful robe of Christ’s righteousness. And look here, look what he has prepared for
us. He invites us to come to this table
and join the feast of the Lamb and rejoice with Him that so many of us who were
lost have been found, and so many of us who were dead in our sins are now alive
in Christ.
Even to those of us who have been jerks, like the older brother of the
parable, caring little about the plight of our lost brothers and sisters and
begrudging them the love and blessings they have not earned, he comes. He comes and tells us that He loves us, that
we will always have a place with Him, and that all He has He is ours. And then by sharing the loving heart of a
Father he teaches us to look at other people in a different way.
B.
He teaches us to view every person as valuable to God. Paul writes, “(Christ) died for all, that those who live might no longer live for
themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised. From now on,
therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once
regarded Christ according to the flesh” (vv.15-16a) When we no longer live for ourselves, but
for Christ then there is no need to view others as competition. God’s love for others and the riches of grace
that He has stored up for them, in no way takes away from His love for us and
the extreme measure of material and spiritual blessings He freely gives
us. All these other people whose sinful
ways you know, all those other people out there the members of this household
of faith who have wandered away and squandered their inheritance and those
sinners out there who do not deserve to be loved or blessed by God, these are
the lost and dying children of God.
These are the ones for whom He waits and watches and runs out to
restore. These are the ones for whom He
has prepared the feast. Do you see it
now? Do you see how valuable they are to
your Father, and how valuable they are to you?
Christ died and was raised again for all of them! They are not your competition, they are your
family to grieve over when they are lost and dead, and to rejoice over when the are found and alive in Christ.
Life for the little girl with
headaches and trouble at school changed drastically after her distorted vision
was corrected. One of the greatest
discoveries for her was when her parents were driving her home with her first
pair of glasses. She turned to them and
said, “Look, the trees have leaves!”
For most of her life all she had seen were green blobs atop brown
vertical logs. But now with a new way of
looking at things she saw the beauty of God’s creation, the detailed texture of
the bark and each marvelous leaf on the tree.
And so it is for us who have been given a new way of looking through
Christ.
III. We
Now See The Beauty Of God’s Work.
A.
We see the reconciling work of God for us through His Son. We don’t need to make deals with God. We don’t have to wonder if our faith is
strong enough, our sorrow pitiful enough, or our new obedience pure enough to
bring us back into a loving relationship with God. We believe and confess as our epistle
declares that, “All this is from God, who
through Christ reconciled us to himself;… in Christ
God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against
them,” (v.18-19) Through the cross of Christ we see clearly
that we don’t have to prove anything to God.
We don’t even have to meet him half-way.
He has come running out to meet us with arms wide open, and now He
embraces us and says, “My son! My
daughter! Welcome home! I forgive you, now come and rejoice with
me!”
B.
With our new way of looking we also see God’s recreative
work in us. Again from our epistle, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a
new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. For our sake
(God) made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the
righteousness of God.” (v.17, 21) In baptism and by the continuing work of the
Holy Spirit we are each being made new each day through repentance and
faith. We do not live according to the
pattern of this world, but by renewing and transforming of our minds we are
being conformed to the likeness of Christ, the glory of the Father.
C.
Finally, looking at everything in the new way of the Gospel we see God’s
work through us. While it may be debated whether Paul’s words about the
ministry of reconciliation was primarily referring to the ministers of the
Gospel, clearly God has given to each and every one of us the message of
reconciliation and the life-giving Word of the Gospel, so that we may make an
appeal to others on God’s behalf to be reconciled through Christ. We know that
this message has been given for us to share, so that we may look to the horizon
for the opportunity to run out and greet those who are in need of the Father’s
love. We can reach out them with the
good news of reconciliation, help them put on the robe of righteousness, and
invite them to come and rejoice with us.
Concl.: What a great new way to look at
God, to look at others, and to look at ourselves! Through the Gospel of Christ we have a whole
new and joyous way to look at life!
Amen.