Greatness in the Sight of God

The Gospel Reading on Humility and Childlikeness

Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church. Kungsvinger is a beacon for the gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern Minnesota. We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.

The Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew, the 18th chapter. At that time the disciples came to Jesus saying, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? And calling to Him a child, He put Him in the midst of them and said, Truly I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.

Woe to the world for temptations to sin, for it is necessary that temptations come, but woe to the one by whom the temptation comes. And if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away.

It is better for you to enter life crippled or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire.

See that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I tell you that in heaven their angels always see the face of my Father who is in heaven. This is the Gospel of the Lord. Grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

My texts for this week were the texts for the remembrance, the celebration, the feast of St. Michael and all angels, and our reading in the Gospel according to St. Matthew will be our foundation. Jesus says, Truly I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Let's pray. God our Father, we are so confounded by sin that surrounds us and the toil of our hands that our nature turns us towards self-sustaining to make our own way, and yet we know that the darkness surrounds us and our own way is stumbling.

So we pray as we hear your word, you would plant your way in us and sanctify us with your truth. Your word is truth. Amen. I've recently rediscovered a favorite medium of mine, a favorite media. I've recently begun listening to stories again that I used to read when I was in my youth.

You see, I've returned to the workforce in recent weeks. I'm back working on a farm and, well, it's not as intellectually engaging as the day-to-day work of a pastor. It certainly is helping the family budget.

And so I found myself turning to audio to listen to things in my ears. I began listening to podcasts initially, and then I rediscovered just how much I enjoy those stories of swords and sorcery, of chivalry and honorable sacrifice.

Those stories of brave men protecting their cities and their folks against tides of evil. Those stories that have enamored generations of people since the very dawn of time. The notion of a great sacrifice by an honorable being for the sake of those who cannot care for themselves.

It has filled me with pictures in my mind of standing there with the great warriors of renown in these stories, perhaps holding a sword with them, perhaps being one of those who was sent out to selflessly give a life in service to the community or to the kingdom, as it is in those books.

Perhaps at times I've found myself contemplating the grandeur of dragons and the working of mystical arts, the foreign beings that are always in these books. Things like goblins and trolls that, well, are probably founded on the biblical notion of demons, if you think about it.

C .S. Lewis' writings most certainly are founded on the Christian scriptures, and so were J .R .R. Tolkien's. So it's little wonder that the entire genre is formed in a way to match the imaginings that we have had as a community of Christians as long as we have had the word of God.

These imaginings, of course, are not exactly what is the truth of what is not revealed to mortal eyes, but a mere shadow of those things that we cannot comprehend, much less see with our own eyes. And that takes me to our reading in Revelation, where we hear of the grandeur of the beings of heaven.

We hear of the grandeur of the angels, and we hear of the terrifying and despotic grandeur of the enemy of all people, not only the enemy of our Lord Christ, but the enemy of God's people. Revelation chapter 12, we read, Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back, but he was defeated.

There was no longer any place for them in heaven. The great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world. He was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.

And I heard a loud voice in heaven saying, Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them night and day before our God.

Sounds much like a story of fantasy, doesn't it? Sounds much like those tales that, well, are founded on the very first source of all knowledge, and that is God's written word. Storytelling is a grand way to encapsulate those things that we do not understand and give credence to our imaginings to even engage in them.

And so, it's little wonder that our imaginings of these things would turn out to be stories of great arcs and great triumph, of rollicking movements, of great characters and great sacrifices. Little wonder, then, that the enemies in these stories would be of utter terror and darkness, black of heart, black of soul, and utterly dangerous to all who come across them.

This is the foundation of our reality in this fallen world. We ourselves live amongst the darkness. We ourselves live in the very place to which the dragon was thrown, and with mortal eyes cannot comprehend the nature of these things that are described in the scriptures.

So, it would be a problem for us, then, if we were to read these scriptures, to read these truths that God tells us, and to attempt to shoehorn ourselves into the wrong role. To allow our imaginings, to allow our notions to dictate how we would understand God's word and how we would understand our place as his children amongst the reality of the fall of those angels with Satan, with the enemy constantly prowling around, and with the greatness of our God and King who rules from heaven with his angels doing his bidding.

We might look at this grand truth, this grand reality that our minds cannot fully comprehend, and think as we do of stories that we ought to be like Michael, that we ought to be like the angels. We ought to strengthen our back for the task ahead.

We ought to gather what weapons we can and engage the fight, and thereby, in some way or fashion, we might even earn the respect and admiration of our great King, our God who reigns from heaven. That in fighting his enemies and turning back the tides of darkness, he might say to us how great and grand we are in his sight and how deserving we are of a measure of his riches that he would pour out to us as a reward.

We might find ourselves contemplating exactly what the devil contemplated, a means to take from God what is his own, whether by guile or whether by effort on our own part. This is, of course, another kind of guile that we might somehow manipulate God, even in our very best way, even with the very best intentions, to turn his favour upon us, not because of his grace, but because of our own greatness.

It's a daunting trap, and one that is ever before us. Firstly, because, well, all generations of human beings have sought to set themselves above God, it is the nature that we are born with. It is what is called concupiscence, original sin.

That is what dictates to us our inmost desire, which is, in fact, for our own grandeur. We are first idolaters of ourselves. This is exactly what took place in the garden with Adam and Eve. The temptation of the devil was not that Eve might find herself accompanying God as a great friend, but that she might find herself equal to him and co-equal in majesty.

And if we were to read the stories of the angels, if we were to find scripture to be a guide for us to place ourselves in a position of might, we would find ourselves back with the very dark stain of sin that dragged all humanity down with the devil himself.

This narcissistic tendency to worship only himself and none other. This is, of course, folly for us. As great as it might sound, as great as it might be to feel powerful, strong, and secure in and of ourselves, the temptation is very dangerous.

And at the end of the day, we ourselves are no match for the darkness, no match for the foe, and are of no great grandeur that God might find us pleasing in any way. And in the very worst case scenario, if we were to be some great warriors of faith, we would likely be turncoats for the right price at any time.

With our desires turned always to what we might receive, born out of our sinful nature. No, there is no place for us as Christians or for any human beings to think that we might make ourselves great in the sight of God and take a little bit of the glory of the angels, whether it be for good intent or with a sound desire or a sense of honor.

No, we are called to a very different path, a fundamentally opposite path, in fact, and we are called to understand the place of the angels to be something very different and beyond our understanding.

We are finally called to trust God's will and to read in his word what he has done to give him praise and thanks for what we have received. Jesus makes it this point very clear to us in our gospel reading.

The disciples, of course, not the only time, this is not the only time, of course, the disciples in scripture have come to Jesus seeking to establish some notion of hierarchy, seeking to establish some notion of their place in that hierarchy.

And so they ask him this question, who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? It sounds rather innocuous when you consider the other question they asked, which one of us might sit at your right and which might sit on your left, which is to place themselves in some semblance of power alongside our God and King, our Lord Jesus Christ.

This is, well, on the face of it, a rather innocent question, a rather fundamental question. In fact, when we consider all the beings that God has created, his own might, which created the earth and heavens and everything that is in them by his word alone, his great power that held back the water of the Red Sea, that confused the languages at Babel and drowned the entire world for the sake of his righteousness.

Certainly what is in heaven, the power of God and those beings that he has created is of some grand significance, especially when you consider the mention of angels in the Old Testament and the work of Christ himself in working miracles before them already on earth.

This question could seem to be, well, just a seeking for an answer, just a seeking to understand more that thing of mystery, the nature of righteous beings with power beyond our sight. But Jesus isn't having anything to do with this question from a human perspective.

And he turns it completely on its head. The disciples and we like them might expect him to reply with something grand. We might expect the answer to the question, who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, to be perhaps a retelling of Daniel's account of Michael.

Perhaps Jesus might say, well, I've created angels. I have created these beings who are without sin, but unlike you, they cannot procreate and their entire job is simply to do what I command. They follow perfectly.

They have all great power to turn back the evil and darkness that has encapsulated this earth. Michael is the greatest among them. He is mighty and powerful. That is perhaps what we could expect Jesus to say, or he might speak of those fallen angels.

He might speak of the enemy and say, even in heaven, there was, there is powers beyond the enemy who has so completely befuddled and turned humanity in on itself and against God that all found themselves condemned.

Yet he, with all his cunning might and power was simply a being to be removed from the presence of God by his own volition. Jesus might speak of his father in those terms and say his might is beyond any knowledge or understanding.

God, the father is clearly the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, and all should tremble and bow. This is what we might expect Jesus to say. Coming from our tainted understanding of the way in which things ought to be ordered, the way we see things ordered in this world.

The way that Israel came to understand their king to be different from their king who is God in heaven when they turned against their people and use their office only for selfish gain. We always taint our knowledge when we seek to place it above what God has revealed.

Jesus won't have any part of this work towards grandeur or self aggrandizing and he does something befuddling. He proves something profound and he places us and all humanity from Moses and Abraham, Noah and all creation before them that would have any good gift from above in the presence and in the person of a child.

Turning back any notions of working by one's hands to establish standing before God or standing in community, Jesus doesn't take a member of their group who has proven himself wise and capable. But what does he do?

In answer to this question, who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? He takes an unnamed child. We only know that it was a boy because in the Greek it says he. He's marked with a masculine tense.

He's completely unnamed. His origin is not recorded. We have no idea what he was doing there. We have no idea who his parents were, whether he was of a good lineage or otherwise. All we know is this, that Jesus took the weakest of humanity.

Jesus took a boy, a child and put it in the midst of his disciples and said, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And that makes no sense whatsoever to the human experience.

Children are not great. Do you remember being a child? I still remember it. You didn't get up when you wanted to. You got up when you were told. You didn't do the things you wanted to do. You were guided by a firm hand.

You didn't establish what you might have for dinner every night or let's face it, none of us would have any teeth from all the lollies, sorry, candy that we would have eaten in our childhood days. No, children are dependent.

Not only dependent, but they are completely under authority. Children have no authority of their own. They have no means of their own to establish any kind of power or might. They are entirely, from the day they are born until they grow into adulthood, entirely dependent, not only for food and sustenance, but for protection against those terrors in the darkness that most children seem to be aware of.

The monsters under the bed, the untold terror that brings about death that we all know to be the result of sin. Children have an innate understanding that there is a power that would destroy them and they are powerless against it and are in complete need of protection from those dark powers beyond.

This is the role of parents to protect and nurture as a shadow of God, who is our father, who perfectly protects and nurtures his creation. Children are not great. They are not the mighty warriors of renown.

They are not Gideon's mighty men or David's mighty men. They are not the kings of old that turned peoples away from destroying their nations. They are not men of renown. How can a child be the perfect example for us of what it is to be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?

We must understand what it is to be a child of God. We must understand what this humility looks like, what it is to be humble like a child in the presence of God. And there we might rightly understand what all the powers of heaven are about.

Not for us to gain riches, strength, or a sense of self, of our own security, pardon, I'm a little bit tired tonight, it's been a long weekend, early mornings and late nights. We don't look at the great powers of heaven to find a place of greatness for ourselves.

Because Jesus calls us to look at a perfectly humble child. A child who is completely obedient and completely dependent. A child who he personally placed in the middle of a group of strangers to be a topic of an example for his disciples.

It's bewildering and yet it is the most hopeful and wonderful promise bound up in this example that Jesus gives. You see for all our striving, for all our best efforts to make our way in this world, our hands grow weak and they are turned towards sinful things.

Our feet, rather than standing against evil and moving us towards good, so often flee from good and take us to those places of darkness where our old Adam delights to enjoy the pleasures that God has, that will finally destroy us.

Those things of the flesh that scripture describes, those things of our old nature. Our eyes, in the same way, so often turn us away from beholding the marvel of God's creation for us and turn either to our lack and bemoan God or to the wealth of others.

So we find our sufficiency not in God but in ourselves and what our eyes behold. But to be humble like a child is to be blind to all these things. To be weak of hand, incapable of holding a hammer or nails, of building anything or fixing anything for anyone.

To be stumbling around on little feet that have not yet got their proper balance. We are to be dependent like these children, humble like them, knowing that everything is taken care of. But how do we go about this?

Sure, it's a great idea, isn't it, really, but the reality is that you and I need to put food on the table. The reality is that we must serve our neighbour. The reality is that this life is one of discipline.

This life is one of action, of work, the sweat of our brow. We cannot forego the work of our hands and we cannot forego growing up into skilled adults for the purpose of serving our neighbour, whether it be wife and child, house and home, or whether it be in our daily vocations.

These things are great good things. They are not the evil itself. This humility stands for us even in the midst of our work here on earth, even in the midst of our striving and our best efforts, to remind us that our place in the kingdom of God is completely different and founded on a completely different structure to this more familiar kingdom that we are aware of and is bound in the fall where it is by sweat of the brow that we must toil as a result of our own sin.

We are called to have complete trust and complete hope as any child would in the kingdom of a righteous king. Not only any random child, not any beggar off the street, but we are to understand ourselves to be humbled like a child who God himself sent, like a child who is without any self-desire but whose desire is only to do the will of his father in perfect submission to him.

We are finally called to be humble like Jesus, to be humble like he who became flesh for us, he who became a child in his mother's arms completely dependent and yet who has the full knowledge of the protection of his father who is in heaven, who went about serving his neighbor with no fear for his own body, with no fear for any destruction that might come upon him, no terror for those things that lurk in the darkness, so complete was his trust toward the father that he went his whole way without fear and without sin in complete humility.

This is the child that we are to be humble like and we cannot do it ourselves, we cannot become like Jesus in any way, we cannot become those who do the will of the father without any grumbling, without any self-interest like Jesus, without him first doing the work for us.

This is precisely why he has set his kingdom toward us, this is why God has ordered the salvation and the work of his servants so that we might be humbled before him, so that we might hear his law, so that we might hear his word and find in it the reality that what lurks in the darkness is more powerful than us.

And what lurks and what is of the light must destroy that darkness and we ourselves could never be the source of it. We must be like Jesus fully trusting that God will overcome the enemy as he already has in time and in eternity.

You must trust like a child who trusts the parent who says there's nothing under the bed, you have nothing to fear, nobody can get you, I stand in the way of any evil that would harm you. Our humility and our trust must be complete and without any self-interest and the only way that it can be this way is if we are turned into a different pattern, if we are changed at the very core of our nature.

Scripture says that we were once children of wrath, we were willful children without guide, we were those children who were turned out of the house at an earliest convenience because in their hearts there is nothing but destruction.

This is what we were, children marked for destruction. But we have been changed and made into something else. All the powers of heaven have achieved this. God's own might has achieved this in the person of Jesus whom he sent and we have been bound in him, humbled as he was.

Jesus was humbled completely, humbled even to death, death on a cross. Likewise he takes us, us who are completely dependent on him, you and I. God takes us, often kicking and screaming as mere infants and humbles us to death, even death on a cross.

In the waters of baptism there we share in Jesus' death and resurrection and there in those waters our name is put into God's book of life and we are named alongside Jesus as heirs and co-heirs with him.

And it's in knowing that that we can finally understand what Jesus means by this humble child being the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. What is the greatest treasure in any king's castle but the heir.

Without the heir the kingdom is sure to fall. This is how monarchies are ordered, this is how the feudal system was ordered for generations. If there was no continuance of good governance through a sound heir all of the structures would fall apart.

So the heir was cherished above all. The first born son of the bride of a king would be cherished, nurtured, cared for and raised in the best case scenario to be the best possible human being. They could be with no expense spared.

Truly the greatest in any castle is the first born because so much rides on him in hope. This is not us ourselves but Jesus who is the first born from the dead and we who are numbered with him. We have been humbled with him in death, death on a cross so that we might be humbled alongside him.

Humble, not humbled alongside, humble alongside him as we see his father who is our father and he the father seeing only his perfect son. It is in that kind of humility then knowing what we have received that we can see just how great the grace of God is toward us.

The might of his angels is turned towards our protection that we might alongside Jesus in humility being heirs and co-heirs find ourselves in such perfect security that even when our consciences are bound by sin and rebellion against the father we might come like trusting children to unburden our conscience and receive from him the forgiveness that turns away the temptation to despair or even engage in those things of evil that so burden us.

We are finally called to be children in the kingdom of God, the kingdom that has no end, knowing that that innate knowledge of darkness, sin and death that encompasses all of us from our very first breath to our very last dying one to find security and safety against that unknown terror knowing that God has overcome and his creation and sorry and his beings at his command hold the field forever.

His castle, his kingdom, his mansions will never fall and our place is assured because the air will never be removed and we cannot be removed from him. What perfect humility this is to be without any work, to be without any strength and yet to have an entire kingdom turned towards our protection, care and nurture in time now and into eternity.

There can be no greater hope or foundation than that. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Support, Distribution, and Closing Remarks

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