Wonderful World of Wisdom - For the Love of Fools

Preached on Sunday, August 19, 19-2018

  

Scripture Readings: Romans 1:8-17; Proverbs 26:1-12; Matthew 5:21-22, 43-48

Back in the seventeen-hundreds, John Wesley was a reformer in the Church of England, trying to get people to grow in their faith by training themselves in using disciplines of the heart, instead of just using the discipline of their brain and ideas. Wesley saw the Good News as a matter of the heart as well as the mind and, strangely, this made many enemies.

Walking Downtown, Ellensburg, WA
August 2018

Wesley went traveling around the country, teaching and preaching from place to place. On his way to his next appointment, he had to cross a stream that had only a narrow foot bridge to get him over. It was a one-way, one-at-a-time bridge, and one of those enemies stood on the other side, wanting to cross.

The enemy was another priest in the same church as Wesley and they both recognized each other at once. The enemy was a big, burly guy and he was going to give Wesley a bad time. He picked up his walking stick and held it cross-wise, like a gate held tight to shut Wesley off from his mission; or maybe like a stave for a fight. And he was claiming that Wesley was a fool.

They lived in the age of honor and the enemy served Wesley up with an insult.

He glared and growled at Wesley, “I never suffer a fool to pass!” He wasn’t going to let John through.

Only, he didn’t count on Wesley’s great sense of humor, or the fact that Wesley didn’t give his own honor a hoot. “You never suffer a fool to pass? Well, I always do!” And he stepped aside from the bridge and bowed for the big guy to cross and pass. Who was the fool now?

That is a picture of one of our proverbs today. “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will be like him yourself.” (26:4)

On one hand, the solution was really simply. The enemy barred the way and the reformer got out of the way. Not answering the fool according to his folly meant not stooping to be like him. It wasn’t simply wise. It was smart.

They lived in the age of honor. It was the age of dueling. The church condemned dueling and the culture of honor as immoral and godless and foolish. The enemy was tapping into the age of honor, challenging Wesley to a duel of battle staffs in the form of their walking sticks. Again, Wesley didn’t answer the fool according to his folly.

But Wesley told the enemy (or else did he show the enemy?) that he was a fool. In Proverbs you find that the fool builds a trap to take someone else, but (in the end) they get caught in their own trap. So, Wesley used the second proverb of the pair. “Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.”

Wesley copied his enemy by putting on his own witty production on the footbridge and foiled the enemy’s threat. John’s clever doge made it impossible for the enemy to be wise in his own eyes. The big guy got caught in his own trap.

The pair of proverbs in chapter twenty-six, verses four and five, literally contradict each other. The whole Book of Proverbs almost didn’t get into the Jewish Scriptures simply on the fact that it contained this one, clear contradiction.

There was a rabbi’s council that met toward the end of the first century AD to standardize the Jewish faith. It was an emergency council, because the Romans had destroyed their country and scattered their people. The Romans had destroyed the official copies of the scriptures in the Temple that were used to standardize new copies.

The rabbis were afraid to include the book that had this pair of contradictions in plain sight. So, they claimed that the two proverbs had to be about two different kinds of fools, one kind that you could talk to and the other kind that you couldn’t talk to, but the proof wasn’t there, and no one was ever really fooled.

I would propose a lesson in the perfect and compete inspiration of the Scripture that we can learn from this pair of contradictory proverbs. I would say that the Scriptures are so inspired by the power of God that even when they contradict each other, they still work. They still teach the truth. They still give us the full wisdom, and counsel, and guidance of God.

This level of inspiration is where we have to start if we want to hear God speak to us through these two contradicting proverbs. The conflict doesn’t prove that the scriptures are merely human, and not divine. It teaches us to see that the human words and the divine words are part of one unified project that God has designed for our salvation.

The word that is both human and divine contains, at its core, the plan for God to give us the bridge from earth to heaven, and from mortal life to the born-again life in this world. God became Jesus, who is completely and perfectly both human and divine. The plan of God is to provide himself with a whole universe of sons and daughters, who will include us.

This plan is that we will be taken up into the presence, and the healing, and the joy, and the glory of God. There, in the sight of God, we will truly and perfectly be both human sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, and we will be the genuine and spiritual sons and daughters of God.

When Jesus grabs us and makes us his own, we move from seeing a contradictory, unexplainable hodgepodge that has no rhyme or reason…we go from seeing the mysterious mess, to seeing the one great mystery revealed in Jesus Christ whose perfect and complete nature as God and human bridges the gap between God and us created by sins. God and human, together in Jesus, defeated sin and death on the cross, and in the empty tomb.

Seeing Christ opens the Bible to us. It opens the secret and the nature of life, in this world, to us. Seeing and knowing Christ in his apparent contradictions opens prayer to us. It opens the puzzle of our free will, and of God’s sovereign will, just a crack. It opens the future to us.

I am very intensely interested in having reliable information on what the will of God is for me and for you. Do you understand me? You may want the exact same thing as I do. I want a direct line to the will and the mind of God.

God’s contradictory pair of proverbs teaches me about this line to the will of God. It tells me that I should never be surprised to find that God has more than one way for me to choose and do something. You can decide that what I’m saying has nothing to do with Biblical teaching and truth, but here it is. When I was in college I always had summer jobs. I also had some jobs during the school year, usually work-study jobs: but I had this pair of jobs open to me one summer and I didn’t know which one to choose. I won’t tell you what they were.

You’d figure it out right away, but I was twenty-one years old and not that bright. I wanted to do both but I could only choose one. There were good reasons for both, but I could only choose one. I prayed, read the Bible, asked for good advice.

Nothing helped. Then, during a time of prayer, I felt God say something like this, “Choose whichever job you want. I’ll bless you either way.” God had organized his own world to give me any number of choices, and I’m sure that he knew which choice I would make, but it had to be a choice generated within myself.

God had also provided me with at least two ways to make the choice that pleased him. That gift was the choice of using my chooser (otherwise known as my heart) or the choice of using my head, which had a brain hidden inside it.

Sometimes we have more than one God-blessed choice to choose from. God will bless us, whatever choice we make, but each blessing will be different, and we will never know the possible consequences of the choice not taken.

The real contradiction of our pair of proverbs has another, completely different message for us. The very contradictions almost form the message for us.

In the larger picture, we see that fools are a danger, not only to themselves, but to others as well. Their lives are about themselves. They are the people who say “Me, me, me,” all the time.

All fools are, first of all, me-me-me fools. Because of this, fools are fools because they don’t understand anything. They don’t understand the importance of God and the importance of others as being a required foundation for the importance of you. You can’t separate your love and care for yourself from your love and care for God, for others, and for the creation.

In this lack of understanding (because they won’t listen to God because they don’t trust him to let them go on straying “me-me-me” forever, and so they will not let God be God) fools stand in the way of God’s desires for others, they harm those others, they harm the creation, and they harm themselves.

Remembering this foundation, our pair of contradictions teach us that wise people can turn into fools, and that fools can lose their foolishness and begin to be wise. Foolishness never ends well unless you end your foolishness first.

“Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will be like him yourself.” If you really are as wise as you think you are, then you may be too wise for your own good. That kind of wisdom isn’t wisdom at all. Then you are actually only wise in your own eyes. Then dealing with the foolishness of a fool can make you turn you into a fool.

“Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.” The finest and most fatal form of foolishness consists of being wise in your own eyes. And we have that proverb at the end of our reading that says. “Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him.”

Being wise in your own eyes is the beginning and the end of foolishness. It’s the foundation and the roof of foolishness. Then you are finished and there’s more hope for a fool than for you.

This pair of contradictions contradicts all of our fondest wishes: that we can depend on being what we want to be to the end.

This is wrong for many reasons. Most of all, God has based his creation on a pattern of contradictions. Some things never change. The amount of energy in the universe is unchanging, never added to and never lost. This essence of the creation never, never, changes.

And yet change is happening all the time in things as they are or seem to be. Everything seems to always be changing. You can find that you are not what you thought you are, and what you are can change.

So, we come to another seeming contradiction. The condition of a fool seems to be hopeless and unchanging, except for the fact that it isn’t.

Looking at history and foolishly wondering how it might have been, I could say that Hitler turned out to be a fool but, if we had judged him to be a fool from the start and fought him as if he were a fool, then he would have destroyed us. Never give yourself the pleasure of judging anyone and calling them a fool. It might destroy you.

And your fool might become wise and your wisdom might look pretty foolish. If you hate the fools you may be hating yourself. If you judge them you might be judged. That sounds like something Jesus said. The wise show us the face of God by showing us the face of Jesus. Don’t hate someone because you don’t see the face of Jesus. See the face of Jesus that might become their face. Don’t be angry, and don’t call anyone a fool. You might be the fool yourself. See everyone, as well as yourself, living in the environment of the love and grace of the Father.

Paul shows this as he opens his self-referral letter to the church in Rome. Paul wrote, “I am obligated both to Greeks and to non-Greeks, both to the wise and the foolish. That is why I am so eager to preach the gospel also to you who are at Rome.” (Romans 1:14-15) I think the readers of this letter would wonder whether Paul was saying that the Greeks were the wise and the non-Greeks were the foolish or the other way around. And, if it was important to Paul so that he felt he owed you a debt of duty to bring you the gospel, would it be because he thought you were a fool, or because he thought you were wise.

Do you want to be loved because you are wise? Or, do you want to be loved because you are a fool?

With Paul, it could be either way. But how would that make you feel? You must know that Paul tried to think in conformity to the mind of God, the mind of Christ. We tend to think that the Bible shows God hating fools when it only says that he hates what fools make happen.

Have you ever loved someone and found that they had made their lives horrifying and disgusting? That is a hatred that comes from love. The eternal thing, there, is the love, and love will pray for mercy.

God loves the wise and the foolish, even when he finds us horrifying and disgusting. Would you want it any other way?

God’s mission in Jesus was a mission of love to the wise and the foolish, and it appears that the people with a well-earned reputation for wisdom didn’t recognize God and God’s message when it came in Jesus. The Lord was recognized by the babies of the world, which means not just the youngest and the smallest physically, but some of the Hebrew words for foolish refer to people who have not developed into maturity.

As we can see, although fools are unredeemable, fools may not end up as fools. Fools may become the wise ones. And it’s the babies, the unfinished and the immature who may suddenly become wise in the presence of a God who made himself profoundly small and human for them.

This is the chasm which is only bridged by the Lord who has made a foolish looking sacrifice for those who least deserve it. Paul didn’t care who you thought you were. He would always think better of you than that.

Whether you were wise or foolish, Paul would see you as something so much more. Paul would see you as someone he was obligated to. He would see himself as indebted to you because of God in Christ who bridged the distance between God and humans, glory and a mud-ball, glory and a painful death. That is the wisdom of God. That guarantees that we should not be wise in our own eyes.

We have to live by a different wisdom than our own. So, we must die to ourselves and rise with the wisdom of God crucified for us in Jesus. We must make God’s mission our own.

We own everyone around us, and everyone in this world a God sized debt, a debt that looks like Jesus, a debt that insists on making us into Jesus for the sake of others. Only then can we be wise in his eyes. Only in the sacrificial love of Jesus for those who crucified him can we know what our life is for, and how to live it out, and thrive for others, and thrive for ourselves.

Things Invisible - Meeting and Beating the Devil

Preached on Sunday, April 22, 2018

Scripture readings: Genesis 3:1-15; Revelations 12:1-12; John 8:31-59

The first time I remember almost stepping on a snake in the wild was when I was about ten years old. My family was on vacation and we were staying in a campground at Lake Shasta.

Walking near the Columbia River, Mattawa/Desert Aire, WA
March 2018

I was just coming out of the restroom, and there was a little gully that I had walked through, from our camp, to get there. I took the same path to get back to our camp.

Something near my feet caught my eye. It made me jump. A rattlesnake lay stretched out in that gully, and I realized that it must have been there when I came that way in the first place. I had almost stepped on that snake twice.

Since then, I’m sure I have almost stepped on a snake at least once every year. I know it was three or four times just last summer. Of course, they weren’t all rattlesnakes. So, by my guesstimate; I may have almost stepped on about 120 snakes in my adult lifetime. That tells me, all in all, that I must be pretty lucky when it comes to snakes.

  There’s one mean serpent, though, that I haven’t been so lucky with. That serpent has been around for a long, long time. It’s about as old as the creation. It’s one of those snakes that never stops growing as long as it lives. It’s been around so long that it’s even grown extra heads. It’s even grown horns.

The Book of Revelation gives us a pretty good snapshot of this serpent. “Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads. His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth.” (Revelation 12:3-4)

If you wonder what the numbers mean (the seven heads, and ten horns, and all that), It means that it’s got plenty. It means that the dragon has more than enough fight in him and more than enough brains in him to do a lot of harm, if he can.

Sometimes, in the Book of Revelation, and a few other places in the Bible, Jesus is a Lamb: The Lamb of God, wounded, bleeding, the perfect sacrifice for all the sins of the world. Sometimes, in the Book of Revelation, Satan (the Devil) is a reptile: snake, serpent, dragon.

This doesn’t mean that the Devil really has become a reptile or that the Devil has horns or anything else that pictures show. In the same way, Jesus isn’t really a lamb. He doesn’t have wool or hooves. But if you had a special dream, or some such thing, with a reptile or a lamb in it, the stories of the Bible could give you a clue about what they are, or what they mean.

Why was Eve talking to a serpent in the Garden of Eden?  The common answer is that Satan took over the body of a living snake in order for Eve to see and talk to something that didn’t scare her. No creature would be scary in those days and in that place, where God’s harmony and peace protected everything and everyone from each other.

Why did the Lord punish the innocent snakes for something the Devil did by forcing them to crawl on their bellies? I think the snakes already crawled on their bellies. It was no punishment for them. But that fowl spirit, Satan, and his team, were humiliated in some way that we cannot imagine. Some power or some dignity, or else the ability to deceive themselves about what their own sins had done to them, was taken from them, and they would never get that back. And Satan would never be able to destroy his own future destroyer.

In all three of the scriptures we have read, we meet some of the same results. First (in God’s prophecy in the garden), we are told of the world as it has become. Next (in the gospel), we meet the same current world as it is resisting the love and peace and freedom of God. In Revelation, we meet the invisible spiritual warfare that goes on in this world, where Jesus has died and risen from the dead, and yet where the Kingdom of God hasn’t been fully installed yet.

In each of these scenes, we meet the snakebite of the world. We meet the Devil and the power of sin as conflict, as deceit, as poison, as the use of ourselves against ourselves. We meet the reason why so many people hate snakes.

Until the final judging and healing come, in a new heaven and earth (heaven and universe), there will be war. That war will be spiritual. The war will also be physical: flesh and blood, and weapons, and killing. In between the war of the spirit and the war of bombs and bullets, we have our own potential for war on the personal level.  This war will be bad attitudes, broken relationships, pride, blame, guilt, resistance, invasion, abuse.

We see and feel this every day. We are all part of it.

It’s poison, it’s sickness, it’s human will, and choices, and habits. It’s lurking there like a snake, so well disguised, so easy to step on, or to step into.

Genesis and Revelation have so much in common. God provides a garden of grace and healing at the beginning of the world and, in the end, when the long war is over, we will all come home to a garden of grace and healing provided by God.

The main difference between the gardens is that the Tree of Life in the first garden will be replaced in the eternal garden by the Tree of Life that is the Cross, and the fruit and the healing leaves will be Jesus, and all the nations (and all of us) will come home to the garden and walk with him, and talk with him, and never need to hide, and never need to ever be afraid again.

All of the conflict and poison of this world, as we see it in the Bible, comes from one sin. It’s been said to be a kind of pride, but it’s also a deep desire for something we don’t have. It comes from a decision to disapprove of what God has made us to be.

We want to redraw God’s design of us in a way that gives us more of an advantage. We want control. We want to be Gods. Eve and Adam wanted to be wise, but this was no trick of the Devil.

The Devil knew that they loved and worshiped what they saw in God, when God walked with them, and when they were tending the garden designed for them. They were created to begin a family of the human sons and daughters of God, but they could be drawn in to a temptation to take it for themselves, without partnership with God. They could just eat the fruit that would give them the knowledge of everything.

They would know the pros and cons of everything. They would know that if you did “A” and “B”, you would get “C”. The value on the other side of the equations wouldn’t be “X”. It wouldn’t be unknown. They wanted to be Gods not by being created in God’s image, but by self-creation and self-design.

The Devil himself had started his devilry with the same motives. That’s what the war in heaven is about. The Devil is in an agony of envy, to become God of a creation of his own making, even if it means creating a dead and poisoned and starving and hating creation.

The poet Milton was wise when he put these words into the Devil’s mouth: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” That is the philosophy and motivation of the Devil and his kingdom.

This is not so far from us. Jesus called a crowd of people who were believers (people who had chosen to follow Jesus and listen to him) . . . Jesus called them “children of the Devil.” (John 8:44)

They were still ready to turn on Jesus if he disappointed them.

It didn’t take much. Jesus poked at them a couple times and the truth came out. They wanted to create a kingdom of themselves in their own image, and Jesus wouldn’t play along. He never does.

We all see this in the end. Following Jesus, “we die daily.” (1 Corinthians 15:31) We die to ourselves to be recreated in Christ’s image. That is what the kingdom of God is for.

How do we beat this? How do we beat the Devil himself?

We do this by prayer: prayer without ceasing. We do this by knowing and understanding the Bible: learning from our heart the mind of God through the word of God.

We beat this by internalizing a reality of Jesus that we call “the full armor of God.” We find this armor spelled out in Ephesians 6:10-18.

Something more is hiding in our reading of the Book of Revelation. There is a song of victory. Someone is singing about the victory of God’s people over the Devil, and how they did it: “They overcame him by the Blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.” (Revelation 12:11)

Let’s take the last phrase first: “They did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.”

We give our greatest gifts when we give the fullness of our own lives. Soldiers do this. Husbands and wives in mutual devotion and thankfulness do this. Parents do this for their children. Sometimes we do this for our brothers and sisters in Christ. We do this for Jesus.

When Adam and Eve tried to hide from God, they lost themselves by trying to save themselves. The step they took, in which they ate the forbidden fruit, led to the next step of self-preservation to rob God of the gift that he had given to them: the gift of his creation and his love.

They robbed God of his created family, because they (along with all of us) were to be God’s family in flesh and blood. The fear of losing what we want to claim for ourselves is a kind of fear of death that can never stand up to the Devil.

Our defense against the dark arts is to love others more than we love ourselves. Our defense is ultimately to love God more than ourselves. We are not afraid to die to ourselves. Fear of anything less is defeat.

For the soldiers of Jesus, the second defense against the Devil is “the word of their testimony”. Another way Revelation phrases this is to call it, “the testimony of Jesus.” (Revelation 12:17) There is a very strange use of the same phrase later on: “The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.” (Revelation 19:10)

It’s a phrase that means two or three different things at the same time. It a sword that cuts both ways. The word of their testimony and the testimony of Jesus is what you say to others about Jesus. It’s also what Jesus says to you. It’s also what the scriptures tell you about Jesus. It’s also the over-arching story of what the gospel (the story of the good news of Jesus) tells you.

Our weapon against the dark arts is to know what Jesus has done for you and what he is still doing for you: to know it, and to share it with others, and to talk to Jesus about it in prayer and thanks.

This weapon against the dark arts is what the Word of God tells us, but it must do more than this.

The Word of God must feed you Jesus. The Word of God must be Jesus knocking on the door of your heart. The Word of God must be a picture of a baby in Bethlehem, and a man teaching and healing others in the desert. The Word of God must be a picture of that same man nailed to the cross, dying for you, and rising from the dead in order to raise you up and to give you life.

Here, again, beating the Devil requires you to make your life into something about more than yourself. Your life is for others. Your life is for the Lord.

The third weapon against the Devil is “the blood of the Lamb.” Again, you have the victory if your life is not about you, but truly a gift designed and shaped by the bloody hands of the one who died for you and for the whole world.

Here is what Jesus means when he started poking at the ones who thought they believed him when they didn’t really believe at all. “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:31-32)

The freedom of reigning in Hell instead of serving in heaven is no freedom at all, in the end. Jesus died in order to give birth to us as sons and daughters of the Living God, and to be brothers and sisters to each other, all around the world. Lesser loves bring the venom of conflict and separation. Freedom is love in Jesus, and in his family.

Reformation - Martin Luther's Last Sermon

Sermon used by Dennis Evans on Sunday, October 15, 2017, in preparation for the 500th anniversary of Reformation Day, under the title: “Reformation – Martin Luther’s Last Sermon; February 15, 1546”

AN EDITED, ABRIDGED, AND PARAPHRASED VERSION OF A SERMON BY

MARTIN LUTHER:

The Last Sermon, Preached in Eisleben,

Matt. 11:25–30, February 15, 1546

On the Saturday following the preceding sermon Luther set out for Mansfeld to mediate a dispute between Count Albert and Count Gebhard. Most likely his last sermon was preached on Monday, February 15, not on February 14, to a large crowd which gathered from all over the countryside to hear him. On the day afterward, while confined to his bed, he signed the treaty between the brothers, on the eighteenth he died, and on the twenty-second his body was buried in Wittenberg. The last four sermons, preached in Eisleben, were published in Wittenberg, 1546. Who the transcriber was cannot be determined.

Original Text in German; WA 51, 187–194.

(MY NOTE: The additions or changes within the brackets, in this edited version, are mine, except for “Predigtampf”.)

This is a fine Gospel and it has a lot in it. Let us talk about part of it now, covering as much as we can and as God gives us grace.

Walking around Crab Creek, Mattawa/Desert Aire, WA
September 2017

The Lord here praises and extols his heavenly Father for having hidden these things from the wise and understanding. That is, he did not make his gospel known to the wise and understanding, but to infants and children who cannot speak and preach and are not knowing and wise.

Thus, he indicates that he is opposed to the wise and understanding. He dearly loves those who are not wise and understanding, but are rather like young children.

…To the world this is very foolish and offensive, that God should be opposed to the wise and condemn them, when, after all, we have the idea that God could not reign if he did not have wise and understanding people to help him. But the meaning of the saying is this: the wise and understanding in the world so contrive things that God cannot be favorable and good to them.

 [They think they know better,] for they are always exerting themselves. They do things in the Christian church the way they want to, themselves. Everything that God does they must improve, so that there is no poorer, more insignificant and despised disciple on earth than God. God must be everybody’s pupil, everybody wants to be his teacher and preceptor.

…They cannot let things be as they were ordained to be. They think they have to do something too, in order that they may be a bit better than other people and be able to boast: “[Here] is what I have done; what God has done is too poor and insignificant, even childish and foolish; I must add something to it.”

This is the nature of the shameful wisdom of the world, especially in the Christian church. One bishop and one pastor hacks and snaps at another, and one obstructs and shoves the other. We have seen this at all times in the government of the church to its great detriment.

These are the real wiseacres, of whom Christ is speaking here, who put the cart before the horse and will not stay on the road which God himself has shown us, but always have to have and do something special in order that the people may say: “Ah, our pastor or preacher is nothing. There’s the real man, he’ll get things done!”

But is this behavior not a disgusting thing, and should not God grow impatient with it? Should he be so greatly pleased with these fellows who are all too smart and wise for him, and are always wanting to send him back to school? As it says [in the parallel in Luke]: “Wisdom must be justified by her own children” (Luke 7:35

Things are in a fine state, indeed, when the egg wants to be wiser than the hen. A fine governance it must be when the children want to rule their father and mother, and the fools and simpletons [rule] the wise people. You see, this is the reason why the wise and understanding are condemned everywhere in the Scriptures.

The pope has also done the same thing. For example, when Christ established and instituted the ministry [Predigtamt] and the sacrament of his body and blood in order that Christians should use it to strengthen and fortify their faith, the pope cried: “No, that’s not the way it should be; it must be wisely handled!” For the pope’s decree says that, when the priest reads the mass for the living or the dead it must be a sacrifice [that purchases a product].

For example, when a merchant is about to go on a journey, he should first have a mass read for him, and then it will turn out fortunately for him.

…So it is, with our Lord God in the world; whatever he institutes and ordains must always be not only perverted but also reviled and discredited by the devil and his followers. And then the world even thinks that God should be pleased and look with approval upon the fact that every fool wants to master and rule him.

In worldly affairs and government, the same thing happens, as Aristotle too has written. A few people are often endowed with great wisdom and understanding, unlike ordinary people. Often God gives us a fine, noble, intelligent man, who could serve principalities and people with wisdom and counsel. But such persons flee from the business of government, and it is hard to bring them to govern.

On the other hand, however, there are others who want to be and to do it, but they have no ability. [And yet, they do it anyway.] In worldly government, these are [the] jackanapes and wiseacres. These fellows [get it all wrong] and we are quite rightly hostile to them. Everybody mourns the fact that we can never be safe from these fools. They are good for nothing and they do nothing but put flies in the ointment.

That’s why the people say of them: The devil has slobbered us with fools.¹ And Aristotle,² who observed in governments that few people are properly qualified to govern, makes a distinction between the truly wise and understanding and others whom he calls… the wise who only think they are wise and understanding; just as we say in German: “Conceit keeps the dance going.”

They imagine that because they are in the government and are higher-ups they must surely be wise. And one such fool in counsel hinders the others from getting on with anything at all; for he wants to be wise by force, in the devil’s name, and still he is a fool.

Now, if in worldly affairs one is quite rightly opposed to these people who want to be wise and are not. [It’s much worse with those], whom both God and men rightly dislike, who want to be wise in the holy Christian church and are not. For these people hinder the ministry, so that the people cannot come to God….

…So, the pope, too, wants to be a very wise man, indeed, the wisest of the wise, simply because he has a high position and claims to be the head of the church; whereupon the devil so puffs him up that he imagines that whatever he says and does is pure divine wisdom and everybody must accept and obey it, and nobody should ask whether it is God’s Word or not. In his big fool’s book,⁴ he presumes quite shamelessly to say that it is not likely that such an eminence, meaning himself, could err. So, too, the emperor, kings, and cardinals; because they sit in such high places, they too think they cannot err or be wrong….

…It sounds almost as if, when Christ spoke these words: “I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven,” etc. (Matt. 11:25), they were spoken with ill will. And yet there was no ill will or hatred in his heart; for, since he gave himself, body and life, for us, how could there be any ill will there?

…His annoyance and displeasure comes from the fact that these miserable, foolish people presume to become masters of the divine Majesty. This he cannot and should not tolerate, and all devout hearts thank him for it, for otherwise there would be no end to this affected wisdom and mastery.…

…Here we ought to say: “Dear heavenly Father, speak thou, I am willing to be a fool and a child and be silent; for if I were to rule with my own understanding, wisdom, and reason, the cart would long since have been stuck in the mire and the ship would long since have been wrecked. Therefore, dear God, do thou rule and guide it thyself; I will gladly put out my eyes, and my reason besides, and let thee alone rule through thy Word.”

…Likewise, the hearers also should say: “I do not believe in my pastor, but he tells me of another Lord, whose name is Christ; him he shows to me; I will listen to him, in so far as he leads me to the true Teacher and Master, God’s Son.”

Then things would be right in the church and it would be well governed, and there would be harmony all around. Otherwise there will be the same displeasure as there is in secular government….

…Therefore, this is what we say: “I grant that emperor, pope, cardinals, princes, and nobles are wise and understanding, but I shall believe in Christ; he is my Lord, he is the one God bids me to listen to, from him he bids me to learn what real, divine wisdom and understanding is.”

…The Lord says: “All things have been delivered to me by my Father” (Matt. 11:25)….

…The Lord, who is the only one we ought to hear in these matters, says: “No one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Matt. 11:27). [That means] to the childlike and simple, who consider themselves neither wise nor understanding, but rather hear and accept his Word. So, if it is his Word you hold up to me and command, I shall gladly accept it, even though it be spoken by a little child, or even the ass [or donkey] that spoke to Balaam (Num. 22:21–30)….

…Our wisdom and understanding in divine things is the eye which the devil opened for us in paradise, when Adam and Eve, too, wanted to be wise in the devil’s name. God himself taught them and gave them his Word, which they were to adhere to, if they wanted to be really wise. Then came the devil and made improvements; he closed the eyes with which they had previously seen God and not seen the devil. This is the plague which still continues to cling to us—that we want to be wise and understanding in the devil’s name.

But to combat this we must learn what this means: “All things have been delivered to me.” In other words: [Jesus] must rule, teach, counsel, give orders, and command in [his] church. And when he said that, Christ openly confessed that he is true God; for no angel nor any other creature can say that all things have been delivered to him.

It is true that the devil once tried to seat himself on the throne and be like God; but he was soon flung out of heaven for it. Therefore, Christ says, “All things have been delivered to me,” that is, “to me, to me, you must be obedient. If you have my Word, then stick to it, and pay no attention to anybody who teaches and commands you differently. I will rule, protect, and save you well.”

…God has set his Son at his right hand and said in Psalm 2:7, “You are my son”; I have made the whole world and all nations your possession; hear him, you kings and lords, if you would be wise; do homage to [Jesus] as your Lord; and know that what he says to you I am saying to you.

This we Christians should learn and acknowledge, even though the world does not want to do it. We should be grateful to God that he has so richly blessed us and granted that we ourselves are able to hear him, just as Christ himself here gives joyful thanks to his heavenly Father.

In times past, we would have run to the ends of the world if we had known of a place where we could have heard God speak. But now…. Father and mother and children sing and speak of [Him]. The preacher speaks of [him] in the parish church—you ought to lift up your hands and rejoice that we have been given the honor of hearing God speaking to us through his Word.

“Oh”, people say, “what is that? After all, there is preaching every day, often many times every day, so that we soon grow weary of it. What do we get out of it?”

All right, go ahead, dear brother, if you don’t want God to speak to you every day at home in your house, and in your parish church, then be wise and look [somewhere] else. [Go on pilgrimages to look at the relics.] In Trier is our Lord God’s coat, in Aachen are Joseph’s pants and our blessed Lady’s chemise.

Go there and squander your money. Buy indulgences and the pope’s secondhand junk. These are valuable things! You have to go far for these things and spend a lot of money….

…[No, instead] we should listen to God’s Word, which tells us that he is our schoolmaster, and have nothing to do with Joseph’s pants….

This is the first point in this Gospel—that Christ and God the Father, himself, are opposed to the wise and understanding….

…When, therefore, the great lords, the emperor, pope, cardinals, and bishops are hostile and wrathful toward us because of all this, excommunicate us, and would gladly burn and murder us all, we must suffer it and say: “We did not start this on account of the pope, the bishops, and the princes, nor shall we stop it on account of them.” Christ says, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy-laden” [Matt. 11:28],

…It is as though he were saying: “Just stick to me, hold on to my Word and let everything else go. If you are burned and beheaded for it, then have patience, I will make it so sweet for you that you easily would be able to bear it.”

It has… been written of St. Agnes⁵ that when she was led to prison to be killed, it was to her as if she were going to a dance. Where did she get this? Ah, only from this Christ, from believing this saying, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.” That is to say: “If things go badly, I will give you the courage even to laugh about it; and if even though you walk on fiery coals, the torment shall nevertheless not be so severe and the devil shall nevertheless not be so bad, and you will rather feel that you are walking on roses.⁶ I will give you the heart to laugh even though Turk, pope, emperor, and everybody else be filled with horrible wrath and rage. Only come to me; and if you are facing oppression, death, or torture, because the pope, the Turk, and emperor are attacking you, do not be afraid; it will not be heavy for you, but light and easy to bear, for I give you the Spirit, so that the burden, which for the world would be unbearable, becomes for you a light burden. For when you suffer for my sake, it is my yoke and my burden, which I lay upon you in grace, that you may know that this your suffering is well pleasing to God and to me and that I myself am helping you to carry it and giving you power and strength to do so.”

So also say Psalm 31 (:24) and Psalm 27 (:14): “Let your heart take courage, all you who wait for the Lord,” i.e., all you who suffer for his sake.

Let misfortune, sin, death, and whatever the devil and the world loads upon you assail and assault you, if only you remain confident and undismayed, waiting upon the Lord in faith, you have already won, you have already escaped death and far surpassed the devil and the world.

Lo, this means that the wise of this world are rejected, that we may learn not to think ourselves wise and to put away from our eyes all great personages, indeed, to shut our eyes altogether, and cling only to Christ’s Word and come to him, as he so lovingly invites us to do, and say: “Thou alone art my beloved Lord and Master, I am thy disciple.”

This and much more might be said concerning this Gospel, but I am too weak and we shall let it go at that.^[1]

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WA D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimar, 1883– ).

¹ Hat uns der Teufel mit Narren beschiessen.

² Luther may have had in mind Aristotle’s reference to epistēmē and doxa in Nichomachean Ethics, VI, 10; cf. WA 51, Nachträge und Berichtigungen.

⁴ I.e., the papal decretals, part of the Corpus Iuris Canonici.

⁵ St. Agnes who died ca. 304 is commemorated in the Roman church on January 21 and 28.

⁶ The allusion is to St. Vincentius, early Christian martyr who was laid on fiery coals, etc.

^[1]Luther, Martin: Pelikan, Jaroslav Jan (Hrsg.) ; Oswald, Hilton C. (Hrsg.) ; Lehmann, Helmut T. (Hrsg.): Luther's Works, Vol. 51 : Sermons I. Philadelphia : Fortress Press, 1999, c1959 (Luther's Works 51), S. 51:383 (Edited 2017 by Dennis Evans for use in his pulpit to celebrate the 500^th anniversary of the Reformation.)