Rooted in Christ

Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

August 31, 2014

Romans 9:1-5

Rooted in Christ

In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

I.

The Christian Church is the collection of sinners that Christ has collected and chosen to be His people, forgiven and adopted into His family. And the Church's roots are deep. They go back thousands of years to the very first sinners: Adam and Eve. They sinned against God, and God in His mercy promised them a Son. He promised that one of their babies would be the Son of God and Man who would save sinners from their own evil selves.

A lot of babies were born between the fall of Adam in Eden until the advent of Christ in Bethlehem. As part of God's plan many of these babies were born as Jewish babies. They were sons and daughters of God's chosen people, who lived under the Old Testament.

Now if you obey Me fully and keep My covenant, then out of all nations you will be My treasured possession. Although the whole earth is Mine, you will be for Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’

Exodus 19:5-6a

This covenant or contract meant—among other laws—circumcising their baby boys, offering sacrifices at the Temple, and refusing to marry non-Jews. Above all, being born in the Jewish nation meant watching and praying for the advent, the arrival of the promised Messiah. The Messiah was the chosen Anointed One who would be a blessing to all nations, for He would suffer for the sins of all the nations. By the wounds of the Anointed Savior, sinners in all nations would be healed.

This is why Nathanael was filled with such joy upon recognizing Jesus as this long-awaited Messiah.

Then Nathanael declared, "Rabbi, You are the Son of God; You are the King of Israel."

John 1:49

II.

But many years later, St. Paul was filled with sadness. Some of his fellow Jews believed that they were sinners whom Jesus had rescused from sin. But many of other Jews were refusing to recognize Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah who had been promised to their forefathers, the patriarchs: Adam, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Paul was heart-broken that these Jews who had been given so many special blessings threw away their Savior. They were the spiritual equivalent of trust-fund babies. They were born into wealth and privilege. They were given the right education and the right connections, and they threw it all away.

Take Paul's sadness and put it into one of Jesus' most famous stories, the Parable of the Prodigal. A father has two sons. The younger son demands and receives his inheritance early and wastes all of it. When he has nowhere else to go, his father receives him back as his son. The older son is furious with his prodigal father, who keeps wasting his inheritance on his worthless brother. The parable ends with the younger son alive and well in his father's house, while the older son gnashes his teeth and lashes out at his father.

The Jews who throw away Jesus, the souls that Paul is heart-broken over and desparate to see saved—which brother from Jesus' parable best fits Paul's countrymen?

When we hear how the Jews threw away their inheritance, we might want to see these Jews who reject Christ alone as their Savior as the younger brother. But in truth, the older brother's anger is the path that they are embracing.

But [the older brother] answered his father, "Look! All these years I've been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!" The father said, "My son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found."

Luke 15:29-32

The older brother was relying on his good blood and good behavior to earn himself a spot at the father's table. He despised the truth that everything he had, had been given as a gift. When he realizes that sonship into God's family is a free gift to which our good breeding and good behavior contribute nothing, he was furious! He wanted to be the reason he got into the banquet. When a useless worthless waste of life—that wicked younger brother—gets into the banquet, he is offended deeply by what this implies: that he isn't any better.

III.

The older brother represents any Jew who believes that their obedience to the Old Testament and their Jewish blood running in their veins is what saves them. In other words, they worshipped their roots, instead of what the root produced by God's grace.

"The days are coming," declares the Lord, "when I will raise up to David a righteous Branch, a King who will reign wisely and do what is just and right in the land. In His days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. This is the name by which He will be called: The Lord Our Righteousness.

Jeremiah 23:5-6

The roots of the Church go deep. Adam and Abraham were the human roots of our Savior and David was the stump from which Jesus was born into this world. The roots are vital, but without the Righteous Branch, without Jesus, the roots do us no good. But with Jesus alone as our Savior who sticks us on to Himself, like little branches onto the big branch, these roots—the circumcision, the worship, the laws—are wonderful arrows that point us to Him.

In the name of the Father

and of the † Son

and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.