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Humans are created to be sociable creatures, to do things together. God did not think it was right for the man to be alone. So God gave the man, Adam, the woman, Eve, to be his companion, his helpmeet, his wife, the mother of us all. God seems to have wired us to want to be together with others, to work together with others for our common good. We like to be a part of a crowd, whether that be a crowd of two as seen in a marriage of one man and one woman or in a crowd of massive size.
But sin stains all of that too. Marriages break apart all too easily. Our families become divided much too easily over the smallest of issues. Christians can be split apart from each other over the silliest of arguments. The devil attacks God's gifts with violence and schism, with selfishness and ignorance. Humans can just as easily join together to participate in a violent riot or to build a tower of Babel in a vain attempt to ascend up to God as they can to do God–pleasing things.
Perhaps we like to join together in crowds to get a rush, an emotional, euphoric high. People most typically like to go to our large stadiums and root for their favorite athletic teams, hoping to get a rush by seeing their favorite team win or by being entertained. I'll never forget cheering for the Indiana Hoosiers basketball team in the NCAA tournament in 2002. I joined 20,000 screaming red–clad fans in a Lexington, Kentucky, arena to watch the Hoosiers achieve two dramatic victories, earning a trip to the “Final Four”. The crowd afterwards just basked in the happiness, the joy of being on the winning side. Strangers were hugging and shaking hands with each other.
That kind of emotional high subsides — it is all very temporary. The next day, I had to report back to work to a job I didn't like so much, to go back to wondering if the company was going to stay afloat and if I would be able to land another job before it sank. No strangers were there to joyously shake my hand or give me a hug for showing up for work. Crash!
Sinners inevitably fail each other. This sinful world and its apparent pleasures fail us. We might receive the desired good feelings, the desired happiness, the thrill of victory even, but if achieving this is our sole source of happiness and joy, then to avoid the agony of defeat, we will have to constantly go back to whatever it is that got us the desired result until we are consumed by it. Then we have other gods.
This is why we warn, on the basis of Holy Scripture, of the dangers present in seeking spiritual and emotional gratification in the large mega–churches out there today. These churches know how to take advantage of having large crowds in comfortable theaters, building them up to emotional highs with blood pumping rock and pop music beats, with lighting, sound effects, videos, and other effects. The show whips the crowd up to the proper high, just in time for the preacher to come on with his or her dynamic, polished message that teaches people how they can be the good, devout person they want to be, how they can be the best spouse or parent, how they can be happy at work or home, how they can achieve the material success they desire. Jesus' work as Savior of the world who died on the cross and rose again to forgive sins is usually left behind or glossed over. That event is in the past. Now we need to worry about today, about our “best life now”, leaders of such churches say.
In and of themselves, feeling good, having emotional highs,learning to be a better person or have a happier family or successful vocations are not intrinsically sinful. But they are when we strive after these things to the exclusion of the things God calls us to seek after in Holy Scriptures: namely, His Kingdom and His Righteousness. Those earthly, temporal things are just that: temporal. God does, indeed, desire to bless us with temporal blessings as we need them. But they should not be the goal of the crowd that gathers together, whether one or two or three hundred or four thousand. When they do, that crowd has other gods.
But there is another crowd that the Scriptures describe. Four thousand men, plus untold numbers of women and children, followed Jesus in the hot sun for three days out into the Galilean wilderness simply to listen to His teachings. Jesus tells us about the priorities of this crowd when He describes them this way:
I feel in my guts compassion upon the crowd, because already three days they have been staying with me and they do not have something they might eat. And if I might send them away hungry to their homes, they will certainly become weary (exhausted, discouraged) on the way, since some of them from far away have come. (Mark 8:2–3, my literal translation)
They stayed with Jesus three days in the wilderness, sleeping under the stars, exposed to the elements. They ate down any provisions they had brought with them. They were essentially fasting at this point. They had come from long distances, by foot, to hear and see Jesus. No doubt they thought to bring Him their sicknesses, maladies, problems to receive the healing they had heard about — only to hear from Him what the Son of God was doing in their midst. Mark says that Jesus' message was: “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the Gospel!” (Mark 1:15)
We know Jesus healed their sicknesses, maladies, problems — to show them and us just who He is, to engender greater faith and dependence upon God. The Kingdom has come. Your sins are forgiven. The effects of sin are being defeated. So repent. Believe the Gospel. Have faith in God alone for all things.
Jesus does not come with quick fixes or quick emotional highs. He knows we need more than that. We need eternal fixes. We need the eternal, higher things of His Kingdom, His Righteousness, His Forgiveness. He comes to brings us those things that are truly profitable for us, as we prayed in today's collect. All the other things are really hurtful for us if we pursue them above the things of God.
So Jesus comes with compassion, eager to serve us God's good gifts. He comes to wash us and cleanse us from our sin in His saving waters of Holy Baptism, making us His own dear child, as He has done for Arilynn Julia Gilbert this morning (in our late service). He comes to preach to us baptized saints, desiring that we should always be able to stay at His feet and hear the living voice of His Gospel that imparts faith and forgiveness to us. He comes to feed us baptized saints with His eternal bread, His perfect bread that gives true life and nourishment so that we do not become weary, exhausted, or discouraged on the way to our heavenly home.
Jesus comes day after day, week after week, with just the right things, those eternally profitable things that last, that we can depend on: His Word of life, His bread of life. It is just what we need. It is a pure and ongoing gift of grace brought from heaven to us, for us.
That crowd out in the Galilean desert did not gather for the things this world thinks it should gather for, nor in the right place. “How could God do His work in such a place with such a seemingly irrelevant message and a paltry meal?” the world says. Who would be crazy enough to go out in the wilderness for three days and run themselves out of food just to hear a poor rabbi preach and break some bread? Who is crazy enough to drive from all corners of North Dallas and beyond just to hear preaching and to be washed in a font and to receive a paltry meal from the mouth and hand of sinners claiming to stand in Jesus' place as Christian pastors? What group of teenagers and adults would be crazy enough to sit in three vans and drive ten hours each way only to join 800 other Christians in hot, boring St. Louis for four days, and not to be pumped up by rock bands, nor entertained in any way, but merely to be continually preached to and taught by more of those Christian pastors from God's Word, to pray corporately three times a day, singing those old Lutheran hymns and liturgies, and to be fed from that same ritual meal on a Thursday night in a hot, crowded–to–the–rafters sanctuary where many had to stand for nearly two hours?
What crowd defies the wisdom and selfish reasoning of this sinful world? What crowd says “No” to seeking only after its own felt needs, its own emotional highs, its own solutions to its own perceived daily problems and needs?
That would be the crowd of sinners who by God's grace have been called, gathered, enlightened, sanctified, and kept in the true faith by the power of the Gospel and the eternal blessings bestowed in the waters of Holy Baptism, the body and blood of Jesus Christ in the Holy Communion, the redeeming Word of Holy Absolution. This crowd is the Church, the communion of saints who relishes in the news of the forgiveness of their sins and looks forward to the resurrection of their own bodies and to life everlasting. God gathers and feeds them where and when it pleases Him, in His time and according to His wisdom, not ours. So it does not always meet in the most beautiful and comfortable of locations, does not always have the huge numerical crowds that the world deems to be “successful”.
God, our Father, keeps calling this world to repentance, seeking to gather everyone into His blessed Kingdom. His Son, our blessed Lord Jesus Christ, gathers sinners with His Holy Spirit to listen to His living voice and to receive bread from His hand. His Church receives those things that are truly profitable for them, the eternal, lasting, higher, heavenly things that save from sin, deliver from death, defeat the power of the devil.
This means for all true Christians a life that is not of this world, but is hated by this world. It means that the Christian is not always the most successful, the wealthiest, the happiest, the healthiest, the one who has the best home, the best family, the best and happiest of feelings and emotions. In fact, the Christian's life is going to be a life lived bearing the shape of the cross, leading through desert and wilderness, highs and lows, ups and downs, exposed to the coldness of isolation from some, to the heat of persecution from others, and finally, to the grave.
But that is where our Lord Christ has first gone and is now leading us out of. He has conquered all that makes our life a cross and now preaches and feeds us through this life to the new life to come that He has promised and prepared for us. Here, as the crowd in Galilee once tasted, we receive a foretaste of that feast to come in heaven, because it comes from Christ. It comes from His great love and compassion for us, from His guts, from what makes Him who He is: pure, no–strings–attached love. He is present even now to forgive, strengthen, renew, and carry us to life everlasting.
Come now, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and receive the gift that gives you what is truly profitable for you: the forgiveness of sins in this blessed meal of our Lord's body and blood. May it ever be said of all the children of God in His Kingdom: “They ate and they were satisfied [by God]… and [Jesus] forgave them.” (Mark 8:8–9, my translation)
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