[Machine transcription]
Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Alleluia. In the name of Jesus. Amen.
Dear Saints, at the end of his life they were publishing Luther. At the end of Luther’s life they were publishing an edition of his German works, and he wrote in the preface of that a little commentary on Psalm 119. We read or sang a few verses of Psalm 119. We probably chanted together about five of the 186 verses of that psalm. That’s the longest psalm, the longest chapter in the Bible. It, by the way, is right next to the shortest chapter in the Bible, Psalm 117.
And between, this is an amazing thing, it doesn’t really matter, but the middle chapter of the Bible is Psalm 118. It’s curious. But that Psalm 119 is the great Torah psalm, the psalm of the scripture. In almost every single verse, it talks about God’s law and His precepts and His instructions and His wisdom, His commands, and talks about how the man of God, how the Christian lives according to those words.
And Luther, meditating on that psalm, says at the end of his life that in that psalm God teaches us how to be theologians. And he teaches us the three things that make a theologian. I want to talk about this because, and this is an important thing for all of us to know, God has called each and every one of us to be theologians. It’s not just your pastors who are called to be theologians, but every single Christian is called to be a theologian, that is, a student of God’s Word.
And the three things that make a theologian are this, according to Psalm 119: prayer, meditation on God’s Word, and suffering. Pastor, could you revise that list for us, please? I know the first two are fine. The last one doesn’t sound so good, but the last one is the main one, and I’ll tell you why. Because the medieval theologians had a different three things that made a theologian. This is what Luther was taught in the monastery: it was meditation and prayer and contemplation.
Oratio, meditatio, contemplatio. And the idea was this—that if you prayed enough and you studied the scriptures enough and you kept yourself pure enough, then God would lift you up from all of the troubles of this life, from all of the afflictions of this life, from all of the muck and dirt and all the things that stain us of this life. He would lift you up into this experience of bliss before His presence. That was the goal, to climb this ladder of devotion until you could see God.
In fact, the monasteries were part of that so that you could remove yourself from all the troubles of life. Like, for example, you could remove yourself from going to work. You take the vow of poverty, and then you don’t have to worry about cleaning out the stables or getting dirt under your fingernails when you’re farming or trying to figure out a deal with your neighbor about how much money you have to pay them for their chickens or whatever. You can exempt yourself from all of that trouble by this vow of poverty so you can keep yourself pure.
Or you can exempt yourself from all the troubles of the family by taking the vow of chastity. And now the men who are in the monastery wouldn’t become husbands and fathers, and the women wouldn’t become wives and mothers, but they would be apart from those things. They wouldn’t have to worry about waking up in the middle of the night to change a diaper. They woke up—the monks and nuns woke up in the middle of the night to say their prayers, not to comfort the children who were having nightmares.
And the third vow that the monks would take was the vow of obedience, not to God and His Word but obedience to the rule in the monastery of saying the psalms and saying the prayers and all of this sort of thing. And all of this was so that you could climb this ladder of devotion and escape the dirtiness and the troubles and the afflictions of this life and arrive at this place of peaceful contemplation. Oratio, meditatio, contemplatio.
And Luther says, wrong. When we pray and when we meditate on God’s Word, God does not lift us up out of the troubles of this life and take us out of the sufferings of this life, but the opposite happens. God sends us into it. When we become theologians, God doesn’t pull us away from our neighbors. He sends us right to our neighbors, right to their troubles, right to their sicknesses, right to their poverty, right to their suffering, and right to our own suffering as well.
We had it in the scriptures, so we have meditation: “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” We had prayer: “Your faithfulness, O Lord, endures to all generations. You’ve established the earth, and it stands fast.” And then this affliction, this tentatio, the anfectum: “If your law had not been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction.”
Dear saints, for a long time, the preaching in the church has been something like this: If you would believe in Jesus, He’ll give you a good life. If you would trust in Christ, He’ll make things go smoothly for you. If you surrender your life to Him, you’ll get all the green lights on the way to work and the best parking spot at Costco or whatever—that Jesus is supposed to be the one who makes our life better. But Jesus says something different. In this world, He says, you will have trouble.
And that trouble is, in fact, increased when He claims us as His own and sets us at enmity with the world and the devil and even our own sinful flesh. So you will have suffering in this world. And the suffering that you’ll have in this world will not just be your own suffering and your own heartache and your own sorrow and your own guilt, but it will be the suffering of the neighbor that the Lord also gives you to love.
I think I’ve explained this five or six times just in the last couple of weeks, that it’s a lot of times more difficult to watch someone suffer than to suffer yourself. Have you noticed that? It’s always the people who are sitting next to the hospital bed who are asking, “Pastor, why does God let this thing happen?” It’s a deep thing to watch people suffer, those who you love, to watch them get sick, or to watch bad things happen to them, to watch them get maligned or rejected, or to watch them plunge into distress and loneliness and all of these sorts of things.
But this is how the Lord has set us in this life to live. It’s especially good that we remember this on Mother’s Day. Because there’s probably no calling as despised in the world as the calling of being a mother, of raising children, of teaching them to pray and to sing the Lord’s Word and to trust in Him, and to take care of the children in all of their messiness and all of their craziness. The world despises this. The nuns despised it too back in the Middle Ages.
But this is where the Lord works. He sends us to our neighbor in need. He sends us there to the point of their suffering and to the point of their affliction and says, “Go and be helpful.” And He sends our neighbor to us in our own deed. And this, says Dr. Luther, is what makes us theologians. We read and pray not so that the Lord would pull us out of the troubles of this world, but so the Lord would strengthen us as He sends us into the troubles of this world.
And that He would give us His Spirit and His wisdom so that we might go and bless those that are in need. Now this is all pointing to what our Lord Jesus does. I’ll tell you what, Jesus in heaven at the right hand of God the Father had it pretty good. There was no affliction. There was no suffering. There was no fasting. There were no whips up there at the right hand of God the Father. No beard pullers and cheek strikers and crosses with nails. There was none of that in heaven. He had it pretty good.
But for us men and for our salvation, He came down from heaven. And that’s the whole direction. Jesus did not consider equality with God as something to be grasped, but He humbled Himself, taking the form of a servant, even the form of a servant who died on the cross, so that Jesus came to us in all of our guilt, in all of our sin, in all of our weakness, in all of our suffering, to suffer with us and to suffer for us, so that we might be His, His friends, His children.
So, dear saints, we rejoice that God, the Holy Spirit, sets us to be theologians by our prayer, by our meditation on His Word, and by our suffering and affliction. He prepares us through these things to trust His Word, to love one another, and to long for that day when all suffering and crying will come to an end. May God grant us this, His Holy Spirit, so that we would rejoice in our calling of being theologians of His cross. May God grant it for Christ’s sake. Amen.
And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Christ is risen. He has risen indeed. Alleluia.