The 12th Sunday after Trinity at The Lutheran School of Theology, Kenya
People of the Lord, let us stand for the Word of our God.
The text I’m proclaiming to you today from God’s Word takes us to our Old Testament lesson, Isaiah 29, verse 18. “On that day the deaf will hear the words of a document, and out of a deep darkness the eyes of the blind will see.”
My dear brothers and sisters in the family of the Lord, especially dear Sine Ayla Manishimwe, just baptized into our Lord by the saving water of Holy Baptism!
It is always, I think, a wonderful thing when our pastor steps into the middle of the congregation and reads the Gospel lesson, don’t you agree? And in today’s Gospel lesson, the Word of God read right in our midst, we heard that wonderful story about Jesus healing the man who was both deaf, he could not hear, and who had a speech impediment, perhaps he could only make sounds and not words.
The part of that Gospel story from St. Mark that I find very arresting, that really should catch our attention, is the reaction of the disciples. The disciples, you remember, after they saw the miracle and had witnessed what Jesus did – they were astonished. In the words of the Bible, they were very astonished.
In the words of my grandchildren, they were super-astonished. They were more astonished than anybody ever would be. I want to ask the question, “Why?” Why were they not just surprised, not just happy, but why were they so astonished? And the answer is this, there is a 700-year-old reason why those disciples were so astonished at that miracle of our Lord Jesus.
To see what I mean by talking about a 700-year-old reason for their astonishment, I want to take you back to our Old Testament lesson, the part that I read a moment ago, and then I’m also going to expand on that. So the center part of our text is, “On that day, the deaf will hear the words of a document, and out of a deep darkness, the eyes of the blind will see.” Now, this is from the Old Testament prophet Isaiah.
Isaiah lived and worked, as we might say, as a called and ordained pastor of the Lord, about 700 years before our Lord Jesus performed that miracle with the man we heard about in the Gospel lesson. So you can see I’m going to talk about the 700-year-old reason from Isaiah that the disciples were so super-astonished at what Jesus did. It will help if I can read to you more of Isaiah’s words, so I’m going to do that.
Just before our text about the deaf hearing and the eyes of the blind seeing on That Day, this is what Isaiah is preaching to the people of Israel. It is a powerful message about how there is a judgment coming. The people of Israel have, once again, been rebelling against God.
They have not been following his Word, and as a consequence, the Lord is going to step in with an invasion by the Assyrians, a very big enemy of God’s Word and of the people of Israel. It is a terrible mess in the congregation and the nation of Israel. This is what Isaiah says a bit earlier.
You have turned things around, as if the potter were the same as the clay. How can what is made say about its maker, “He didn’t make me?” How can what is formed say about the one who formed it, “He doesn’t understand what he’s doing?”
The potter is God, the Lord. The pottery is the Israelites.
Everything is upside down, turned around. Can’t you just picture that? Suppose someone in a village, or suppose you’re visiting Nairobi to see a place where pottery is made. The person is working there with the clay.
They may have it on a potter’s wheel to move it around, and they’re making a bowl. Now imagine what it would mean if, when that potter was done, and there was a beautiful bowl there, the bowl would suddenly stand up and say, “He didn’t make me!” What if that same bowl said, “He doesn’t understand what he’s doing when he makes clay bowls?” This would be a terrible thing.
That’s exactly what the children of Israel were doing to God. He was the potter, the Creator, who had made them. And they were saying, “He didn’t make me.”
And they were saying, “He doesn’t know what He’s doing.” Then we come down to our text. You’ll remember this opening from when Pastor read the Old Testament lesson shortly before the Gospel reading.
Isn’t it true that in just a little while, Lebanon will become an orchard, and the orchard will seem like a forest? Everything is going to be turned around when God steps in to turn back the right way. On that day, the deaf will hear the words of a document, and out of a deep darkness, the eyes of the blind will see.
This is the reason why the disciples, 700 years after Isaiah, were so very, very astonished. As we say, things were falling into place. Things were coming together. They were not just seeing the miracle, they were looking at Jesus in astonishment.
They were thinking about the Scriptures that they had learned since they were little boys. And here’s one of them. “The Lord is going to step in on That Day,” which means this is God’s day.
In the future, Isaiah is promising, God is going to step in. It will be The Day of the Lord. And on that day, the deaf will hear.
Remember Jesus’ finger into the ear of that man who was deaf? “The words of a document, and out of a deep darkness, the eyes of the blind will see.” It is dawning on the disciples, all of a sudden, like a rainy season dumping every bit of water in the sky on them, that Jesus is God Himself. This is the Maker of the pottery.
This is the Creator who knows exactly what He’s doing. This is the Lord God Himself who said way back in the beginning, after our greatest grandparents wrecked everything by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, “I am going to send the woman’s seed who will crush Satan and forgive the sins of the world.” And the disciples are looking at Jesus, I imagine, with their mouths open, and with their hearts open, with their eyes and ears open, and they are thinking what the apostle Paul is going to write down later.
This is Jesus, who being in very nature God, did not consider his equality with God something he had to grab, but made himself nothing, taking on the form of a servant, and being made in human likeness. You remember that passage from Philippians? He humbled himself and became obedient unto death, and then the Lord raised him from the dead. Now, of course, the fulfillment of all of that is a little bit in the future from the standpoint of the disciples. No wonder they were astonished.
How could you not be astonished? We’re even astonished to hear this 2,000 years after Jesus did that miracle. You feel it too, don’t you? This is God in the flesh. This is Immanuel.
This is the Lord of Isaiah, who finally came to take away the sin of the world. And that means two things. Number one, we have to be reading and treasuring all the words of God, including the Old Testament passages from Isaiah about that Savior, as well as the New Testament. And, number two, we need to think and believe and act in light of the fact that Jesus is the one who did that miracle in His own day, in The Day of the Lord.
I’d like to give you an example to help us think about the importance of God’s Word, so that we too can be astonished as we learn more about Jesus, and so that we can help others to be happy and astonished as we teach them more about the Word of God. So my story comes from about two centuries ago in a small country named Denmark.
Now Denmark, just like Madame Tina’s Finland, is pretty far north, way up from where we are. I picture this being very cold, and that may be wrong. But it’s way up north, and there, there were two men. One by the name of Lessing, and another by the name of Kierkegaard. Lessing and Kierkegaard. This man Lessing was a librarian, and he wanted to be a scholar of the Bible.
So Lessing said, we are separated from Christ and the New Testament church by a great ditch, so that we today cannot know for sure what Jesus did or what was said. Now, do you hear what he’s saying about the Bible? He’s saying that all of the things, such as Jesus’ miracle of healing that man in the gospel, all of those things happened (from his viewpoint 1,800 years ago). And there is this great big gap in between then and now.
I know that some family members and listeners in the United States are going to be listening to this sermon. So for them, they would probably think of the Grand Canyon. There is this very, very big hole in the ground in the western United States, where you cannot possibly jump across or somehow climb across it.
Every year, people, sometimes it’s a child too – every year, people get so close, and they think they’re safe. They fall down into that deep, deep canyon, and they die.
But for us here in Africa, I think that I would refer to the Great Valley Rift. Now think about that being very deep, and you have a sense, though I think none of us really knows, that that’s very, very wide. What Lessing is saying is that Jesus and the Gospels and the other Scriptures are that far away from all of us today. Across a great canyon from us, across the Great Rift.
Now here comes the other man from Denmark, Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard says, “No!” As a matter of fact, what you need to learn about and what everybody needs to hear about is what Kierkegaard calls “the leap of faith.”
The leap of faith. So if you’re standing on a canyon or standing on the edge of the Great Rift, that leap of faith suggests to a lot of people that that you have to try to jump out there. That’s actually not true.
Kierkegaard didn’t teach that we must take an impossible, risky leap. He taught a leap of the faith. What do you think that means? Well, we’re not going to be able to answer the question, what does this mean, unless we know what faith is.
So from the Bible, we have a definition, you might call this the First Act of the Mind explanation of what faith is, according to the book of Hebrews. “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” Kierkegaard said it’s actually a passion.
It’s a passion because just like our emotions happen to us even though we don’t ask for them, God’s grace comes to us through His Word and works faith even though we didn’t ask Him for it. But what I’m going to say for our sermon is that that Kierkegaard’s leap of faith is really a leap onto a bridge. It’s stepping onto a bridge that is not just a bridge of timbers and rope.
It’s not even a mighty bridge made out of steel and concrete pylons. It is a bridge of words, a bridge made up of the words of God in the Bible, a bridge made up of words that were spoken by Jesus, which is not just what he said to that man he healed, but every single piece of Scripture. It is the Word of Christ.
It is God our Lord talking to us. These are his very words that work on our heart. You perhaps already know this passage. “Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God.” So I’m preaching about a bridge of words.
And that bridge of words is also made up of water, water and the Word, which is the saving sacrament of baptism.
And that bridge made of words is also made up of bread and wine and the Word of God, which we know as Holy Communion.
That bridge does not just go from place to place. It is a bridge that reaches across time as well as space. God has seen to it. He’s told us this in so many words of his Word. “Heaven and earth will pass away” – Judgement Day, right? – but my words will never pass away.”
This is the bridge which God Himself created as the only Way to relate to us and so that we can relate to him.
Now let me explain this a bit more by looking both at the Gospel and how astonished the disciples were and going a little bit farther here in the passage in Isaiah. “On That Day,” this is the verse we’ve been hearing repeated, on That Day, the Day of the Lord, the deaf will hear the words of a document.
The reason my translation is saying “document” instead of “book” is that in Bible times there weren’t books. There were the rolled up documents. “And out of deep darkness, the eyes of the blind will see.”
Now listen to this.
The humble will have joy after joy in the Lord. And the poor people will rejoice in the Holy One of Israel for the ruthless one will vanish. The scorner will disappear and all those who lie in wait with evil intent will be killed. Those who with their speech accused a person of wrongdoing, who set a trap for the one mediating at the city gate, and without cause deprived the righteous of justice.
This is all about the work of the Lord. Now you can think this way, what about the big men in our world? What about the big men who are politicians or maybe even church leaders? The big men with money and influence.
What does the Lord say about that here? He says, “Oh no, no, do not be ashamed of your poverty. Remember that you need to be poor and have poverty and humility to be listening to my Word. The humble will have joy after joy in the Lord and the poor people will rejoice in the Holy One of Israel.”
Because of our weekly pericope or Sunday text study that we do for all of the pastors in Africa and beyond, we study this carefully. (You’ve also seen the link for that in our WhatsApp group.) I found out that Luther says about this exact passage that I just read for you, that in The Day of the Lord when Jesus came, he did open eyes and ears and mouths so that people could see the Bible and hear the Bible and speak the Bible. But here’s what Luther adds; Only some followed him, only some.
So this wonderful and astonishing 700-year-old reason for rejoicing in God is something that we need to take to heart now. And we need to share this with the precious African souls now. We can’t just sit back and say, “Oh that’s nice.”
We need to be completely astonished and motivated to tell everybody about our Jesus.
Now a final thought. How can you and I be sure that we are going to do our part as Jesus’ disciples today? Well, in our mission statement for your Lutheran School of Theology, we talk about our mission being to form African Lutherans for teaching the faith. The faith.
So that’s the bridge. That’s that Word of God and the sacraments. But what about the forming? What about the forming part? How is the pot of God’s creation formed? How are we, as the clay pots that he has made into human beings and breathed into us life, how are we formed? We are formed by the Word of God.
By the Word of God. In our Lutheran Confessions, we say there’s no other way that we are formed. This is it.
So practice and rely on your Baptism. Prepare yourself and come worthily for Holy Communion.
Think this way.
Every bit of homework that you’re doing, every minute that you spend in class about the Word of God or learning more how to study the Word of God is you and all of us together being formed by Christ Himself. And maybe, maybe, just maybe, you may actually realize that the finger of Jesus that reached out to heal that man in the Gospel is also reaching out to touch your ears and your eyes and your tongue, forming you with His Word. I think it is time for you and me to be astonished, right along with the disciples because for us, it’s now a 2,700-year-old reason for being really astonished.
And here we are in Africa with that bridge of the faith to share with one another and to share with the people around us. Let us be very, very astonished! Amen.
The peace of God, which goes beyond all understanding, shall keep your hearts and your minds through faith in Christ Jesus. Amen.
Rev Gregory Schulz, DMin, PhD
Professor of Theology and Academic Dean