Die

Lections: The Eighth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 18), AD 2025 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Vanity of vanities—all is vanity! … I applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven … all the deeds that are done under the sun, and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind!

Oh, how I do love Ecclesiastes. He speaks to the cynical heart.

There’s an old legend that King Solomon wrote the Song of Songs in his 20s, when he was young and full of sap; Proverbs in his 40s when he waxed increasingly contemplative; and Ecclesiastes in his 60s when he was just too bloody old to deal with anybody’s nonsense. Such a tradition hardly holds up to historical-critical analysis, but I don’t much care. I find it illustrative of how biblical wisdom literature presents not a single unified vision but a good old Judaic argument. God is enthroned upon the clashing of our truths.

I stand before you today halfway through my fifth decade—just about two-thirds of my US male life expectancy spent—old enough now to have accrued certain accolades, but also old enough to know real failure and disappointment and grief. Whether he is Solomon or no, the Preacher of Ecclesiastes presents himself as a philosopher-king, possessing power and wealth and fame. Yet all of it turns to ash in his mouth. All of it is vanity. All of it dies. And that makes me feel—free.

We’re all good Lutherans here, aren’t we? My old Confessions professor liked to say that Lutherans have three-and-a-half answers to every question: Law and Gospel; Salvation by Grace Through Faith; Theology of the Cross; and, half an answer, the Two Kingdoms. Now, Salvation by Grace Through Faith more-or-less has percolated throughout Christianity; and on paper, at least, we settled the issue with Rome decades ago. Theology of the Cross must needs rear up periodically in order to combat prosperity theologies of glory. And we all live within Two Kingdoms, rendering to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.

Yet Law and Gospel remains an almost exclusively Lutheran phenomenon, which I find tragic in an age when most people cannot make sense of the Bible. Law and Gospel don’t mean the Old Testament and the New, Moses and the Apostles. No, Law and Gospel refers to a hermeneutic, to an interpretive method of reading: a lens by which to read the Scriptures so that they give us Christ. And that lens is nothing other than death and resurrection.

Law is the Lutheran term for whatever in the Scriptures kills us, convicts us, reveals to us the depths of our depravity, our sin, our weakness, our failure, our wickedness and pride. Law tears a hole through self-righteousness and arrogance, revealing to our horror that we are already dead, already in hell, already in need of a Savior who can overcome this world. And having been thus slain by Law, the Gospel resurrects us. The Gospel is the promise of God’s love and mercy, forgiveness and grace, of new life preached into the bones of the dead.

The Law reveals to us our great need for salvation, and the Gospel reveals the great Savior for our need. Christian life, Christian Baptism, is death and resurrection every day. And that is how Christians read the Scriptures! That’s how we find Christ on every page. We discover a great deal of Gospel in the Hebrew Scriptures, in, for example, God’s steadfast love preached through the Prophets to His people lost in Babylon. And we encounter some terrible Law in the New Testament. No-one can preach the Law like Jesus Christ.

“It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle,” Jesus proclaims, “than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven”—to which the Apostles do not reply, “Heck, yeah! Eat the rich!” as I might be wont to do. No, the Apostles freak out. They realize that by such a standard all of us are damned, for none of us can fit a camel through a needle’s eye. “Who then can be saved?” they cry. Whereupon Jesus issues the coup de grace: “For mortals it is impossible!—but for God all things are possible.”

You see that? You see how He slays them with the sword of His mouth, then raises them up in His Spirit? We die to our sins and rise up again with the life of Christ within us. And we do this every single day: every time that we rest and awake; every time that we confess and are absolved; every time that we open the Scriptures, whether it be in the midst of the liturgical assembly or at home all alone in the silence.

The Bible is not a history book, nor a science book, nor even a book of theology. It is our living encounter with Christ, made possible by His Holy Spirit, in His Body the Church. Because if the Bible doesn’t give us Jesus Christ—well, then to hell with it. Our time might be better spent with some Shakespeare or Moby-Dick.

All of that said, I hope it clear enough that one cannot simply take a pair of highlighters, one pink and one blue, and go through the Scriptures page-by-page, marking this verse as Gospel and that verse as Law. The Spirit, I’m afraid, is not so literalistic. A simple Beatitude, “Blessed are the poor,” rings as Gospel to the forgotten beggar, but as death-knelling Law to the billionaire Objectivist. “Love your neighbor as yourself” has similar effects.

And then there are situations when a single verse, a single word, can serve simultaneously as both Law and Gospel unto a single person:

Vanity of vanities—all is vanity! … I applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven … all the deeds that are done under the sun, and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind … What do mortals get from all the toil and strain with which they toil under the sun? For all their days are full of pain, and their work is a vexation; even at night their minds do not rest. This also is vanity!

Oh, God! It kills me and makes me alive.

This Scripture has feet and it chases me, hands and it lays hold of me. It is merciless and slashing in its purity. I revel in Ecclesiastes’ lack of simpering sentiment. “Oh, you’re old, disappointed? Life didn’t go quite the way you thought that it ought to have gone? Well, buck up, because there’s a support group for that. It’s called everybody; they meet down at the bar.” The wise, the wealthy, the warriors, we all build up our castles of sand, these Ozymandian monuments to our own supposed greatness, and all of it is vanity and wind.

All of it will be forgotten. All of it will die! How is this not liberation? You are not your bank account. You are not your résumé. You are not the degrees on your wall. But neither are you your failures. You are not the dreams that you never quite fulfilled. You are not the mistakes that you’ve made. You are not your broken relationships. You are not your sins.

What you are, my brothers and sisters, is loved. You are loved, not for what you’ve accomplished, not for what you’ve accrued, not even for what you’ve lost. All of that will burn—thank God. You are loved, by God, as a Father loves His children; loved by the God who in Christ has gone to hell and back for you; loved by an unmerited, illimitable, inexorable grace, which fills you up to overflow on all of those around you.

And that you get to keep! The love that you share, the Goodness and the Beauty and the Truth, these are the treasures of the Kingdom, our participation in the life of God. And in God nothing good is ever truly lost! “Seek ye out the things that are above.” Our friends, our families, our loves—our faith in Jesus Christ—these cannot ever be taken from us, not by time, not by death, not by hell; for our lives are hidden with Christ in God. Strip away my old self, my old Adam, my old flesh, and clothe me with the new. Clothe me with Christ. Come, Lord Jesus!

Everything else is vanity. And from vanity, one way or the other, He will set me free.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

Blog: https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RDGStout/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsqiJiPAwfNS-nVhYeXkfOA

Twitter: https://x.com/RDGStout

St Peter’s Lutheran

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064841583987

Website: https://www.stpetersnymills.org/

Donation: https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home

Nidaros Lutheran

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100074108479275

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nidaroschurch6026