Sermon: Trinity 7 and Baptism of Paula Koenig - 2021

18 July 2021

Text: Mark 8:1-9 (Gen 2:7-17, Rom 6:19-23)

In the name of + Jesus.  Amen.

What a contrast between where Jesus is preaching (a “desolate place”) vs. the garden that the Lord God placed mankind in the first place: “a garden in Eden.”

In the original creation, “every tree” sprang up and was “pleasant to the sight” and “good for food.”  The garden was so lush that it didn’t even require the removal of thorns and thistles by the sweat of one’s brow.  There was a river that watered the garden, which “divided and became four rivers.”  God had made a paradise for man to multiply into, to enjoy the perfection and abundance of creation.  And He even provided beautiful gold and onyx stones for the man to craft into luxurious jewelry.

How different than the “desolate place,” the desert, the wilderness, arid, dry land where hardly anything grows.  For in time, the world became filled with desolate places, and even the most fertile of our gardens pale in comparison with the beauty of the paradise lost.  Farmers must spend all day contending with weeds and blight and wild animals and trying weather conditions in order to get crops to grow.  And compared to the fruits of the garden of Eden, they are scrawny and bland.

But we live in the “desolate place” of this fallen world, in which we all must labor, and even the bearing of children and raising of families are painful.  We have strife in our families, communities, countries, and in the world.  We have food and water shortages, and people suffer desolate conditions.

We see a picture of this as great crowds came to hear our Lord preach, but “they had nothing to eat.”  They were a long way from the fields where grain and fruit trees provided food.  There were no merchants close by to sustain them in their hunger.  And our Lord said, “I have compassion on the crowd, because they have been with Me now three days and have nothing to eat.”

And given the long stretch of time without food, and the fact that they must walk for days, there will most certainly be a toll of human suffering, and certainly those who will even die.  This is how much people hungered for the Word of God.  And the disciples ask: “How can one feed these people with bread here in this desolate place?”

But the Lord who created the universe and planted the original  garden of paradise is with them, and He is with us as well.  Our Lord “took the seven loaves” and gave thanks.  He broke them, and “gave them to His disciples to set before the people.”  He also took a few small fish and performed the same miracle to provide for the needs of the people who had come to Him in faith to hear His Word.

The desolation became a little window of paradise.  The desert became a garden – for Jesus was there to transform it.  And this is His mission for the world, dear friends: to transform it.  He has come to take the desolate places and restore paradise.  He has come to take us, we who also are desolate in sin and death, and to restore us to the original glory of creation before we sinned and turned Eden into a wasteland.

Jesus has come to take the shortages and human suffering – and even death itself – which we simply accept as being part of life – and He turns back the corruption and repairs the damage.  He gives us not only bread for the body, but He gives us the Bread of Life, that is His very body, for our bodies and souls in eternity.  He sheds His blood on the cross in the desolate place known as Golgotha, but He rises again in the tomb that was placed in the garden.  And just as the miraculous bread was multiplied, and it fed and satisfied the thousands in that desolate place that turned into a place of abundance, so also does our Lord Jesus Christ continue to multiply His flesh by means of His Word, turning the desolate places of our sinful and death-ridden lives into the paradise of His promise of everlasting life.

This abundance is doled out in the Divine Service, where we not only eat and drink our Lord’s miraculously multiplied body and blood for the forgiveness of sins, but we are also absolved and set free by His Word, by the Gospel, by His promise that He made good on at the cross and at the tomb.  And this gift is given to us in Holy Baptism, even as you, Paula, can now say unequivocally that you are part of the kingdom of God.  For in baptismal water, the desolation of the wilderness yields to the lushness of the garden.  But this is “not just plain water, but it is the water included in God’s command and combined with God’s Word.”  For that is where the transformative power of Holy Baptism is to be found – in the Word combined with the water.

And we are indeed transformed from desolate sinner to saints abounding in righteousness: by God’s grace, by His compassion, and by His miraculous Word.

For He sets us free from what St. Paul refers to as our previous condition of being “slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness” – the kind of lawlessness that caused our ancestors to be removed from Eden, but now we “present [our] members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.” 

We have gone from the bitter fruit of sin – whose end is nothing but death, decay, and eternal damnation – and we have been transformed by being “set free from sin,” and now the “fruit [we] get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.”

We are just like the people who came to Jesus, who heard His preaching, who believed His promise, who came in faith knowing that He would provide, who ate of the miraculous bread, who were sustained in body and soul by the compassion and the work and ministry of our Lord Jesus Christ.  For we too come to Him to hear of His mercy, His compassion, His life-giving miraculous presence, the bread of His flesh, the wine of His blood, the promise of life given in Holy Baptism: sanctification and its end of eternal life!

And just as the crowds “ate and were satisfied,” and just as the abundance was so great that there were “seven baskets full” of “broken pieces left over,” so too does the store of God’s grace continue to multiply, unlimited, freely distributed to people across all boundaries, in every city and hamlet in the world, to people of every nation and tongue, and across the span of century after century.  This promise is for you and your children, and your children’s children, until that day when the Lord returns, and there will be a new heaven and a new earth, and there will never again be a desolate place nor a person who is hungry.

For although the wages of sin is the desolate place of death, the free gift of God is the everlasting paradise of eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord!

Amen.

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