The Sixth Sunday after Trinity – Pr. Faugstad sermon
Text: Deuteronomy 6:4-15

In Christ Jesus, through whose saving work we have been united with the one true God, dear fellow redeemed:

At various times during His public work, Jesus spoke this phrase: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” That phrase should make our ears perk up. We should be asking the question: what does Jesus want me to learn and keep in mind? In our reading for today, Moses begins with the same message: “Hear, O Israel.” What should they hear? What should they pay attention to and remember? They should hear this: “The LORD our God, the LORD is one.” And then, “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.”

First of all, “The LORD our God, the LORD is one.” We worship one God, the God called Yahweh—I AM—, the name He told Moses to say to the people of Israel. This God is uncreated, infinite, eternal. He is omnipotent (almighty), omniscient (all-knowing), and omnipresent. This one LORD and God is the only God. There are other made-up gods, other make-believe gods, but there are no other true gods.

This is why Moses warned the people, “You shall not go after other gods, the gods of the peoples who are around you.” There were plenty of false gods in Old Testament times, just as there are plenty of false gods today. Humankind has been creating its own gods ever since the fall into sin. In Romans 1, St. Paul writes that fallen mankind “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things…. [They] worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (vv. 23, 25).

The devil and the demons tempt us to do this. These demons are not gods, but they are more powerful than we are. They try to trick us into thinking there are other gods, and that those gods can help us. So some people think “the gods” send them special messages through their dreams, through the stars, through tarot cards or ouija boards, or through certain individuals who claim they can connect with these powers.

Even we Christians who have been chosen by God as His own dear children can be taken in by these things. Maybe we want to find a supernatural way to punish those who have hurt us. We want to connect with the spirits of the dead. We want to know what will happen in our future. We want answers to deep questions or concerns or ways to find out other people’s secrets. The devil is only too willing to encourage this thinking which leads us away from God and His promises.

And if the devil does not succeed in turning us toward other gods, he tries another tactic. He seeks to confuse us about the true God. We are taught in the Bible that God is triune—one God in three Persons. That means God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit have always existed and always will exist—three Persons of the same essence and power. As one God, the three Persons work in perfect unity. The Son is eternally begotten of the Father, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.

It is wrong to think of the Triune God in a hierarchical way, as though the Father were the most powerful, followed by the Son, and then the Holy Spirit. Or that the Son of God did not fully exist until creation or until He took on flesh in Mary’s womb. Or that the Holy Spirit is a motion or a force but not really a Person of God. In recent times, we hear people changing the terms for God by teaching that the Holy Spirit is feminine, or that God is not “Father” but “Mother.”

These attacks on God’s unchanging truth will keep happening until the end of time. But we must not be taken in by them. Our fear, love, and trust should be in the LORD our God only. That is the second thing Moses wanted Israel to hear: “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” There is no part of you that should love anything besides God. All your heart should be committed to Him. All your soul should be bound to Him. All your might—every ounce of your power and the force of your will—should be applied to His truth and His service.

But if we are supposed to love God with every part of ourselves, how can we also love our neighbors, including our parents or siblings or spouse or children? Wouldn’t that divide our love? Well God doesn’t tell us to love our neighbors instead of Him. We show love for our neighbors because of our love for God. And He counts the love we show to others as love shown to Him (Mat. 25:40).

We wouldn’t know anything about love if we did not first learn it from God. Love did not begin in the world. It came from outside the world to us. It came from God. The apostle John writes, “for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God…. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him” (1Jo. 4:7,9).

God the Father showed His love for sinners by sending His only-begotten Son to save us. The Son of God became one with us by taking on our flesh. He was “incarnate,” He was made man (Nicene Creed). He did this, so that He could live the life of perfect love on our behalf that God requires of us.

You might think this was easy for Him, since He is God. But Jesus in His state of humiliation did not make full use of His divine powers. He was able to feel weakness and pain. The author to the Hebrews writes that Jesus can certainly sympathize with us, because He “in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (4:15). His righteousness far exceeded that of the scribes and Pharisees (Mat. 5:20). He fulfilled every tiny detail of God’s holy law (Mat. 5:18), so that perfect life of love could be credited to us.

And so it is! You and I have not perfectly used our ears in hearing and learning the Word of God. We have not perfectly honored the true God and loved Him with all our heart, soul, and might. But Jesus perfectly kept the Scriptures and obeyed His Father’s will in our place. He dedicated every part of Himself in love for us sinners. He did nothing out of selfishness and everything for our salvation, including sacrificing Himself on the cross as the payment for all sin.

This victory over sin and death is yours. You don’t have to earn it by being good enough or by proving your love for God and neighbor. It is yours as a gift from God through His Word. For many of you, perhaps all of you, this gift first came to you through the water and the Word of Holy Baptism, “through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit” (Ti. 3:5). At the baptismal font, you were baptized in the name of the Triune God—“in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Mat. 28:19).

Through Baptism, the one holy God caused you to be united with Him. Baptism made you a member of the body of Christ. All that is His—His perfect love toward God and neighbor, His perfect life of righteousness—belongs to you and covers over you, so that God does not see your sin or count it against you anymore. St. Paul writes that you who have been baptized into Christ “must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 6:11).

You live in God and for God. You are one with Him. Jesus prayed for this to His Father, and the Father heard His prayer, just as He hears every prayer in the name of His Son. Jesus said, “The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me” (Joh. 17:22-23). The one true God—the Triune God—loves you. He gives you every good gift from above (Jam. 1:17). No other god can do this for you, because there are no other gods.

So we gladly hear and learn the Word of the true God. We teach it diligently to our children. We talk about it in our homes and while we are out and about (including at camp). We meditate on the Word from morning to evening. We commit it to our memory, we wear it on our clothes, and we put it on our walls. There is nothing better than God’s gracious, life-giving Word. “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost; as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, forevermore. Amen.

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