Doing More than the Minimum
This sermon was preached by Pastor Ted Carnahan for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, July 13, 2025.
Transcript
Grace, mercy, and peace be with all of you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Sometimes American Christianity doesn't always exactly line up with the way that we as Lutheran Christians should understand and talk about the world. I think that it is true that in one particular way we have mistakenly adopted the language of the fundamentalist world. It's not that the phrase itself is wrong. It's just that it can be so easily misconstrued that it kind of leads us off the path.
The problem is when we use the language that the purpose of the Christian faith is to establish a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I'm not saying that there's not a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. It's just that that relationship, at least as far as it comes from us, is not the gospel.
The gospel is the forgiveness of sins that comes to us. The direction of the arrow is downward towards us, rather than what we do to connect with God. The language substitutes the language of feelings and desires and personal commitments. The problem with that is it pushes us into the trap of saying that all of these things are about us. It's my decision, my feelings, my commitments.
The end result of all of this is it makes church optional. Church becomes just one more way of expressing my own personal commitment to Christ, as opposed to being the vessel through which God is doing his word to his people.
The Trap of Self-Centered Faith
I run into people who will say, "Pastor, I have a personal relationship with Jesus." "Oh, that's great, I'm glad to hear that." And then you find out later, well, no, I don't actually attend worship. I don't confess my sins and receive absolution. I don't receive the sacrament of the altar. I don't engage a Christian community in fellowship or Bible study. I don't serve my neighbor alongside other people who call on the name of Christ. But I have a personal relationship with Jesus. I feel close to Jesus. And that's what matters.
No. That's actually an attitude straight from the evil one. The evil one takes good things and twists them. Nobody falls into the hands of Satan because he says, "Come, Christian, let us be evil together. Let us do bad things." That's not how the devil works.
The devil takes something good and twists it slightly so that it serves his purposes instead of God's. He says, ah, you want a personal relationship with Jesus? That's enough. Your feelings and your commitment to Christ? Yes, that is what saves you, not what he has done for you.
Personal relationship is good. But his word and sacraments are what come down to us and save us. These are God's actions toward us. Your relationship with him is ultimately your action toward God.
So anything that makes you trust in your own efforts or your own feelings rather than God's action in Christ, things that make you trust more in your arrow pointing up toward God rather than God's arrow pointing down towards you are ultimately going to lead you away from Jesus.
The True Gospel Commitment
No, Christians, the gospel is the commitment of God in Jesus Christ to rescue you from sin and death. It isn't about you, your feelings, your commitments at all. It's about God choosing and committing to you before you had lifted one finger to love him or to obey him, especially when you don't deserve it.
Today, the parable of the Good Samaritan draws a sharp contrast between those who know the word and those who put that word into practice. Frankly, the mistake that many of us make when hearing the parable of the Good Samaritan is in thinking that Jesus' purpose here is to show us how to be good.
To be sure, he does show us how to be good, but he's not confronting the problem of people who simply want to be lazy and self-centered. No, he wants to help us understand that it is not you who justifies yourself by your own commitments, your own cognitive understanding of God, but it is rather those who are transformed by the word who please God.
Examples from the Parable
He holds up for us two examples of people who do not.
The priest knows the word. He is a holy man, consecrated and set apart for the service of the temple in Jerusalem from a very early age. He is a good man by every standard of his culture and religion. But when he sees a man broken and bleeding on the side of the road, his response is not to sully himself on his way to serve God. He does not want to touch the blood of this man whom he knows nothing about and his purity is more important than his love for someone he doesn't know. In other words, who is my neighbor? Not you.
Similarly, the Levite, also someone who knows the word of God, part of the tribe of Levi, those who are set apart to rotate through on a regular basis for regular service in the temple of God. But perhaps he looks at the man broken and bleeding on the side of the road and he says, the robbers who have done this to him will surely be lying in wait and ready to do it to me as well. So he will not put himself at risk.
And then along comes the good Samaritan. Notice that in the story, in the actual Bible passage, he is never called the good Samaritan. He is simply called a Samaritan.
The important thing to remember with Samaritans is that Samaritans also know the word of God, but Samaritans are not Jews. And they are reviled and hated by the Jewish people because they do not keep the law in the same way that the Jews do. The Jewish people worship God, as the scripture tells us, believe that they can worship God wherever. This is the problem.
The Jewish people hearing this story would have heard the Samaritan coming along and assumed that he would do evil. And instead, he is the one who does the word.
The Lawyer's Question
The problem in the parable today is that this lawyer, and let's be clear, we're not talking about lawyers like we talk about lawyers today, who practice civil law, who study the law books of the state or the nation and apply them to particular situations in court. A lawyer in this day would have been much more like what we might call a canon lawyer in the church, in the Catholic church or something like that. Somebody who studied the church's law. This is somebody who studied God's law.
This man has devoted himself to being an expert in the five books of our Bible, the Torah. So this man knows God's law front and back. And he comes to Jesus asking, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?"
This is the question that motivates the Good Samaritan parable. And Jesus asks him, you're a lawyer, you know the law, you probably have giant chunks of it memorized. What do you read? And he says, well, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself." And Jesus says, yeah, that's right, do that and you will live.
But wanting to justify himself, Luke tells us, he asks, "Who then is my neighbor?" The question betrays him. Not that he does not know his scripture, he does. He clearly does. That's why he asks Rabbi Jesus his question in the first place.
But the question betrays his heart. He wants a small neighborhood. He wants a limited amount of obligation for the people around him. He wants a minimum of entanglements in the lives of strangers. He wants to be left alone and to leave other people alone. He wants to know what the minimum effort is.
We all want to know what the minimum amount of effort is in order to be saved. What is the minimum that we must do in order to be good with God? Our question is this lawyer's question. "What must I do? What must I do to inherit eternal life? What is the minimum standard? Give me the line of the law. Draw a bright line between those who will be saved and those who will be not." This is what we want.
Our Own Minimum Standards
Okay, Lord Jesus, Rabbi Jesus, I believe, I have had knowledge of Christ. I think that the stories about Jesus are basically true, that he really did die on a cross. He really did rise from the dead. But that doesn't make me special. Demons believe that these things are true. Many unbelievers in Christ also do. They read the Bible too, and they know what it says.
So then the question is, how much do I have to put it into practice? And if we judge ourselves by that standard, I dare say that none of us will stand for long.
Do you worship him? Do you always put God first? Do you always make him your priority and make sure that your children and grandchildren always see that Jesus Christ is first in your life before anything else? No, I don't. And neither do you, if you're honest.
Too often, we are people of small discipleship, tiny neighborhoods, limited faith. We want to look good, but we don't want to be good. We want to appear to be God's people. To have things put together. To have our lives in order. But we don't want to turn over control of our priorities, our schedules, and our checkbooks to the Lord Jesus.
No, the parable of the Good Samaritan is not to show us what we must do to inherit eternal life. No, it is to question the motivation of that question entirely. He won't let us stop right there. He won't allow us to stop with just some of our life dedicated to Christ.
God doesn't want just some of your affection, some of your obedience. He doesn't want just some of your heart converted to believe in God, in Jesus Christ. Like the priest and the Levite believe in God, but only with some of their hearts. No, God wants all of you.
And He wants it not just for His own sake, not just so He can say, look how many good, faithful, and fully converted followers I have, but He wants it for the sake of other people. He wants your heart for the sake of your neighbors who need the love and care that God intends to show them through you.
Living Out True Faith
Our relationship with Jesus Christ is, in fact, very personal. But it is not just for our sake. What could be more personal than to be washed by the waters of baptism by Jesus Christ Himself? What could be more personal than to eat the body and drink the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ and thus have eternal life? Just for us.
Because God intends that converted hearts who believe and trust in Jesus Christ might live not just for ourselves anymore, but for the sake of our neighbor. Yes, even the hated other.
We are called, as St. Paul tells us today in the book of Colossians, not just for our own sake, but to bear fruit. The fruit of repentance. Righteousness. Or as King David puts it in the psalm today. God will consider those who do what Godly people do. Or as St. James puts it faith without works is dead.
Not because the works save. It is God's grace that saves and which comes to us through faith. But because that faith always bears fruit.
St. Paul gives us the answer today when he says, "So that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to Him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God."
The result of a converted heart is a life led to the glory of God. For this is what Christ's obedience to His Father at the cross has done. Christ Himself dedicated Himself fully to God for your sake. And He shows you His way.
Would you follow the Lord Jesus? Then take up your cross and follow Him. He shows you His way when He says to you, when you were yet ungodly, Christ died for you. He gave Himself for you on the cross. Not for His own sake or His own glory, but to join Him in the blessedness and peace of God's kingdom.
Christ dies for you so that you might have the righteousness that you need to live. And He bids you live. He calls you to truly live.
And what that truly living looks like is a life that is not any longer curved in on ourselves, obsessed with our own personal commitments and understandings, but a life which is focused outward, and serves and loves our neighbors and, yes, even our enemies for the sake of Christ.
A life that is truly worth living because it's no longer about us, but it's about God and Christ and our neighbor. So that we take up our crosses and live sacrificially as He did.
May you find your true identity and purpose in the one who chose and committed to you. May you carry the love that He has given you out into the world. In Jesus' name. Amen.
