Luke 13:28-30 “There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth in that place when you see Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, but yourselves thrown out. They will come from east and west, from north and south, to share the banquet in the kingdom of God. Note this: Some who are last will be first, and some who are first will be last.”

The surprise at the end is not that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the prophets make it in to heaven. The Bible pretty much assured us they would, though none of them got there on good behavior. Their stories reveal they were constantly making a mess of their lives. Bad parenting, bad marriages, and dysfunctional families were pretty much the standard by which they lived. But the one thing they held onto was God’s promise. They listened when God spoke. They embraced his grace and lived by faith. And now they find themselves in the kingdom of God.

The surprise comes from the people who were Jesus’ contemporaries. They had all the examples from the lives of the patriarchs and the prophets. They had the same promises, now fulfilled. The Savior stood among them. God’s Son walked in their streets and taught them God’s word. They had all the advantages, but most of them would end up on the outside looking in.

The surprise comes from the great masses who have turned to Jesus from every point of the compass. They have given up their ancestral gods and religions, beliefs that were woven into the fabric of their culture for generations, to embrace the Jewish man who was executed on a cross at the eastern end of the Mediterranean 2000 years ago as their Lord and God. They have given up on their own best accomplishments, considered themselves broken failures, just to own Jesus’ life of love as their own, his sacrifice for sin as their cleansing and redemption.

Think of how exotic this Christian faith should seem to them, how strange and foreign to their experience, and even scary. Yet such people will come “to share the banquet in the kingdom of God.” You and I need to take care of our own faith if we want to be one of them.

For the past 1000 years Christianity has seemed to be a white European thing to many. The rise of Islam, the fall of the Byzantine Empire, all but ended Christianity among the people of color across the Middle East and North Africa. Today, only a remnant of the faith remains in those places.

Today, perhaps, people of European heritage stand in a place similar to those who were listening to Jesus when he first spoke these words. The Bible faith is passing from such people to those of other colors and languages in distant countries. The nations where Christianity once dominated now have only a tiny percentage of practicing Christians. Already more Christians live south of the equator than north of it. Asian Christians are sending missionaries to the United States. Leaders of African Churches confront the heresies that are constantly rising in the European and American churches that planted Christianity in Africa one or two centuries ago. Christians in these places now are faithfully following Jesus while those who had every spiritual advantage for so long are letting him go.

You and I don’t have to lose him. While we have life and breath, “Make every effort to enter through the narrow door.”

Luke 13:24-27 “ ‘Make every effort to enter through the narrow door, because I tell you, many will try to enter and won’t be able once the homeowner gets up and shuts the door. Then you will stand outside and knock on the door saying, ‘Lord, open up for us!’ He will answer you, ‘I don’t know you or where you’re from.’ Then you will say, ‘We ate and drank in your presence, and you taught in our streets.’ But he will say, ‘I tell you, I don’t know you or where you’re from. Get away from me, all you evildoers!’”

Like us all, the people to whom Jesus was speaking had the door open to them so long as they were alive. But after death, the door is shut. It is no longer possible to go through in faith and find salvation with God. Twice the Lord says to them, “I don’t know you or where you’re from.”

That would be especially painful for a Jewish person to hear. They were God’s chosen people. He had singled them out from all the nations to receive his word, to be the people of the promise, to be the family of the world’s Savior. Now the God who has all the hairs on every head numbered, who knows every sparrow that falls to the ground, couldn’t recall who any of these people were. They were proud to be from Israel, the land of promise, as proud as anyone who wears one of these t-shirts with an outline of your home state and the word “home” inside it. But the Lord tells them, “I don’t know where you are from.” They were utterly, completely disowned. They wanted nothing to do with Jesus in life. He would be just as happy to have nothing to do with them for eternity.

The Jews are no longer God’s chosen people, at least not as an entire nation or race. We are. Peter says to Christians in his first letter, “You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God…” Don’t take that privilege for granted! We have it only so long as we have faith.

You may know that American Christians have been abandoning Christianity in record numbers. Half the Presbyterians are gone. Vanished! Half the Methodists have disappeared as well. It is estimated that there are 3.7 million evangelical Christians between the age of 18 and 29. About 2.6 million of them will leave the church by their 29^th birthday. Over 1.7 million of them will never return. These are the people who attend the big mega-churches that look so successful. Trends in my own church body suggest that we could be half to one-third our current size by 2060.

Not everyone makes a conscious choice to reject Bible teaching and cut Jesus out of their lives. Some are slowly distracted away from him by all the other things competing for their attention–education, careers, families, hobbies, health. They feel less need, less attraction, until Jesus is just a memory. Don’t let it happen to you! Take care of your own spiritual business. Feed your faith. Hear his word, because in this world your soul and mine are still in spiritual danger.

Luke 13:23-25 “ ‘Lord,’ someone asked him, ‘are only a few people going to be saved?’ He said to them, ‘Make every effort to enter through the narrow door, because I tell you, many will try to enter and won’t be able once the homeowner gets up and shuts the door.’”

Many people came to Jesus with spiritual questions. “What is the greatest commandment? Who is my neighbor? How often do I have to forgive my brother? Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar? Can a man divorce his wife for any reason? Sometimes he gives a simple, straight up answer. Sometimes his answers don’t seem to fit the question very well. It’s not that the question was stupid. But the person was asking the wrong one. It is as though Jesus is saying, “Here is the question you should have asked, and here is the answer to it.”

We have a case like that in our Gospel lesson this morning. A man asks Jesus, “Are only a few people going to be saved?” That’s sort of a theoretical football to toss around, but what difference does it make? Will answering it change anything for anyone? The better question, Jesus seems to imply, is this: “Should I be concerned whether I will be among those who are saved?”

Notice how Jesus has turned the conversation from mere statistics, to the living, breathing humans in front of him at that moment. “You people, the ones listening to me, don’t make any assumptions for yourselves. You make every effort.” And here is why that is important.

The way into salvation–eternal life with God lived in his good graces–is a narrow door. It is as narrow as Jesus himself, who told his disciples, “No one comes to the Father except through me;” who warned his enemies, “I am from above…Unless you believe that I am he, you will die in your sins;” who used this very picture for himself, “I am the gate. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved.”

Jesus’ picture of the way into salvation only though him is so tight, so narrow, that it makes us feel cramped and uncomfortable. Everyone knows someone, it seems, who isn’t interested in Jesus’ way. They have found a different path, or invented one themselves, that “let’s me be me.” There is no call to change, no sin to repent, no need to be forgiven. Perhaps they simply regard their eternal fate as uninteresting or unimportant. They sense no danger to their souls, so they live for today.

We may react by hoping Jesus wasn’t so serious about the “narrow door.” But do you know him to be in the habit of kidding about this sort of thing? What’s the use of pretending there’s no danger or ignoring it when it’s near? Why make no use of the solution when it’s easily available and free to use?

We have a tornado shelter in our garage. If the sirens are sounding, if the weather radar says it is practically on top of our neighborhood, if we can hear that roaring sound like a locomotive bearing down on our house, is that the time to get a snack out of refrigerator and start watching a movie in the living room? Is that the time to try a little anti-rain dance to turn the storm? Isn’t it time to get into the shelter, and hope your neighbors have the good sense to do the same? And if they don’t, does it help to pretend that they are just as safe eating popcorn and watching a movie while you are hunkered down in your shelter, and your homes are being scraped from their foundations?

Maybe there are more ways of escaping the tornado. There is only one way of being saved from sin and making it to heaven. Jesus is the narrow door. Outside of faith in his grace, his sacrifice, his forgiveness, there is no other way. But his way works perfectly well. The door may be narrow, but it isn’t locked. It isn’t stuck. It isn’t hard to fit through. He has opened the door. He even carries you through it, if you don’t squirm out of his arms. So let him take your through that door while it is open.

Hebrews 11:13-16 “These all died in faith, although they had not received the things that were promised. But they saw them from a distance and greeted them, and confessed that they were foreigners and temporary residents on the earth. Now those who say such things make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they were thinking about where they came from, they would have had an opportunity to return. But now they desire a better place–a heavenly one.”

I once spent a day with a man visiting the United States from China. We talked a little about our countries and their differences. “Here is one difference between Chinese people and Americans,” he said. “You Americans love your country.” He wasn’t saying that he hated his own country. But he recognized in Americans a pride and patriotism that citizens of China didn’t have for their own.

Maybe we should be careful of how attached we become. When the writer of Hebrews says, “these all died in faith,” he is not speaking only of Abraham and his family, who traveled around like people who had no country. He also means the earlier believers he mentioned, like Noah, whose entire world was destroyed by a flood, or Abel, who was killed by his own brother for offering God a sincere and heartfelt sacrifice. These all “confessed that they were foreigners and temporary residents on earth.” Faith teaches us not to put too much value on the place where we live now. We need to remember that “God and country” doesn’t put those things on equal footing. God comes first, first by a longshot. “Country” only limps along, and only for a time.

Faith values the homeland to come. “Now those who say such things make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they were thinking about where they came from, they would have had an opportunity to return. But now they desire a better place–a heavenly one.” If you consider yourself a foreigner here, that implies a citizenship somewhere else. There is another place where the culture suits you better. There is another country where the people are all your own kind of people. There is a better homeland that truly feels like home. It goes by the name of “heaven.”

We should take a moment to note that this is where Abraham and Sarah’s journey was truly leading all along. This is why the Lord was moving them around. He was leading them away from families that practiced idolatry to keep them away from false religion in them. He kept moving them around as nomads in Canaan, the “Promised Land,” so that they wouldn’t get comfortable with the false faiths practiced there as well. He brought them to this place, however, because it would be the land in which the Savior lived and died, the Savior who descended from the miracle baby God had given them. In ways they could not fully understand, all these changes and experiences in life were God’s way of preparing the heavenly homeland they desired and making sure they made it there themselves. “Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.”

Somehow, someway, that’s the story behind our lives, too. We may look like simple people living simple lives. But by faith each twist and turn, every new chapter or strange episode, takes us further down the path that leads us home. Believe it.

Hebrews 11:11-12 “By faith even Sarah herself, when she was unable to have children, received power to conceive offspring, even though she was past the age, since she considered that the who one had promised was faithful. Therefore from one man–in fact, from one as good as dead–came offspring as numerous as the stars of the sky and as innumerable as the grains of sand along the seashore.”

At the ages of 99 and 89 respectively, Abraham and Sarah still had no children. Throughout their lives, they needed reassurances that they would have a child. Neither Abraham nor Sarah were physically capable of becoming parents by the time they reached this age. The natural effects of aging had ended that hope by all appearances.

But God had given them a promise. And by faith they held onto that promise. And their faith received God’s gift. When Abraham was 100, ninety-year-old Sarah gave birth to Isaac. Through him, their family eventually became an entire nation.

Imagine that you were a royal child, born into wealth, and power, and privilege. Literally nothing was beyond your reach if you needed it. How would your life change?

Imagine that you lived under the constant watch and protection of a person with unmatched super powers. Super-strength, speed, intelligence, ability to bend and suspend the laws of nature–Your unbeatable body guard had no equal on earth. Might you worry less and venture more?

Imagine that you were one end of a relationship in which you were loved with an infinite love. This love knew no limits, no conditions, no end. It was so deep, so intense that nothing you did could make it stop, and no request was too much to ask of it. Would you feel more secure, and perhaps live more graciously and generously yourself?

Stop imagining. Start believing. It may not always be obvious to see, but this is your life, your situation, under the love and power of the God who gave up his only Son to save you. By faith in this God Abraham and Sarah received extraordinary gifts and lived extraordinary lives, though they themselves were very ordinary people. By faith we can do the same.

You see, faith not only changes our way of life. It changes the content of our lives as God pours his gifts into them. By faith you receive answers to your prayers. By faith you receive your daily bread. By faith he gives you wisdom for life’s challenges. By faith you continue to cling to the forgiveness of your sins, and the cross from which it comes, and the confidence that death is now a gateway to life that never ends. Faith may not bring you a miracle like Abraham and Sarah’s baby, but it still changes your life with gifts that bless us, body and soul.

Hebrews 11:8-9 “By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed and set out for a place that he was going to receive as an inheritance. He went out, even though he did not know where he was going. By faith he stayed as a foreigner in the land of promise, living in tents as did Isaac and Jacob, coheirs of the same promise.” (CSB)

I hate moving. I hate the packaging and boxing, the lifting and stacking. I hate deciding what to throw and what to keep. I hate the way your stuff seems to multiply while you are packing it up, and a room never seems to get empty. I hate the idea of starting from scratch, and relearning everything in a new place.

I think that part of the reason I don’t like moving is because I like to be comfortable…too much so. I let myself become attached to things and places in a way that is not spiritually healthy. Like Lot’s wife, I want to look back and long for things that God says need to be left behind. “Do not love the world, neither the things that are in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him,” John writes. Moving makes me let it go, at least some part of it, and my sinful nature objects.

By faith, Abraham moved, and what a move it was. He moved his ranching operation five hundred miles across a desert without roads and without trucks. He packed up and moved even though he didn’t know where he would end up. God gave him no address to enter into his GPS. He didn’t tell him why the move was necessary. “Leave your country, your people, and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you,” he says in Genesis 12.

When Abraham finally arrived, what did he find? Have you seen pictures of the Holy Land? The man was leaving the area known today as the Fertile Crescent, some of the best farmland in the ancient world. He was leaving the area we call the Cradle of Civilization, a place with culture, technology, and refinement. He settled in a land of rocks and scrub and just enough grass to keep your sheep alive.

Abraham lived there on a camping trip that lasted the rest of his life, one hundred years of it, and then continued for two generations to follow. “By faith he stayed as a foreigner in the land of promise, living in tents as did Isaac and Jacob, coheirs of the same promise.” I like camping, but a week or two is usually enough. And Abraham wasn’t living in some thirty-foot RV with water and electrical hookups. He lived in tents, with hundreds and thousands of sheep and goats around him.

Abraham made all these changes, and he lived this life, without demanding God explain why he chose this place and life for him. There were no clear advantages in living here. It’s not as though this new life represented an obvious upgrade by earthly standards. Still, by faith he accepted and lived the life God chose for him.

Take a moment to look at your own life. I’ll bet that much of it seems hard to explain. The people you have buried, the injuries or sickness you have endured, the jobs you have had to work, the mistreatment you have suffered, the opportunities on which you had to pass, the sacrifices you have been forced to make, the battles you have had to fight–why? Why this life? Why trust God when so much seems wrong or out of place? Why accept the life he gives me, the life and place to which we have been called?

Why? “For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.” Abraham had God’s promise. Abraham trusted God’s promise. And faith changed everything. The Lord promised him a future with foundations, a life with permanence. No one has that now. You can’t stop the clock and stand in the way of change. It will run you over.

God promised him a place, a city, the Lord had designed and built himself. It’s not like the place the Lord designed and built here, a world now spoiled and ruined by sin. It all works right all the time. It’s a life with God the way life was always meant to be. It’s a life God gives as a gift of his grace. By faith Abraham accepted…no, Abraham embraced the life God chose for him now because Abraham believed God’s promise that a perfect life would follow. Faith changed his life now because faith would change his life to come.

Jeremiah 23:28-29 “Let the prophet who has a dream tell his dream, but let the one who has my word speak it faithfully. For what has straw to do with grain? declares the Lord. Is not my word like fire, declares the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?”

Unless God’s word is preached faithfully, all the life-giving power is drained from it. The dry and empty straw which is left has no power to change people’s lives or eternities. To the degree that God’s word is not being spoken faithfully, it ceases to be God’s word.

But God’s word has real power. Like a hammer, it can break through even the stoniest heart. It can soften it, and make it humble, and loving, and useful again.

Like a fire God’s word can consume our wickedness, and purify us from our sins. It warms us with his promises of forgiveness and life in Jesus Christ. It makes us shine with the light of God’s love.

Doesn’t Jeremiah’s message help us to understand the proper Christian concern for faithfulness to God’s message? You are just as aware as I am that those who make a fuss about the purity of God’s word, as Jeremiah did here, are perceived as being narrow minded and self-righteous. When Christian people will tolerate no compromise with error, many are inclined to say, “You just think that you are better than everybody else.”

Maybe one place to start with such people would be confessing our sin. Yes, we have been guilty of thinking we are better at times. We have been sinfully prideful about the purity of God’s word, as though we could take the credit for it. We are imperfect people, and sometimes we are more concerned about our own “rightness” than we are about God’s reputation or the spiritual welfare of souls. For this I am ready to say, “I’m sorry.”

But in the end, we are not the issue. We are not better people. Concern for the truth about God is finally not about us, it is about him, and about the people whom he wants to save. If the truth about God in his law is diminished, then people will not know how much they need a Savior. If the truth about God in his Gospel is diminished, then people won’t be able to know him as their Savior.

When gross immorality is condoned as just an alternate life-style or a personal choice, people will fail to grasp God’s forgiveness for such sins. When God’s gifts of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are no longer perceived as gracious acts by which he promises forgiveness and life, but merely human acts of obedience, people will perceive God’s loving goodness and the faith-building power of his promises that much less. When we love God, love his Gospel, and love his people, we will care about the faithful preaching and teaching of his word as much as he does.

Don’t be afraid of what God’s word will do if we tell the whole truth. Let his fire burn. Let his hammer strike. Let hearts be touched by the full force of his word. Only good will follow.

Jeremiah 23:26-27 “How long will this continue in the hearts of these lying prophets, who prophesy the delusions of their own minds? They think the dreams they tell one another will make my people forget my name, just as their fathers forgot my name through Baal worship.”

God is concerned that people not forget his name. That does not mean that he fears that the words “God” or “Lord” or “Father” or “Savior” are somehow going to disappear from memory. God’s name is all that he has revealed about himself. His name is his reputation–everything that we know about him. It is the glorious and gracious reputation of God which is at stake when false prophets preach their false messages.

This makes false preaching and teaching a sin against the Second Commandment: “Do not misuse the name of the Lord your God” (or “Do not take it in vain”). The Catechism points out that doing so not only involves cursing and swearing. It is also a matter of lying and deceiving by the use of God’s name. This leads people to see him as a different kind of God.

Unless God’s law is preached with a hard edge that convicts us of our own sins, we lose sight of the fact that the true God is a God who hates sin so much, he will not let a single sin go unpunished. If that happens, how will people appreciate the fact that every single sin was placed on Jesus’ shoulders and punished by his death on the cross?

This is how we know his greater reputation as the gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger, abounding in love, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin is more than empty words. It is proven in the life and death of Christ himself. How incredibly gracious God has been to me to sacrifice his own Son in payment for my sins!

Do you see that this not only affects God’s reputation, but the faith and salvation of human souls? God’s people are led to trust him when God leads them to understand how much they need a Savior. Then he leads them to see that he is their kind and loving Savior. This was just as true in Jeremiah’s day as it is for us today. Something infinitely precious was at stake if the prophets didn’t get the message right.

Jeremiah 23:25 “I have heard what the prophets say who prophesy lies in my name. They say, “I had a dream! I had a dream!”

It was bad enough that the rival prophets of Jeremiah’s day gave the people false comforts, and distorted the words of God. Worse yet, they did it all in “God’s name,” as though the Lord himself approved of their messages. What they were trying to pawn off as God’s own message was nothing more than their own dreams. It may have sounded good to the people. It may have been interesting, fun to listen to, even uplifting. But it wasn’t a message in which God was revealing himself. It wasn’t the message in which people could come to know who God is and what he demands or promises.

I realize that it’s not a popular thing to say, but such prophets are still around today. For many years I received a monthly mailing from an organization trying to foster good relations between various faiths and their houses of worship in my community. They sponsored some fine charitable activities and programs. Across the top of their letterhead was the Jewish star of David, the Christian cross, and the crescent moon of Islam. They put these and other faiths on the same footing. They believed that all religions are just different ways to the same God.

One year they sponsored an anti-violence Sunday. Among the sermon texts they suggested were some from the Quran, the Talmud, and Hindu Scriptures. It seems that the Christian churches which were members–and they were many–did not believe God wanted their Jewish, Muslim, or Hindu friends to convert. They didn’t believe the Christian Bible can make us any more certain of who God is or what he is like than these other religions could.

Perhaps a more subtle example of the thing Jeremiah was confronting takes place when law preaching loses its hard edge. Some preachers may be riveting speakers. They make you laugh. They make you cry. They tell entertaining stories. But they don’t call people to repentance. They make no attempt to convict people of their sins. If that is the case, what sense will a gospel of forgiveness make to anyone?

This is a danger for our own church, too. I once met a lady who left the Lutheran Church over 60 years earlier because her pastor would not preach repentance. When she noticed this, and asked him about it, he indicated that he knew on which side his bread was buttered. He told her that if he actually preached against the sins he knew were common, members of his church would leave.

I must admit that it is tempting to skip past a text like this one from Jeremiah. False teaching inside the Christian church is an uncomfortable and unpopular subject among Christians today. But the spiritual health of God’s people depends on becoming aware of the problem and able to recognize it. If we lose our ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, what will happen to our faith in God’s grace? We need preaching that isn’t afraid to identify popular sins and lead people to find forgiveness at the foot of the cross, not happy dreams that distract us from the real dangers to our souls.