Sunday, January 14, 2024… Second Sunday after the Epiphany

“Bought At a Price”

Psalm 139:1-10; 1 Samuel 3:1-9a; 1 Corinthians 6:12-20; John 1:43-51

Divine Service III

Hymns: #395 “O Morning Star, How Fair and Bright”; #537 “Beautiful Savior”; #392 “God Loves Me Dearly”; #412 “The People That in Darkness Sat”

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

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

1 Corinthians 6:19-20 was my Confirmation verse, back in the Spring of 1975, forty-nine years ago. “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own, you were bought at a price, so glorify God in your body.” I will freely confess and admit that I haven’t always lived up to those words over the years. It’s taken me years, in fact, to begin to understand what they really mean. The wisdom of age, I guess. But these two little verses from St. Paul really serve to define who we are to God, and who God wants us to be, and what God has in mind for us when we get to the end of all things.

These bodies of ours – your body and mine – are “temples of the Holy Spirit.” Your body isn’t just a mass of blood and muscles and bones. You didn’t come here by chance; it’s no accident you’re here. You were made with a holy purpose. God gave you that body of yours as a gift; as a container, a vessel, a “jar of clay,” to house your precious soul while you live in this world – and also as a Temple, a sacred place, for God the Holy Spirit Himself to come and inhabit and live in.

Would you bring trash or filth into this church of ours, empty your garbage pail in the middle of the aisle? Of course not; this is a holy place. So why on earth would we pour unholy garbage into these minds and bodies of ours, these little churches that God has made of us? (Think about that next time you turn on the TV, or go to the movies, or pick a book to read, or log on to the internet!)

Our human bodies don’t belong to us. They are a gift, “on loan from God.” You and I have no right to neglect or abuse these bodies of ours -- which are actually His -- or to use them for any purpose other than that for which God has intended. And God’s intent and purpose for these bodies of ours is that they be used to honor and glorify the One who gave them to us. That means when we have to make choices about what

to do with these bodies of ours (because we do have the option to use them for good purposes or bad, free will being what it is), our words and deeds and actions done while living in these bodies ought to always honor and give glory to God and bear witness to Him. Anything we do that doesn’t serve that purpose, at least in some small way, is a thing we Christians shouldn’t be doing. “Everything that does not come from faith is sin,” Paul says.

So, says Paul, “You are not your own, you were bought at a price.” To say that we were ‘bought’ implies not only that we are owned, but also that we were once owned by someone or something else. And Paul says that it was sin, death, and hell that once owned us, because we’re unable to live up to our Confirmation vows (remember those?) or to keep any of the good and holy commandments God has given us. We were “sold as slaves to sin”, Paul says, property of the devil’s kingdom, without help or hope in the world, and destined for an eternity in hell.

So isn’t that word “bought” a lovely one? In Greek it refers to an “agora,” a marketplace, a place where things are bought and sold. Specifically, the word means “to redeem something,” which means to trade one thing in order to obtain another. The marketplace Paul is referring to, given the context, is a slave market, a place where human beings are traded, bought, and sold. So why would anyone want to pay a high price to purchase, redeem, and save the likes of hopeless sinners like us?

Jesus bought us, “not with gold or silver,” our Catechism says, “but with His holy, precious blood and with His innocent suffering and death.” Why? Because of the high value God places on these souls and bodies of ours – a far greater value than we’re inclined to place upon them ourselves. God so loved the world, folks, God so loved us all, that He was willing to redeem our lives with the life of His Son.

We still don’t belong to ourselves, and we never will; there’s no such thing as a free agent. Either Christ will own you, or the devil will; there is no in between. The devil, if you are his, wants only to use you, abuse you, and hound you to hell. But now, by grace and faith, we belong instead to a new Master, who loved us enough to die for us, and who really wants to help us, and who even wants to adopt us and have us for His very own children. If we must be owned by someone, isn’t it much better, and happier, and more joyful, to belong to the Master who loves us?

God our Father’s intent, from the beginning of time, has been to redeem us. God created all things, and gave the first man Adam a body, knowing that he would sin, and

what sin would do to Adam’s body, and then to all of ours. Sin has turned us into mortals and made us perishable. Sin has made us prisoners of the inevitable deterioration of these bodies of ours, and then of death.

So “God sent forth Jesus, our dear Redeemer; God sent forth Jesus, to set us free.” In our Gospel, Jesus, the Son of God, the Redeemer of all mankind, has come to walk in the world. There He found that man Philip (Philip didn’t find Him). It was no accident; Jesus knew who He was looking for. Philip belonged to Jesus, before Philip ever laid eyes upon Him. Jesus knew Philip before the world was ever made. And Jesus had every right -- the right of ownership -- to say to Philip, “Follow Me.”

Philip was from Bethsaida, a little town on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee. That’s also where two other future apostles, brothers Peter and Andrew, were from. Did Jesus just happen to pick three disciples from the same town; or did God bring them together in that place, at that time, for the sake of the moment? Did God know who the particular twelve would be, even as His hands were forming Adam, and cause them to be there at just the right time to be found? Are you and I here, in these bodies of ours, because God has us right where He wants us to be? I, for one, don’t believe in accidents or coincidences – especially when it comes to the things of God.

Now Philip, God bless him, seems to have been no skeptic. Jesus impressed him greatly, right from the start, so much so that he just had to tell someone. Philip went and found his friend Nathanael (although Jesus knew he would do that, too!), and told him, “We’ve found the One! The One Moses wrote about in the Law, the One the prophets said would come! The Savior! The Messiah! The Redeemer! He’s here! He’s Jesus, the son of Joseph, from over in Nazareth.”

Nathanael, also known as Bartholemew, wasn’t as easily convinced. He hadn’t seen Jesus in person just yet; and saviors and Messiah’s and sons of God popped up in Israel all the time. Nathanael had no doubt heard it all before. “Nazareth? That backward little place? Slow down, Philip! How could a Savior come from there?” If you ever get a “Nathanael reaction” when you try to share your faith and tell someone about Jesus, Philip’s answer is a good one, maybe the best: “Come and see.” Come with me on Sunday. Come visit my church. Come and meet my pastor. Come and see!

Keep in mind that if you find yourself talking to someone about Jesus, it’s no chance encounter. God sent you to them, and God’s good Spirit has been working on them long before the two of you ever met. No coincidences. No accidents. Even if their

answer is no, you’ve planted a seed, and you’ve become a link in the chain that will bring someone to Christ. You and I can’t covert anyone. All God asks us to do is put the Word in an ear; the path to the heart is up to Him.

When Jesus and Nathanael met, Jesus greeted the man like He’d known him all his life (and after all, He had!) “Here is a true Israelite,” Jesus tells him, “in whom there is nothing false.” “I knew you before you were knit together in your mother’s womb,” the Psalm says. Man judges by the outward appearance, but God alone knows the heart.

Nathanael, surprised that Jesus was so quick to judge his character, asks, “How do you know me? We’ve never met…” Jesus answers, “I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip called you.”

What’s your fig tree? What’s going on in your life? What are you dealing with or suffering through? Where does this day find you? Please know that Jesus knows you and sees you, and loves you, wherever you are. God knew you before you were born, and before the world was ever made. He knew where you’d go, and where you’d be, and where you’d live, and what you’d do. King David writes in Psalm 139: “Lord, where can I go from Your Spirit? Where can I flee from Your presence? If I go up to the heavens, You are there; if I make my bed in the depths, You are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there Your hand will guide me, Your right hand will hold me fast.” St. Paul, in his sermon in Athens from Acts 17, says about God: “From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 'For in him we live and move and have our being.'”

The blessed thing about all this is that the God who knows you also loves you, enough to give you His Son, enough to forgive your sins, and redeem you, and buy you for His own, with His own precious blood, shed upon a cross. You became His when you were washed in baptismal water; you’re His whatever fig tree life finds you under today; and you’ll still be His when you close your eyes for the last time and the angels take you home. St. Paul says, “If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.”

Nathanael, after meeting Jesus, was ready to believe, and ready to follow, as the Lord always knew he would be. "Rabbi -- Teacher -- you are the Son of God; you are

the King of Israel!” he says. And Jesus tells Nathanael that he hasn’t seen anything yet. “You believe because I told you I saw you under the fig tree. You shall see greater things than that. I tell you the truth, you shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man."

Soon after this in the Gospel, the miracles began. There was the wedding at Cana (Nathanael’s hometown), where Jesus turned the water into wine. Nathanael and Philip, Peter and Andrew and John, and all the rest of the disciples, saw Jesus make blind people see, and deaf people hear, and people with crippled limbs get up and walk away dancing. Greater things, and even greater things, just as Jesus promised. Finally came the greatest miracle of all, the greatest proof of who Jesus was that there could be, when they put their fingers in His living flesh on His Resurrection day.

You and I were bought at a price, by the precious blood of Jesus, “a Lamb without blemish or defect.” We have been bought, purchased, and redeemed by His blood, so the “greater things” could be ours as well. St. Paul says in Galatians, “The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” Live a life of faith, and you’ll see the angels, too, “ascending and descending on the Son of Man.” Lord, in Your mercy, grant that blessing to us all. In Jesus’ name; Amen.