Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity
 
Promises can be broken.  This is the sad reality we know too well.  Everyone here has suffered the anguish of a promise broken.  Maybe it was a promise to keep something confidential.  Maybe it was a promise to return something in the condition it was in when you lent it and you received it back damaged, or not at all. More painfully, maybe it was the promise made in the vows of holy matrimony, to be faithful to you and your spouse cheated.  Regardless of the broken promise, every one of us knows what distrust, cynicism, heartbreak, and ruined relationships come from a broken promise. 
 
This earthly pain and hesitancy to trust again is something the devil uses to his advantage.  Even before that pain existed Satan worked on our first parents to get them to doubt God’s Word and to question His goodness.  His entire goal is to get us to turn our back on God, to see Him as a liar, and to fear, love, and trust anyone but Him. 
 
This is never truer than when something in life goes wrong.  When the effects of sin rear their ugly head and someone in your life gets a terminal diagnosis, or you fail a major assignment, or you don’t get a spot on a team or in a show, or the person you thought was your friend abandons you, or you’re fired from your job, or your electricity is turned off because you couldn’t pay the bill, or your child dies.
 
 In those moments Your temptation is to call God a liar, to accuse Him of neglecting you, of failing to uphold His end of the God-child relationship.    The temptation is to forsake faith in Him, to walk away from Him and rely on yourself alone.  And it is so easy to do that, to believe the lies about God that the devil, the world, and our flesh tell us.  In those times we are forced to deal with two conflicting realities: First, that God loves us dearly and protects us, and second, that we are bearing a tremendous cross.  Those two realities seem irreconcilable.  The devil tells us, just like he told Adam and Eve, that if God really loves you He wouldn’t hold out on you, He wouldn’t allow any pain of any kind befall you, even if that pain is something as minor as not being allowed to eat from one tree in a garden full of the greatest food any human has ever experienced. 
 
So, your trust falters and you lose your footing as you carry that cross.  You consider those earthly promises made to you and how people let you down.  You let those times of sin color how you look at God.  Your flesh believes Him to be as untrustworthy as the gossiping friend, cheating spouse, or swindling business partner.  You trusted them wholly, but they broke their promise and crushed you, so maybe God has done that too.
 
That place between faith in God and complete trust in His fatherly divine goodness and mercy is where we find ourselves, just like the nobleman in today’s Gospel.  Like him, you have had to walk an exhausting road fighting with the two polar opposites.  In his head he had to fight between his son’s severe illness and probable death and the declaration of Jesus, “Your son lives.”  You know what swirled in his head because it swirls in yours, too.  Did God really say?  Of course He did, and He cannot lie or break a promise.  Is God really powerful to mend what sin has marred?  He created heaven and earth by a word, allowed Israel to pass through the Red Sea on dry ground, and raised the dead, so He can right my wrongs as well.  Does God really love me?  His Son willingly died for your sin while you were till his enemy, so of course He loves you.
 
When you are Caught in that spiritual warfare, Satan’s lies on one side and God’s declaration on the other, remember that you have the protection you heard in today’s Epistle, the armor of god’s soldiers: righteousness, the gospel of peace, and salvation.  Take comfort in all of the armor God has given.  As fierce the fight and as many pieces of armor He has given you, notice that He has only given you one weapon, not an entire artillery but one, seemingly weak weapon, but one that is really the strongest ever: the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.
 
When bitterness, doubt, despair, and unbelief threaten to gain the upper hand, take up the divine armor and the sword of the Word of God.  War against everything the devil and your flesh would have you give in to with things that are true and certain.  You have something far greater than a promise, you have a reality, something no one can take from you.  No maybe, no someday.  Like the nobleman you have a declaration: Your son lives.  It is finished.  I forgive you all your sin.  You are a child of paradise.  Your God does not deal in promises that may or may not be kept.  He does not deal in wishes and dreams.  He deals in absolute certainty, words that say what they mean and give what they say.
 
Forget those promises made and broken in this life.  Take your attention off the pain of the crosses your bear and find comfort in the nail-pierced hands that hold you and the armor with which He has covered you.  Look to the cross, trust Christ, and live, say with the faithful of every time and place: “Behold, this is our God; we have waited for Him, and He will save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for Him; we will be glad and rejoice in His salvation.”

Martin franzmann, the author of this morning’s first hymn and a long-time professor in our Synod, called the man in today’s Gospel “the man who went home with only a word in his pocket.”  I think this does more to help us understand today’s Gospel and its importance than anything else.  The nobleman is a reminder to us, an encouragement to us, to live by faith alone, faith in the strong Word of God.  He went home with only the Word, only a promise.  His faith was rewarded with fulfillment.  May God grant us all such a faith that endures all things, content with only a Word in our pocket and nothing more!

Today’s Gospel is one of the most relatable accounts in Holy Scripture.  We can sympathize with the difficult situation of the official.  He needed something badly.  He wanted the reassurance that Jesus heard him, cared, and would do something about his son’s deadly illness.  He pleads with Jesus twice to come with him, but He will not.  He sends the official home with only a word in his pocket.  He doesn’t have Jesus in tow, he does not have an antidote for death.  He has only a word.  Through this official, Jesus teaches us to have faith in His unfailing Word.  He is faithful and He will do what He says. 

What is faith?  We talk a lot about it.  We know that it is necessary for salvation, because faith is that conduit that delivers to us all that Christ did for us on the cross.  We know that it is created by the Holy Spirit working through the Word.  We know that it is strengthened through the Sacraments.  We know that it is what motivates our good works towards God and neighbor.  But what is faith?