TITLE: “A Sermon on Parents and Preachers”

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.  Amen.  Our text for today is the healing of the deaf/mute, with focus on these words: He has done all things well. 

There are very few of us here that can really understand what this poor man was going through.  He was deaf.  The life around him was muddied and unclear.  He couldn’t communicate well with the world around him.  There was no Medicare or Medicaid to take care of him.  He lived off of the generosity of the people around him, and that generosity would ebb and flow.  And because he couldn’t speak, people often didn’t even know what he needed, and so his needs went unmet and unheard.  It was a tragic life.

This is not simply about the man born deaf and mute, though.  This is your life as well.  How often do you hear or read about the need to increase communication skills?  It’s a regular facet of any job description: works well with others, communicates well, and so forth.  This is a regular part of being human, hearing and speaking in response.  It’s what separates us from the animals.

This is, of course, exactly what the Fall into sin was all about.  Satan taught Adam and Eve to listen to their own voice, rather than the voice of the God who created them.  Imagine how twisted and warped your world would be if the only voice you heard was your own?  Imagine what a skewed view of reality you would have?  You would be the center of the universe.  What was important to you must be important to everyone.  The results would be disastrous!  Or think of what a school would be like where the opinion of the student was the most important.  I’m not going to learn math, because I don’t think it’s important!  Could you really learn anything at all?

As strange as it may seem, this is what sin does to each of us.  Sin closes our ears and hearts from hearing God’s Word.  This sinful nature in us curves us in on ourselves, so that all we can hear is our own voice, or the voice of Satan himself.  When you think of how you treat the people around you, and how we refuse to listen to the ones God has placed over us, it is easy to see how sin deafens us to hear God’s Word.

 Martin Luther in his sermons on this text says that there are two people that God primarily places over each Christian.  First, their pastor, because the pastor is the one who preaches God’s Word to them; and second, their parents, fathers and mothers.  These people are God’s fingers, as it were, to unstop our ears so that we can hear God’s Word.

As we are preparing and studying starting a Lutheran school, I am struck by how important the role of parents is in their children’s education.  In our society today, as often as not parents are hindrances in education.  They are not wanted.  And parents who seek to take an active role in their children’s education, or dare to criticize, well, those are the troublemaker parents.  They are the parents who should leave the teaching to the experts.

Yet we hear time and time again in the Scriptures that it is God who places parents into our lives.  Who gave you your father and mother?  God did?  By whose authority do they act?  By God’s authority.  So when my parents teach me, be it how to tie my shoes or how to hear God’s Word, they are actually doing God’s work.  They are God’s hands and feet.

Now if this is true when we are talking about how to live in the world, how much more is this true when we get to God’s Word!  Hear our Lord’s words from Deuteronomy: