God Needs Our Help!

 Matthew 21:23-32

September 27, 2026

Jesus Preaching to the Multitude
Jorge Coco Santangelo

 

I’m going to tell you something you may

or may not know about Lutherans – or more

specifically Lutheran seminary professors –

when it comes to our basic tenant of Lutheranism.

 

Justification by God’s grace, not by our works.

We love it. (That’s not the insider info by the way.)

We believe it. It converted me,

I think Luther was right about stressing it completely

considering where Christianity was at the time.

We are saved by God’s grace and not by what we do.

Here I stand I can do no other.

 

But the insider info is that

professors of Lutheranism

and therefore Lutheran pastors,

are really leery about putting a definite

picture together about what you do AFTER

you know you’ve been saved.

 

Don’t worry, I’ll over-explain this for you.

Here’s how the fourth article of the Augsburg Confession reads:

“Human beings cannot be justified before God by their own powers, merits, or works. But they are justified as a gift on account of Christ through faith when they believe that they received into grace and that their sins are forgiven on account of Christ, who by his death made satisfaction for our sins.

God reckons this faith as righteousness.”

 

So it’s kind of circular logic, MC Escher drawing:

we are saved by Christ when we believe that we’re saved by Christ.

Our faith in our salvation becomes our righteousness.

 

So all talk about sin, and our actions

and the beatitudes and anything Jesus said

is just there to help us to realize how sinful we are,

and how we deserve to be eternally punished for our sins,

and that realization drives us to ask for mercy,

and we find that in the belief

that Christ died for us for our sins.

Our Faith is becomes the righteous robe which

covers our wardrobe of sinfulness.

Therefore faith is our ultimate goal.

 

BUT Lutherans, Lutheran professors, and Lutheran pastors,

and Luther are/were reticent, hesitant, resistant

to talking about what people of faith

then are supposed to do AFTER they have faith.

 

In the Lutheran Theological world

They call that, “the third use of the law”

and it’s usually said with a wrinkled nose

like you’ve smell something funny.

 

Our professor in Philadelphia did have one class called

“What we do after we know we don’t have to do anything”

but other professors I know kind of cut off

the conversation about it entirely.

One pastor said that their professors at a more uber-Lutheran

seminary said  “your questions about this are not helpful”.

I’ve had my conversation about it cut off at times.

 

The Lutheran ideal is that, because you’re

thankful for God’s grace, the good works of Jesus

will flow out of you naturally, whatever comes out of your

thankfulness for your salvation must be good.

(Isn’t everything that all Christians do good?)

Lutherans are kind of stuck on salvation.

 

 And this is not just true for Lutherans.

All Protestantism, American Protestantism at least,

seems to be stuck on salvation.

The objective is to confess Jesus Christ as

your personal Lord and Savior and once  you’ve done that,

then your only objective is to get other people

to confess Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior.

 

And there’s a lingering feeling in Christianity

that if we get enough people doing that,

even if that’s by force or coercion,

then all will be right with the world.

The objective with a lot of

 

Even the creeds that we say each week.

The ones which have guided the Christian

church since the fourth century,

are all about what we believe together

about God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

I believe in God, We believe in Jesus Christ.

 

Christianity is like a club you get into

and once you’re in we’re all good.

 

And I think that this feeling, attitude,

deeply held theological premise,

whatever you call it, has left a large, nebulous void.

The objective is to convert,

declare your Christianity, then people can just

fill in what want into that blank outline that is Christianity.

 

I know that there are many different ways

to live out our faith and everyone has different

gifts that God can use in many ways to serve the gospel.

But everything that every Christian who believes

that Jesus saved them has not been good.

There have been some very faithful Christians

who have done some very lousy things.

I mean, we have Christians right now who are

making laws and policies that immigrants who don’t

have citizenship should be put into concentration camps.

Who are taking healthcare from needy people.

We have Christians who feel comfortable saying every kind of

cruel and hateful thing about poor people.

Who believe that think blatant racism is a trait of a Christian.

Who are right now, defending slavery.

Lutherans are some of those people too.

 

Because of the void, people have filled

that blank slate in with whatever their impulses lead them.

Making faith the ultimate mark of discipleship

has put Christianity in some murky places over the years.

 

Wouldn’t it have been helpful if we had some guidance?

Could it have been helpful if we in addition to the normal

creeds, we had spent 2000 years saying every week:

“we treat every human as a child of God.

We won’t be racist, sexist, and classist oafs.

We will love our enemies.

We make sacrificial service to others a priority”

 

I know I’m giving my Lutheran professors a brain

aneurism at this point, but couldn’t that have been helpful?

 

I always remind everyone that the earliest Christians

called their religion “the Way”.

You followed the Way of Jesus.

It was about living the way that Jesus did

and doing the things that he told them to do.

And I’m going to go out on a limb and say that

even people who don’t believe in Jesus as

their Lord and Savior can follow “the way of Jesus”.

It’s not about believing in a doctrine,

it’s about following the way.

 

And Jesus stresses that in the gospel today.

(remember we have a gospel to talk about?)

Jesus tells this really simple parable.

This parable only shows up in Matthew by the way.

 

The parable is about two sons.

Father asks them to do something.

One said yes and didn’t do what he was supposed to.

One said no, and did it any way.

The question is: Who did the will of his father.

Of course the second one.

Jesus is saying that the chief priests and the Elders

are like the first son who just paid lip service to God.

And the Tax collectors and prostitutes are like the second son

who are actually doing God’s will.

 

Jesus is saying that what we do actually

matters to God. It’s not just a litmus test.

It’s not just an abstract hypothetical paradigm.

And the tax collectors and prostitutes were doing

a better job of the whole thing than the religious leaders.

 

Something relevant about tax collectors and prostitutes

Mark Allen Powell, who was the New Testament

prof at Trinity Seminary in Ohio when I was

serving in Ohio was sharing this amazing

research he was doing on tax collectors

and prostitutes (or “sinners” as earlier translations

of the bible calls them wrongly because I guess

they didn’t want to give any delicate people the vapors.)

 

We all know how much Jesus talked about tax

collectors and prostitutes and how much

scorn he received because he was

eating with them and hanging out with them in public.

 

 Our classic view of tax collectors is money hungry

thieves basically, and our classic view of

prostitutes is overly sexual women.

 

Mark Allen Powell says that neither were correct

Both of them were most likely people

that were sold into slavery at young ages.

When families couldn’t pay off debts,

it was common to sell their children off

permanently into slavery.

 

Tax collectors were most likely big strong boys

who probably had some mental challenges.

They were enslaved to threaten people and

forcibly extract money from people

for the Roman government.

 

And prostitutes were young women

who were sold and trafficked into sex work.

Powell says that in historical writings

from the time, there are very few

adult women talked about as prostitutes

the cut off age was 15 or 16 because the

truth was, very few of the girls sold into

sex slavery survived into adulthood.

 

Tax collectors and prostitutes were not

degenerates who chose an easy life of

fun and debauchery. They were people

who had all their personal agency and humanity

taken away from them at a young age to

fulfill the endless greed that is human society.

 

And Mark Allen Powell notes  that by this point in Jesus ministry,

Jesus had actually stopped telling tax collectors

and prostitutes that they needed to repent

to prepare for the kingdom of God.

 

 Because he knew that they could not change

their professions since they were slaves.

They would be beaten or killed if they did.

But they could live the life that they were forced in differently.

They could still follow the way of Jesus.

 

Tax collectors and prostitutes were obviously

looked down on, (much like prostitutes are now even though 

most of them have been also, been trafficked at young ages.)

And the religious leaders and most of the rest of the people

would have thought themselves superior to them.

 

But it’s obvious from this this parable

and how Jesus uses them as his lesson to the religious leaders,

that after they joined Jesus at his table and followed

his way. Meaning they did their life differently.

They couldn’t change their status or jobs,

but within their present lives, they did God’s will.

 

Maybe they treated others with kindness,

Maybe they sacrificed for others,

or shared with others or they regarded others with respect,

they tried to love their enemies and not hurt them.

 

And Jesus elevates these people

who were normally looked down on.

Jesus is telling those religious leaders:

“You should work your way up to level of these people.

Make their behavior your goal.”

Don’t change your profession either, but look

at the way they are conducting themselves now

be like them instead of how you’re being now.

That is doing the will of God.

Whatever these despised groups of followers

were doing was closer to God’s hopes for humanity

than what the religious leaders were doing.

 

Notice that Jesus says that the tax collectors

and prostitutes are getting in to the Kingdom of God first.

Meaning that the Chief priests and the elders

are still recipients of God’s grace,

they just may have to wait in line.

So Jesus is obviously a good Lutheran.

 

Luther was reported to have said this:

“God does not need your good works, but your neighbor does”

That kind of thinking was effective to stress

justification by God’s grace which was Luther’s job.

 

But I really think now, we can say God does need

our good works. And those works need to

be based on Jesus words and commands and

Jesus actions. At this time especially,

God need us not to not just to

say that Jesus is our Lord and savior,

but to live that out in our world.

 

God needs us to do those things

that Jesus outlined and modeled for us

over and over again in his life.

God needs us to help save the world.

I think that is good news.

 

God’s not asking us to do it alone,

God’s certainly going to do some heavy lifting,

but for some reason, God wants to work with us.

And with the tax collectors and prostitutes

and all the other outcast people in our world.

 

And us religious leaders can even come along too.