Proper 14: Epistle, Romans 10:5-17                            

Romans 10:5-17

What is the sense you value most? God gives us five. Sight, hearing, taste, touch, and the sense of smell. There they stand and what magnificent gifts they are. But what would you choose as most important? I would venture to say most would choose sight–at least if given the choice between sight and hearing. But for those of us to whom music is perhaps the highest expression of human creativity, hearing might actually push sight into second place.I struggle with that choice.

Hearing brings us a great deal. We can listen to the giggles of our children, the night-breathing of our spouses or the tender trill of the violin in Vaughan Williams’ masterpiece, “The Lark Ascending.” Hearing brings it to our place setting and the feasting is real. But there is another gift that comes to us by the ear. It is Christ Himself. Luther famously quipped that the Virgin Mary conceived our Savior in her ear, at the announcement of her divine impregnation. And something of that sort comes to us through our ears as well.

In the middle of the tenth of Romans St. Paul reminds us whence faith comes. And it is hearing the Word of God that produces a faith that calls us to live without sight, or better beyond sight.

“So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”

– Romans 10:17, NKJV

The earliest Christians didn’t have the written Scriptures as we do today. And so when we hear the Word read in the Divine Service each Sunday we are “getting the goods” in the actual way that God intended: through the ear. Hearing births faith. Listen well.