How Evil Happens, Why It Matters, and How Freedom Comes

[This was shared during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, on Sunday, July 15.]

Mark 6:14-29

With its account of John the Baptist’s execution, our gospel lesson from Mark today is so laced with evil that it’s disturbing.

But when you think of it, what we see in today’s Gospel lesson is a lot like what we see in life on Monday through Saturday. These are the evils—like the inhumane things that human beings sometimes do to one another—which, when you learn of them, make you wonder, “How could this have happened? How can people be so cruel?”

And I’m not talking just about murders or holocausts. I’m thinking mostly of the everyday evils, the cutting, harsh ways in which we all can diverge from the clear will of God for us to love God and love neighbor.

We all are sinners, of course. That’s the burden Jesus came to share with us, the weight He took on His own shoulders on the cross so that all who turn from sin and trust in Him will have life with God forever, a free gift from the God Who loves us. 

As Christians, we’re called to do daily battle with our sin, through daily repentance and renewal. 

The failure to hear what God’s Word says about our sin, acts as a wall between God and us, between life and death. 

We’re called to keep grabbing the strong, outstretched hand of Jesus Christ so that the power of sin and death over our lives can be destroyed by God’s powerful grace and deathless love. That isn’t always as easy as it seems it should be.

Most of you have heard about the frog in the kettle so many times that you’re tired of it. But it gets told a lot because it packs a lot of truth. A frog haplessly plopped himself into a kettle full of water that sets on a stove top. Shortly after he got there, someone turned on the burner underneath the kettle. The frog, being a cold-blooded critter, adaptable to the world around him, didn’t realize he was being boiled to death. 

Only insane people set out to be evil. Yet, like the frog in the kettle, sometimes people who should know better, are capable of evil, of cruelty to others. We allow our kettles--our environments, the world and the people around us, as well as our inborn tendency to think of ourselves first--to dictate how we will act and react in everyday life.

Herod Antipas was a man who should have known better than to fall into evil. He had been schooled in God’s will through a knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures, what we know as the Old Testament. On top of that, Herod had good political reasons for avoiding evil: Though his family had no legitimate claim on the honor, they had for generations held themselves to be Israel’s royal family. It was so important to Herod Antipas to be seen as the “king of the Jews” that he had undertaken to build a new temple on Mount Zion, the same spot in Jerusalem where, a thousand years before, King Solomon had built the first temple. Both spiritual training and political common sense then should have kept Herod from evil.

But our Gospel lesson for today tells us that Herod perpetrated a horrible evil: Ordering the execution of John the Baptist, a man Herod knew to be innocent, whose only crime was speaking the Word of God. 

How that happened, a piece of history you know well, comprises most of the lesson. It comes in what the moviemakers would call a flashback. Herod gets reports about the miracle-working ministry of Jesus and is convinced that John has come back from the dead. We’re then told about the night Herod threw a birthday party for himself (who throws a party of himself?), how the daughter of his wife—the wife he had stolen from his brother--had danced for him, pleasing Herod, and how—probably a little more than drunk—Herod had promised the girl anything in exchange for the dance. 

How she had asked her mother what to ask for and was given the chilling reply, “The head of the prophet of God on a platter.” 

And how, in spite of what Herod knew to be right, he complied with the girl’s expressed wish. 

It was an act of evil equal to anything you might see in your news feed or on the TV news today. 

But unlike those news items, I believe that Mark’s flashback can help us to avoid falling into evil ourselves.

It does this by helping us to see that evil happens, first of all, when we want what we want more than what we want God wants. That was Herod’s problem. He wanted to please this young woman and appear to be a man of his word, no matter how sick and ill-advised his word may have been, more than he wanted to honor God.

That kind of thing can happen to us, too. Years ago, a man came to see me and explained how he bilked his company for thousands of dollars and got himself fired. I tried to understand how this otherwise upright man fell into this evil. “I just knew what I wanted and saw stealing as the way to get it. I just forgot about God.”

Second, evil happens when we’re more concerned with how we appear than with who we are. Herod kept his vow to his wife's daughter because he didn’t want to seem like a welcher to his guests.

A pastor I worked with while I was in seminary taught me a valuable lesson. One week, he made a mistake, one that the congregation needn’t have known about, not a sin, but a failure to do something which cost the church some money. The first thing that pastor did the following Sunday morning during the announcements was stand up and apologize. If that pastor had worried about appearances, he wouldn’t have said a word. But he was willing to admit his imperfections and gained credibility for it.

If to no one else, it’s essential that we own our sins and imperfections before God. It’s only when we’re open with the Lord Who knows about is anyway that He can take His holy scalpel and remove the unrepented sin that blocks His grace from penetrating into our lives. 

In Psalm 32:3-5, King David, tells God: “When I kept silent [about my sin], my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy on me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.’ And you forgave the guilt of my sin.” 

This is why in another one of the Psalms, David asks God, “Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” (Psalm 139:23-24) 

It’s only when we’re open to undergoing the spiritual surgery by which the God we know in Jesus Christ removes the power of sin over our lives and replaces it with Himself as God, Savior, King, and Friend that we can know the healing of His grace!

Third, evil happens when we ignore the Word of God. Herod, in spite of the judgment against his actions he could hear in John’s preaching, liked to listen to it. He knew that John’s words were from God. Yet, at his birthday party, he turned a deaf ear to God’s Word.

Hebrews 4:12 tells us: “For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.” 

And 2 Timothy 3:16-17 reminds us: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” 

When you and I spend time in God’s Word each day, asking God to show us the truth He wants us to see and act upon that day, we’re reassured again that this God Whose love for us is so desperate that He went to the cross, went to hell, and rose from death for us, will never leave us or forsake us. 

God’s Word gives us the power to live in the light of His Good Friday, Easter Sunday love!

But all of this still leaves us with a question: What’s in it for us? At the end of our Gospel lesson, after all, Herod was still alive, still on his throne, and John’s body was taken away by his disciples for burial. Herod had caved into evil. John had remained faithful to God. 

So, what’s in it for us when we resist evil?

Of course, there’s the obvious answer…and the true one. Those who faithfully seek to follow the God we know in Jesus Christ will, in spite of our sins and failings, spend eternity with God. 

But there are more immediate rewards for those who commit themselves to keeping hold of Christ’s hand and resisting the temptation to sin. They’re mentioned in our lesson from Ephesians for today. We’re given, we’re told “every spiritual blessing.” 

Herod went to bed on the night he killed John the Baptist knowing that he had killed an innocent, that he had done evil. That reality, I believe, haunted him and he felt utterly alone, evil, and foolish.

Unlike Herod Antipas, John the Baptist lived and died with the certainty that, even in the midst of things he couldn’t and didn’t fully understand, in resisting evil, in seeking to follow God faithfully, he had a Lord and Advocate Who would never desert him, not even beyond the gates of death.

If you remember nothing else from this morning, please remember this: 

The simple truth is that God is present for all who want God around.

A true story I’ve told before. She was dying and I visited her in the hospital. "Are you angry with God?" I asked her. "I was at first," she answered honestly. "But then I remembered that He's right here with me. Somehow that helped me." 

It can help us too. Knowing that, as we turn to Him and away from evil, God is with us always makes the pain and sacrifices of resisting evil worth it. 

In Jesus, the crucified and risen Lord, we know this to be true! Amen

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, and a sinner saved from myself only by the grace of God given in Jesus, in Whom I trust.]

An Ancient Call to Post-Modern People

[This sermon was shared yesterday morning during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio.]

Ezekiel 33:7-11
God needs lots of Ezekiels today, people like Jon.

Jon is a man I know whose mother died when he was in his early twenties. Jon, his brother, and his sisters were comforted in knowing that their mother had trusted in Jesus Christ. They were confident that because of God’s gracious gift of the crucified and risen Jesus and their mother’s faith in Christ, she was with God for eternity.

But they were all concerned about their father. Though he had been a good husband and father in many ways, he had, years before, wandered from God. As a result of having no relationship with God, Jon’s Dad was shattered and beyond all comfort at the death of the woman he loved.

Christians grieve. But as the New Testament book of 1 Thessalonians puts it, Christians need not “grieve as others do without hope.” Jon’s dad was hopeless and, as a result, he was falling into some destructive patterns of behavior—drinking too much, working too much, staying up all hours watching infomercials. Jon decided he needed to have a heart-to-heart talk with his father.

“Dad,” he said, “I love you and I’m concerned about you. Dad, you’re slowly killing yourself. You’re letting your grief over Mom kill you. And you’re killing yourself too, by relying on beer and work to get you through. I know you don’t want to hear this, Dad, but you need to get right with God. You need to lean on Him.”

Jon’s father began to protest at hearing another religious jaw. “Wait a minute, Dad,” Jon said, “think about Mom. She believed in Jesus with all her heart.” Jon’s dad, tears welling in his eyes, admitted that was true. “Dad, she’s with Jesus, don’t you think?” Again, Jon’s dad agreed. “Dad, I not only don’t want you to be separated from God, I don’t want you to be separated from anyone who has believed in Jesus. I want you to be with Mom again in eternity.”

At that moment, Jon’s dad realized how far he had walked from God and God’s people and how he needed to lay everything aside that he’d been using to make it through his days. Jon’s dad turned to Christ and slowly, started to live again with hope and purpose. When I met him five years later, he was a truly happy man, deeply involved with his church, especially in helping feed hungry people. He still missed his wife. But he had hope.

Jon, a heavy machinery salesman by trade, was used by God in that moment as a sentinel—a guard—warning his Dad of the judgment his father was bringing down on himself, but also showing him the new life that could belong to his dad if he would turn from sin and self-absorption and trust in God alone. The life of Jon’s father was saved for eternity because Jon dared to speak a word of truth to him!

Our first Bible lesson for today comes from the Old Testament book of Ezekiel. I can’t delve too far into the history of this remarkable book, but Ezekiel was a prophet and priest who, for years, had warned the people of Judah, the southern grouping of God’s people whose capital city was Jerusalem, that their continuing reliance on things other than God, their unjust and unloving treatment of others, and all their other sins would lead to the destruction of their country unless they repented and turned in faith to God.

These people—God’s people, the descendants of slaves who had been miraculously brought to a land filled with blessings showered on them by God, had turned a deaf ear to Ezekiel’s warnings. As the 33rd. chapter of Ezekiel begins, God calls Ezekiel again. He has more messages He wants Ezekiel to share with His people. God is about to orchestrate the devastation of Judah by foreign conquerors.

But God doesn't intend for that to be the end of the story. God meant the impending destruction and enslavement of his people in Ezekiel's time to lead a different conclusion.

God wanted Ezekiel to carry a new message to His people.

Now, if I had been Ezekiel, I might have thought, “I’ve had enough of the preaching business. No one wants to hear what God has to say anyway. Why should I waste my breath?”

But it was at precisely this moment that God came to Ezekiel again and, in some mysterious way, God told Ezekiel that just as Ezekiel had earlier prophesied destruction, now Ezekiel was to prophesy restoration. God was going to renew His people, give them back their land, allow them to rebuild their temple.

The key to the fulfillment of the promise of restoration was the same as the avoidance of the earlier (and ignored) threat had been: The people must repent for sin (turn away from sin) and trust in God alone. God told Ezekiel that Ezekiel must share this word with His people. Look at how God puts it in verses 8 and 9 of our first lesson: “If I say to the wicked, ‘O wicked ones, you shall surely die,’ and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from their ways, the wicked shall die in their iniquity, but their blood I will require at your hand. But if you warn the wicked to turn from their ways, and they do not turn from their ways, the wicked shall die in their iniquity, but you will have saved your life.”

God called Ezekiel to play for high stakes. He was to tell people to turn to God. If he failed to share that message, the blood of those he feared or hated too much to share it with would be on his hands.

If he shared the message and people still refused to repent and trust in God, their blood would be on their own hands.

Now, folks, this is more than a history lesson. In this history, we see the hand of God and we also see how God still operates to call unrepentant sinners to restored fellowship with Him when they turn from their sin and trust in Him.

We see God operating this way in today's Gospel lesson. There, Jesus lays down a process by which a church member sins against another can be restored to fellowship with God and with the church. If the member at fault refuses to renounce his sin, Jesus says, the Church must excommunicate that person, stripping him of his membership and denying him the privilege of receiving Christ's body and blood. Jesus says that this action must be taken not to bring an end to the story, but to allow the one at fault to understand the full consequences of unrepented sin. When we refuse to acknowledge our guilt, we are separated from God and the life that only God can give. If the one at fault, at the end of the process Jesus lays down in Matthew 18:15-20, will repent, restoration will come. Forgiveness and new life will come.

Jesus lays out this same pattern in his story of the prodigal son. The prodigal was allowed to experience the full consequences of his sin. But when he turned away from his sin and returned to his father, who, of course, represents God, his connection to his family was restored again.

When, six centuries after Ezekiel, God came to the world in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, He gave the same message to the world which, up to that point, God had given to His chosen people. Today, through Christ, eternal restoration and renewal, the new life that Jon’s father grasped that day Jon and he had a heart-to-heart, is what God offers to all who repent for sin and believe in Jesus. Jesus put it this way according to the Gospel of Mark, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the Good News.”

Also today, the call that God gave to Ezekiel, the prophet and priest, is a call that He gives to every believer in Jesus Christ. A passage that has played a critical role in Lutheran history, the basis for the Lutheran theology of "the priesthood of all believers," underscores this. Please take up a pew Bible and turn to page 703 and find 1 Peter, chapter 2, verse 9. Read it aloud with me, if you would:

But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light. 

God calls every believer in Jesus Christ to be an Ezekiel, to be a Jon, who shares the life-changing news that all who turn from sin and trust in Christ live with God for eternity.

When we believe in Jesus Christ, God walks with us through every step of this life, giving us strength and peace we can find nowhere else.

We all know that the message about Jesus Christ isn’t something that most people are clamoring to hear today, no matter how desperately they need it. Words like those God instructed Ezekiel to share with His people sound like antiquated nail scratches on a chalk board to modern ears. Read them in verses 10 to 11 of our first lesson:

…say…’Our transgressions and our sins weigh upon us, and we waste away because of them; how then can we live?’ Say to them, As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why will you die, O house of Israel?’

In an era in which...

• freedom is institutionalized as selfishness and an excuse for greed, 
• drug addiction right here in Hocking County is epidemic, 
• child abuse and a coarse disregard for the humanity of others can be seen everywhere, 
• sexual promiscuity of all sorts is seen as the inevitable result of irresistible biological impulses rather than the choice of a society that worships at the altar of self, and 
• things like racial bigotry, the unjust treatment of women, and a sense of entitlement pervade our culture, 

the call to turn from sin and believe in Jesus Christ as the only way to live here and in eternity is not welcome. In sharing the message of new life through Jesus Christ, we run the risk of becoming the guests nobody wants to show up at the party!

But, here's a question we must all address:

Whose approval do we want more, that of a world hurtling toward death in its sins or that of heaven, which awaits repentant sinners with open arms? 

The answer, I think, should be obvious. Speaking for myself, I want to be on the side of the One Who will be standing when Jesus returns to claim His final victory over sin and death! And, if I can help convey the message of new life to people who don't know Jesus Christ, I am more than willing to live with the disdain of some.

God tells Ezekiel that He takes no pleasure when people spurn Him and follow the way of death rather than following Him. God still takes no pleasure in that. He wants to welcome all into relationship with Him.

Jesus, God in the flesh, demonstrated this same sentiment on the Palm Sunday before His arrest and crucifixion. You'll remember that Jesus was given a hero's welcome to Jerusalem. Later on that same day though, knowing all that awaited Him in the week to come, Jesus wept over the city. The days would come, He told this place that housed God's temple, that they would be crushed because they had failed to see that in Him, God had visited them and offered new and everlasting life to all who repent and believe in Him.

Today, there are people in our community—people in your own personal circles of acquaintance—who, right now, at this moment, are condemning themselves to eternal separation from God and who need you to be their sentinels.

They need you to warn them of the destruction to come for those who refuse Jesus’ outstretched hand of grace and forgiveness and of the new life that can be theirs if only they will quit struggling to be self-sufficient, self-contained, and self-driven and surrender to the only love that lasts forever, the love given to all through Jesus Christ.

Fine, you may say, I’m called to share Christ with others; how do I do that?

Well, it isn’t a matter of what you do. It’s a matter of who you are. As I've said before, God made you a human being, not a human doing.

By Baptism, you are already a child of God. Your belief in Jesus confirms that fact.

So, be a child of God. Live out the privilege of that.

Without apology or self-doubt, be the forgiven, free, and hopeful child of God Christ has already made you.

Ezekiel was a believer God used as a conduit for His message: repent and believe. If you and I try to make believers of others by our efforts or with our own messages, we will fail.

I used to be the kind of Christian and preacher who thought I could, by use of a program or a method or clever word games, win converts to Christ.

But the message I shared came from me, not God, and it was about me, not God.

I’ve never won anyone to Christ by being clever. But Christ has won people to Christ through me when I’ve gotten out of the way and let Christ live in me. He can do the same through all believers!

In Psalm 44, the writer remembers how God gave the promised land to His people: “…not by their own sword did they win the land, nor did their own arm give them victory; but Your right hand, and Your arm, and the light of Your countenance…”

God needs lots of Ezekiels today, people who will listen to the Word about Jesus Christ and then, in the power of the Holy Spirit, trusting that Christ is living in them (and He lives in all believers!), open their mouths to spread that Word to others.

That’s nothing other than being a Christian. That’s depending on God to be who we were made to be as children of God. That’s who Jon was. That’s who Christ can help us to be, who God made us to be, and who everyone of we know needs us to be: people who listen to God’s Word and then pass it on.

May we all be Ezekiels!

Amen!

Revealing Our Dark Places: The Privilege That Brings Healing

Interspersed through Philip Yancey's fine new book on prayer is a series of drop-in boxes in which "neighbors, other authors, fellow church members, spiritual mentors, ordinary people" talk about their experiences with prayer, good and bad. In one box, a man identified only as John writes:

My friends in AA tell us we're as sick as our secrets. I know many folks with dark secrets, and nowhere to take them. Sometimes they go crazy, literally insane, because they can't stand being alone with their dark thoughts and secrets. Or they get loaded, or get high.

Even those active in the church can harbor secrets that kill them. John goes on:

An acquaintance of mine ran a street ministry just a few blocks away. He had secrets about failures in his past and financial pressures in his present that he never told anyone. They bottled up inside him. One day his wife walked in the front door and found his body swaying from a rope. I cannot tell you what a blow that was for the people he ministered to.

I agree with John. We can't keep secret sins or fears bottled up within us. It isn't that we should vent everything to the world, engaging in the kind of verbal diarrhea we see displayed on many of the daytime talk shows. But there is something therapeutic about exposing our dark secrets to light.

Doing so can rob our secrets of their power. Once, as a young adolescent, I was dogged by a large and foreboding thought. It haunted me through every waking moment of my day. It was such a horrible thought, one I thought that no good person could entertain. It tripped me into a series of obsessive-compulsive behaviors that, owing to the irrationality that dark secrets can trigger, I thought might fend off the thoughts.

Finally, one day, unable to take it any more, I went to my mother and told her what had been going on inside my head. While it must have been disturbing for my mother to hear, the moment I tearfully got the words out of my mouth, something amazing happened. The dreaded thoughts had no power over me. Exposed to the light, the thoughts shriveled and went away. I literally stopped thinking about something horrible that had hounded me for weeks.

"Confession is good for the soul" is more than a hackneyed saying. It's an unalterable truth.

A man I know, a responsible, loving father, not a Christian, huddled with me one night in a corner at a party. He began telling me about his past history of drug abuse and the combination of guilt and foreboding for his children that personal history caused him. He was afraid that his body had sustained permanent damage, afraid too that his past would become known to his children and blunt his efforts to keep his kids from making the same mistakes that he had made.

But after recounting his concerns, without our discussing any potential solutions, a look of relief crossed his face. With a smile, he alluded to the adage about confession and said, "I guess it's true. Confession really is good for the soul!"

The Bible teaches that confessing to God regarding the ways we hurt God, others, and ourselves, is an essential element to a relationship with God. To those who want life with God, Jesus says, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (Mark 1:15). The Good News to which Jesus refers, of course, is the message that God gives new and everlasting lives to all who will repent--turn from their sins--and follow Christ.

I find that divulging my secrets to God, secrets that He already knows about but never forces me to discuss with Him, is always the beginning of healing from the things that might otherwise kill me--in body, mind, and spirit.

Israel's King David learned all about the pain created by keeping dark secrets and about the healing power that goes with confessing them. Recalling a time when he refused to discuss his secrets with God, David writes:

While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long.

For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer...

Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,” and you forgave the guilt of my sin. [Psalm 32:3-5]

We Lutherans, like many other Christians, always include confession and the proclamation of God's forgiveness as part of our weekly public worship celebrations. There are several good reasons for doing this, I think:

• First, by doing so, we acknowledge that all of us are part of an imperfect human race, each of us in equal need of God's forgiveness and equally worthy of it.
• Second, we deliberately set aside time to actually confess our sin and receive God's forgiveness.
• Third, we remind one another that confession needs to be a daily part of our lives, regularly acknowledging our secrets to God so that we can experience the healing that comes from His forgiveness.

The Bible teaches that the wages of sin is death. Having experienced the heavy weight of unconfessed sin in my life, I know how close to death a person can feel when he or she refuses to acknowledge the dark places. One of the prayers I frequently offer, in fact, is, "Thank You, God for not killing me. Thank You for filling me with Your life!" I agree with John, who writes in that drop-in box in Yancey's book:

The fact that we're still alive shows that God has more tolerance for whatever those secrets represent than we may give God credit for.

There's nothing we can't tell God. He's shockproof and He bears healing in His wings. Revealing our dark places to God isn't some odious duty. It's a privilege that brings renewal and life!