Sermon Title: -“Endurance produces character and character produces hope” - Pastor John
Grace and Peace to you from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.
In 2002, I went with the Methodist Church in Parkville on a mission trip to El Salvador to build houses for families headed by women. We stayed in a village high in the mountains and I became friends with the Lutheran Pastors there, Francisco and Maria. They did a tent-making ministry. They had a tailoring shop, worked for the Red Cross as ambulance drivers and led two small congregations. I used their internet to email home. They were beautiful people. Giving, spirit-filled, peaceful, and loving; everything you would expect from pastors.
El Salvador is one of those banana republics that is always having constant trouble and violence. Two percent of the people own 90% of the wealth and most of the folks live in grinding poverty. The church speaks out against this injustice and I suppose for that reason these two loving, good people were gunned down in cold blood last week. I went cold when I heard the news. Rarely does violence like this touch my life.
In today’s lesson from St. Mark, Jesus says “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars but do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. It’s a grim picture. The words were spoken nearly 2000 years ago but words like them are repeated on the nightly news and in the headlines of the morning paper.
We get news from Iraq and the picture is grim.
The peace process between Israel and her neighbors is stalled again. North Korea acts out. , Iran, in fear, behaves suspiciously and the mad violence of 9-11-01 still haunts us.
Our lesson from Mark begins with one of Jesus’ disciples marveling at the great Jerusalem Temple – a huge building – the architectural achievement of its time in Israel. Kind of a sacred equivalent to our Twin Towers that were destroyed like Jesus predicts the destruction of the temple “Not one stone will be left upon another.”
All this bad news is pretty depressing, and can leave you feeling kind of hopeless, but these impressions are not the whole story. In our lesson from the book of Daniel, comes a powerful word of promise, and of hope. Michael, this is the Archangel Michael, the Major General of the whole host of God’s angelic forces and troops will come to Israel’s aid. Angels were agents of God’s power. In a little known passage from Isaiah, God sent just one to help King Hezekiah with his war with the Assyrian King Sennecharib’s army.
Sennecharib’s army had surrounded Jerusalem and was laying siege to it. The people inside the city were starving to death. In answer to their prayers and entreaties, God sent a single angel and destroyed the whole Assyrian army,185,000 men. We don’t know the details of how it happened or the method the angel used. This word stands in scripture as evidence that there are times that God simply intervenes in human affairs. It bears witness also to God’s vast power. If one angel can “off” 185,000 soldiers, imagine what a troop could do, or a regiment, or an army of them? We have domesticated angels and made them simple, sweet, benign social workers. But almost always, whenever an angel appears to a human being – the result is as the Old Kings James Bible puts it: “They were sore afraid”; in other words; terrified, freaked out, scared witless.
Daniel reminds them of that great power in order to restore their hope. He writes to inform them that with God on their side they don’t have to succumb to fear.
There is more here. Daniel speaks of a resurrection of the righteous. He is speaking to a people held in captivity. Daniel’s words were written about 3 centuries before Christ’s birth and Israel was under the thumb of another foreign, oppressor, a descendant of Alexander the Great, named Antiochus Epiphanies. He made the Romans look absolutely benign in comparison. He sacrificed hogs on the altar of the temple in Jerusalem, set up his own image in the Temple and insisted that the Israelites worship him. Those that refused were killed. He was a tyr ant and a thug. Under such oppression the Israelites people nearly gave up hope. They felt abandoned, rejected.
Daniels word was and is a word of hope. “The Archangel Michael is coming. God will send him to protect you, more then that, those who have died as martyrs will live again in a resurrection which will vindicate their faith’.
I have been reading a marvelous book lately called “Simply Christian”. It is an introduction to the Christian faith for newcomers – but believe me, it has plenty to say to us old timers in the faith too. One of the things the author says is that all of us have some kind of mental “model”, if you will, of how God relates to the world.
One model suggests that God is a great force or power and that God exists in all things. God empowers life but doesn’t really direct it too much. Such a view is called pantheism - “pan” meaning all, “theos” from the Greek for God – God in all things. Like any of the three basic models it has some attractive qualities. It accounts for natural evil like floods or tsunamis and gets God off the hook for responsibility for lots of things.
Another model is Deism. In this model, God was creator and did create the world but “past tense”. In this model, God watches the world – as the old song goes “from a distance”, but is detached. God in this model, kind of lets the world happen like a clock that was wound up, and is slowly unwinding. Prayer to this God doesn’t make too much sense and people who believe in this model of God don’t pray very much – why would they? God has kind of “retired” and is in some cosmic resort just watching life happen but never intervening.
The third model he describes is of course the model that the Bible presents. In this model, God is everywhere in the world he has loved and created, the world he prizes as his first born. And God in this model is vast, powerful and yet at the same time tender and caring. The world of God and the world of humans are overlapping, interacting one world. God is before, behind, above, below, beside, around and even in us. Prayer to this God makes sense. When entreated, God reverses his own cause and affect order. He cur es cancer, tuberculosis, or reverses heart disease as an act of sheer grace and love. We call these interventions miracles because whenever they happen – our reaction is to stand stupefied, dumb of speech, just standing, staring with our mouth hanging open. At will, God opens the door between his divine world and our profane one whenever we call on him. When we pray. When we baptize and through his power create another citizen of the Kingdom. When we offer him bread and wine, he makes a divine leap straight into it and turns it into himself – so that we are cleansed, freed and fed at the same time. This same God sends Michael and all his angelic lost whenever we ask for rescue. So have no fear. You are safe.
God reigns. Be at peace. Amen.
Who We Are