If this sermon works well then I will probably offend all of you before I’m done, and then add to that by giving a depressing message. But only then can we truly be in a place to understand God’s grace and know how to joyfully live in forgiveness.
I’ve long read the Bible passages
about the disciples arguing among themselves as who was the greatest as if they
were adolescent boys posturing for dominance in some toxic masculinity sort of
way. I’ve wondered how shallow and
selfish they must have been! How did
Jesus put up with them, and why did Jesus select this bunch of nitwits? Surely there were better people that he could
have selected. But more recently I’ve
begun to question these ideas. Have I
been turning them into caricatures I could easily cast aside instead of
realizing their dynamics are very common today?
Perhaps they were actually as bad as I’m apt to caricaturize them, but I
suspect not.
Something that has been growing
worse for decades, but it has gotten especially prominent since the last
presidential election, is moral posturing and virtue signaling. And are not moral posturing and virtue
signaling any different than arguing over who is the greatest? All sides seem to do it, and in doing so all
sides miss the truth. Here is where I’m
likely to offend all of you.
Many on the
conservative side of things praise President Trump. However, as conservative author David Brooks
pointed out in his recent address to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship,
this is a fundamental mistake. Trump is
not conservative. He is
anti-liberal. His policies are irrational
and inconsistent. They’re dangerous and
weaken the nation at home and abroad. You cannot undermine the legislative and
judicial branches of government by declaring everything to be an emergency. At the very beginning of his term his
surrogates called the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America a money-laundering
organization. He has wreaked havoc in
our social service programs, immigrant resettlement programs, and threatens our
mission work worldwide. People the
Lutheran church used to care for nationally and internationally are dying
because of him. So called government
efficiency is, as far as I can tell, excuses to go after everything an
anti-liberal doesn’t like. There is
serious fear within the Rochester area by Lutheran pastors. I have not personally been threatened by
federal officials, but colleagues in the area have.
Perhaps you are a conservative who
is opposed to Trump. There are plenty of
people like that. They’ve gone pretty
quiet lately out of fear. But rarely do
I meet conservatives like David Brooks who can also critique
conservativism. Conservative approaches
can stall progress, create divisions, and not recognize that systems cause
problems powerless people cannot get out of.
Trump supporter, or conservative against Trump, it easily comes in line
with the disciples arguing for who is the greatest.
But if you’re on the liberal side of
things the same dynamics are happening.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is truly on the liberal side
of things. Most of its policies reflect
the attitudes of the educated elite.
Fancy words and sophisticated concepts are thrown around all the
time. They site endless studies and
claim to what they call unbiased do scientific research, but their perspectives
show ignorance of: hard manual labor, the dynamics of rural communities, commercial
production, and present-day agriculture.
Liberals have become great at virtue signaling. Clothes and cars are chosen to send the
message of their so-called enlightenment.
They shop at stores and farmers buying locally sourced organic produce,
and ethically sourced commercial goods, claiming they are good environmentalists,
good humanitarians, and stewards of the earth.
They’ll write letters, attend rallies, create policies, and fight on
behalf of whatever minority happens to be the shiny object of the moment, yet
never be willing to do hard tedious manual labor, and think themselves good
people. Is this also not arguing who is
the greatest?
Have I managed to offend you
yet? All sides seem to create
caricatures of the other and then hole up within their self-built
righteousness.
Now that I’ve offended you, it is
time to depress you. Evil is clever,
very clever. It is thrilled to have us
pointing at each other. While each side
has merits to its case it also does have evil elements. Evil is thrilled to have us consume our time
and efforts pointing fingers and arguing over who is the greatest. Doing so keeps us from seeing the real
problems. We try to take the speck out
of our neighbor’s eye and miss the log in our own.
Evil is truly clever. Among its more clever things is to turn good
into a destructive bad. Last year one of
my doctoral courses had best-selling author Joanna Penn as a guest. She’s written over 40 books of multiple
types. She’s a British author, and like
many British authors she is particularly adept at creating villains. I asked her how she went about creating an
evil character. She said she started by
finding something good within herself.
And then she’d push that good just a little too far until it became
destructive. In one of her books there
is a woman who has a heart for saving the environment. After much soul-searching the woman realizes
the only way to truly ensure environmental safety is to cause the extinction of
one particular species – humans.
Here's a trick of
evil. I think we’d all agree that health
care is a good thing. We’d also agree
that we should care for the elderly, the weak, and the disabled. We don’t kill off a person as soon as he or
she consumes more from society than they give to society. And yet, the greater the health care the
weaker humans become. In the natural
world those who are not fit and vital die quickly. They do not become a burden.
For one of my
son’s recent college classes they used computer models and artificial
intelligence to speculate about what good health care does to human
genetics. Good healthcare undermines one
of the fundamental dynamics of evolutionary health. It allows the weak the opportunity to pass on
their genetics. It should be no surprise
when I tell you that my son’s computer models predict humans will quickly
become less physically strong and less intelligent.
Is healthcare
therefore bad? Yet it is undeniably
dooming us! Actually, we don’t have to
worry about that. Our level of health
and way of life will collapse long before we become genetically weak. I’ve preached in the recent past that
according to geologist Scott Tinker we need to reduce our energy consumption by
93% if we want the planet to survive. That
means immediately stopping life as we know it.
We also need to eliminate at least 6 billion people from the earth
because the earth cannot sustain the human population. From what I understand we’ve already passed
the tipping point. There is no going
back. The damage is done and things will
only get worse.
To withhold basic care from a
suffering and struggling human is evil.
The Bible tells us over and over again to offer care. Yet providing it is destroying us and so is ultimately
evil as well.
Do you see how clever evil is? And this is just one example. It happens all the time. Yet as long as we keep our moral posturing
arguing over who is the greatest, evil (in is subtlest form) is allowed to run
unchecked.
Simple fact. We’re in a mess. We can’t get out of it. We’ve all contributed to it. We’re ruining God’s good creation and we have
no good options before us. I told you at
the beginning I would make you angry and then depress you.
In our gospel reading James and John
wanted to call down divine wrath upon towns of foreigners who didn’t accept
Jesus. Then several would-be followers
wanted to follow Jesus. They each had
rational excuses for a delay. Jesus
rejected them. Jesus was focused on
Jerusalem and his crucifixion that would happen there. That would be the price of defeating
evil. By all worldly judgements and
perspectives it was nonsense; but all worldly judgements and perspectives end
up having evil weave itself into them.
So here’s the truth. Only when we can go to God realizing that we
are trapped, helpless, and broken are we truly in a place to be amazed by God’s
grace. Only when we realize how trapped,
helpless, and broken we are are we able to have the authentic humility needed
to work in God’s kingdom for the future.
Our culture: its conservatives, liberals, and any philosophical
perspective that thinks it has the ultimate answers, does not like the truth of
evil or the cross it leads Jesus to.
A happy future, and the happy ending
to a dark sermon, is to be in awe of God’s boundless forgiveness for us. It is to know that God loves us, and delights
in us, even as we endlessly make messes of everything we touch.
What do we then do? How do we act? How do we work through messes that even our
best efforts cause, things like the side effects of having basic healthcare for
sick people?
We endlessly root ourselves in the
humility of our sinfulness. Martin
Luther’s ever famous quote in a letter to Philip Melanchthon comes to mind:
“Sin and sin boldly, but rejoice in Christ more boldly still.” It is not by dwelling in our sinfulness that
gets us out of it. It is by rejoicing in
Christ that we have the perspective we need to be able to engage evil. Again from Martin Luther, the words of the
hymn A Mighty Fortress. This is a German
to English translation from centuries ago:
“For still our
ancient foe, forsworn to work us woe, with guile and dreadful might is armed to
wage the fight: on earth there is no equal.
“If we in our own
strength confide, our striving turns to losing; the righteous one fights by our
side, the one of God’s own choosing.
“…Let goods and
kindred go, this mortal life also; though all of these be gone, they yet have
nothing won. The kingdom’s our forever!”
Luther’s truthful thoughts are an
expression of complete humility yet absolutely bold defiance because of the
security of God’s love. It is
helplessness that is rooted in hope that is beyond us. When that perspective is applied to the
world’s problems the answers are neither flashy nor easy (and they are never
popular or will be widely embraced by humanity) but they are the end of evil
and the beginning of God’s kingdom.
This will never be fully realized in
the world. God alone can bring it
about. But it lets us live with bold
defiance with faith in God’s promises. It
gives us hope in the face of hopelessness, and can let us navigate the
inevitable mess of evil with true love.
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