Pentecost XVII (Proper 21 B) [Mark 9:38-50] (27-Sept-2015)

This sermon was preached at St Mark's Lutheran Church, Mt Barker, 8.30am, 10.30am.

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Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ.

If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to be thrown into hell.

Prayer: Dear Lord Jesus, send to all of us your Holy Spirit, to me that I may preach well, and to all of us that we may hear well. Amen.

There are so many important themes in today’s Gospel reading, but we’ll focus mostly on verses 42-48 which in my bible has the heading “Temptations to sin”. This reading contain something we don’t hear too often, and something that the world doesn’t want to hear at all. They contain some words of Jesus that we may not be too comfortable with either. That’s why we’ll take some time and look at these verses and their relevance for us today.

When we look at these verses we could say that they don’t seem to be too friendly. They have in them the word ‘sin’ four times. Four times in a few verses. What is even worse, they contain the word ‘hell’ three times. And also three explanatory phrases which tells what the hell is like.

Some people might think – so we as Christians still need to talk about sin and hell? After all, it is the 21st century! Aren’t we past all of that? Aren’t we much more enlightened and knowledgeable to need to talk about these “irrelevant” words? Isn’t Jesus’ message all about love and acceptance and not judging anyone?

In recent times, words like “sin” and “hell”, and the message related to them have become very difficult to swallow for those Christians who don’t trust the bible as God’s Word and his own revelation from heaven. Some people have come up with a different picture of Christ, and with different message from God. One writer once said that people believe in: “a God without wrath who brought [people] without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the service of a Christ without a Cross.”

When one gets influenced by this message, it really is quite difficult to deal with words like sin and hell – and many people simply have hard hearts when it comes to talking about these things. In the 1980s, some scholars in America who believed in this ‘God without wrath and Jesus without a Cross’ founded what they called “Jesus Seminar”.

One of their projects was to find which words in the New Testament really came from Jesus and which are simply invented by human beings. How could they know it? Of course, by means of voting. They decided to vote and then count votes.

So they looked as the New Testament passages and voted: “This seems to be from Jesus. This perhaps was from Jesus. This definitely doesn’t feel like it is from Jesus.” We can be pretty sure that according to these people, most of reading for today wasn’t from Jesus.

Here in our church, in the Lutheran Church of Australia, we have a different take on the Bible.This is what we believe: “We accept without reservation the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, as a whole and in all their parts, as the divinely inspired, written and inerrant Word of God, and as the only infallible source and norm for all matters of faith, doctrine, and life.”

If this is true, then also these verses about sin and hell are the inerrant Word of God. Inerrant means there are “no mistakes”, “no errors”. And they are the infallible source and norm for our faith and life. Infallible means everything the bible says is true. So let’s have a look at our reading and see what can we learn from it that is relevant for us also today.

Let’s think a little bit. Why are these words so difficult for us these days? Sin. Hell. Why? There must be something wrong with our understanding that makes us feel uneasy about these words, and especially about the reality they refer to.

There are at least two things that are wrong. The first thing that is wrong is our picture of God. The second thing that is wrong is our focus. First, let’s talk about our picture of God. I think we all are influenced by this totally unbiblical idea of ‘God without wrath and Jesus without a Cross’.

It seems much nicer to think about God as a God of acceptance and inclusivity. ‘Don’t worry about God, He is too good to judge anyone (maybe except Hitler and Stalin). You’ll be just fine! She’ll be right, mate! Keep on doing whatever you want.’

Maybe it may seem nicer, but it is not true, and second, it is not actually nicer at all. When people try to make their own god after their own image and likeness, they think of him as of one of us.

Remember, the God we worship, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Holy Trinity, eternal and almighty, He is our Creator, the Creator of the Universe. He is the One whose almighty word holds everything together. He created everything with a purpose.

He created human beings in His image and likeness. And we are His representatives to care for His creation. In the Bible God often uses the imagery of a vineyard in talking about His people, and compares people with trees. This image helps us to see things differently.

We and God are not on the same level. No! God is not one of us. He is a holy, eternal and almighty being. Now imagine that you have planted some trees in your backyard, in your beautiful garden. You expect the trees to produce fruit. But they don’t.

You water them, you fertilize them, you care for them, but… no fruit. Instead, they dry out the soil, they infect and corrupt other plants, gradually they destroy your wonderful garden, everything you care about. What would you do?

You cut these trees out and burn them to save and cleanse your garden. It is that simple. The solution is so obvious. Now we are like these trees. We are fruitless, we don’t do what we are created to do, we just use everything for our own benefit, and corrupt all that is important for our Creator. What is He supposed to do?

If He cares for His creation at all, then don’t you think he would clean up his garden, and purify it from all evil and to restore it in its goodness? He must get rid of all evil that corrupts His good creation. And this is what He is going to do.

So how does Jesus describe all of this? How does he describe hell? We can try to summarize it by saying that this will be a place where there is no presence of God, or His gifts -- no peace, no joy, no light, not warmth … only pure evil. This will be a place of outer darkness, of fear and trembling, of eternal, unquenchable fire, where their worm doesn’t die. This is how Jesus describes it.

Now -- someone might say, but how can a loving God desire something like that for anyone? Well, He doesn’t desire that all, because He is loving and caring God. This is where we get to our second thing that is wrong with our thinking. We have a wrong focus.

When we hear words like sin and hell, our sinful nature, our flesh, our sinful self plays a trick on us and we end up having the wrong focus. Imagine the situation where you see a doctor. Everything seems fine, you enjoy your life, all is good. Then suddenly he says: “You have a heart decease, nothing can be done, you have not too much time left. You will die. Unless you get a new heart.”

But then he goes on and offers his heart to you, so that you can live. He gives up his life so that only you can live. Now think about this. What is shocking in it? Where is our focus? What is so unbelievable about it?

Is it the diagnosis of heart disease that is most shocking? No! The most shocking thing it the doctor! He gives up his life for you. Why would he want to do that? What kind of a sacrifice is this? This is something that our minds are completely unable to comprehend. Most people would perceive it.

But now, look at what Jesus says. He tells us in His word that our sin is such a devastating disease that all we’ll die, and the evil of our sin has to be purified, it has to be destroyed once and for all to stop it from destroying everything else.

In the Book of Concord, our Lutheran confession of faith, we read something where Martin Luther wrote: “[Our] sin has caused such a deep, evil corruption of [our] nature that reason does not comprehend it; rather, it must be believed on the basis of the revelation in the Scriptures.” Do you understand what this means? Nobody knows what sin is and how serious it is—only the bible can tell us what our sin is and how serious it is.

This is how Jesus illustrates how serious our sin is. He says: If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out. It is better for you to enter life crippled or lame or with one eye than be thrown into hell, ‘where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.

Jesus doesn’t mean it literally—and I think most Christians have understood this. I’ve never been part of a church or heard of a church where most people have a hand or an eye missing. (Actually, I was once part of a congregation where every man in the congregation except me had a missing finger from farming or industrial accidents. Things like this make a piano player like me a bit nervous!) But even we did cut off our hands and pluck our eyes out of their sockets, we wouldn’t be free us from sin anyway, because sin dwells in our hearts. But Jesus shows that even losing the most needed members of our body would be a small price to avoid hell. Jesus is showing us how serious this is.

We couldn’t possible consider God good and just and loving if He allowed sin to exist forever. There is no hope for Paradise and eternal life and eternal joy and heaven, if sin remains. Sin has to be destroyed.

This is what the hell is about. God purifies His wonderful creation from all evil and corruption, and he dumps it in the garbage. It is His triumph of justice. He restores the beauty and the goodness of his creation.

So, let’s imagine again that Jesus is our doctor. We go to the doctor and the doctor says: ‘You are going to die because of you sin.’ And this is where people get it wrong. They get offended or upset that someone has told them what’s wrong with them. They say: “What? I’m going to die? I’m getting a second opinion.”

A doctor’s diagnosis that really matters is one that is not only for this life, but for eternity. This is what is wrong with us, we focus on this diagnosis as if it were the main message. We focus on a wrong part of Jesus’ message.

Then we get all cross and upset about the diagnosis, and we don’t hear the most important part. Jesus says: “I love you so much, that I give up my life, my heart, myself so that only you can live. I have a solution that will bring you healing and life, eternal life.

I have a solution that will rescue you from the hell. God won’t have to destroy you, because I have taken your sin and evil on the cross, and I give you my righteousness and goodness. This is why I have come. This is why I speak to you. This is what I want you to receive.”

Jesus Christ is your true Doctor, and he is your Redeemer. He gives His life in exchange for yours. He offers you salvation and life, rescues you from hell, He offers you His forgiveness – and this forgiveness is the only possible treatment for your diagnosis.

But so often we have a wrong focus… Instead of looking at Jesus and rejoicing in God’s wonderful gift of eternal life, we get upset and ticked off about the diagnosis. This is how our sinful nature tricks us.

If we needed to summarize God’s message to us then this is it. Everything was created very good. But then through the disobedience of our first parents sin and death came into this world. But because our loving Triune God so loves His creation, He will purify it from all sin and evil, and He will restore its perfect goodness.

But because He loves so much, because He loves His little and rebellious creatures, created in His image, He will do whatever it takes, to rescue us from eternal destruction, He even gives up His life and creates for us a rescue path in Jesus Christ.

This is why Jesus says: I am the way and the truth and the life. This is Jesus’ message. This is what He tells you.

Once we have a right picture of who the holy and eternal God is, how serious our sin is, once we get our focus right - on our loving Doctor, not on diagnosis, then we can see that these words ‘sin’ and ‘hell’ are not hard anymore.

They help us to see and appreciate even more what the Son of God, Jesus Christ has done for us and what He still does for us today. Today in our church we are having a baptism where Jesus himself comes to pour out his forgiveness and his salvation and his eternal life upon a new little child today, and we ask that the Holy Spirit would create a living faith in this child so that he may always remember what his Saviour Jesus has given to him in Holy Baptism.

Also, back in April, I preached about the Lord’s Supper. Now if you were there, do you remember something that the ancient church called the Holy Communion? The medicine of immortality. When we go to the Lord’s Supper, this is what Jesus gives us. We will receive the medicine of eternal life, of immortality.

The same body that Jesus gave for you, the same blood that the Son of God shed for you, to rescue you from sin and eternal destruction. He gives you this wonderful sacrament, so that you can rejoice in His words, and you can rejoice in his word in all its parts, and so that we can recognize how serious our sin is, so that we can appreciate and rejoice in God’s plan to destroy all sin and evil, and be grateful for the life that Jesus Christ gives us.

Don’t be ashamed of Jesus words. Have the right focus – on our Divine Doctor. This doctor gives you himself as your Saviour, so that we can love each other and care for each other, and so that we can tell others about their diagnosis and God’s wonderful solution that is freely offered and given to everyone.

Amen.

Dear Lord Jesus, we thank you for caring for us enough not to hide the truth from us about who we really are, hopeless and helpless sinners. But even more we praise and thank you for not hiding the truth from us about who you are and about what you have done for us on the cross. Dear Jesus, we place ourselves into your loving hands. Amen.