Im quite ashamed of my blogging performance in the past few months. I had a crazy summer and restarted my seminary career this fall while still serving part time at Lebanon. That being said, my blog has been very silent. I know this is a lame way to kick off my reawakening, but here is the sermon that I gave this morning in my Homiletics class. There are a few things that I said in the sermon that were not in the manuscript, but you will get the point. Feedback, as always, is very much appreciated. Here's to new beginnings...
At first glance, this passage is mortifying. We read first that the word of God is living and active! We respond with Yes, amen! God’s word speaks to us in fresh ways every time we pick the blessed book up! And then we continue reading…The word of God is sharper than any two-edged sword and it pierces right through you, dividing soul from spirit and joints from marrow. It can even peer through your pretense to judge the content of your heart! And now our response is Oh wow, this is certainly not what I signed up for!
The word of God that we read about in early portion of our Scripture, the law, has no feelings. It does not care how ashamed of your evil or misguided deeds you are. It is concerned that you are made quite well aware of your sinfulness. It is there to point out to you and everybody else that you are not good enough. Hebrews puts it in terms of “being laid bare.” While this immediately conjures up images of being nude and exposed, these same words are used in Greek to express the frightening image of bending the person’s neck backwards to be exposed to the sacrificial knife.
Personally, I hate the idea of my neck being bent backwards. Now my reason for that is certainly a bit silly. I was always pulling up my collar and guarding my neck in the dark because I was afraid of vampires. My mother actually recently confessed to me that it was her fault that I had this irrational fear as a child because she let me watch the Lost Boys, a movie about teenage vampires, somewhere around the time when I heading to Preschool. Now you may not be afraid of vampires, but none of use prefers to feel vulnerable.
Try as we might, we are unable to keep our guard up or hide in the presence of God. The most common analogy to this revealing function of the word of God is a surgeon with his scalpel. And while no one can be faulted for making the reference because the passage describes the word of God as a sword, both of these references are completely foreign to the majority of us. Unless you are a surgeon or a Medieval War re-enactor, chances are you have little experience with swords or scalpels. So I would like to offer up the vegetable peeler as a modern example. The word of God is sharper than any dual edged vegetable peeler. Sounds a little emasculating to go from a sword to a vegetable peeler, but there is certainly truth to be found here.
Think about what a vegetable peeler does. It fairly easily strips off the layers of whatever you are using it on. Now think about how we function as people. We love layers. We don’t want anyone to know our business. Sure, we sign up for Facebook and MySpace and Twitter so we can tell the world that we just had the best Turkey Club of our lives, but we wouldn’t post our deepest thoughts out there for all to see, would we? We don’t want anyone to know our deepest sins, and the things that truly beset us. So we hide. We hide behind pretense. We hide behind a lie. We hide behind a smile.
No one likes to be caught in his or her sin.
In the 1950’s there was a woman by the name of Marion Keech. One day Marion believed that her body had been overtaken and she had received a message from a being named Sananda. Sananda told Marion that at midnight on December 21st the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean would rise causing a great flood that would destroy the would. Of course, the only way to be saved from this disaster would be to believe in Sananda and await the rescue spaceship that she would send. Although not evangelistic, word spread about Marion and the impending disaster and converts were made. Doctors left their lucrative posts, families literally sold the farm along with all of their other belongings, and on the evening of December 21st, they all gathered in the living room of the Keech residence. Listening to the ticking of the clock and waiting intently for their rescue spacecraft to land curbside, Marion and her followers watched as midnight came and went. As the reality of burned bridges and unfulfilled expectations came crashing down, some wept openly while others stared blankly. Marion was faced with the consequences that she was wrong and she was going to be held accountable by those who had placed their lives in her hands. So what does she do? Like so many of us, Marion searched for a way out. Thinking quickly, she had a new revelation from Sananda claiming that due to the faithfulness of her followers, she had decided to spare the earth from disaster.
We want to make Marion the antagonist of this story. But the truth of the matter is that if we are honest, we can see ourselves in her. We too have been guilty of dishonesty. We too have been guilty of covering up our misdeeds with more misdeeds. We have learned how to rationalize so effectively that we are able to fool ourselves along with those around us. We know what it is like to build up walls between ourselves and the truth about ourselves.
These walls get stripped away, one by one, by the discerning word of God. Our layers are stripped away in the presence of the one to whom nothing is hidden.
Having our layers stripped away we find ourselves broken and defenseless. We have come to the realization that we have nowhere left to hide. I would suppose that many of you know what I mean. Maybe this very day you feel as though you have landed at the bottom of the barrel, unable to move under the weight and guilt of your own wrongdoing. Here we feel incapable of doing anything but asking, praying, and reaching out for mercy.
Here enters the Word of God once again in our passage, however not the law that lays us bare and renders us indefensible, but rather the Word of God made flesh in Jesus Christ.
Jesus finds us as the broken people we are and he is able to sympathize with our weakness and our inability to keep ourselves from sinning. Often when we think of sympathizing, we think of someone placing a gentle hand on our shoulder and telling us that they know what we are going through. While this is warming, many times we are left wanting for something more than words. We long for a companion with whom we can struggle. Jesus Christ is that companion. A better translation of Christ’s sympathy here is “to suffer with.” Jesus Christ suffers with you. He knows what it is like to be tempted, in all the ways that we are, because he lived a life just like you and me and was able to overcome sin and death. The very presence of Jesus Christ, the one through whom all things in creation were made cares enough about you to come alongside you as you struggle in your sin and are laid bare by the law.
Thankfully, Christ’s sympathy is not the end of the story. Sympathy does not save nor will it solve your problems. Through Christ’s life, death, and resurrection He has become for us the perfect mediator between God and ourselves. Christ has taken on and relinquished the condemnation of the law for you! As our great high priest, Christ has gone through the heavens and sits at the right hand of the throne of God. He has transformed that throne from the place where judgment is delivered to the place where grace and mercy can be found.
The call of Christ is to come boldly to this throne as you are. Let go of pretending that you are OK. Let go of the notion that you have to be good enough to come to this throne. Let go of your pretense. Let go of your fear. Believe in the name of Jesus Christ and that He has exhausted the sentence of the law for you. Hear his call to come, for the Word of God is no longer condemnation for you, but rather grace and mercy to meet you in your deepest need. Amen.
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