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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of The Holy Spirit. Amen.
Grace, mercy and peace be to you …
Our readings for this morning have a real lament about them. Jeremiah, St. Paul and Jesus … all lamenting the hard hearts they were encountering as they spoke a call to repentance that reflected God’s love. “I love You! Come Back to Me,” God was saying through these men of old …
But, if we were to sum up the reaction to that message … we might do so by borrowing the old cliché “Kill the messenger!”
Jeremiah even addressed his audience on that point … that if they do they are thinking of doing, Killing the messenger … they will be guilty of shedding innocent blood.
St. Paul felt that same rejection by those to whom He was sent. And now, he is anticipating being killed as God’s Messenger at the hands of the Romans after being accused and turned over to them by his own countrymen.
And in Luke’s Gospel, we see Jesus being warned that Herod Antipas was plotting the same fate for Jesus.
“Kill the messenger!” How many of the Old Testament prophets can we name that suffered that fate, right up through John the Baptist?
And then, in the New Testament … we see the Romans being manipulated by the Jews into being their executioner of choice when it came to Jesus and St. Paul.
But look at what’s common for all three of these “Messengers.” Tears. Not tears for themselves … but tears for those who were rejecting God’s message of Love, His call to “Come Back.”
Another thing all three shared is that they were sent to people who thought permanently silencing the messenger would silence the One who sent the message.
So we move from Killing the Messenger … to Killing God. Didn’t they realize that God is bigger than the one speaking for Him? That is a critical question.
It would seem that if they DID recognize God as God, then they’d know that just killing the messenger was only a temporary solution … And perhaps more importantly … if God really is God … shouldn’t they fear His punishment? His retribution for their acts of violence against those He had sent??
But it seems none of them expect either temporal or eternal punishment or consequences for these acts of violence. It almost seems for them … God simply does not exist…
Or if he does … He is only able to act through people like Jeremiah, John the Baptist, Jesus and St. Paul … apparently simple mortal men.
It would seem, then, to control His messengers is to control God … and so … by killing them … you silence God. And as God does not seem to intervene … they conclude that God is helpless to do anything about it.
One of Jesus’ calls to repentance was a parable of a vineyard owner who had rented out his vineyard to tenants who refused to pay their rent. So the owner sent messenger after messenger asking for his due … only to have the tenants treat these messengers the same way the prophets of old were treated.
And so, then, the owner determines to send his own son, assuming the tenants would respect the son as the rightful heir of the property. But what to the tenants do? They kill the son … seeing that as the opportunity to take his inheritance for themselves.
In this Parable, Jesus was exposing the motive of those whom He was weeping over. They were fully intending to silence God, kill Him, as it were, so that what belonged to God… would be theirs.
Now… we can see that same motivation at work in those Jeremiah found himself up against … and also in those whom St. Paul referred to as having their carnal pleasures, their bellies, as their god …
They all wanted what was God’s. In the Parable it was a piece of property that produced fruit. But Spiritually … that piece of property represented the kingdom of God on earth.
They wanted the worship of the people due God. Look at how the Pharisees and those in charge, the Herod’s, acted in Jesus’ day.
In the book of Acts we see one Herod die… consumed by worms… because He saw Himself as god in the eyes of the people.
But you see the logic?… If you kill God; you can take over what is His!
Well, all this is a great history lesson, right? Well, the problem these texts put before us is that we are also guilty of the same sin. We … Kill … God.
“Wait, Pastor, that’s not us! We’re here to worship Him. We love Him. We’re not like those we see in our readings!”
Sorry. Our purity of heart is deception of Satan. We ARE those people. It’s true, in faith, God does see us with the purity of Christ. But, as we live in the world … we live as sinners. And sinners are .. by nature … enemies of God …
Don’t fool yourself. In spite of God’s forgiveness … God doesn’t go along with your sinning. He just doesn’t sit up there in heaven and wink at you when what you’re doing is really abhorrent to Him.
He doesn’t sit back and say, “Oh, I’m so sorry, you couldn’t help yourself … that’s all right. Don’t worry about it. I’ll let it pass.”
No, for Your sake, He doesn’t let it pass. He sends messengers to you … seeking your repentance.//
It is true … out of God’s mercy for the sake of Jesus’ suffering, death, and resurrection … He doesn’t punish you for what you’ve done. Because of the faith He’s given you, Jesus is your scapegoat. And so God punished Jesus on the cross for what you just did…
But does He ignore your sin? No. Why? Because it is injurious to your spiritual well being. And remaining in sin can lead to the shipwreck of your faith.
And so … to you, God sends His messengers. One messenger you can’t ignore … is your conscience. You could call that your moral compass.
Interesting thing about consciences is that they come pre-programmed. St. Paul speaks of it as the fact that we come into the world having God’s Law written on our hearts.
And that is an anthropological fact. It has been verified that even peoples with no knowledge of the God of the Bible … have made their own laws which are not in conflict with, and most often reflect, the Ten Commandments.
So … what do you do when your conscience … is God’s messenger? You can repent. Or You can Kill it …
David did that after his affair with Bathsheba and the murder of her husband, Uriah the Hittite. David killed God … by killing his conscience. But God didn’t give up.
God sent a messenger in the flesh by the name of Nathan. What do you do when faced with that … ? Well in David’s case, he did repent.
But … you can also react like Herod Antipas did after God sent John the Baptist to him to seek his repentance for his taking his brother’s wife. Herod reacted by imprisoning John, only to be deceived later into having John beheaded.
Kill God. We do it, my friends, as much as we don’t want to admit it. Like the characters we see in our readings for today… when we, like they… refuse to repent … that’s what we are doing. .. killing God.
We’re taking God off the throne of our hearts and replacing Him with ourselves. The end result is … we behave as if God didn’t exist. That we don’t owe Him anything when it comes to our past …nor our future behavior … How dead can He be?
Now, you’re right … we didn’t REALLY kill him. But that’s exactly how we act. Unrepentant and hard hearted. The good thing is, because God really isn’t dead … He never gives up trying to call us back.
Jesus stricken, smitten and afflicted … and even nailed to the cross never gave up trying to calling his enemies to repentance. That even worked … witness the salvation promised to the one thief having heard Jesus’ words from the Cross.
And so, the word to us from God today is: … LOVE the messenger. Whether that messenger be your conscience, the Bible, your friend in the next pew … or even one of God’s favorite messengers … one of your own little children …
When the message is “Come Back.” Listen. Call upon the power of the Holy Spirit to Repent. Make amends as appropriate. And live there after in the Light of God’s grace.
Come Back. It’s what this season of Lent is all about.
In Him. Amen.
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