Repentance and Forgiveness of Sins is to be Proclaimed

 Sermon for the Third Sunday of Easter

13 April 2024

Key Verses:

 

Acts 3:19 - “Repent therefore, and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out, …”

 

1 John 3:4-7 - “Everyone who commits sin is guilty of lawlessness; sin is lawlessness. You know that he was revealed to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him. Little children, let no one deceive you. Everyone who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous.”

 

Luke 24: 46-48 - “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.”

 

Message

 

“Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”[1]

 

He is Risen!

 

R:  He is Risen Indeed.

 

Let us pray.

 

“May the meditations of my heart and the words of my mouth be pleasing unto you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.”[2]

 

Amen.

 

Good evening.  Today we continue our celebration of the Easter season as we carry along our way.  We encounter again in the gospel lesson this week, a scene of the risen Lord coming into the very presence of the disciples and apostles.  Last week it was about Thomas Didymus, this week is a collective meeting with instructions and confirmation, but also a core lesson to be brought out.  But before I get into more on the particulars of the lessons, let me get into the thread that I think weaves them together.

 

To me this is two words:  Repentance and Forgiveness

 

We hear these words specifically in the reading from Acts and in the Gospel lesson, but it is also indirectly within the epistle from John and in the Psalm.  But do we understand these words?  I ask this because I too many times and in too many places see them misused or abused.  Perhaps we ought to know what these words actually mean before we presume to understand what the lessons are telling us this week.

 

Let’s start with the first word:  repentance.  For me I always like going back to the original language of the scripture to get a sense of the word being used.  Luke, being a Greco-Roman physician was most likely writing in Greek, and we have solid manuscripts in Greek for both his gospel and for his book on the Acts of the Apostles.[3]  So what is the actual word we render “repentance” or “repent”, in Greek?  Well in the gospel for “repentance” the Greek word is metanoian and in Acts, it is rendered as metanosoate.  The root of both, is simply metanoia, often simply stated as “changing one’s mind” or “to change one’s mind”.[4]  This is a word that is not entirely unfamiliar for us in English and is used occasionally in such publications as Rolling Stone or Forbes.[5]  According to dictionary.com this word means, “a profound, usually spiritual, transformation; conversion.”[6]  A common analogy used for the meaning of this concept is taken directly out of nature/creation in what happens when a caterpillar is transformed in to a butterfly or a moth, called in biology metamorphosis, which is drawn from the same root word.  So, when Christ in the gospel lesson, and Peter in the lesson from Acts, are speaking they are calling for a “changing of mind, that results in a fundamental transformation of our way of life”.  That is what repenting and repentance is about.

 

The other word here is forgiveness.  Again, let’s return to the Greek.  Here for the gospel lesson the Greek that is translated as “forgiveness of sins” is aphesin amartion.  Literally translated is “leave of sins”, but perhaps better verbs might be “remission” [7] or “release”.  So, forgiveness is at its core about a release, remission, a “leaving” of sins.  If you think a bit more on this, you will soon come to realize that “repentance” and “forgiveness” are a bit redundant.  Because, what are we to “repent” from?  What are we to be forgiven of?  Answer:  our sins.  Both of these concepts are all about how we deal with sin.  Thus, we now have third word we need to make sure we have a clear understanding of:  sin.

 

What, then, is sin?  Now this seems like I am going down a rabbit hole of things that you probably thought you had a good handle on, but please bear with me.  Again, let’s go to the Greek in all three of our New Testament lessons today.  We’ve already addressed it in the gospel lesson, but in John’s first epistle it is again amartion and in Acts it is amartias.  From the root of this, you might gather that this has something to do with being “marred” as in “damaged or spoiled to a certain extent; made less perfect, attractive, useful, etc.” or “disfigured or defaced, as by scratches, nicks, scars, or discoloration.”[8]  And to an extent that is getting at it.  But to get a true sense of this, we probably need to go back to our Psalm, which was written in Hebrew, and try to understand this concept that is “sin”.  Now while I can have a chance at navigating Greek, thanks to being an engineer that has seen a math equation with a few Phis or Omegas thrown in for good measure, Hebrew escapes me.  That said, a Methodist pastor that I met in DC, Jason Micheli, provides a detailed analysis of this concept drawing from the Hebrew as well as numerous preeminent theologians such as Karl Barth, Robert Jenson, Reinhold Niebuhr, and others.  As he offers in a recent post, “As a seventeen-year-old convert to the faith, I was taught that sin is ‘missing the mark.’  It was not until much later I realized how problematic it is that such a definition leaves God invisibly assumed.”[9]  He goes on to say that, “[a]ccording to Karl Barth, the only possible definition of sin is that it is what God does not want done.”  “… but the scriptures attest quite thoroughly that there are a good many deeds God does not want done.”[10]  He boils it all down to the reality that “sin is idolatry.”[11]  It’s taking other things as more important than God, in direct violation of the first commandment.  As Jason puts it “[t]o say that to sin is to ‘miss the mark’, misses the mark.  All sin is unbelief and idolatry; it’s a turning away from what the true and living God wants, to whatever else might make us more than a mere creature over and against our fellow creatures.”[12]  He goes on to say that, “[j]ust as sin is not an ethical category [(it’s a theological category)], sin’s opposite is not morality but faith.”[13]

 

So, what does all this have to do with today’s lessons, or more importantly, the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ (aka the season of Easter)?  Well, it is smack dab in the center of things.  As stated in our gospel lesson today, “[t]hus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.  You are witnesses of these things.”[14]  Jesus himself makes it clear that sin, our repentance, and forgiveness are at the very essence of his big “G” gospel in the world.  This thing we call the Church, which is called to witness Christ, is not supposed to be a shiny city on a hill, nor a perfect court of kings and queens, emperors and empresses, or presidents or other civic leaders, nor is it a place of those that self-justify themselves as “saved” and “having a personal relationship with Jesus” as if that is a badge of honor.  No, the Church, is first and foremost a hospital, a place where we are laid out plainly, our wounds for all to see.  It’s a place where we first and always reckon with the fact we are idolaters and false, and rank with unbelief so that we can be the vessels ready to receive Christ and his grace and hope through faith.  The Church needs to be a place to enable metnoia to happen on God’s terms, not ours.  And where we are quicker to forgive before we are forgiven.  We are to follow Christ’s example so that we do “what is right ([forgiving ourselves and those around us]) … just as he is righteous.”[15]  We are people who lean into faith, not just mere morality, even as we must do both.  We know that we must “metanoia therefore, and turn to God so that [our] amartion may be wiped out.”[16]

 

How do we do this?  As Jason offers in his post, borrowing from Karl Barth, this is an “impossible possibility” that “does not lie in the possible possibility of the law, but in the impossible possibility of faith.”[17]  It relies on the thing that is given to us to thwart our sin, to enable us to repent and receive our leave from our sins:  faith.  And this is the heart of the paradox that we must come to in our journeys with God.  His call to us, his utter wooing of us, is for us to give up and give in to him and his love for us.  That is what faith is about.  It is about God and his righteousness over and against any self-righteousness we might pretend to have in this life, whether as a person or as a people or even as a nation.

 

This, then, brings me to a dialogue that I had this week as I prepared today’s sermon.  A bible study partner friend posited on a social media site, the following question:  “Isaiah 26:2 ‘Open the gates that the righteous nation that keeps faith may enter in.’  So, who is this righteous nation?”

 

Here was my response, which may require some after service reading/consideration on your part, but seems utterly relevant to both today’s lessons as well as the time and place we are living in:  “…, this set of verses from Romans comes to mind in response to your post: ‘For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith.  He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus.’[18]  The ‘righteous nation’ is the one which humbles itself through, with, and in Christ:  his life, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension.  That ‘nation’ is what Jesus called ‘the kingdom of God.’  For those of us who abide by the two kingdoms principle, we are both citizens (here, now, and always) of our earthly dominion (in this case the USA, NYS, St. Lawrence County, etc.) as well as this heavenly kingdom.  It is this [latter, preeminent] kingdom, the one that is God, that we pray for in the Lord’s Prayer: ‘thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’[19] 

 

We will not have, anywhere, a fully ‘righteous nation’ or much more of a shadow of one, until the work of his grace, as described in the latter two chapters of Revelation come to pass, here on earth, as a redemption and renewal of creation for all times and all places.[20]  Could we and should we do more in the meantime?  Certainly.  Do we in the US have particular and weighty sins to bear?  Absolutely.  Does that mean that all is lost, or that there are not also redemptive aspects of who we are as an earthly domain?  No, not at all.  There is much good we can and often do in the world, even as the headlines sell you on us at our worst.  It doesn’t mean we get off the hook for our worst, but we need to be careful to not go too far and forget who established things like the liberal international order in the first place, or the reality that we have a society that is so hyper-critical that makes it exceptionally hard to hide or screen us at our worst, or that while imperfect, we’ve aided in the development of numerous democratic, justice, and rule of law efforts in countries throughout the world.  We are lost, no question, but that being lost doesn’t mean we don’t do anything good.  But we can’t and shouldn’t get a messiah complex over our earthly goodness, to the degree we have it, because we cannot and will never be the ‘righteous nation’ of our own doing.”

 

To conclude, may we recognize and recompense with the realty that we need repentance, we need forgiveness and we need “leave from” our sins.  This is true no more or less for ourselves as individuals, ourselves as neighbors and communities, ourselves as states and nations, and ourselves as a species on Earth.  May we earnestly, as a result of a metanoia, do as Christ asks us to do today, through our mind, voices, and actions, to proclaim “repentance and forgiveness of our sins.”[21]

 

Amen.

 

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[1] 1 Corinthians 1:3

[2] Psalm 19:14

[3] While we do not have originals, we have early papyri that are attributable to Luke in the second century AD/CE.

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metanoia_(theology), accessed on 12 April 2024

[5] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/metanoia, accessed on 12 April 2024; Cassady Rosenblum, Rolling Stone, 28 June 2022 and Elizabeth Edwards, Forbes, 12 October 2021

[6] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/metanoia, accessed on 12 April 2024

[7] https://biblicalprospector.blogspot.com/2010/04/remission-of-sins.html

[8] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/marred, accessed on 12 April 2024

[9] https://jasonmicheli.substack.com/p/christians-do-not-sin, accessed on 12 April 2024

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Luke 24: 46-48

[15] Cf. 1 John 3:7

[16] Cf. Acts 3:19

[17] https://jasonmicheli.substack.com/p/christians-do-not-sin, accessed on 12 April 2024

[18] Romans 3:22b-26

[19] Matthew 6:10

[20] Cf. Revelation 21:1-22:4

[21] Luke 24:47

Get Behind me Satan, instead be a “Good Soul”

 

“Grace and peace to you from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ.”[1]

 

Please pray with me.

 

“May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart, be pleasing to you my Lord and my redeemer.”[2] Amen.

 

So I have to level with you all. I suck at “doing Lent”.  Giving up something or taking on a particular orientation or activity for the Lenten season is just not something I do well.  While Jackie is Catholic and there are lingering of the prohibition on eating meat on Fridays in Lent, we routinely ignore it.  I’ve been an eager sharer of various Lenten devotional calendars, especially the interfaith power & light carbon diet Lenten version, but I simply can’t keep on top of them.  For all of my military background, with its requisite disciplines and rhythms of routine, I just really struggle to maintain the discipline that I ought to have during this season.  And I’ll be blunt in saying, that if we listen to the lessons today, you know what, that’s kinda OK.  Because, for all of the goodness that comes from such disciplines, such routines, such rules, such laws, they aren’t the things that, in the end, really matter.  What matters is faith, faith that pervades and is a part of our very essence, not just something we confess at worship on the weekends.

 

What is this faith that I speak?  One of my former congregants, at Hope in Annandale, Virginia,[3] used a phrase “you have a good soul” to describe this faith. As she put it, there’s just something that people of deep and abiding faith exude, that you can’t but see and recognize, that makes it evident that all is right with them and their relationship with God.  And it’s not what they do or don’t do, it’s not about them adhering to this or that set of rules or devotions, it’s just the ease at which they simply exist that makes their faith clairvoyant, which is demonstrative of a “good soul”.

 

So then, what is a “good soul”?  Well, I think today’s lessons get at that very question exceptionally well.  If we take them in order, we start with Abram and how God reckoned with his righteousness through a covenant.  What is not in our verses today is the preceding interlude where God forewarned Abram that he would be the father of many nations, in Genesis chapter 15, and where the pronouncement of Abram’s righteousness is made, namely in verse 6, “And he believed the Lord, and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness”[4].  Abram would between that verse in chapter 15 and the reading we have today, listen to his wife Sarai, being a bit impatient, who recommended Abram lay with Hagar, and ultimately begat Ishmael[5].  Here God again reconciles, knowing what is in Abram’s heart, his “good soul”, and seals the aforementioned reckoning in a covenant that is put into Abram, now turned Abraham’s, very flesh.  We could wax long and deeply on circumcision and its symbology, its physical effects, and much more, but that is not the core of this lesson or even at the core of the covenant God is making with Abraham and Sarah and all of their descendants (which, by the way, includes us).  God in his covenant making, makes it clear that it is not what Abraham has done or not done, it is about his faith and faithfulness to God that has enabled the covenant to come forward, and the penultimate consequence is a form of tangible blessing.  But the core of this is still about the “good soul”.

 

Paul helps us understand this further in his letter to the Romans.  He states clearly, that “[f]or this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham.”[6]  Paul goes on to further clarify this point that “[t]herefore his faith ‘was reckoned to him as righteousness.’ Now the words, ‘it was reckoned to him,’ were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.”[7]  In essence, it is not about what we do, but the fact we believe in God and his promises.  Famed Lutheran theologian Carl Braatan, called this justification, “the doctrine on which the church rises or falls.”  And that brings us to today’s Gospel lesson.

 

In this famous segment, Peter, who only a few versus before in Matthew’s telling, has his utterance of the Devine truth of who Christ was affirmed as the rock upon which the church is built (Matthew 16:13-20),[8] is now told to get behind Jesus as if he was Satan himself, for not accepting the ultimate fate of the Christ (Matthew 16:21-28).[9]  As Jesus makes clear to Peter, knowing in his soul, that Peter is  “… setting [his] mind not on divine things but on human things.”  There is a lot to unpack in this episode, but if we borrow from the Biblical principle of how scripture interprets scripture, and understand the other lessons for today, the core of this comes more into focus.  Jesus tells us, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”[10]  Often we think of the notion of “taking up our cross” as taking up the suffering and death of Christ onto ourselves.  But in the context of this week’s lessons, we can and should refocus this on the idea that we are to “put on Christ” as Paul puts forth in Romans[11] or, in other words, become the very faith that God asks us to be.  The idea of “denying ourselves” is that we are fully in, through and with the Holy Spirit that is written on our very hearts, if we simply listen and live into it.  That’s the ultimate “good soul” that we need to be.

 

So this is all fine and good and we hear it, but like my opening confession that I don’t do lent well, it’s hard to live into the life we are supposed to be when we have the very tangible and challenging realities of this present time and place and life on earth.  So what I am going to now do is share with you two reflections on the Christian life, on being a “good soul,” that came to me from some friends this week.  The first of these two is from Carroll Boswell, whom you may recall is the husband of the Priest at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Norwood.  Carroll is a retired Clarkson mathematics professor whose faith journey began in the southern Baptist tradition, travelled through Methodism, before Kathryn and he found their home in the Anglican Communion.  He put forward this post earlier this week with the following preamble:

 

“This is an extended quote from an anonymous letter to someone named Diognetus, dating somewhere between 130 and 170 AD.  It is a description of Christian faith to someone who is not acquainted with it. How well can this description fit into modern America, do you think?

 

Here is that quote:  “For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe.  For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity.  The course of conduct which they follow has not been devised by any speculation or deliberation of inquisitive men; nor do they, like some, proclaim themselves the advocates of any merely human doctrines.  But inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life.  They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners.  As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if they were foreigners.  Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth is as a land of strangers.  They marry, as do all others, they beget children, but they do not destroy their offspring.  They have a common table, but not a common bed.  They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They pass their days on earth but they are citizens of heaven.  They obey the prescribed laws and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives.  They love all men and are persecuted by all. They are unknown and condemned; they are put to death and restored to life.  They are poor, yet make many rich; they are in lack of all things, and yet abound in all; they are dishonored and yet in their very dishonor are glorified.  They are evil spoken of, and yet are justified; they are reviled, and yet they bless.  They are insulted and repay the insult with honor; they do good yet are punished as evil-doers.  When punished, they rejoice as if quickened into life; they are assailed by Jews as foreigners, and are persecuted by the Greeks, yet those who hate them are unable to assign any reason for their hatred.”[12]

 

While Carroll was putting forward a question for us to contemplate in our American context, I think this quote actually is a good one to make anyone who claims to be a follower/disciple of Christ in any society pause and think about how they are “wearing their faith” or being “a good soul” wherever they find themselves and in whatever situation.

 

The second reflection that I am borrowing to share with you, comes from a Lutheran Pastor named Tim Larson whom I interact with through the online ELCA Facebook Group.  Pastor Larson is the Pastor of Peace Lutheran in Southfield Michigan.  He offered this story, which we both seem to have heard back at the ELCA Youth Gathering in San Antonio in 2006.  Here is what he shared:

 

“Here's a well known story that illustrates what it means to love people ‘objectively’:

 

A Christian sociologist and pastor named Tony Campolo spoke at a convention I attended with my wife and a bunch of youth from my church.  This is a story he told:

 

Campolo was eating out very late in an all-night diner in Hawaii when a group of women who were obviously prostitutes came inside.  One of the women, named Agnes, said her birthday was the next day and observed that she’d never had a birthday party in her life.  Campolo overheard the conversation and asked a man behind the counter if the women came in every night.  He said yes.

 

The next night, Campolo brought some simple decorations, hung them up and threw Agnes a surprise party in that diner.  She cried tears of joy and ended up taking the cake home, untouched. It was the first birthday cake she had ever received.

 

After she left, he prayed with the people who remained in the diner, and one of the employees asked him what kind of church he belonged to.  Campolo said he belonged to the kind of church that gives a party for a prostitute at 3:30 a.m.  Not because he approved of prostitution.  But because he cared for Agnes.  He threw that party for her before he knew how she’d respond, before he knew whether she’d leave the streets and before he’d had a chance to say anything at all to her about Jesus.  The party itself spoke to her more loudly than any words could have.

 

That's the kind of Christian I try to be.  It's easier than you think.”[13]

 

This reflection by Pastor Tim is another one that I believe also should cause us to pause think and also act on.  Are we ready to give a birthday party for Agnes?  Can we be constant sojourners in a constantly foreign land?  Are we willing to put down our pride, our prejudices, and our “hard earned” way of life, to be like Christ?  As Tim offers, perhaps it’s not as hard as we think it is.  But it does mean we have to be willing to return again and be refreshed and clothed in the living Christ for the world.  It seems daunting, and I will admit, it seems that way to me.  But this is the “good souls” that God wants us to be.  Not just in lent, not just when it is convenient, but all the time, in all places, for everyone.  As I said at the outset a faith that pervades and is a part of our very essence, not just something we confess at worship on the weekends.  Jesus knew and knows we can do this, he asks us to make the clear choice.  Put behind us Satan and the earthly things that falseness promises, and instead stand forward on the risk of all eternity, Christ and his love.  What we need to do is have faith, deep and abiding self-evident faith, and we can be assured of the ultimate core of the Gospel and its truth for us and all creation.  Amen.

---

[1] Cf Philippians 1:2

[2] Cf Psalm 9:14

[3] Unell Hobbs, whom is active on Facebook among other things, and still very active at Hope

[4] Genesis 15:6, NRSV

[5] Cf Genesis 16

[6] Romans 14:16 NRSV

[7] Romans 14:22-25 NRSV

[8] Cf Matthew 16:13-20

[9] Cf Matthew 16:21-28

[10] Mark 8:34-35

[11] Romans 13:14

[12] https://www.facebook.com/carroll.boswell.1/posts/pfbid0S2w5RNd7BfnRM3x7TB1nU5h83o3TGHwgobJukqiiMHHtmkKDarBQJDn1tAArw6fgl

[13] https://www.facebook.com/tim.larson.33/posts/pfbid02u3ScLTHJ8BLHRRvWtxwjW8A1G3L3JmEBgobP8Fokkic4gjoYo2Ctp5kuYauyTKoPl

What are our Demons? How do we slay them?

 

What are our Demons? How do we slay them?

 

 

Let us pray.

 

“Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.”[1]  Amen.

 

My connection to CS Lewis

 

Ever since I was a boy, I have been a fan of Clive Staples Lewis and his writings.  Better known as CS Lewis, a contemporary of JRR Tolkien and the other Inklings of the 20^th century British literature juggernaut, he looms large for Christianity to this day.  This devout atheist, turned Christian apologist, has become among the foremost authors, for many to turn to, in order to understand our shared faith.

 

My first encounter with Lewis, was through a pantomime play that was a part of a supported arts program for the schools in the Syracuse area as a boy.  The group put on an adaption of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe which, thanks to some great teachers, encouraged us to read the tale ourselves in Lewis’ original prose.  And so, asking my parents, they got me the first of the Chronicles of Narnia, and I devoured it.  Not long after followed a reading of Prince Caspian, the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Horse and His Boy, The Prince and the Silver Chair, The Magician’s Nephew, and, of course, The Last Battle.  The 7 Chronicles, were perfect for a boy who was intrigued with history including knights and archers, still mystified by magic, and loved the possibility of a make-believe place that one needed only find the right apple tree to be whisked away to.  While made explicit at the end of the Dawn Treader, little did I put together that this was a long analogy for the story of Christ, God, and his power to transform and perpetuate grace through and with the world around us.

 

So it wasn’t until later in life, late in my high school years, that I realized that Lewis was not first and foremost a children’s tale author or a fantasy writer, but instead was a professor of medieval literature and a thorough going Christian writer.  The first book I pulled in of what most call his apologetic works, was Mere Christianity.  This rather effective and powerful work helps to provide a pathway from unbelief to belief in a way that continues to echo for many people to this day.  Certainly, it must be said of Lewis, that he was a man of his Edwardian context, fully complete with its rather masculine chauvinism and its heady assumptions about the order of society.  But if you understand that, and appreciate the occasional foibles in the context from which he wrote, his works just leap off the page and remain very relevant to us.  They are, perhaps, among the best books to explain many of the core theologies we embrace as Christians generally, but even more for those of an Anglican, Lutheran, and even Roman Catholic persuasion.

 

“So what does Lewis have to do with today’s lessons?” you are probably asking yourselves.  And that is certainly a valid question.  There are two of his works that are exceptionally helpful touchstones to help understand the thrust of the lessons today.  The first, is “The Problem of Pain.”  The Second is “The Screwtape Letters.”  If you are familiar with one or both of these works, I hope to do them justice as we proceed.  If not, well, I hope to do as my teachers in elementary school once did and encourage you to read them for yourself (you will not be sorry you did).

 

The Problem of Pain

 

All powerful God?  Why not end the pain?

 

Let’s first start with our lesson from Isaiah and address the proverbial elephant in the room.  The prophet lays out in no uncertain terms, a vision of God that is all knowing, all seeing, and all powerful.  Isaiah states, “It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, …”[2]  He goes on, “To whom, then, will you compare me, or who is my equal? says the Holy One.  Lift up your eyes on high and see:  Who created these?  He who brings out their host and numbers them, calling them all by name; because he is great in strength, mighty in power, not one is missing.”[3]  Concluding with “Have you not known?  Have you not heard?  The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.  He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable.”[4]  Our God is indeed an awesome God!

 

But if this is true, if God is omnipotent, if God is omniscient, if God is omnipresent, if God is omnibenevolent, and “God is love”[5], how is there pain?  How are there demons?  How can there be suffering in this world?  This is the conundrum that inevitably has to be addressed in our faith.  It is the often insurmountable elephant that make people of all ages, genders, nationalities, cultures, and more “loose faith” and call into question everything.  Yes, Isaiah, we hear you, God is everything and anything.  God is the great “I AM who I AM”[6].  But if that is true, then how unconscionable it must be to believe in a God that continues to allow pain and suffering and disease and demons of all varieties to exist in creation.  It’s downright unethical, false, and untrue to say this is a God of love, if this God is all that Isaiah says he is, and this God has not stopped evil and pain and all the ills of the world, that this God so clearly, as Isaiah tells us, has the power to solve it all in a flash.

 

And this question, this accusation, is at the center of CS Lewis’ book, the Problem of Pain[7].  Lewis knew well this question and all of the arguments made to tear down God in this way, because he made them himself in his years as a strident atheist.  So, in his text, Lewis takes this question head on and with vigor.  To do so, he returns to the story we find in Genesis chapter 3, and the fall of humanity.  Just to remind us all, this is the story of when our first parents ate from “tree of the knowledge of good and evil”[8] and fulfilled the prophesy that the serpent uttered to them that “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”[9]  Lewis explains that this story is a metaphor, an allegory, that persists for all times and all places.  He borrows heavily from St. Augustine’s discussion of the doctrine of original sin[10], in that we, thanks to this act, have an inward turning, a selfishness, or “concupiscence” [11], that we have a hard time breaking free from and ultimately is the cause of the suffering, pain, and evil in creation.  And Lewis goes on to highlight that all of this is because, even though God is indeed the God Isaiah describes, he did not step in, he has not quelled every pain, disease, and demon, because he also is the God that gave us “free will”.

 

 

Free will is the blessing and curse

 

As Lewis, again borrowing from Augustine, explains it, God created us in his image, we are, and fundamentally supposed to be, good.  And we were created with perfect free will, the ability to choose, because God loved us and still loves us, and wants us not as slaves or servants but as friends[12].  Before the fall, we only knew this perfect relationship, even as we had the power to choose otherwise.  But by now knowing good from evil, the choice is not so easy and we are rife with making bad choices.  Paul, in his letter that we read from today’s lectionary, helps make this clear.  He states that “[f]or if I do this of my own will, I have a wage, but if not of my own will, I am entrusted with a commission.”[13]  What Paul is getting at is that when we use our “freedom of the will” the results are merely earthly.  But if we submit to the will of God, we are pulled into not only the earthly benefits, but the heavenly ones.  Luther, for his part, rightly called out the reality of our situation in his text “The Bondage of the Will”.  Luther, in contrast with his interlocutor Erasmus, acknowledged that this side of the Fall, any expression of “our will” really is to be in rebellion to God and his perfect will.  “Free will” is, in reality, anything but freeing.  The “gift” of the knowledge of good and evil, is to fall into sin, over and over again.  And while we are indeed baptized into the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we are in constant need to refresh that baptism through confession and forgiveness, the very thing we open our weekly worship with.  Free will is a curse, in reality, when it comes to the things that matter most, us and our relationship with God.

 

But why did God give us this not so “free will”?  Again, he did so that we could love him as he loves us, not as a demand, not as servants, but as friends, as requited lovers.  So, we live in a world of pain and suffering, and evil and demons, not because God is impotent, or uncaring, or immoral, or anything we might blame Him for.  No, the problem of pain is a creation of ours, because God empowered us to love as he loves, to be free as he is free, but instead of giving up and giving in to Him and his grace, we want control, we are selfish, we want our will to pervade.  God can and, when asked, intervenes in the creation and with us, but he seeks not to impose his will on us.  So when we are choosing “not God” and “not God’s way”, we are choosing other than the path of love and peace and all the good that his power and might and knowledge and wisdom give us.  And that then brings us to the very subject of demons, the very real demons we have in our midst, and the gospel lesson for today.

 

Modern Demons

 

Demons, what are they?

 

Our gospel lesson from this week and last week speak about Jesus and his casting out demons.  Last week, it was that “… there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, and he cried out, ‘What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.’  But Jesus rebuked him, saying, ‘Be quiet and come out of him!’  And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him.”[14]  This week we hear “[t]hat evening, at sunset, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed by demons.  And the whole city was gathered around the door.  And he cured many who were sick with various diseases and cast out many demons, and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.”[15]

 

We, living in an era of much advanced medical science, might question the very existence of demons, but I am here to tell you they are very much among us.

 

It is here that I now turn to the other work of CS Lewis that I mentioned at the beginning of this sermon, “The Screwtape Letters”.  This work of allegorical fiction, if you are not familiar, is a collection of letters between a senior demon named Screwtape and his nephew, Wormwood, a junior tempter[16].  Terming the human subject of Wormwood’s endeavors his “patient”, Screwtape advises Wormwood in all of the many ways he can “inhabit” the patient in a devilish effort to corrupt and ultimately have the patient turn from God entirely.  And what are the “demons” that Wormwood uses?  Ahh yes, sex, love, pride, envy, gluttony, war, religion, and much, much more.  In essence, as Lewis relays through Uncle Screwtape, it’s all the vices we fall into over and over again as humanity.  And Screwtape makes it clear that knowing better and being intelligent doesn’t prevent us from letting these little demons in.  As Screwtape offers, “... the safest road to hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts."[17]  And I think a simple perusal of our own lives, never mind the news or what we see in our neighbors, bears truth to the realities that these demons are no less present today than they were in Lewis’ time or any time in human history.

 

How do we slay them?

 

So the question then begs, how do we slay our demons?  How to we solve the problem of pain we have brought on ourselves?  Paul, in our second lesson starts to get at that answer.  He writes that “[f]or though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might gain all the more.  To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to gain Jews.  To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so that I might gain those under the law.  To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (though I am not outside God’s law but am within Christ’s law) so that I might gain those outside the law.  To the weak I became weak, so that I might gain the weak.  I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.”[18]  To expel the demons that inhabit us all too often, we need to “put on Christ”[19] in all his manifestations as the crucified, risen, and ascended Lord of our devotion.  We need to be weak for the weak, we need to be bound for those that are bound, and we need to be “slave to all” so that we are not slaves to sin.  This is precisely why the demons in our gospel stories are so petrified by Jesus and his disciples.  Because they cannot inhabit them any longer with any foothold.  If Christ is in us, we are no longer ourselves, we are “… put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit.”[20]  And that Spirit is the one that resides in our very hearts, and writes the law of Christ there for eternity.

 

Conclusion, Eustace and his baptism

 

To conclude, I have one last thing to offer that helps me think about our lessons today and how we deal with demons and suffering in our lives.  In CS Lewis’ chronicle, “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”, there is memorable scene that helps us bring together baptism, pain, and becoming renewed after we have been inhabited by our demons.

 

Eustace, one of the child characters in the story, is a disagreeable sod of a child, who is only happy when he is causing others misery through the first parts of the tale.  And the tale is one of sailing on a grand ship to far off lands, visiting islands and mystical places along the way.  On one of the mystical islands they stop at, Eustace through his greed and spite, starts to steal from a dragon’s treasure trove, only to be turned into a dragon himself.  Having slipped on a gold bracelet in human form, when turned into a dragon, it pinched and chaffed at his arm with great pain, such that he sought relief any way he could.  After many attempts to solve this through his own force or through other human means, he was visited by Aslan the Lion, who is the God character in the Narnian universe.  Eustace resorted to trying to rip his very skin off, but it wasn’t until Aslan told him that Aslan himself had to tear off the dragon skin, that he finally would get relief, and be turned again into a boy.  To describe this, Eustace recalled that, “[t]he very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right to my heart.  And when he [Aslan] began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I had ever felt.  The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off.  You know – if you’ve ever picked a scab of a sore place.  It hurts like billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away.”  “Then he caught hold of me – I didn’t like that much for I was tender underneath now that I’d no skin on – and threw me in the water.  It smarted like anything but only for a moment.  After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone away from my arm.”[21]

 

To defeat our demons, we need to be willing to shed our dragon skins, to give up our “free will” and give in to God’s will.  When we do, life can become “perfectly delicious” and the pain can recede from our lives and those around us.

 

Amen.

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[1] Psalm 19:14

[2] Isaiah 40:22

[3] Isaiah 40:25-26

[4] Isaiah 40:28

[5] 1 John 4:8b or 1 John 4:16a

[6] Exodus 3:14

[7] Summary at:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Pain

[8] Genesis 2:17

[9] Genesis 3:5

[10] Cf. Confessions

[11] https://mereorthodoxy.com/augustine-concupiscence-friendship

[12] Cf John 15:5

[13] 1 Cor. 9:17

[14] Mark 1:23-26

[15] Mark 1:32-34

[16] Summary at:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwtape_Letters

[17] Letter XII, The Screwtape Letters

[18] 1 Corinthians 9:19-23

[19] Cf. Romans 13:14

[20] 1 Peter 3:18

[21] The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, pp 90-91