Sermon Tone Analysis
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SERMON 5: LENTEN MIDWEEK 4
"Faith for a Complicated World"
Luke 23:1-25
Let's be honest.
The world around us is a complicated place that can be hard to
figure out.
Life sometimes sends us a fair bit of pain and suffering; when you look around, it's
not hard to spot cruelty and injustice.
Pastors become aware of this especially when they get
to walk alongside of people in their suffering.
Whether you've come through a lot or been
spared a bit, still we all know this; it's nothing new.
It's been this way since Genesis 3.
And it
certainly is that way now.
Now, let me be a little direct here, and point out a problem.
Sometimes Christians talk as if the world is not a complicated place; sometimes Christians talk as if they sort of have things figured out, by and large.
Little sayings go around, and people often mean well, and the
sayings can contain some truth.
But they tend to make things way simpler than they really
are.
One example: "I believe in the power of prayer."
There's truth in that, of course, but what
about the prayers to which God says, "no"?
Or what about the prayers that seem to be met
only with silence?
I've experienced that a lot in my life, and I'm pretty sure you have as well.
So, it's complicated, and we don't know all we'd like to know about how it all fits together.
Here's another one, and if you like this one, I don't mean to hurt your feelings.
It goes like
this: "When God closes a door, he always opens a window."
Again, it's a simple and hopeful
thing to say.
It's not in the Bible, you know.
And I think I understand the good intent behind
such a saying-but it doesn't acknowledge just how complicated the world is, and just how
puzzling-and frankly, how hard life can be for people, including us Christians.
And yet.
Even though God's ways are often hidden to us, still we Christians believe that God is at work in the middle of the suffering.
God is at work; yes, we do believe that.
And yes, we do pray with faith-because of the kind of God we have come to know.
And yes, even with
the evil in the world around us, we trust that God is at work against the evil, in spite of the
evil, and sometimes God even takes the evil and uses it for his purposes.
How God does that
I am often not at all sure.
But I-we-believe that he does.
Is this a blind sort of faith?
It's a pretty tall order, actually, to ask people to believe in such a God.
The question is, why do we?
Now, a full answer would be another sermon series ... or maybe ten sermon series.
But in a very beautiful way, the reading for tonight from Luke 23
gives us our answer, our reason for believing.
We're going to ponder what happened when
the leaders of Israel led Jesus to stand before Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea
and Samaria, early that morning long ago.
What happened then?
The short answer is ... evil,
real evil in different shapes and sizes, coming against the only man ever to live of whom it
could be said, "He didn't deserve any of it."
And yet all that evil was taken up and put to use
by the living God, the Father of the Lord Jesus, for good; for my good, and for yours, and for
the good of the whole world.
This is why we can live as we do in a broken world, in faith and
in hope.
Let's look at the "major players," one at a time, from the reading in Luke 23.
There
are three major players.
First, the chief priests.
We met them in the verses for last week that lead right up to this
evening's reading.
Their evil was the blind ignorance of unbelief.
They hated Jesus.
In his
ministry, Jesus has claimed authority as God's Son and the true King.
Jesus rejected the way
they thought about their God and one another; Jesus leveled the playing field for all people,
shutting out all comparison, teaching that the only way to know the true God is in complete
humility, looking only to ... him.
To Jesus.
For this reason and others, the chief priests have
spoken with one voice.
And now they have led Jesus to Pilate, and they accuse him of crimes
against Roman order and Roman justice.
They want Pilate to believe that Jesus is guilty, and
they want Pilate to execute Jesus.
But it doesn't work.
They can't convince Pilate at all.
And when Pilate sends Jesus to Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee in the north, the chief priests keep accusing Jesus there, but that
doesn't work, either.
They can't convince Herod that Jesus deserves to die.
Herod belittles
Jesus and mistreats him and mocks him.
But he doesn't think that Jesus deserves to die.
The
accusations against Jesus from the chief priests don't work.
But that does not stop them or their evil.
They keep on coming, they keep on demanding Jesus's death by crucifixion.
"We would rather have that murderer, Barabbas, than this Jesus!"
Did that convince Pilate to change his mind?
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