Sermon text: John 8:31-36
Everything about this is wrong. He was too young. Fifty-four is much too young to pass away. The circumstances of his death are wrong. A heart attack while driving on the road home. The timing of it is wrong. We're a week away from Christmas. Bad things aren't supposed to happen at Christmas time.
Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!
Of course, there's a lot that's wrong in our world. We see on the news each night of something else that's gone wrong. War, disaster, disease, poverty, hunger. All wrong. Even within ourselves there is much that is not as it should be. We treat strangers as enemies and those we love most we too often take for granted. Our lives are far too brief. Our loves too fragile. We are not honest with ourselves or with others. We cave into our fears instead of doing what is right and necessary. We do not appreciate what we have. We obsess over those things we desire most.
All of it has gone wrong.
We are trapped in many ways by the wrongness of this world. Imprisoned by it, and no proof of that is more powerful and more conclusive than what brings us here today. We are gathered to mourn the death of a beloved friend, brother, son, and husband. We are here to mark the death of Dennis Herbst, a death that is, like so much else in our world, wrong.
Why? That's always a difficult question, especially when there was so much that was right in Dennis' life. He was a good man, hard working. Loved his wife. Loved his family. A man of the earth, ever comfortable tending his garden or being out in the woods. A quiet but thoughtful man. It was a simple life, but a good one. There was nothing in it that merited it being cut short so early. Nothing in it that one can point to that says he had this coming.
But deserve has nothing to do with it when the world has gone wrong. And it has. It went wrong a long time ago. And the fact that it has is something that God has busied himself with ever since.
You see, God has been wanting to fix what has gone wrong. He's wanted to fix the ways in which we mistreat each other. He's wanted to fix the brokenness of the world around us. He's wanted to make it so that none ever need gather like this again, bound together in grief, bound together by death.
Death and sin are what have made things so wrong in our world. But God has a solution.
It may seem wrong for Dennis to have died so close to the Christmas holiday, but there is something fitting and right about our gathering together now, at this time. You see, that's the solution. No, not the day itself, nor all the human traditions that we've built up around it.
It's that baby that's the solution: Jesus, the Christ. God incarnate and come down to Earth. Here to fix what has gone wrong.
That's why he came. And all of Jesus' life he shows us how he's going to fix everything. He came among us and taught us that love is greater that hate. He showed us that even those society abandoned were people of immense value to God. Those broken by the world, those who infirm or diseased, he gave them healing. Those burdened by guilt, he forgave. He fixed what had gone wrong for them.
But those handful of examples were simply that: examples. What Jesus really came to do, he would do for everyone. And so to fix everything, he handed himself over to death. And we, the very people he came to help, nailed him to a cross and left him to die. And die he did. But it was a death with purpose; it seemed wrong, but it was not random or meaningless. No, he died for us. God died so that we could live.
It may be hard for us to wrap our brains around that. But it is that truth that sets us free. It is the truth that sets right what has gone wrong. You see the story doesn't end for Jesus on Good Friday. It doesn't end at the cross. There's more for him and for us.
What await Jesus after the cross is the empty tomb of Easter. He returns. He is resurrected. Life emerges where death once held fast. And what has happened to our Christ is what he now promises will happen to us.
St. Paul writes of this promise in that wonderful passage that I read from Romans at the beginning of our worship. “If we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like this.” That's how this works. That's how everything that is wrong becomes right. Dennis, you, me, all of us just as we will see death, we will also see resurrection thanks to Jesus Christ.
It's why he came. That promise is sure. It is sure for Dennis. He will live again. It is sure for you and for me. We will live again. Death has been defeated. What was wrong in the world is now made right in Jesus Christ. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment