“A Sermon I’ve Never Wanted to Preach” (Hebrews 10:26-31)

 

Aside from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, I wonder if anyone here this morning can tell me what may have been the most famous sermon ever preached…

I don’t have any statistics to back me up, but I am certain that one of the top contenders has to be a sermon delivered to a congregation in Enfield, Connecticut, on hot July day in 1741. The preacher was Jonathan Edwards, a distinguished graduate of Yale University, who would later be appointed president of what was to become Princeton University. Along with the Anglican preacher George Whitefield he was one of the leaders of the remarkable spiritual revival known as the Great Awakening. It was a movement of the Holy Spirit that profoundly touched the hearts and changed the lives of thousands as it swept across New England in the mid-1700s—reaching as far as Nova Scotia!

The title Edwards gave to this particular sermon was “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”. And if you find its title forbidding, its contents are nothing less than soul-shaking. By my estimate the sermon would have taken close to an hour and a half to preach. And it was around the mid-way point that Edwards thundered forth to the congregation with these words:

O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you, as against many of the damned in hell. You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder; and you have no interest in any Mediator, and nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one moment.

I’ll leave it to you to imagine the rest!

The reality of judgement

Now I have never been what you might call a hellfire and brimstone preacher. I am one of those who believe that the carrot is generally more effective than the stick, that the glories of heaven are far more inducive to faith than the threat of hell.

Yet I have to acknowledge that Jesus himself warned about the prospect of hell for those who turn their backs on God. He declared to the people of Capernaum, who refused to accept his message, that it would be more tolerable on the Day of Judgement for the inhabitants of Sodom than it would be for them (Matthew 11:23). He cautioned his followers, “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire” (Mark 9:43).

Think too of his parable of the rich man and Lazarus. The rich man ended up in flames and anguish, desperate that Lazarus might even dip the tip of his finger in water so that he might have a droplet to cool his tongue (Luke 16:19-31). And at the last supper Jesus warned his disciples, “If anyone does not remain in me, they are thrown away like a branch and wither; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned…” (John 15:6).

In fact it has been claimed (and not without merit) that Jesus had more to say about hell than anyone else in the Bible. So perhaps we should not be surprised when we come across it again in this morning’s verses from Hebrews. We read of “a fearful expectation of judgement”, and those chilling words at the conclusion of the passage: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

The word in both cases in the original Greek is foberon. It’s related to our English word phobia, hence words like acrophobia, the fear of heights, and arachnophobia, the fear of spiders. Or how about odontophobia, the fear of dentists!

It all reminds me of my days in elementary school back in the Dark Ages, when to be sent to the principal’s office was a punishment you sought to avoid at all costs. Who knew what penalty was going to be meted out behind that thick oak door? Well, at least you came back from the principal’s office. But here there is no coming back.

Now lest I leave you thinking that God is some kind of celestial killjoy, constantly on the lookout for people to punish, let me remind you that there is a whole other side to the coin. Ours is a God who cries aloud to his people, “As I live…, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live.” And he pleads, “Turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why will you die, O house of Israel?” (Ezekiel 33:11). And our Lord Jesus is the good shepherd, who seeks out his sheep that have strayed and brings them back into the fold. Yet there remains the tragic possibility of an eternity without him.

So it is that our verses from Hebrews this morning contain that stark warning to those who might be tempted to abandon the faith, that “if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgement…”

Why people leave the faith

Now this connects with one of the themes that has been in the background of Hebrews all along. Indeed it is likely that it is the reason for its being written in the first place: that one by one and for various reasons people had been dropping away from the community of believers. And for the author of Hebrews that was no light matter. It’s not like dropping out of a bowling league or even dropping out of school. No, dropping away from following Jesus is a matter of life and death.

Now for some people this whole topic brings up the question of whether or not it is possible for a believer to lose their salvation. And that is an issue I’m not going to delve into right now. But no matter which side of that particular debate you stand on, you don’t have to have been a Christian for very long before you notice that there are people who at one point appear to have had a genuine faith and yet somewhere along the road have left it behind.

Christian author Frank Viola offers a list of reasons why this happens.[1] Here are a number of them that he highlights:

·      The nasty way that Christians can sometimes treat each other. Disputes in the church can often arise over what are really non-essential issues and church members can become overinvested in them to the point where they lose perspective altogether and end up treating those with a different perspective as though they were enemies.

·      The simplistic answers they have been given to complex and difficult issues. The world can present us with challenges that strike at the roots of our faith. Yet sometimes these questions end up being treated with suspicion or simply dismissed with a pat answer, instead of being dealt with honestly and openly.

·      Disappointment with God as a result of a tragedy or seemingly unanswered prayer.

·      The busyness of a life that doesn’t leave room for prayer or engagement in the community of faith.

·      A legalistic understanding of the faith that demands perfection and can only lead to self-reproach, disappointment and even serious depression.

All of these can be factors in slipping away from the faith—and no doubt we could list many more as well. Indeed, in my experience one of the prime factors has been adultery. One of the biggest disappointments of my ministry has been to see leading laymen, men who have a deep and articulate understanding of the faith, Christian leaders, become involved in secretive affairs that end up undermining both their marriages and their faith. And I am sure that many of you could name any number of Christian “rock stars” who have fallen for the same reason in recent years—famous preachers and teachers, megachurch pastors and authors among them.

Today the internet adds an additional, highly powerful factor as well: pornography. It’s no longer a matter of hiding copies of Playboy under the mattress as it was when I was young. Our high-speed fibre optic cables can bring full-colour images and videos right into the privacy of our homes. And they can be deeply addictive.

Preventing departures from the faith

So what are we to say to all of this? How are we to deal with it? I could tell you that you’ll have to wait until next week’s exciting episode, and the weeks that follow. After all, we still have three chapters of Hebrews left!

But before I conclude, I want to mention one author who has been particularly helpful to me recently in thinking this whole issue through. He is psychologist Jonathan Haidt[2] and he is not a Christian but a secular Jew.

His thesis is this: We often think of our mind, our rational faculty, as what is most important in giving direction to our lives and guiding our decisions. But Haidt says no—that as often as not it is our emotions that guide us. And he summarizes it in a simple picture.

Picture if you can an elephant driver on top of an elephant. Now, by and large the elephant has been trained to be compliant. It will go wherever the driver commands. But if for one reason or another the elephant decides to take a different path, the hapless driver is forced to go along for the ride.

The elephant, says Haidt, is that part of our faculties that is based on feelings and sensations, while the driver represents our rational faculties. By and large it is our minds that we look to to guide us through life. But there will be times when the elephant of our emotions takes over—and I don’t imagine you have to think for very long to remember occasions when that has happened in your life.

So what does this mean for us as Christians? Perhaps one of the weaknesses of our Protestant tradition is that we often tend to place our emphasis on the mind at the expense of our other faculties. We engage primarily on a cerebral level, and only secondarily (if at all) on what we might call a gut level. Now I know that part of that is to avoid manipulation. Yet if our faith is to be fully rounded, it needs to involve the whole of us.

For example, how crucial music is to Christian experience! Even Paul, who seems like such an intellectual type, encourages us to “sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Ephesians 5:19; Colossians 3:16). Besides, I’m told that singing helps to release endorphins that contribute to both our mental and our physical health.

And how crucial is fellowship! By this I mean not just that casual cup of coffee after the service (as important a part of church life as that is!), but engaging with fellow believers on a deeper level—having others you can share with about the important things of life, people you can trust to stand by you without judging even in the most difficult times, and yet who have the courage to say, “Get with it!” when that’s what’s needed.

I would be remiss too if I didn’t stress the fundamental importance of developing a habit of taking time to be with God on a daily basis—coming before him in prayer and praise, reading his word, and simply enjoying being consciously in his company.

Yes, it is indeed a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Yet what is more wonderful than to be held in the firm grip of a loving Father, who vows never to leave us or forsake us? What could be a greater privilege than to walk with a Saviour, who promises to be with us to the end of the age? What could be more amazing than to be filled with a Spirit, who will be with us forever!

So as we hold these verses from Hebrews in one hand, let us balance them with these words from Philippians in the other:

And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ… And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ. (Philippians 1:6;9-10)

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[1]     “7 Reasons Why Christians Abandon the Faith” https://frankviola.org/2022/05/12/7reasons/

[2]     Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 2012

“The Lion Roars” (Hosea 11:1-11)

 What do you say to a congregation you’ve never met before, in a denomination where you’ve never served, and among whom you know barely a single soul? That’s the predicament I’m in this morning here with you at King’s Presbyterian. And if you have the answer, I’ll gladly surrender the pulpit to you for the next twenty minutes! More seriously, I am grateful both to my long-time friend and colleague, Paul Hutten, for his recommendation and for the graciousness of your Minister, Tim Archibald, for entrusting his pulpit to a stranger for a Sunday morning.

But back to my conundrum. What to preach on? Well, as an Anglican my fallback position is, when in doubt, go to the lectionary. And among the Scriptures that the lectionary offers for this particular Sunday in the church’s year is the reading you heard a few minutes ago from the prophet Hosea, chapter 11.

As I began to read through the passage, I felt a little bit like the teacher of the law that Jesus talked about in Matthew’s gospel. Jesus said he was “like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old” (Matthew 13:52).

Recently I came across the story of Terry Herbert, a metal detector enthusiast:

In July 2009, [he] decided to try his luck in farmland close to his home in Staffordshire in the English countryside. He came across an artifact, and bingo. Over the next five days, he found enough gold objects in the soil to fill 244 bags. An archeological expedition was hatched, and all told, the “Staffordshire Hoard” was found to contain some 3,500 pieces representing hundreds of complete objects. The cache of gold, silver and garnet objects from early Anglo-Saxon times represents one of the most important kingdoms of the era—and was valued at around $5.3 million.[1]

Like Terry Herbert, who I suspect may have walked past that Staffordshire field dozens, even hundreds, of times, I know I’ve read Hosea 11 many times. Yet in over forty years of ordained ministry I’ve never preached on it before. And as I began to comb through it, I also began to realize what a treasure I had been passing by again and again. As one biblical scholar has put it, “Here we penetrate deeper into the heart and mind of God than anywhere in the Old Testament.”[2] So let’s take the next few moments to see what God may have to say to us from these verses.

God’s abiding care (1-4)

The reading divides neatly into three sections, the first of which begins with a declaration by God himself: “When Israel was a child, I loved him…” As parents love their children, so God intimately, tenderly loves his people. You can see that love reflected in the series of verbs that follow: “I taught them to walk.” “I healed them.” “I led them with kindness and love.” “I lifted them to my cheek.” “I stooped down to feed them.”

Those who are parents in the congregation will remember how you cared for your own children, how you looked after them, fed them, taught them, bandaged up their cuts and scrapes, and no doubt shed the occasional tear with them as well. And if you haven’t had the privilege of sharing that kind of love as a parent, I suspect you probably received it as a child.

The eighteenth-century poet William Cowper beautifully expressed what we read this morning in a hymn that includes these words:

I delivered thee when bound,
and when bleeding healed thy wound,
sought thee wandering, set thee right,
turned thy darkness into light.

Can a woman’s tender care
cease toward the child she bare?
Yes, she may forgetful be,
yet will I remember thee.

Mine is an unchanging love,
higher than the heights above,
deeper than the depths beneath,
free and faithful, strong as death.[3]

Of course Hosea was not the first to say what he did. In fact, the opening words of this morning’s passage hark all the way back to the time of the Exodus, when God commanded Moses to tell Pharaoh, “This is what the Lord says: Israel is my firstborn son…” (Exodus 4:22). Nor would Hosea be the last. Years later the prophet Jeremiah would proclaim, “The Lord appeared to us in the past, saying: ‘I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with unfailing kindness’ ” (Jeremiah 31:3). And of course part of Cowper’s words came from Isaiah, through whom God reminded his people, “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you!” (Isaiah 49:15). For me one of the places this truth is most poignantly expressed is in the Garden of Eden, when God looks on the human being that he has formed from the dust and bends down and breathes into him the breath of life. It is an arresting picture of the deep tenderness of God’s love for us, his creatures.

Of course as Christians we see this love taking on human flesh in the person of Jesus. Jesus’ act of reaching out his hand a leper, who had not felt the warmth of a human touch for years, perhaps decades, spoke to him more about the love of God than any words even of the most eloquent prophet. Jesus’ act of stopping and turning to a woman who was too humiliated to do anything more than touch the hem of his robe said to her in a way that words could not, “You matter. You too are God’s precious child.” And calling down Zacchaeus from his safe perch up in the sycamore tree and going to his house to share a meal would teach him that God’s love does not exclude cheats and reprobates either.

John’s gospel tells us, “God so loved the world…” But that love is not just a theological construct or some feel-good wish. It is a love that is both personal and practical, a love that cares, touches, heals and even weeps for his people. Yet there is a whole other side to Hosea’s prophecy, as we shall see…

Israel’s persistent defiance (5-7)

In the second segment of Hosea’s prophecy the focus shifts from God to the nation of Israel. And what do we find? We move from a gently caring parent to a defiant and rebellious child. There is an important historical background to what Hosea wrote. The year was probably around 733 BC. Hosea was writing in the northern kingdom of Israel, centred in Samaria. The nation had already been attacked and conquered by the powerful armies of the Assyrian Empire and a couple of things had happened. Some of its citizenry had fled southwards to Egypt, while others of its leadership had thrown in their lot with their Assyrian conquerors. In either case, this represented not just a geographical move or even a political alliance, but a shifting away from God to embrace the rituals and practices and, more seriously still, the deities of those nations.

Equally seriously, even those who had remained had consistently refused to heed warnings of the prophets, who had repeatedly called them to repent and return to the Lord. Less than a generation before Hosea, Amos had warned them in these crystal-clear words (and here I read from Eugene Petersen’s earthy paraphrase in The Message):

This is what the Lord says:
Because of the three great sins of Israel—make that four—
I’m not putting up with them any longer.
They buy and sell upstanding people
People for them are only things—ways of making money. 
They’d sell a poor man for a pair of shoes.
They’d sell their own grandmother!
They grind the penniless into the dirt,
shove the luckless into the ditch.
Everyone and his brother sleeps with the ‘sacred whore’—
a sacrilege against my Holy Name.
Stuff they’ve extorted from the poor
is piled up at the shrine of their god,
while they sit around drinking wine
they’ve conned from their victims…
I also raised up prophets from among your children…
but you commanded the prophets not to prophesy. (Amos 2:6-8,11-12)

The biggest problem facing Israel, Hosea and the other prophets argued, was not its Assyrian conquerors who had attacked from the outside, but the spiritual and moral corruption that was slowly but inexorably eating it away from within. In the New Testament we find Jesus saying much the same thing to the religious leaders of his day. Again, let me read it to you from The Message. “You’re hopeless, you religion scholars and Pharisees! Frauds! You’re like manicured grave plots, grass clipped and the flowers bright, but six feet down it’s all rotting bones and worm-eaten flesh. People look at you and think you’re saints, but beneath the skin you’re total frauds” (Matthew 23:27-28). As the prophet Isaiah lamented, “These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me” (Isaiah 29:13).

And so we see that some of the most telling condemnations that we find in the Bible are against God’s own people. We are quick to blame so many of the world’s woes on other people, be they politicians, Islamists, Hollywood, the NRA or whatever. But what about ourselves? We may not have bowed down before idols like Hosea’s fellow Israelites. But to what extent have we yielded to false values of the world around us? How much does what we profess here on Sunday morning bear an influence on what we do and the kind of people we are from Monday to Saturday? Does God look upon us in the same way that he did upon the people of Hosea’s day?

The final outcome (8-11)

There was a punishment prescribed for recalcitrant youths in the Old Testament and it was severe. Let me read Deuteronomy 21:18-21 for you:

If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town. They shall say to the elders, “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.” Then all the men of his town are to stone him to death. You must purge the evil from among you. All Israel will hear of it and be afraid.

I’m not sure the sentence was ever carried out (I certainly hope not!), but I have no doubt that when Hosea proclaimed his prophecy against his people, both he and they were well aware of these words. As a nation they had brought upon themselves what was happening to them. They deserved to be wiped out. Yet God, who had brought them into existence, who had nurtured and cared for them, who loved them with an everlasting love, would not allow this to happen. “How can I give you up?” he cries. “How can I hand you over? … My heart recoils within me; all my compassion is aroused. I will not carry out my fierce anger… For I am God, and not a man—the Holy One among you.” If we had time, we could spend hours just poring over these remarkable verses. In all of Scripture there are only a handful of other places where we are permitted to gaze so deeply into the heart of God. I think we could probably count them on the fingers of one hand. Like Moses we need to take off our shoes and hide our faces, for we stand on holy ground. We have entered the Holy of Holies.

But our moment of meditation is broken by a lion’s roar. And I suspect that those of us who are C.S. Lewis or Narnia fans will not be able to read these verses without thinking of Aslan. Do you recall the scene, towards the end of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where the great lion says to the children, “And now to business. I feel I am going to roar. You had better put your fingers in your ears.” Then the story goes on,

And they did. And Aslan stood up and when he opened his mouth to roar his face became so terrible that they did not dare to look at it. And they saw all the trees in front of him bend before the blast of his roaring as grass bends in a meadow before the wind.

“The Lord will roar from Zion,” wrote the prophet Joel, “and thunder from Jerusalem; the earth and the heavens will tremble.” And then he goes on: “But the Lord will be a refuge for his people, a stronghold for the people of Israel” (Joel 3:16). God roars—his hatred of evil and all that undermines and despoils his good purposes in creation is unabated. God roars—and the powers of wickedness and injustice will fall like a house of cards before him. God roars—and his children will know that they are safe once again.

“When he roars, his children will come trembling from the west.
They will come from Egypt, trembling like sparrows,
from Assyria, fluttering like doves.
I will settle them in their homes,” declares the Lord.

The Lion has roared. May we hear his voice today.

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[1]        http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/stories/6-incredible-treasures-found-with-a-metal-detector

[2]        H.D. Beeby, Grace Abounding, 140

[3]        “Hark, my soul, it is the Lord”