11 September 2011

“Because of your sins”
Judges series – “The Lord raised up deliverers”
Selections of Judges 1 and 2
Matthew 18:21-35
OT 24A / Season of Pentecost
11 September 2011

So why a sermon series on Judges?
Honestly, it has everything to do with football. Last spring, when it looked like there wouldn’t be an NFL season this year (because of the lock out) I happened to see a news story … an old grizzled guy, reacting to that news, said, “Well, if there’s no football, maybe I’d better head back to church.”
I wanted to make this choice worth his – and your while – so I chose perhaps the roughest, most violent book in the Bible for our soon to be Seahawk-less Sundays – I was going to call the series “Missing blood and guts? – A look at Judges.”
Then the lock out ended … but plans has already been made. And why shouldn’t we look at Judges? After all, we don’t hear much from the this OT book in our regular Sunday lectionary – only one brief reading, from chapter 4, is included. The most familiar story from Judges – that of Samson and Delilah – doesn’t even make it into our regular weekly rotation of Scripture texts.
So most of us probably don’t know a lot about this book – the 7th in numerical order in the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament.
So here’s a little background.
Judges is part of the history sections of the Old Testament which also includes Joshua, 1st and 2nd Samuel, and 1st and 2nd Kings. It’s called the “Deuteronomistic history” because these authors center their theology on the Torah of God which is laid out in the book of Deuteronomy. Most scholars believe these books of the Old Testament were written around the 6th century BC, after the Israelites had been taken away into exile in Babylon … and they were written as theological treatises, trying to explain to the Israelites why this terrible misfortune had happened to them.
Indeed, one could put a universal heading on these books: “You are here because of your sins.”
The authors of Judges put this theme out there, for everyone to see, right from the start.
We see it in our reading today, taken from the first two chapters of Judges.

Things start up where the previous book, Joshua, leaves off … the Israelites under Joshua’s leadership (Moses now being dead) were ready to take their new homes in the land God had promised to them, “the land flowing with milk and honey” which had been their dream and goal for a generation … while they were in slavery in Egypt, while they wandered around in the Wilderness, while they received final instructions from Moses before he died.
Now, they were finally there … so they went off, found places to live, settled down … and forgot about their God.
Another generation grew up after them, who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel.

And thus began the people Israel’s problems, once again.
The authors, looking back across the centuries from the misery of their current bad situation … their exile and slavery in Babylon … they were looking for a theological explanation for their misfortune. And so they found it, in these stories of Israel in an earlier time and place … “Because of your sins” (“your” being a catchall term referring to the people Israel of all time)… “Because of your sins we are here, suffering, in slavery, in exile, in Babylon.”
There is a cycle to the collective life of Israel which begins here, in Judges:
*People forget about God;
*People start worshipping other gods, primarily the gods of their neighbors;
*People start to suffer at the hands of their enemies (plunderers who plundered them);
*People lift up their voices and weep at their misfortune;
*God sends a judge to deliver them from their enemies;
*Judge dies and people go back to their stubborn, disobedient ways;
*Repeat steps 2-6.

Because of your sins … it’s the overarching theme of these books of history, and serves as a good summary for most of the actions which happen within them.
Because of your sins… God had to send judge-deliverers to his people. The Torah, what we Christians slap-dash label “law” but really, it’s so much more than that, “Torah” being God’s wholistic way of life for his people Israel …
… Torah – if people followed it, lived it, the way God set it out, there would be no need for judges because God would be with and lead his people, and they would live as his people, and that would be that. But because of your sins, Israel … God had to send human deliverers, judges to rescue them from their enemies.
And later, because of your sins, Israel … God relents and sends kings to rule over Israel. Of course, because of your sins, Israel … the kings don’t work out either … and they end up conquered, hauled off to Babylon, into exile.
Because of your sins.

The authors of these books – beginning here in Judges – they are very clear about who is … and who isn’t … to blame that the whole enterprise of God and his people Israel has gone wrong.
It’s not God’s fault.
No – the authors insist - it’s our own. You and I, we did this to ourselves, and we have no one else to blame for it but ourselves.
What, then, of God?
Well, note from our portion of Judges today what exactly God does – and doesn’t – do.
God doesn’t go in and start smiting people right and left, sending floods and earthquakes and hurricanes upon them because of their disobedience.
No, it’s all because of your sins that bad stuff happens.
God, for God’s part, keeps his promises, despite the people’s disobedience.
What does God say in all of this?
I will never break my covenant with you.
That’s what God says.
So what does God do?
God just gets out of the way … and lets what would happen (without his preventing it), happen.
You could say, that the Israelites create their own sad reality, don’t they? They don’t recognize God as God, therefore, there apparently is no God there for them anymore. The levee against the flood, the wall against the invaders, that is God, is gone, because of your sins, and now, it’s all up to you, Israel. You want it? You got it!
EPIC FAIL.
That’s what that phrase “I am a jealous God” really means. What, who God is here, is all about relationship. And when God’s people don’t want God around anymore, for them … well, that’s precisely what happens.
Because of your sins.
This is also the message of our Gospel reading this morning.
Peter comes to Jesus asking a question which follows Jesus’ words to us last week, Jesus’ instructions on how he wishes us to repair and rehabilitate broken relationships between us.
It’s the immature question … Peter wants to know what the bare minimum is, which he must do, in order to be “in good” with God. How many times must I forgive … once again, not a ‘member of the church,’ but instead ‘a brother,’ meaning, anyone with whom we are in relationship. Peter shows how immature in the faith he really is.
So Jesus’ answer, seventy seven times, isn’t to be understood literally … hey, this is time number 78, so long, sucker! … but again, taken in the context of his words from last week, it represents a large number … a number which isn’t supposed to be counted … there is no end to forgiveness, Peter, because forgiveness starts with God and comes to us, God’s forgiveness for you has no end so neither shall yours have an end for your neighbor.
And the story – the parable, really, which Jesus tells next – lays this out so clearly.
The debt the slave owes his king is insurmountable … representing millions of dollars … a figure so high that the slave could never pay it back.
Thus the forgiveness which the king gives to the slave is just as immense.
In comparison, the amount the other slave owes him is petty. Three or four month’s wages would pay it back.
Yet the one slave refuses to “pay it forward,” pass along the forgiveness given him, if you will; he gives him the punishment he himself deserved for the enormous debt he owed the king … the debt he was now forgiven.
So what happens?
Once again, it’s an outcome because of your sins. Because of the sins of the one slave … his inability to forgive his fellow slave, especially and even after he himself was the recipient of the lavish and extreme forgiveness of the king … because of his sins he is now “in bondage and cannot free himself.”
The Word of God sticks a pin in his … our “blame” balloon … and pops it.
When we … we, who have been forgiven everything … EVERYTHING … by our God … when we who have been forgiven everything, withhold that forgiveness from others … because of our sins … we place ourselves into bondage, the bondage that leads to death, the bondage from which we cannot free ourselves.

It is curious … at the very least … that both these texts come to us on the 10th anniversary of September 11, 2001. Yes, I chose the Judges text, it’s true … but the Gospel text is the one regularly assigned to this date in Ordinary Time on the church calendar. And so … as a people who believe that the Word of God isn’t just a dead letter on a page, but a word which speaks to us, here and now, today … we must consider what this Word has to say to us here, on this particular day.
Although it’s hard to picture it now, once upon a time, right as the events of that awful day unfolded, and in the first few days which followed … we Americans were a far more introspective people, more as one in our grief, not racing to point fingers in blame but rather, wondering and considering and praying about what all this meant for us, and for the world.
Though it didn’t take us long to embark on the long, slippery slide we’ve been on ever since then.
At first we had righteous anger, certainly, at the ones who planned and carried out the initial acts of our national tragedy. But then came … Freedom Fries … discrimination against Arab Americans … death threats to the Dixie Chicks! … a deeply divided Red America, Blue America in which everything bad which has happened and is happening to us is the fault of someone else.
I’m not to blame… it’s their, it’s your fault … for… the deficit. The bank failures and corporate bailouts. The wars. The economic crisis and job losses. One side blames the other, the poor and powerless bear the greatest burden of it all … and some, in their utter hubris, make God out to be their own personal heavenly avenger, sending everything from the DC earthquake to Hurricane Katrina upon us because they don’t agree with the President or the wars or some court decision or another.

I was the preacher on Sunday, September 16, 2001 at Glenwood Lutheran in Minnesota. My colleague, Art Montgomery, had flown to New York to be at the first 9/11 memorial service, as his cousin Lee Ludwig was one of the 3,000 killed in the collapse of the Twin Towers. This past week, I went back to that sermon … and found these words … consistent with today’s text and theme … I close with them now.

If there’s anything the events of the past week have taught us, it’s that evil is a reality. Evil has always been a reality in the world. Some among us already knew that … some of us have tasted it personally … in the sights and the smells of a liberated Nazi concentration camp … in the streets of Little Rock in the late 50’s and Birmingham in the 60’s … or, perhaps, in the faces and actions of people we thought we knew so well, but really, didn’t at all.
And some of us continue to see it, in exclusion or discrimination against people whose are a different color, or speak a different language, or live their lives differently than “the majority”; in a nation divided, politically, economically, socially.
Somebody asked me on Tuesday, “How could this have happened? How could people do this to other people?” Many of you know I just returned from a trip to Germany, where I visited not just the Luther sites, but also Buchenwald Concentration Camp … where I was left with this similar question: how could more than six million of our Jewish brothers and sisters be gassed and shot and burned to death by the Nazis? For what I’ve found is that those German people weren’t any different from you or me. They lived their lives and worshipped as Lutheran Christians, and loved their country, and flew their flag too. Yet … what they did stands as the acme of evil for the past century.
Hate and evil starts in one heart, and spreads, to consume; its goal, destruction of everything. And anyone who denies that, who wants to avoid it or shelter themselves or their children from that reality, is doing themselves more than a disservice … they are lying to themselves, and to God …denying the cross of Jesus Christ.
God knows us. God made our hearts so that we could choose to love him freely, and not be puppets on strings – God wants our love for him to be from the heart, that we would eagerly choose to be with him. For what kind of a love is so tightly controlled that there is no freedom? It is no love.
Yet God also knows that, given the choice, we will choose our own way, to better ourselves, to line our own pockets, to believe we are the ones in control, in charge … every time.
God knows this about us. God’s Word for us, for the people of his creation then as well as now, is that this behavior, this sin, this evil, will lead us and all creation back to the chaos from which we came.
Except.
Except that the God who claims us as his own … not our money, not our stuff, not ourselves … not church nor flag nor nation … God is the only God who keeps all promises. None of those other ones can rightfully claim that.
And God’s Word of promise is this: “I will never break my covenant with you.”
Though we do. Our actions would lead us to total and utter destruction of everything we know. But God’s promise, is that this shall not happen.
God’s Word for us is the Word of the Cross … the Word that does not deny pain, or suffering, or death, but looks them straight on, and says, yes, there are these things in the world … and I, your Lord, your Savior, have been there myself, I have also walked through the valley of the shadow of death.
I was there.
I was there at Auschwitz, and Dachau; in Little Rock and Birmingham; in Oklahoma City and Columbine.
And I was there on Tuesday in Manhattan, and in Washington, and in Pennsylvania.
I was there.
I was there on the cross, the ultimate victim of a human thirst for sin and evil. I died there. Yet I did not stay dead. I am alive. I beat sin and evil and death; once, then; and one day, forever.
Look at my cross. See me there. See my cross in the sin which is part of what it is to be human. See my cross and lay down before it. Your sin, your evil, they would lead to your destruction. “Yet I will never break my covenant with you.”
Hate, and sin, and evil, start in one heart.
And so we pray, O Lord, we ask, O Lord, we beg, O Lord, that it may not be in ours.

And so we are called to repent … a repentance we must make every day of our lives, dying to the sin that lies in each one of us … and rising, renewed in Jesus’ baptismal promise of our forgiveness … a forgiveness we are called to share just as freely as it has been given to us.
And now, having been set free by Christ to live new lives in him … now … and only now … can we go forth in Jesus’ name to fight that evil outside ourselves … using the weapons and the might God alone can give us … praying and working and living God’s Word … the Word that inexorably calls us to lay down everything we have and are for the sake of our neighbor … our poor, tired, suffering neighbor … all the while knowing that we will never see the end of sin and evil and the suffering they cause in the world, until that glorious day when falling buildings and failing hearts and all the loose ends of life are tied together in his mighty end of all endings … the end of sin, and evil, and death itself; and eternal life with the Father and the Son forever.

God promises it … I will never break my covenant with you …
… and God alone will deliver us. Amen.