God In The Hands Of Angry Sinners

God in the Hands of Angry Sinners An old joke goes: Q. What did the preacher preach on today? A. Sin. Q. What did he say about it? A. He was against it. Today I'm going to talk about sin. It's easy to divide preachers up into those who preach grace, and the gospel, and those who like to talk about sin. Those of us for whom the center of attention is the gospel might give the idea that sin isn't such a big deal. I don't know about you, but I don't very much care for people who like to talk about sin. I always suspect that behind the preaching against sin the real motive is the desire to control people, to manipulate them with guilt and fear. To get the kids to shape up and conform to norms of respectable behavior, rather than messing up the grownups' world. Also, I get the idea that people who make a big deal out of sin really get off on the idea that most people are going to be tortured forever in Hell. (Have you noticed how angry and upset they get at the idea that maybe, somehow, everyone will be saved in the end; you'd think they'd get upset and angry at the idea that, in the end, some people may insist on being lost. This is a very different attitude than that of God, who would rather die than let this happen...) And isn't there often an air of hypocrisy around those who preach against sin, so we suspect that they're probably trying to hide something, and trying to make themselves safe from what privately obsesses them by publicly preaching against it. When Jimmy Swaggart messed up, was anyone really surprised? All of this makes it seem that there is something suspect about making an issue of sin. As though, like sex, death, and salaries it's better taken for granted and not much talked about. But I think we really have to tell the truth about sin, always remembering that it isn't the truth we tell if we don't tell it in love and in the light of God's good news. The only way to know what sin is is by way of the gospel. Otherwise we deny that the gospel is the power of God that exposes sin for what it really is and that utterly defeats it. We need to hear about sin from those who are willing to preach God's unconditional acceptance of human beings, from those who are ready to admit that God completely accepts us no matter what we do, or want to do, or fail to do. Everyone thinks he knows about sin. Even people who are outside the Christian church know, or think they know, what sin is. Sin is what they'll have to quit doing in order to get right with God.

We've all heard people say this: 'I can't become a Christian yet. I'm not ready to give up my card playing, my booze and women, my shady business practices,' or whatever. Sin, they think, is what you trade in for salvation, as soon as they have the will power to do so. Sin, they think, is what you repent of in order to make things right between you and God. Amazingly, even Christians sometimes encourage this pagan idea of sin, insisting that people swear off one thing or another as a condition of getting admitted to the Church. But Christians need to fight the belief that this idea of sin contains, that the problem of the human race is that we want to be bad. Human beings are not sinful because they want to be bad. As though this is how the Fall took place: Adam, in the days before fig leaves came into fashin, sees Eve and says 'I want to be bad! Let's do evil! Let's go wild!' But of course this is false. The problem of the human race, the problem of sin, is what the Word of God says it is, not what human fantasy wants to imagine it is. Adam and Eve wanted to be good, they wanted to be like God, knowing good and evil. The essence of sin is this desire we have to be good. Think of it; to be like God, to be God-like! To be a divine being, complete and good in oneself, independent and self-sufficient. To be the source of one's own life and one's own goodness. To have the power to tell what's good and what's evil. The power to see to it that what's right gets done and what is not right is not done. To have the power to shape reality as one knows it should be shaped. To have the power to lay down the law, and see to it that others toe the line, doing what I know is best. We don't understand what sin is, and what it means for us to be sinners, unless we focus on the fact that it all begins in our desire to take God's place, to become supremely good and wonderful and powerful and righteous, instead of trusting God to be God. Fitz Allison, Episcopal bishop of South Carolina, once said 'Most of us do not have a sense of sin, the interior existential evil within us from which all else is hatched. Instead, we have a feeling of guilt derived mostly from comparing our behavior to a moral or ethical code, and our pious gestures of repentance really have little to do with any real personal sense of the nature of sin. When we confess that we are 'sinners', we really mean that we admit to our failure to conform to a behavioral code, particularly of our religious body' (Forgiveness: Who Needs It?) The nature of sin is that we human beings decide not to trust God to know and do what is good, especially good for us, but to take this upon ourselves. The nature of sin is that human beings decide they need not rely on God for life and righteousness, but close themselves off from him and try to become god-like in their own right. When we take God's view of sin, rather than the standard human one, our thought and talk about it will be radically altered. The gospel liberates us to tell the truth about sin, which is that the sinner wants to be good and powerful, like his idea of a god. Our sinful desire to be virtuous and powerful takes many forms. One of the most important is the desire to control. We want to control God, to know the things we have to do to get his approval and be in his good graces, and to find the techniques for getting him to make things go the way we want them to go. Thus sinful man invents religion. Of course the true God cannot be controlled by our religious rituals, prayers and good deeds. So the 'God' religious, sinning human beings try to bring under their control is nothing but an idol. Every 'God' of every religion is a

hollow idol, a projected image of man himself. Sinful man tries to control God by becoming God. He ends up being controlled by his own idols. We want to control other people. Part of our idea of being like God is to be able to determine how other people act. We want to have power over their lives, because part of knowing good and evil is stamping out any competing idea of what is good and evil. Human relationships at every level are infected with the desire to dominate, to manipulate, to use the other person for our own ends, to control the other person so we can feel that we are righteous and in the right. When many people are involved, our sin manifests itself in our institutions, societies, governments. For sinful human beings, politics becomes the array of techniques by which some people dominate others and feel good about it; it's the means for some people to live off the work of others and feel worthy while doing so. Ultimately our institutions, especially are nations and their governments, come to be our gods, the things we accept as being absolutely good and powerful. The history of human misery since the Fall is largely the story of human religion and human government. The first murder was the result of a religious dispute. The culmination of man's rebellion against God, portrayed in the Apocalypse, is a religious dictatorship. And God himself is executed for blasphemy and sedition. Man in revolt against God wants to control reality. Human beings want reality to accord with their dear illusions about their virtue and power, so we tell ourselves that it does. Think how very rare it is for someone to say 'Yes I did that because I wanted to do something bad.' People almost never admit that what they are doing is evil; people have to tell some story that makes them seem righteous in their own eyes. We are intractable self-justifying creatures. 'I'm not hurting other people, I'm just standing up for my rights! I'm not fighting for slavery, I'm fighting for my property rights! I'm not killing an unborn child, I'm exercising my freedom to choose what happens in my own body.' Even the madman who climbs up in the tower and shoots dozens of innocent people feels that he is in the right, that the 'system' has done him wrong and that 'they' have it coming. When people do what's wrong they tell themselves what they're doing is right. Ever since the day Adam tried to pin the blame on Eve, and she blamed the snake, human beings have been endlessly evasive, experts at ignoring reality in favor of self-deception that makes us feel justified. Because we want to feel secure in ourselves we tend to avoid looking reality in the face. We often prefer to stay closed up within ourselves, living in a subjective world of fantasies rather than taking the risks involved in living in open fellowship with other human beings. Rather than facing the truth about ourselves and our desire to be like gods, knowing good and evil, we trivialize sin, inventing rules for us to follow and 'sinners' to break. We create the illusion that sin is the desire to do bad things, have bad attitudes, and think bad thoughts, evading the awful reality and depth of human sin, which lives precisely in our passion to be right and righteous. It is in our good works that we are most Godless. Sin is at its strongest exactly where we feel most sure of being right. Wanting to be like God is to want what is impossible. The 'Father of Lies' promised Eve something that cannot be. All human efforts to achieve a sense of security and righteousness utterly fail. Only self-deception and fantasy can keep up the illusion that they are succeeding.

Our revolt against God leads to frustration; taking his place is impossible. This frustration creates anger and despair in the human heart. The end-state of rebellious self-righteousness is selfcondemnation and self-hatred. A lot of the overt sinning that goes on in the world is a symptom of despair, the bitter realization of our failure to be like God, of our inability to masterfully order reality according to our ideas of good and evil. Our reaction to the deep unsatisfied needs that only the real God could possibly satisfy is to try to satisfy them in bizarre, destructive ways. Much of the patently self-destructive and other-destructive things that we do are the result of our giving up, distracting ourselves from our failure to carry off the revolt against God. The existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre summed this up when, pointing out man's hopeless desire to become God, he described man as a 'useless passion.' Frustration doesn't lead just to despair. It leads to anger and hatred. Carried to its logical conclusion, the decision to deny God and take his place for oneself is the decision to destroy him. The moment Eve accepted the proposition 'You will be like God, knowing good and evil' in her heart Christ was implicitly nailed to the cross. The Puritan Jonathan Edwards wrote a famous sermon called 'Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God' but I think he got it wrong. To understand the human condition, to understand the true nature of sin, we must say 'God in the Hands of Angry Sinners.' Sin implies not only our death; it implies God's murder. The murder begun in Eden is completed at Calvary. Only when we say and think this do we comprehend what sin really is. And it's only when we know the God who becomes the 'God in the Hands of Angry Sinners' that the gospel of Jesus Christ breaks through our sinful, religious fantasies about God and ourselves and frees us from the power of sin. Man, wanting equality with God, desires to be like God, knowing good and evil and lording it over his fellow man. But God graciously does the opposite, refusing to be the thing man in his sin strives to become. God refuses the temptation to be a self-sufficient, self-satisfied divine being. The great, amazing, heartbreaking fact is God's response to man's rebellion. He doesn't respond with indignant wrath at human ingratitude and stupidity. He immediately seeks man out and starts to help him, even while letting him have his own way, and become separated from God. God's response to our desire to destroy him and take his place is not to defend his place. God will have his way in the end, but not by overpowering or destroying the sinner. Man will have his way first. Thus starts the long road that ends with God in Christ murdered by angry sinners, offended at his challenge to their power and piety. God will have his way in the end. He will have his personal, passionate, covenant relationship with the people he has called into being. At all costs. He will break down every power and every structure that destroys those whom he loves. God will defeat even our desire for self-sufficient godhood and forgive us for it. But he will not forgive us in a cavalier, whimsical, destructive way. He heals and forgives us only after letting our way of rebellion reach its logical conclusion. It is as though God says to sinful man 'Have it your way...for now, but I will not forsake you in the end, and even before then I will not leave you to your own devices. From the very worst evils of your having things the way you want them I will bring forth your salvation. I will save you despite yourselves, turning what you do for evil to your good, which is your trusting me.' God makes clothes for Adam and Eve, even though their shame is a product of their new-found selfrighteousness, a rejection of their 'merely human' status as physical, sexual creatures. God gives

them a law to follow, a law that will preserve and protect man from himself, though he will use it in a vain attempt to achieve righteousness, as though righteousness could be something in oneself rather than one's being related rightly to God. But in the end will come the One who fulfils this law and delivers man from sin, even the sin of legalism and moralism. The people of God demand a king, and a government like that of their neighbors, so God lets them have what they want, despite the fact that in this they will more fully and perniciously manifest their fallenness. Yet from this kingship God will finally bring them their savior-king. And finally, he gives them what they want, the chance to execute God as a threat to their religious and political power. God brings something good out of something evil. Even as we act to intensify our alienation from God, God lets us do so, but he graciously turns our actions' results to his own end, which is our reconciliation to him. From the worst we do to God, he brings us what’s best for us. The good news, as Luther once put it is this: 'God sent his son into the world...and said to him: 'Be Peter the denier; Paul the persecutor, blasphemer and assaulter; David the adulterer; the sinner who ate the apple in paradise; the thief on the cross.' (Luther’s Works 26:280, 1535 “Lectures on Galatians”). The good news is that God, with us as Jesus, refused to do the very thing that Adam and all his descendents attempted. Adam rejected his relationship of love and trust with God his father by trying to grasp equality with God. Jesus did not count equality with God as a thing to be grasped, but took the form of a servant. God became a servant to save men who tried to become gods. Rejecting the Devil's temptations of power and glory, Jesus chose instead to trust in his Father's word. What Jesus refused, and all the rest of us have accepted, in one form or another, is epitomized in the legalism of the Pharisees and the law and power of the Roman state. What Jesus rejected, and all the rest of us have tried to get, is a goodness that is one's own, rather than a goodness given us by God. Coming to us as he did, Jesus demonstrated that his commitment to us is more tenacious than our sinful self-righteousness, self-satisfaction, and self-contained independence; that his desire for us to belong to him is stronger than our desire to be as gods. This is the invading gospel that breaks the power of sin. The good news is that Jesus Christ is not for those who want to be good, respectable people. He is for those of us who are sick and tired of trying to be good. He offers himself to us as we repent of our desire to be as God, knowing good and evil. There are plenty of empty words about sin thrown around and about what to do about it. But there is exactly one solution to the problem of sin: trust God. The essence of sin is our distrust of God, our refusal to let him, rather than us, be God. So the solution to sin must be the opposite: trust God. Most of us one way or another feel and act as though there is some other solution, like stop sinning, or want to stop sinning, or trying to stop, or wanting to try to stop, or trying to want to try to stop doing whatever it is we've noticed as bad behavior. Or, amazingly, we tell one another that the thing to do is to resist temptation! But as someone once said, I can resist anything except temptation! These strategies are not ways to defeat the power of sin in our lives; they are exemplifications of its power, manifestations of the belief that we can do something to make ourselves right in God's eyes. Should we then not care about the profound tendencies within us toward destructive, evil ways of thinking, feeling, and acting? No: we need to trust God. Here, I think, is where the preachers who

preach against sin let us down. They tell us to trust God, as though this were something we could do, if we just tried a little harder. But what do we do to trust God? What can any human being, born in sin and shaped in iniquity, do to trust God? Trusting God is very hard, not because it is hard in and of itself. In a way, there's nothing to it; it's what we're made for. Trusting God is very hard just because it's not hard enough for selfrighteous, distrustful fallen humans like you and me. We don’t trust trust. We crave something else to do to convince ourselves we're good enough in our own eyes, and in God's. We want to be like God, knowing, and in control of, good and evil. It's not so much that trusting God is difficult; it's just that the truth about God seems so strange to us, and it's so easy to ignore. When the truth seems odd, and it's easy to ignore and easy to forget, what we have to do is obvious. We sinners need to say it and hear it. We need to tell it to one another, again and again. And we need to hear it from one another, over and over. Don't tell me to stop sinning! Tell me that God has utterly defeated the power of sin over me. Let me hear the good news, the good news that stays news, because I am always more or less desperate to hear it and be changed by it. The gospel alone has the power to break through the illusions about sin that sin creates. So hear that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. Hear that we have, as a free gift, the righteousness of Jesus Christ. Listen and hear that there is nothing you can do to merit God's favor, because you already have it. Hear and believe that God would do anything for us, even put himself into the hands of angry sinners. Amen

Lay Sermon by Donald H. Wacome Church of the Savior Orange City, Iowa