Pentecost 25

Pentecost 25 (Luke 21:5-19)
Beware that you are not led astray.

The Good News of God’s love in Jesus Christ brings division to the world.
Those who reject Christ reject those who follow him. For the first three hundred years of the Christian Faith it was illegal to be a Christian. It is still illegal in many parts of the world.

When Jesus spoke of the persecution his followers would face he never authorized the Church to fight and kill for the Faith. He asks us to live for our faith. And, sometimes he asks us to endure persecution for our Faith.

Not all who associate with the Church are willing to live for the Faith. Not all who associate with the Church are willing to endure ridicule, rejection and outright persecution. There is a tendency to adjust the Faith to the surrounding culture.
Jesus warns us that those who seek to make such an accommodation are in danger of being led astray.

There are three basic sources of this erosion of Faith. They are the world, the flesh and the devil.

The world is the surrounding culture. The world says it’s OK to be religious but all religion says the same thing. The world presses hard to redefine Christ according to its own perceptions and values. The world sees Jesus as one among many religious teachers. The world says: it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you are a good person.

The world also seeks to change faith into belief and belief into opinion. For the world. It doesn’t matter if Jesus ever lived. He is an ideal not a reality.
Finally, the world teaches that there is no evidence for religious belief.

Therefore, religion is less important and less significant than knowledge, power, pleasure, prestige. The world seeks to turn the Faithful into lukewarm Christians who see Jesus as one option among many for our time and attention.
The flesh is the distorted desires and demands of our mind, heart and will. These desires generally place the distractions of entertainment and pleasure as their first priority. The demands of the flesh say: church is fine if I’m not too busy and have nothing else to do.

The devil, Satan, works through the world and the flesh to seduce people away from our Heavenly Father’s Plan of Salvation in Jesus Christ. Satan is most effective when people think of him as a cartoonish myth used to frighten children. Satan works by corrupting language, leaders and love.

The corruption of language is the tendency to obscure the meaning of words. Satan seeks to influence language through writers, artists, academics, advertisers, politicians and religion. The greatest form of linguistic confusion is the assertion that there is no absolute truth and that everything is relative to our own individual tastes and desires.

The corruption of leaders follows the corruption of language. Satan is powerful but limited. He focuses on seducing leaders in society to abandon Biblical values and then relies on them to do his work in the name of progress, science, or enlightenment.

The final corruption is the corruption of love. God is love. Satan knows very well who this love is and how this love created the universe, redeems the universe and can transform the universe. Satan uses a very old bait and switch technique whereby he redefines love as self indulgence.

And so, temptation to sin often comes with the words: if you really loved me. Or, I’m just not in love with you any more. Or, how can it be wrong when it feels so good?

Satan corrupts our understanding of love by confusing the meaning of the word and then encouraging popular culture to portray love as romantic idealism and self indulgence.

The ultimate Satanic Seduction is through religion. Satan targets the religiously inclined and seeks to subvert Faith by distorting belief. Satan is an expert in creating religion and then fomenting divisions within religion. Atheists very astutely observe that religion kills, divides, and contradicts. Of course, this is exactly what Satan wants. It is a form of negative advertising that creates confusion and disgust with all religion so people resist the Plan of Salvation as just one more unsubstantiated mythology.

The ultimate expression of false religion is the anti-Christ. An anti-Christ offers an experience of the divine that rejects the Incarnation of the co-eternal Son.
Why does this matter? After all, if God is love surely he will forgive our mistakes and confusions. That is perhaps the most subtle of Satan’s lies.

For God does indeed forgive. There is in fact no condemnation in the steadfast holy unconditional love of God. The problem is not with God. The problem is with us.
God the Father designed us to live in an eternal relationship with God the Son through the presence and power of God the Holy Spirit. Sin is the choice we made to separate from God. Jesus Christ is the solution to the problem of separation.
Jesus died on the cross not just to satisfy the demands of the law or some spiritual debt. Jesus died on the cross to transform separation back into reunification. Jesus died on the cross to transform death back into life.

Jesus just doesn’t show us a way to seek God. Jesus is the way, the only way, God finds us, restores us, and transforms us.

Jesus knows very well that human beings lost in sin are also lost in the distortions of fear, self will and pride. The Bible is not a book about man’s search for God. The Bible is a two thousand year record of man fleeing from God. The Bible is also a book of how God nevertheless patiently and persistently seeks and finds the lonely, broken and lost.

If religion alone were the answer to the fundamental problem facing the human race then Jesus would never have had to die on the cross. Moses would have been sufficient. The Temple in Jerusalem would have been enough.

As the religious leaders of Jesus day rejected him through fear and anger and turned him over to the Romans to kill, so they eventually rejected the purpose for which God authorized the Temple. The Temple was built to be a house of prayer for all nations. The religious leaders turned it into a nationalistic symbol of pride and might.

Once the Temple became a political symbol of aggression against Rome, it became the preeminent rallying point for the nationalistic to wage war, and it became the preeminent military target in that war. In 70 AD terrorists seized the Temple, slaughtered the priests and led the people into a devastating war. They promised the people that God was on their side. They lost that war. The Romans killed everyone in Jerusalem then leveled the city and the Temple. The Temple has never been rebuilt.
Jesus Christ has risen from the dead. In his resurrection he has transformed death back into life. As we unite with Jesus by grace through faith we receive the great gift of God: reunification with the Father, through the Son, by the indwelling presence and power of the Holy Spirit.

The principle of salvation is very simple: we become like who we worship.
It is not entirely a matter of belief. It is entirely a matter of faith. The question the Bible asks is: who do you trust?

Jesus warns us that there will be many false teachers, false prophets and anti-Christs who will offer an alternative to our Heavenly Father’s Plan of Salvation. They are all spiritual dead ends. They are all spiritual deadly ends. Only Jesus can and has transformed death back into life, separation back into reunification, sin back into love.

Be warned. Be wary. Beware that you are not led astray.