Do You Hear the Lion s Roar? Introduction

Transcription

1 May 28, Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11; John 17:6-19 Do You Hear the Lion s Roar? Introduction We live in a world which too often doesn t make sense to us. Earlier this week there was a bombing in Manchester, England. I m sure you heard the report and saw the pictures of people fleeing in panic from the music concert by a popular young singer. Many of the people killed were young people, teenagers. Later this week, two days ago, a group of Coptic Christians boarded a bus to visit the monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor in lower Egypt. Coptic Christians make up about 10% of the population in Egypt. It is one of the oldest Christian groups in the world, established by the author of the Gospel of Mark, during the reign of Nero, within 25 years after the resurrection of Jesus. As they headed south from Cairo their bus was overtaken by three SUV s. 10 men wearing fatigues and carrying weapons entered the bus and demanded that the passengers recite the Muslim profession of faith. Then they opened fire on the pilgrims. 32 persons died, among them children, and 13 others are in critical condition in the hospital. ISIS has claimed responsibility for the atrocity. It is the fourth attack on Christians in the last six months in Egypt, including the Palm Sunday raid on two churches, and a December suicide bombing in a Cairo church which killed 75 persons.* While Manchester is important, and what happened there is part of the struggle between the West and a medieval culture, the other stories of Christians being singled out and killed, receive little attention and fade quickly from the headlines. This, even though they demonstrate a persistent pattern of deadly persecution occurring not just in Syria and Iraq, but also in Egypt, Libya, Nigeria,

2 Somalia, Sudan and Pakistan. In the last ten years 900,000 Christians have been killed for their faith. Amnesty International, a group which monitors terror attacks and government violations of human rights, reports that (Coptic Christians) have increasingly been under attack in Egypt. (Their) churches and homes have been set on fire, members of the Coptic minority have been physically attacked, and their property has been looted. The apostle Peter wrote in the latter part of the first century to churches that were under fire, that were being persecuted by officials in the Roman Empire: Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour. My friends, he s roaring now. The World of Peter and John At the time when the apostles Peter and John lived and evangelized, the world was ruled by Rome. On the whole the Emperor and the Roman Senate didn t care what you believed as long as you paid your taxes. But the Romans were extremely superstitious and had the practice of respecting, even worshipping, the gods of other lands and people they conquered. This served the purpose of pacifying subject states but also increasing a hold on the strange, invisible forces controlling the destiny of every person. Christians posed a problem, a threat to this ideology. By the end of the first century they were spreading into every corner of the empire and all classes of society. But they did not recognize the many gods Rome had collected. They insisted that they only had one God, and that all others were false. This meant that Christians would not participate in various civic rituals if they involved homage to a local deity. They would not swear an oath in the name of any of

3 the gods Rome honored. And, they would not swear loyalty to an Emperor who claimed he was a god, as Caligula, Nero, and various other Caesars did from the first century onward. There were sporadic and sometimes brutal persecutions in the empire, but the church held on. The trouble came from the fact that Christians defined themselves as being loyal to only one God, the one revealed by Jesus Christ. Why do Christians in 2017 die for their belief? For the same reason they did in ancient Rome. They place loyalty to Jesus Christ above everything else. In the historic Christian lands of the West, we strive to live by Jesus command that we live side by side with people of different faiths, loving them as we love our own family and friends. The presence of Hindu or Moslem or Jewish people in our neighborhoods does not lead to violence and persecution, except in isolated cases of racism or some other kind of local prejudice. But in other lands obedience to the God revealed by Jesus Christ is not tolerated. In North Korea to admit you are a Christian will put you in a labor camp where you will be worked to death. In Iran, if a Moslem person converts to Christianity he is subject to the death penalty. The Ones Jesus Claims John reports that on the last night Jesus spent with his disciples he prayed saying: Holy Father, protect them in your name the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. This is not a prayer that they, or we, be taken out of the world, but that we be protected from the evil one who tramples across the world. You will remember that Jesus himself was tempted by the devil, and that the final temptation was to receive all the power and authority in the world, and deny

4 God, by worshipping Satan. For Christians in lands of present day persecution the choice is sharp and clear. They must not convert at the point of a gun barrel. They must risk death itself to hold on to Christ. For us the attack on our loyalty is more disguised. We are sometimes asked to put our career ahead of God by looking the other way when we discover fraudulent or illegal business practices. Or, young people are lured to their doom by addictive drugs, which become the center of their lives, everything to them, instead of Christ. A nursing home aide is tempted by the despair of elderly patients to take the place of God and give a lethal injection to some of his charges. (You may remember that there was a story about an individual who did this, three months ago in the news.) Like a hungry lion evil stalks us, and seeks to terrify us, because we Christians refuse to place anything ahead of our loyalty to Jesus Christ. Sanctified Jesus asked his Father for one other special blessing for you and me. He said: Sanctify them in the truth. To sanctify something is to make it holy, to set it apart from common usage and instead make it special. That which makes you special is the uncommon knowledge of God, who God is, what his purposes are. Now you say Who me? That s for a preacher, that s for theologians, that s for others who maintain the church in the world. Not acceptable. We are not allowed that excuse, any of us. It does not matter what our occupation may be, what station we have in life. It certainly does not matter to ISIS whether you are young or old, male or female, humble peasant or college professor. If you wear the name of Christian you are

5 their enemy. Jesus himself revealed God in his life and what he asks of you is no less than complete loyalty to the truth of Jesus Christ. Will you demonstrate to the world courage when the lion roars? Will you lift up someone who has fallen? Will you feed the hungry, care for the sick, and visit those who are in prison? You are called to live the way Jesus did, trusting in God for all things, showing compassion and standing up for what is right, and just. To be made special in the truth means you have the knowledge the world longs for and must have. Conclusion Not out of the world, but protected in the world. Not escaping from the world, but living courageously in it. Not cursing and reviling injustice, but forgiving those who do not know what they are doing. If brother and sister Christians in Egypt have the courage to do this, can we do anything less? For the glory of God Stuart C. Wattles *[Sources: CNN, Fox News, Wall Street Journal,