“Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness.”  Well, I don’t know of anybody being persecuted for unrighteousness.  In Calgary, Alberta, there are some three thousand people living on the streets. Want to be homeless, in Calgary, in January?  There are Christians who minister to them, including a group called Mission 7 Ministries.  Derek Reimer is a pastor with that ministry to Calgary’s homeless.  Reimer himself is no angel, to be sure, and he testifies to the power of Jesus to change lives, including his own.  During the COVID shutdown up north, Reimer fed the hungry homeless of Calgary while protesting his government’s COVID policies.  That got him arrested.  The government had made it illegal to disagree with public health policies.  I guess that blew over.  In 2021, Reimer ran for the Calgary city council but was not elected.

Meanwhile, since around 2018, the Calgary Public Library system—the state-owned, state-funded libraries, I may need to clarify—in partnership with a group called Calgary Pride, has been hosting an event called Reading with Royalty—drag queens, that is—reported by the CBC as an event “geared towards children ages six to eight.”[1]  It turns out there are parents who think it’s good, wholesome family fun to take their little ones to the library, to have a man dressed as a fairy tale princess read to them.  I’m pretty sure they’re not being read the Bible.

Anyway, Reimer began showing up to these events, protesting.  He was arrested for that in March and had, I guess, the equivalent of a restraining order put on him.  He went again in April and was arrested again.  He was charged with saying mean, insensitive things, charged with pushing past parents to get to the front of the room, and charged with causing children to cry.  When the law enforcement officers arrived, they threw Reimer to the ground and dragged him away.  The authorities want to make it clear that protesting drag queen events for children in Calgary’s libraries is strictly forbidden.  I’m not sure what will eventually happen to Reimer.

Decades back and a third of the way around the globe, there was a Romanian Jew by the name of Richard Wurmbrand.  In his youth, he studied Marxism in Moscow and was a person of interest to the at-that-time non-Communist Romanian secret police, who imprisoned Wurmbrand on several occasions.  In 1938, Wurmbrand became a Christian and eventually a Lutheran pastor.  During World War Two, still in Romania, he shared the Good Word with people as they huddled together in bomb shelters and did what he could to rescue fellow Jews—Romania was an ally of the Nazis.  In 1948, with the war over and Romania, now a satellite of the Soviet Union, Wurmbrand publicly said that Communism and Christianity were incompatible.  He was promptly arrested and left in prison until 1956—that’s eight years, including a three-year stint in solitary confinement in an underground cell: no windows, no light.  Sit with that, for a moment.  In 1959, after three years outside of prison, he was arrested again—he hadn’t learned his lesson, you see; he had continued his work in the underground church.  In 1964, a Norwegian humanitarian group bought Wurmbrand’s freedom for about $10,000, around five times the going rate at the time.  In current dollars, they bought him out of prison for $98,000.  Wurmbrand eventually made his way to the US, where he helped establish a ministry that came to be called Voice of the Martyrs, which smuggles Bibles into countries where Christianity is officially prohibited and/or persecuted.

May I share some of the things Wurmbrand’s former Communist comrades did to him while he was in prison for being an unruly Christian?  He was burned.  He was frozen.  He was mutilated.  The soles of his feet were beaten until all that was left was a torn, raw, bloody, meaty mess.  The next day they took up where they left off, beating his ruined feet right down to the bone.

“Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (5:10).  Lord willing, neither you nor I will ever have to experience what Wurmbrand experienced.  Lord willing, neither you nor I will ever go through what Rev. Reimer is experiencing.  Lord willing, you and I will live for righteousness, worship in righteousness, encourage one another and invite others to live by this righteousness, which is not my righteousness nor your righteousness, which is not the righteousness of Left or Right but is God’s righteousness in Jesus Christ, the Word of God.  Where do we know true righteousness?  Here, in this book, when the Spirit makes Christ come alive in us, so that we truly hear his Word and begin truly to live his way.  The Spirit alive in us does not change the words of this book or explain these words away in ways acceptable to modern taste, contemporary fashion, or current political values.  The Spirit alive in us causes this Word to come alive in us.

Christ’s way does not make wickedness righteousness, does not make depravity good family fun: it makes lost, ruined people into God-honoring people by changing them, not by approving, affirming, and applauding them in their sin.  “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.  Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight” (Is 5:20-21).  In our relationships with one another, we must find workable compromises.  In our relationship with God, when it comes to this faith, compromise is destructive.  We don’t need militancy—the Iranian and Saudi governments have more than enough of that for the rest of us!  We need wisdom and fidelity, gifts from God for living faithfully in unfaithful times, for pursuing righteousness in an unrighteous age.  Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

More than half a century ago, Scottish pastor and biblical scholar William Barclay wrote, “the plain fact is that the vast majority of men still refuse to take Jesus seriously” and “there are still those who, consciously and unconsciously, have come to the conclusion that Jesus does not matter, that he is a factor which can well be omitted from life.”[2]  The more things change . . . the main noticeable difference today is that rejection has become more strident, belligerent.

As usual, there are those in the churches who are eager to keep up with the vanguard of culture, eager to downplay tension with the world and defend their winsome claims to sophistication and urbanity, insisting they are allies of the cultural vanguard, not realizing they are barely tolerated and already on their way out.  They are allies no one wants.

Let us devote ourselves to being allies of Christ.  Let us continue to seek ways to use the vocabulary of our age to make Christ sensible to those lost around us, but let us never adopt the values of the godless.  Godless values euthanize faith and make a mockery of Christ’s church.

But you and I know, and you may even have personally experienced that to speak up for Jesus, to speak out for Christ, can result in ridicule and rejection.  And the time may well come (as it came long ago) when ridicule is but the mildest response to our message.  What does Jesus say?  “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me” (5:11).  In these times, so long as we will not shove and confine Jesus into the role of progressive social revolutionary, so long, in other words, as we are true to the saving work of Jesus Christ, you and I put ourselves on the path to persecution.  No wonder we aren’t exactly eager to speak up and speak out for Christ.

We’ve all been taught quite thoroughly that religion and politics don’t mix.  Who taught us that?  Where were we taught that?  And who gained by such teaching?  Christianity provides Christians with bedrock values.  We see around us today what comes of conscientiously keeping our bedrock values out of the American political system, out of the public sphere.  Jesus spoke of the man who had been cleansed of an unclean spirit.  The interior space—heart, mind, soul—was now clean, in order, and vacant.  Beloved, nature and sin abhor a vacuum, so, too faith.  Jesus tells us that the empty, ready space was filled, soon enough, with seven demons worse than the one driven out.  God hates sin because He knows all too well what sin does to the sinner, what it does to relationships.  We must do what we can to fill the space, our own and even that of our society and culture, with what is good, what is godly, lest wicked things become squatters there.

Jesus mentions false evils being spoken of those who follow him, lies that will be spread about Christians—well, a certain sort of Christian, you know.  What false evil is said of Bible-believing Christians in our time?  They, we, get called “militant.”  That term sounds like military, some sort of militia—armed and dangerous!  The Word of God is all our weaponry.  To whom is it dangerous?  Militant is also a pejorative way of saying organized and motivated.  The powers arrayed against us want us disorganized and unmotivated—such people can be easily dominated.

Some in the media have begun using the term “Christian Nationalism” to describe traditional, historic, orthodox Christianity and those who subscribe to these values.  In this globalist age, “nationalism” sounds like a goose step away from Nazi-ism.  The wonder of it is the sheer historical ignorance at work in all this, but, beloved, the dictate of worldly power is that history and all things must bow the knee before political expediency.  Those who oppose our faith will attempt to make our faith an object of fear as well as derision.  An article in the Huffington Post, a bellwether for Progressive right-think, speaks of those “mean, crazy, violent, hateful, misogynistic and anti-science” Christians.[3]  No one is ever invited or encouraged to examine what is meant by such terms, or what evidence demonstrates the accuracy of such labels.  Those who know the Huff Post is obviously right already know.

In the face of our scowling culture, Jesus tells us to “Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you” (5:12).  Jeremiah, Zechariah, and John the Baptist come to mind: God’s messengers.  What was the message for which they were persecuted?  The prophets shined the unwelcome light of God’s Word into all the dark, heavy, hot, happinesses people pursued, where they wanted no light, no criticism, no . . . judgment.  Life without judgment.  Don’t judge, right!?  Judgement bad, self-indulgence good.  Judgment bad, political right-think good.  And who are we to say, anyway?  Who really knows the truth, after all?  You?  Me?

The Gospel is life with judgment, good judgment, wisdom and discernment from God, conscience and clear teaching from God.  Beloved, it’s not the point of the Gospel to make life easy; it’s not the point of the Bible to make life comfortable.  We’re not called to be in conformity with this world.  God’s Word is the framework for holiness: the way and the truth and the life.  Oh.  Ugh.  There’s that mean, crazy, violent militancy again!  The Church exists for advancement in faith.  This world will, indeed must, persecute any who seek to advance in faith, advance in Christ, advance together with Christ.  Richard Wurmbrand said that “the living Jesus will give you joy amid tribulation.”  I guess he would know.  He also said, “A faith that can be destroyed by suffering is not faith.”  Christ’s journey on this earth was always the journey to the Cross, but that wasn’t his final destination.

A consequential faith will have consequences for you in this life.  William Barclay wrote of how people “will try to silence the troublesome voice of conscience.”[4]  Sin will always, must by its very nature always seek to silence the troublesome voices of the faithful.  Shall we, then, be silent until we are silenced?

               [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/derek-reimer-calgary-drag-storytime-protest-court-arrest-1.6802594

               [2] William Barclay.  Gospel of Luke.  1953.  Daily Study Bible.  Philadelphia: Westminster P, 1975.  279.

               [3] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/10-ways-christians-are-destroying-christianity_b_8213708

               [4] William Barclay.  Gospel of Matthew.  Vol. 1.  1956.  Daily Study Bible.  Philadelphia: Westminster P, 1975.  118.