Woe to the one who causes one of mine to stumble, to sin (9:42).  Woe to that culprit especially if he or she is also one of mine!  I don’t think I’ve encouraged anyone to sin.  I will say this: when I first started going to church, wanting to cultivate that habit, I was in the church office one day, talking with the secretary.  She was training her replacement.  Talking got to joking.  The joking got a little off color: the secretary-in-training said something like, “Hey, now, guys”: as much as to say, is that sort of joking good?  Is this how followers of Jesus Christ joke?  Well, I could have said, “Dang, lighten up!”  But that wasn’t my reaction.  My response was to honor her desire for a cleaner atmosphere.

How could I cause another believer to sin?  God forbid I ever do such a thing!  Not because I am a pastor—Lord knows too many of us have been a cause for grief!  It’s not because I’m a pastor that I pray I may never cause or tempt a fellow believer to sin.  I pray this because I am a believer.  The last thing any believer in Jesus Christ should do is to lead a fellow believer into sin!  It’s not as if this isn’t happening!  It’s happening in all the mainline denominations, and has been for some time.  I wrestle with shame, anger, and fear over being part of this denomination, but I think back to our strong theological and doctrinal heritage, and I consider you who are here today, and I remain.

In what we heard today, Jesus is urging us to do one thing: candidly consider the quality of your own discipleship.  I may not intentionally cause another believer to sin, and I may have such little concern for my own discipleship, that I fail to be a positive, constructive example for my fellow believers.  May I never be a Christian in name only!  Well, most of us don’t try to live as an example for anyone.  I’m not perfect.  I stumble in many ways.  If you called me here hoping for a saint, you got the wrong man—unless by saint you meant someone, like yourselves, who knows he has been called and claimed by God for God’s special purposes.  God has called all of us here.  There is no one here today whom God has not called, even those of you who may sort of be thinking about other things, right now, imagining the fun you hope to be having, after church, or imagining the fun you could be having, if you weren’t here at church.

There are no perfect disciples.  There are only disciples who live more or less by faith, who are more or less candid with themselves and others about their own weaknesses and failings.  There are only disciples who believe and live more or less by the belief that God’s grace is sufficient.  Each of us has our thorns.  Each of us hefts our cross and continues, trusting in this grace, this amazing grace that will lead us home.  The thorn hurts.  Sin knows exactly where we are weakest and will always try to ensnare us, there.  Do you concentrate your forces at the strongest point or the weakest?

What we used to understand but have allowed ourselves progressively to forget over the last centuries is that sin is not a surprise, never a surprise.  Sin is not first of all a matter of hurtful actions or words.  These are the effects of an underlying cause.  Harmful actions and words meant to hurt are manifestations.  Sin describes human nature.  It’s where we are.  It’s who we are.  It’s what we are.  Until God comes.  The Bible explains that we are fallen: fallen from goodness, fallen from God.  We have a will.  We use it to choose.  It feels free—we’d kind of like it to be, anyway.  So far as choosing red or green grapes, or Crest or Colgate, certainly our will is free.  How about chocolate cake or an apple?  How about alcohol or prayer?  How about death or life?  I choose, but sometimes I regret my choices.  My mother, dying from diabetes, regretted some of her choices.  She had been regretting such choices for years.  I regret choices I made and make, choices that I know do me no good.  So many things in this world, offered to us, alluringly, that can do us no good.  How do we know we are fallen?  We willfully harm ourselves and others.

Until God, in mysterious, wonderful, blessed mercy, grace, and love, calls and claims us, we use our ruined wills for ruin.  By our eyes, our ruined wills look for opportunities for ruin.  The ruined will uses the feet to carry us there and uses the hand to take.  How many sins our hands have committed!  And can any blessing from our hand be enough to wash away those stains?  How do you get a white garment completely clean, once stained?

The news presents us regularly with shocking stories of brutality, cruelty, viciousness, lewdness, sickness, sliminess—and that’s just the football recap!  We think, oh, those are only extraordinary examples, outrageous exceptions, but we ourselves are hardly paragons of virtue!  Review your own record.  Review it without benefit of our highly developed capacity for excuse-making, for self-exoneration.  But it really feels right!  Seems okay to me.  Review your record through the eyes of God: purity and perfection Himself.  God has compassion.  God offers forgiveness.  God is under no illusions as to what you did and failed to do, how many times?  In how many ways?

“Therefore,” St. Paul informed the Christians in Corinth, “to keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated.  Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.’  So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.  Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor 12:7-10 NRSV).

When I am weak, then I am strong?  When I am weak, when temptation is digging in its heels, pulling me more strongly, I realize my will, by itself, isn’t going to help me.  My will is already onboard!  I can’t save myself.  Isn’t that pathetic?  Because, you know, I should be able to, right?  My choice.  My will.  I should be able to save myself.  I should be able to stand with some iron in my back and some granite in my will and say “No!”  When Jesus says that, apart from him, we can do nothing, what do you think he means?  I think he is helping us to understand what Paul means, and Paul is helping us to understand what Jesus means.  In our weakness—and sin wants us, needs us weak, beloved—in our weakness, God comes to us, and illumines us by the light of His Holy Spirit, so that we suddenly see, clearly, distinctly, all the ugly things we’ve stored up.  We don’t see them when we’re in the dark.  We see them in God’s light, and suddenly we realize that we need something, we need someone, to help us, to guide us, to lead us, to get us out, to save us.  And Christ comes to us, holding out his arms to us, as much as to say, “I have the strength, let me help.”

When we in Christ come to others, this is what Christ says to others, through us: I am living in this one, and I can live in you, too.  By my living in you, I will heal you, purify you, bless you, help you, and you will live: for be sure of this, those in whom I do not live are dead and dead they will remain, here and forever.

Our faithful discipleship matters, not only for ourselves, but for those around us, too.  I don’t know how to tell you how blessed I feel to see the Spirit in you—you encourage me.  May God be pleased to allow me to be this for you, too.

Faithful discipleship is purifying.  We don’t talk about purity much: it sounds so goody goody, but God expects purity, for God is pure.  When Jesus talks about salt, he could have a few things in mind.  Salt was required in sacrifice, for salt purified (see Lv 2:13, also 2 Kings 2:20-21).  Salt helps to prevent corruption, which is why, prior to refrigeration, people learned to salt-cure their meat.  Purification, preservation.  Beloved, all the faithful will be purified, and the faithful are called to be part of God’s plan for the purification of the world.  Don’t you want to live in a purer world?  I do!  I don’t have the wisdom to purify it . . . but God does.

Christ warns us, sternly, against being a cause for another believer to sin.  Friends don’t let friends sin.  Friends don’t encourage friends to sin.  Friends don’t lead friends into sin.  True friendship, in Christ, purifies.  We mentor and disciple one another, through the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit, at work in and among us, is purifying us.  The theological word for this is sanctification.  “Sanctification is the work of God’s free grace, whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God, and are enabled more and more to die unto sin and live unto righteousness” (Westminster Shorter Catechism, Ans. 35).  Those called are, in this life, being sanctified, purified, preserved.  It’s a long process, a challenging process, a wondrous process, a holy process.  It’s a process of trust, of faith, of obedience, of learning the strength of God, typically in the context of our own weakness.  Sanctification is a journey of renewal unto God, enabled by God.  I like that: enabled.  We are more and more enabled as we continue our walk of faith, not trusting in our supposed strength, knowing our weakness, but trusting more and more in the strength of God in Jesus Christ, through the Holy Spirit.

Sisters and brothers, we can obey sin, or we can obey God.  We can place our will first or we can place God’s will first.  Placing our will first is sin: the serpent did not make Eve taste that fruit.  Sin is relegating God’s will to some position other than first.  We can always rationalize—oh how we rationalize!!  We’re quite talented at making what our ruined wills want blessed, good, even holy.  Scripture tells and shows us all about that.

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven,” Jesus reminds us, “but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven” (Mt 7:21).  How we live matters.  It shouldn’t be too difficult for people to identify us as Christians; not Christians in name only, those with only “the form of godliness.”[1]  All those wretched Catholic priests, bishops, perhaps a cardinal(!) who committed only-now-being-told atrocities against children—they are not the only ones who wore their Christianity the way people wear a coat or a jacket.  The Christian maxim is, though we are in the world we are not to be of the world.  Let us walk with the Lord and one another in such a way that we are not just in the church but truly of the Church.  There is nothing quite so attractive as a genuine Christian life, being Proverbs 31 people: living wisely in the fear of the Lord.  Strive to live in such a way that no one can honestly say that your example ruined any interest they might have had in Christ or in being his disciple.  Examine regularly the quality, the depth of your own discipleship, for your sake and for the sake of those around you, especially those who know that you claim to be a Christian.

Brothers and sisters, there is a hunger in this world, this land, this community, for something true, good, genuine, and fulfilling.  Disciples have that.  Disciples offer it.  Disciples don’t throw it away.

And to Jesus Christ, who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests of his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.

                [1] W. Graham Scroggie.  Gospel of Mark.  Study Hour Ser.  Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1976, 173.