Our scripture reading today is not a typical Advent or
Christmas time scripture. And, and, and, and I say that
while at the same time being able to say, and I'm not sure
why, because it really, really fits well with the Advent and
Christmas season. And we'll see why a little more
explicitly later. You might be able to guess right
off the bat, but we'll see here. Hosea Chapter 11 verses one
through 11. When Israel was a child, I loved
him, and out of Egypt I called my son.
But the more they were called, the more they went away from me.
They sacrificed to the bales. They burned incense to images.
It was I who taught Ephraim and Ephraim is another name for for
the children of Israel. Ephraim was one of the 12
tribes, and for whatever reason, some of the prophets will use
that tribe of Ephraim to refer to all of the Israelites.
So when when we're talking about Ephraim, we're talking about the
Israelites. It was I who taught Ephraim to
walk, taking them by the arms. They did not realize it was I
who healed them. I LED them with words, with
cords of human kindness and ties of love to them.
I was like one who lifts a little child to the cheek and I
bent down to feed them. Will they not return?
Will they not return to Egypt? And will not Assyria rule over
them because they refuse to repent?
A sword will flash in their cities.
It will devour their false prophets and put an end to their
plans. My people are determined to turn
away from me. Even though they call me God
Most High, I will by no means exalt them.
How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over Israel?
How can I treat you like Adma? How can I make you like as a
boy? M My heart is changed within me,
all my compassion is aroused. I will not carry out my fierce
anger, nor will I devastate Ephraim again, for I am God and
not a man, the Holy One among you.
I will not come against their cities.
They will follow the Lord. He will roar like a lion when he
when he roars. His children will come trembling
from the West. They will come from Egypt
trembling like sparrows, from Assyria, fluttering like doves.
I will settle them in their homes, declares the Lord.
May the Lord add His blessing to the reading and hearing of His
Word. Now we're starting our Christmas
series, Advent series here, Wicked for Christmas.
I'm going to say just a few introductory words about the
whole series before we jump into the meat of it.
And the first is just I. I know that there are split
opinions about the Wicked movies and and not everyone is a fan of
Wicked. I'm shamelessly piggybacking
right now on the reality that this is one of the most popular
movie series. It's a 2 parter in in many, many
years and many, many, many folks love it and some folks don't.
Some folks are very loyal to the original and not really loyal to
the original. We don't I I couldn't tell you
what the original Wizard of Oz movie Wicked is a retelling of
The Wizard of Oz. The 1939 version starring just
lost her Judy Garland. I almost said Dorothy Hamill,
which was wrong on so many different levels.
Starring Judy Garland was not the original.
It was the 4th full length feature adaptation of the book
by Frank. Yeah, Frank L Baum, L Frank
Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
It was like the fourth full length feature adaptation.
If you if you factor in stage adaptations and shorter
adaptations, the 1939 version is like that.
Depending on how you do the addition, it's like the 8th or
10th different version of of that thing.
So it's not the original, but it's the one that I grew up
with. So to me, it's the original.
I always liked that movie. The flying monkeys scared the
bejeebers out of me, but I liked that movie.
I love the Wicked movies as well.
The if you're not a fan of musicals, you're not going to
like it. There's just no getting around
the fact that it's a musical. But the themes that it explores,
the values that it expresses, I, I don't think it's an accident
that the same person that wrote the stage play on which the
movies are based is the person who wrote the musical Godspell
many, many, many years ago. And the themes of, of love and
loyalty of, of goodness and wickedness.
And what is goodness and wickedness and who are the good
and who are the wicked? And, and where does friendship,
you know, what role does friendship play?
These are how do you stand up to, to forces of evil in the
world? These are themes that are are
prevalent all throughout the scripture and all throughout
history indeed so. So if you haven't seen them, I
encourage you to check them out. If unless you don't like me, if
you don't like musicals, you're not going to like them no matter
how good they are. If you, if you're willing, at
least willing to enjoy or tolerate a musical, check them
out. I think you'll really, really
enjoy how that story develops and plays out.
The opening song for the music, for the movies and the stage,
theatrical stage production of Wicked is a song called No One
Mourns the Wicked for. For some of these weeks, I'm
going to use clips from the movies.
Other weeks we're going to have live singers in here in two
weeks. Tiny little girl, she's about
that tall. She's in second grade down at
Meg's here. She's going to come and sing a
song from the movies. The song is called Popular.
If you know the musical, you'll know that's a really, really fun
song. She's so tiny.
She's got a voice and and a personality that fills a room.
So that's going to be a lot of fun in a couple of weeks.
But today we have a movie clip from the first song called No
One Mourns the Wicked. And and on the outside chance
that there are people in here that are unfamiliar with the
Wizard of Oz storyline, a character known as the Wicked
Witch of the West is killed. And there is great celebration
in Munchkin Land and throughout the Kingdom of Oz.
And that's what's happened when they're singing No One Mourns
the Wicked. They're singing about the death
of the Wicked Witch of the West. So could you turn up the volume
and turn down the lights, please, Donna?
And for whatever reason, this recording doesn't have quite the
same volume as the musical other musical recordings.
So we got to crank it up a little bit so we can hear it.
At this point in the sermon, we listen to the song No One Mourns
the Wicked from the musical Wicked.
For licensing reasons, I can't include it in this recording.
It's a great song and Ariana Grande sings it beautifully.
You can find it on YouTube, Spotify and iTunes.
I hope you'll give it a listen. Now back to the sermon.
That question of why wickedness happens, we're going to kind of
get to that over the next few weeks here.
But this business of no one mourns the wicked, no one mourns
the wicked. There's a lot of truth in that.
There's a lot of truth if you pick the lowest hanging fruit on
the tree of wickedness. I don't know if there was anyone
in the world that was mourning when Adolf Hitler died, when the
Nazi regime fell. No one, certainly no one in the
United States, no one in Western Europe, no one in Russia, no one
in Africa was mourning that day. When, when people or groups that
we see as doing horrible, evil, awful, wicked things in the
world, when they are gone, our tendency is to celebrate, and
understandably so. If a source of wickedness has
been removed from the world, people tend not to grieve over
that. They celebrate that.
I think that that is a common human thing across ages, across
cultures, across religions, across all sorts of barriers,
that no one mourns the wicked. No one.
Folks in Munchkin Land there happy that the Wicked Witch of
the West has died. However, however, there is a
truth that we as followers of Jesus have to contend with, and
that truth is this. Well, we see it in Isaiah.
I will not accuse them. This is God speaking through the
prophet Isaiah, and he's speaking about his people,
Israel. I will not accuse them forever,
nor will I always be angry, for then they would faint away
because of me, the very people I have created.
I was enraged by their sinful greed.
God's not looking at His people through rose colored glasses.
He saw them and he understood them and he knew the depth of
their wickedness. I was enraged by their sinful
greed. I punished them and hid my face
in anger, yet they kept on their willful ways.
I have seen their ways, but I will heal them.
I will guide them and restore comfort to Israel's mourners,
creating praise on their lips. God looking at people, his
people that he has made, that he has done so much for seeing them
persist in evil, persist in wickedness.
And God says, I will comfort them, I will heal them, I will
care for them. If we jump back to Hosea, we see
it even more clearly that God mourns the wicked.
God mourns the wicked. We'll look at that Hosea passage
again a little bit later, but the simple reality is this.
The we as human beings might celebrate the death of the
wicked. God mourns the wicked.
God's heart is broken. You go back to the greatest act
of destruction in human history, the great flood.
And God looked out and said every desire of every heart is
always evil all the time, except for Noah and his family.
And God decided to wipe out all humanity with a flood except for
Noah and his family. We are told that God was grieved
by that. God was not celebrating the
death of those folks. God's heart was broken.
God was grieved. Our God, the one we serve, the
one we follow, God mourns the wicked.
God mourns the wicked, hears that Hosea passage.
God says this. My heart is changed within me
after going through that whole list.
I saved my my, I saved Ephraim. I've saved Israel like I brought
them my son out of Egypt, and then they turned away from me
and they followed the bales and they burned incense to other
things. They did all of these wicked
things and God is set to destroy them.
But says, my heart is changed within me.
All my compassion is aroused. I will not carry out my fierce
anger, nor will I devastate Ephraim again, for I am God and
not a man, the Holy One among you.
I will not come against their cities.
They will follow the Lord. Now here's the catch God, well,
not a catch. It's it's a just a piece of this
and it's something God says in a couple of different ways at a
couple of different points in Scripture where he says here for
I am God and not a man. It's like when he said through
Isaiah, my ways are not your ways and God talking to the
human beings. My ways are not your ways.
My thoughts are not your thoughts.
The heavens are higher than earth.
So are my thoughts higher than your thoughts and my ways higher
than your ways. God much more succinctly here,
for I am not a man. God is saying, I'm not like you.
That's what holy means. I'm not like you.
I am holy. I am different from human
beings. And where you celebrate, I have
compassion. Where you rejoice, I mourn even
for the death of the witch, even for those who have done great
wickedness, even for those who have died in that wickedness.
God mourns the wicked. And that's an essential thing
for us to grasp here as we move into the Christmas season that
we see a lot of where there was a lot of wickedness going on at
that time. Herod the Great, who was the,
the, the king of Israel at the time that Jesus was born.
And you know the stories, the three magi, they come, they see
the star, they're looking for the one to be born king of the
Jews. They go to Jerusalem, they go to
the palace, they ask Herod, where's the one to be born king
of the Jews. Herod hasn't heard anything
about it. He sends them off to find the
Messiah in Bethlehem, the one who's been born.
And he says, please come back and tell me so I can worship him
too, when he just really wants to kill him because that's what
Herod the Great did. Herod the Great did all sorts of
wicked things, including killing political rivals, including
killing his own children at times.
He did many wicked things. He killed every boy, child, 2
years old and two years old and under around Bethlehem.
And so God, but God had warned Joseph in a dream, and Joseph
took Mary and Jesus and they fled to Egypt.
And we're told by Matthew that when God calls them back, that
this is the fulfillment of the prophet and Hosea.
For I have called my son out of Egypt.
We're going to come back to that in a minute.
But this wickedness is real. Lots of people were mourning the
death of those children in Bethlehem.
I don't think any of those folks were mourning Herod's death.
When it came. It was wicked.
No one mourns the wicked except God.
God mourns the wicked. But this begs a question that we
have to answer, which is who are the wicked?
This is I, I feel like I'm not an English major, I'm not a
music major, I'm not a theater major.
But I feel like this is the central theme of the Wicked
movies is who are the wicked? Who really is the one that's
wicked in the in the book, the original book by by bomb and in
the 1939 movie, clearly the wicked was the Wicked Witch of
the West, the bad guy in the whole thing doing all sorts of
awful things. And you have, you have the great
and powerful Oz, who's a fraud, but he's essentially good.
He has no, he, he's, he's not great and powerful.
He's just a guy. And then you have Dorothy coming
in and, and acts as the hero and, and kills the Wicked Witch
of the West. And people celebrate and people
rejoice. The Wicked theatrical production
and the movies retell the story and in this version spoilers if
you haven't seen it spoilers You'll find this out very early
on in the movies anyway that that it's Oz and his chief
assistant that are really the wicked and the witch known as
the Wicked Witch of the West is is actually named Elphaba.
And she's really the one that's on the side of good.
She's the one protecting the weak, protecting the vulnerable
from exploitation and slavery and death.
And she gets branded as wicked and her name gets stripped away
from her, and she's no longer known as Alpha, but just the
Wicked Witch of the. West.
That's this one of the central themes here.
And Glenda the good witch. Glenda the good Once you watch
them and do I encourage you to watch the movies, they're
really, really good. But once you see the whole thing
all the way through and go back and watch that opening sequence
again, you see where it looks like Glenda is rejoicing along
with the crowd and where it looks like she's agreeing with
them and all that they're saying she's really not.
There's a lot of subtle storytelling there as they
grapple with this question, who are the wicked?
And that's a real question we have to grapple with and in our
earth. And it seems to me, again, I'm
not a history major, but it seems to me this is not a new
problem and it's not a particularly cultural problem
that it's out there everywhere that human beings divide up into
groups and, and decide who's good and who's bad, who's in and
who's out, who's wicked, who's righteous, and, and make those
decisions. And to make it easy for
everyone, we can tell whether you're wicked or not.
All we have to do is look at how you vote or look at how you
tweet or look at what you post or look at whether you go to
church or not, or look at this, that or the other.
And then we can know whether you're wicked.
We know, we know. But the problem is there's lots
of fighting over it. Actually, maybe that's a good
thing that we don't all agree. There's lots of fighting over
it. And I'm going to get a little
dark for a second. I'm going to a little
controversial for a second. At least touch on topics that
are controversial. But a couple of years ago on
October 7th, when one group of people raped and murdered and
killed men, women, and children among another group of people,
the world was instantly the divisions within the world were
revealed because you have one side saying that one group was
wicked and the other side saying that the other group was wicked.
You had you had one group of people saying that the folks
that were killed that day were innocent and good and victims,
and the people doing the killing were the wicked.
Yet another very large group of people, both sides very large,
another very large group of people saying no, no, no, no.
It's the people that got killed that day that were wicked.
And that's why we're celebrating who are the wicked.
Charlie Kirk was assassinated. He had one group of people
celebrating the wicked was dead. And another group of people
mourning that a good and righteous person is dead, killed
by wicked people. Another folks saying the person
doing the killing, that was the good person, who are the wicked?
These are questions we have to grapple with that we have to
wrestle with and and we need to be cautious about how easily we
arrive at answers for these questions.
The good news is, the good news is, is that as followers of
Jesus Christ, the Bible gives us a cheat code for sorting out who
the wicked are and who the wicked aren't.
We, we got it. We got it.
And here's another passage from Isaiah.
Yeah, we got as Jesus, as followers.
We have a cheat code for this debate.
Here's the cheat code. Isaiah 53, six prophecy of the
Messiah. All of us, like sheep, have
strayed away. We have left God's paths to
follow our own. Yet the Lord laid on him the
sins of us all. Our cheat code is this.
Who are the wicked? We are.
All of us. All of us.
That passage in Isaiah 53 is is one of the most well known
passages, prophecies of the Messiah of Jesus when he comes,
and in the heart of that passage is this.
All of us. Like sheep have strayed away, we
have left God's paths to follow our own.
Yet the Lord laid on him the sins of us all.
The fact that someone went off the path in a direct different
direction than us does not make us less wicked than them, or
them more wicked from us. If we're off the path, we're off
the path. And the reality is that the by
whoops wrong button, the Bible makes very clear that we are all
we are all in that category of wicked because we all like sheep
have gone astray. By the way, God is not always
does not always speak nicely about us human beings, does he?
God looks at us and says, I'm not like you people.
Just so you know, I'm not like you people and you're more like
sheep than people sometimes. Calling us sheep was not a
compliment. God was not saying how cute and
cuddly humans are and all fluffy and nice.
God was saying you guys are dumb.
Sometimes you do the same dumb things over and over.
You cannot take care of yourselves.
You need a shepherd to guide you and protect you or you won't
even be able to find your own food and water.
Yeah, we've gone astray like sheep.
Here's the good news right here as we move into the Christmas
season, that the Christmas season is a time to celebrate
the world altering truth. That God mourns the wicked
because God mourns the wicked. Jesus was born because all of
us, like sheep, have gone astray.
God sent his Son Jesus to live among us as one of us to live
and die and rise again to be our Savior and our King, because God
mourns us in our wickedness. If God celebrated the death of
the wicked, if God celebrated the destruction of the wicked,
Jesus would have no reason to have come.
God would have no reason to have been born among us.
The simple truth is, here we are again back in Hosea.
My heart has changed within me. All my compassion is aroused.
I will not carry out my fierce anger, nor will I devastate
Ephraim or any or or or the world, for I am God, not a man,
the holy one among you. I will not come against their
cities. They will follow the Lord.
Let's look at Matthew. And so it was fulfilled what the
Lord had said through the prophet out of Egypt I called my
son and in Hosea begins with Hosea 11 begins with when Israel
was a child I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.
Matthew was quoting Hosea and when he was quoting Hosea, he
wasn't just picking a cherry. He wasn't just cherry picking a
verse and saying, oh, here's a place where God said out of
Egypt, I've called my son and, and, and Jesus had to go to
Egypt and then God brought him back out of Egypt.
Prophecy fulfilled. It's not that's kind of a
simplistic way of looking at it. Matthew's looking at that and
saying that at the very moment of Jesus's incarnation, at the
time of his birth, Jesus is part of this story that Hosea was
telling. He's tying the incarnation of
Jesus to this entire Hosea Chapter 11, where God, instead
of rejoicing and punishing his people for their wickedness,
God's heart changes and he has compassion and he calls them to
return to him. And in Jesus we see that he
comes to be our shepherd, to be our shepherd here on this earth
with us. God's grief and compassion for
the wicked is what motivated Jesus's messianic ministry.
That's why he came. That's why because God mourns
the wicked, because God has compassion for the wicked.
And that is so good, such good news for us.
Because we all, like sheep, have gone astray.
And just because some people have gone off the path in a
different direction doesn't mean we've gone off the path any less
than we've gone off the path. And because we're sheep, because
we're sheep without a shepherd, we will always be going off the
bat. You seen some of those videos on
I've never raised sheep. If you're a sheep herder and you
feel like I'm insulting sheep, I apologize.
But I've seen those videos where the sheep stuck in the ditch and
it's way down there and it can't get out.
And the guy struggles and he gets down in the ditch and he
frees the sheep and he gets him up on land and while he's
climbing back out of the ditch, the sheep runs around and jumps
back in the same ditch. I saw one of the video, guy got
up and he looked what the sheep had done and he just went like
that. That's what sheep do.
And so Jesus came to be our shepherd because he doesn't want
to destroy us. He doesn't.
Want to wipe? Us out.
He doesn't celebrate. Even when those things
ultimately at times have to happen, he doesn't celebrate.
He mourns and grieves because each one of us he knit together
in our mother's womb, each one of us he died for, each one of
us he has given His image to placed his image within.
And when one of us dies? In wickedness, God mourns.
That doesn't celebrate that. It might be true.
That among human beings, no one mourns the wicked but it.
Is also. True that our God, who is holy,
who is different than us, mourns the wicked, and he invites us
to. Share in his heart.
For all people to share the love.
Rather than throwing stones at the wicked, we drop the stones,
knowing that all we, like sheep have gone astray.
Rather than celebrating when the wicked die, we mourn,
particularly if someone has died in their wickedness and we.
Grieve that. And we go to them in compassion,
and with that voice of the Lord, call them to follow our Good
Shepherd in Jesus name, Amen and Amen.