Years ago, I remember listening to a new song thinking, “I don’t think I should be listening to this. It doesn’t seem appropriate…but I’m not sure.” Why was I concerned? Because the song touched on themes that seemed to be getting really close to a line I knew I shouldn’t cross. I felt uncomfortable. At the time I was in middle school, and in the mind of a middle schooler, I wondered if I should turn the song off, but I was intrigued.

The song, by my favorite band, Irish rockers, U2, is called “Desire.” Desire is a subject that we evangelicals are very cautious about. And rightly so! Evil desire, James writes, can lead to sin. U2’s song is not shy in talking about many kinds of desire. Now years later, I understand that the song is not trying to entice a person’s desire to become sin. Instead, the song is a social commentary on how easily we succumb to evil desire. In that sense, it is a courageous song, a truthful song, will to bring up a topic we need to talk about. Likewise, we need to talk about desire.

I encourage you to listen to the song. You can watch the music video here. Even if rock music isn’t your style, you’re probably very familiar with the themes the song covers. Here’s a sampling of the lyrics that ooze with desire: “Bright lights and the big city.” “Needle and spoon.” “Shotgun.” “Everybody’s got one.” “The dollars…my protection.” “Promise in the year of election.” And my favorite, “a preacher stealin’ hearts at a traveling show for love or money, money, money.”

Do you see how lines from the song describe desire? “Bright lights and the big city” point to a longing for fame and opportunity. “Needle and spoon” is a drug reference, a desire to get high and let the pain of life fade away under the influence of mind-bending chemicals. “Shotgun” speaks to our national obsession with guns and military power. “Everybody’s got one” is about peer pressure, and the desire to be like others and to be liked by others. “The dollars” is perhaps the most obvious, as we crave money to be our protection. “Promise in the year of election” should be no surprise, as we can place our hopes in a particular politician who guarantees they will right the perceived wrongs of the previous politician. Finally, the “preacher stealing hearts” speaks to the sway a pastor or compelling preacher can have, but deep down they are motivated by a desire for financial gain.

Do any of those descriptions of desire speak to you? Are you familiar with any them in your life? Maybe you’ve had those desires from time to time, and maybe you’ve even fallen prey to them. So what do we do with desire? Is Buddhism right when it teaches that we should eliminate all desire from our lives? As we continue to study Ezekiel, in chapter 14, God has something important to say about desire. Read it ahead of time and see what you think, then listen to the sermon.

Have you ever been in a conversation with someone and thought to yourself, “Woah…they have some strange ideas!”??? Do you confront them? Do you ask for more details? Do you just let it go? Maybe it’s not worth the trouble. Or maybe, we need to be more like children. Children? Yes.

Think about the classic situation where one child is telling another child about how excited they are for Christmas, because Santa Claus is coming soon, and he will bring loads of gifts for them! The child listening quickly responds, “Wait…you know that Santa Claus isn’t real, don’t you?” Both kids’ parents overhear this, and rush in to the rescue. The first child starts saying, “What do you mean Santa isn’t real? Of course he is real! He brings me presents every year!” That child’s parents start comforting the child, assuring them that the other child doesn’t know they’re talking about. Then the other child’s parents pull them aside with a stern look on their face, saying, “Stop this conversation right now. Just let it go. His parents will decide when they want to tell him the truth.” Children are quick to confront false belief, aren’t they?

My guess is that you’ve encountered that Santa Claus situation many times. Perhaps it makes your heart ache, as you long for the first child to continue to enjoy the mysterious wonder of Christmas. Perhaps you agree with the second child, that a false belief needs to be revealed as false!

Which is it? Is it okay for a child to be led to believe in something false? I suspect most people would say, “Yes, it’s fine.” Whether it is the Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny or Santa, they aren’t doing any children harm. But if those beliefs would persist into adulthood, I think just about everyone would have serious concerns. Most of us would say they would be justified in those concerns. Truth is foundationally important. Especially as we consider this from a Christian viewpoint, we should be people committed to the truth. False ideas about life can deceive, leading people astray.

As we continue our study in Ezekiel, this coming Sunday we look at what God has to say in Ezekiel 13 about false and true beliefs. I’m not concerned about anyone believing in Santa Claus, but I am concerned that many adult evangelical Christians believe in other false ideas. I’m concerned that those other ideas can lead us astray. In fact, if we are believing false ideas about God, it can result in us not knowing who God is. That is quite serious. A. W. Tozer once wrote that what comes to mind when you think about God is the most important thing about you. He’s right. We need to think about God as correctly as possible, if we want to know God as he truly is. In this sermon, God, through Ezekiel will help us think about who he truly is.

Did you watch the scenes from Afghanistan this past week? Awful, right? People hanging on US Air Force jets as the jets took flight, and the people fell to the ground. How about the destruction in Haiti because of the earthquake? More than 2000 dead. How is it that Haiti has one horrible disaster after another? Then there are the devastating wildfires in the Western USA and Siberia. Do you ever watch the news and think that the end of world must be near?

Maybe an asteroid will hit the earth. A big one made the news recently, passing by on July 25th. The scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab watch asteroids, and they log them on their website. Look it up, it’s called Asteroid Watch. There are big ones flying by every day. A 2,000 footer passes by tomorrow. While these huge asteroids are classified as near-earth objects, their trajectory only puts them a million miles from us at the closest. The 2,000 footer tomorrow, for example, will pass by 2,130,000 miles away, which is nearly ten times farther away than the moon. So maybe global warming will get us first.

Is all this stuff just hype? Have you ever thought that it’s just hype? Or have you wondered if the end is near? People talk like that. They say the end is near. But people have claimed we’re in the end times for decades. Year after year goes by, and the world doesn’t end.

Ezekiel once said the end is near. Remember that in Ezekiel chapter 7? It was a big bold prediction of disaster. But nothing happened. Was Ezekiel’s prophecy false? When a prophet’s words don’t come true, they are considered to be false prophets.

This week we continue our study in Ezekiel, having arrived at chapter 12, and there we’ll meet people who thought Ezekiel’s prophesy was hogwash. The way God describes those people is really interesting, and he gives Ezekiel another strange skit to try to reach them. What we will learn has very important implications for us in 2021.

This coming Sunday is our next once per quarter Current Events sermon. On the Monday before each Current Events sermon, I scour the headlines looking for sermon ideas. There are so many possibilities. Over the last 18 months, quite frankly, our national headlines haven’t changed a whole lot. That caused me to think about local headlines. I really hoped to find a hot topic that was making a splash right here in Lancaster County.

Initially I thought of Eagle Disposal and their struggle with labor shortage. I am an Eagle customer, and in the last few months, they have missed a regular weekly garbage and recycling collection three different weeks. All up and down our street, people would set out our collection bins, and they would remain on the edge of our yards for days, till one by one we realized that Eagle wasn’t picking up that week. Why would they not at least communicate with us? This past week Eagle sent a letter saying they were discontinuing recycling collection. Things are not well at Eagle. Why can’t they hire people? What might the Scriptures have to say about labor shortage or garbage collection? A lot, actually, and I would be glad to talk with you about that. But in the end, I decided not to talk about Eagle.

Instead, I asked three local Christians what they thought I should preach about. They each attend other churches, and they each have a unique vantage point in our community. Matt Hess is an East Lampeter Township Detective. Sally Bredeman is principal of Smoketown Elementary. Anne Shannon is a WGAL reporter. All live in Conestoga Valley, and all have kids who attend the school district. Additionally, their jobs put them in communication with a wide cross-section of the community. Finally, I asked my barber, Shane, who works at Main Street Barber Shop in Leola. He might have the most interesting conversations of all. They responded with a variety of ideas that I could preach about, many of which you would find quite familiar: personal responsibility, sexual identity/ethics, Covid, etc. I thought their responses could lead to an interesting panel discussion or sermon series.

But as I reflected on their suggestions, I had the sense that we need to see the forest for the trees. They gave me excellent ideas, each of which we could say was an individual tree, a singular issue in society. It struck me that we all likely already have opinions about those issues. It would be helpful to examine what Scripture would have to say about those issues, and sometime perhaps we will, but I thought it would be good to zoom out, trying to see the forest for the trees. What I mean is this: what are the societal or cultural forces that influence how we have already formed our opinions about those issues? We first need to examine those forces, those influences, before we evaluate the issues. And that led me to our sermon topic for this coming Sunday’s Current Events sermon. See if you can figure it out…it’s a bit of riddle. Here it is:

Why We Are A Purple Church

Have any ideas what it is about? Grab a Bible and play the sermon to see what Scripture has to say about why we are a purple church.

Is there hope for a world on fire? Do you feel like it is hopeless? Lately watching the Delta variant on the rise, it can feel hopeless. Do you know what I mean? Are you wondering if we’re going to have to start wearing masks again? Have you had disagreements or differences of opinion among family and friends about the vaccine? It can feel so frustrating, right?

Or what about politics? Do you feel like it hopeless? Watching politicians disagree about seemingly everything, and rarely trying to reach across the aisle to work together, can be so disheartening. Each side seems to have gravitated to the extreme ends of their belief system, and they caricature the other side as evil. Have you had disagreements or differences of opinions among family and friends about politics?

Or what about sexual ethics? Do you feel like it is hopeless? The school board meetings, the proposals in government for fairness in sports, and the actual human people affected…it’s all so fraught. Maybe you’ve had discussions and disagreements about that too.

Then there is Critical Race Theory. What is true? What is false? It can feel hopeless.

Last week we left Ezekiel in a bit of a cliffhanger. God had transported Ezekiel through a wild virtual reality vision back to his hometown, Jerusalem, where God gave Ezekiel an unsettling tour through the temple. Room after room in the temple, God showed Ezekiel how the Jews living there were worshiping idols and practicing pagan religion. Then God says he has had enough of the Jews’ adultery, and he not only begins leaving the temple, but he also unleashes judgment on the city. While the judgment is awful, God first saves those who remained faithful. Remember that all of this took place in a vision, meaning that it was a prophecy of what was to come upon the people there in Jerusalem. That is where we stopped, with Ezekiel still in the middle of the vision, a vision that mostly seems hopeless.

There is more to come, including an important message from God that will become a major theme throughout the rest of the book of Ezekiel. Let me give you a hint: it’s not hopeless! But why? Check out Ezekiel chapter 11 ahead of time, then listen to the sermon as David Hundert preaches this chapter.

I would like to introduce you to what I consider to be one of the strangest (and maybe most interesting!) verses in the Bible. Ezekiel 8:3,

“He [the glowing metal fire creature] stretched out what looked like a hand and took me by the hair of my head. The Spirit lifted me up between earth and heaven and in visions of God he took me to Jerusalem, to the entrance to the north gate of the inner court, where the idol that provokes to jealousy stood.”

Did you get all that? Do you need to read it again? Yes, that is a real Bible verse!
We’ve been studying the amazing book of Ezekiel for a few months now, and lest there be any doubt of its uniqueness, I think what happens next will seal the deal. So far Ezekiel has experienced some very shocking visions, and God has asked him to perform unsettling prophetic dramas, living among his fellow 10,000 Jews in exile in Babylon. In chapters 1-7, therefore, we learned that Ezekiel’s ministry is unconventional. It is true that last week in our study of chapter 7, we heard Ezekiel preach a fairly standard prophetic word. Get ready, though, because what happens next is anything but.

Just read that verse again up there. What do you think it means? Check out Ezekiel chapters 8, 9 and 10 to see for yourself, then watch the sermon. I think you’ll find that what happens next in Ezekiel’s life is very applicable to us. I know…whatever is going on in Ezekiel 8:3 seems like the last thing that might relate to life in America in 2021. But there’s a lot more to the story. More than you and I need to consider, as we seek to be faithful disciples of Jesus in our world.

The end is near!!!

Encouraging start to this description, huh?

But have you wondered if the end actually is near? Have you looked at our world situation, our national situation and wondered if Jesus is coming soon? If you have, you’re not alone. I’ve heard people speculate about it a lot lately, especially given the tumult in our world and nation in the last few years.

Musings about the end times have been a part of Christian discussion, and especially evangelical belief, for a long time. Remember how popular the Left Behind series was? The Left Behind series was an attempt to dramatize what it would be like if the end times happened in our world. The first novel was published on December 31, 1995. 15 novels later, the series concluded in 2007. It also spawned a load of kids’ books and three movies. The end times were a fascination, however, long before the Left Behind series began. Larry Norman’s popular song about the rapture, “I Wish We’d All Been Ready” came out amid the turmoil of 1969. Keep traveling backward in history. Imagine how Christians living through the World Wars must have felt about the end times. They had a far better case for believing that they were living in the end times than just about any other time in history. Now travel back further in time to the 1860s, and our American Civil War was another awful period that sure looked like end times. Globally, speaking there are plenty of other examples. Genocides, Holocausts, terrible disasters, war, and displacement. All seem like end times.

The original proclamation of “The end is near!” goes back way further still. Millenia further! 600 years before the time of Jesus, Ezekiel boldly declares not that “The end is near,” but that “The end has come!” While he may have heard the prophet Amos say this years earlier (see Amos 8:2), Ezekiel is simply declaring what God told him to say about the times he lived in. So what end had come during Ezekiel's lifetime? More importantly, why was God saying that had the end come?

Though the end has not come for us, meaning that Jesus has not returned, we can learn much from the end times that had come upon the Israelites in Ezekiel’s day. God has important principles to share with us through the message he gives to the prophet Ezekiel. As I studied the passage this week, it struck me how relevant it is to our current situation of American Christianity in 2021. Check out Ezekiel chapter 7 ahead of time to see for yourself, then listen to the podcast!