God Mourns the Wicked (Rock Springs UMC)

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

Hosea 11 · chapter mention

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

Hosea 11 · chapter mention

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.