Please note: The following sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him.

It was a horrible, disgusting place, a valley south of Jerusalem.

It was where the bodies of executed criminals were thrown for the scavengers,

where offal and garbage of all sorts lay smoldering and stinking.

It was the place where in earlier times people had literally roasted children alive in an iron cage as an offering to the gods Molech or Baal.

It is a terrible place to be, Ben Hinnom by its Hebrew name, the origin of the Greek term Gehenna, or in English, hell.

Jesus uses the knowledge of this place in very strong ways in the Gospel reading today.

Let's understand this carefully:

Jesus is not threatening his hearers and us with hell as a future punishment for some infraction,

instead, he is pointing out that this horror is already here whenever and wherever we have taken or are driven down our own paths, for they inevitably go to Ben Hinnom.

Let's name a few of those places.

Our valleys like Ben Hinnom can exist right next to better places.

Several years ago when we were in Pittsburgh helping David look for an apartment, we checked out an address that turned out to be in a block within sight of the great University of Pittsburgh, but that entire block of early 20^th century grand homes was a disaster.

Piles of refuse and heaps of beer cans, broken windows and boarded up openings.

Pigeons everywhere, and I'm sure rats were lurking in the shadows.

How or why would anyone want or be able to live in such places?   How many persons remain lost in such surroundings?

Some valleys like Ben Hinnom we think are private and out of the view of others, but they are just as deadly to us and destructive to society.

We may not roast children out in public, but we do burn them with saline solution and dismember them in the womb and claim that it is legal and ought to be morally acceptable.

The new name for the god Moloch is “choice.”

And the pain and sorrow do not go away.

Bette McCrandall our missionary in Liberia, visited with us this week.

She is a small in stature, but tall in bravery in the Gospel.

She knows first-hand the horrors like the valley of Ben-Hinnom.

She reminded us of the many years of civil war in Liberia, the destruction of our hospitals schools, and churches there, and the massacre of 600 persons that took place inside St. Peter Lutheran Church.

She has worked with the survivors from the various factions in the conflict, seeking to build a new future on the ruins of hatred.

How do you rebuild lives when children have grown up solving every problem with  machine guns in their hands?

Our parish secretary Susan has a special-needs son that is in the hospital these days, in precarious health.

Imagine the frustration of being unable to communicate effectively with care givers there unless mother is close at hand about even such basic things as I'm hungry or I'm thirsty.

Ben Hinnom comes in all guises:

--the things that we choose badly,

--the things that simply are life circumstances,

--the things that others force upon us.

What does Jesus do with these situations?

Master story-teller Fred Craddock relates this:

His mother took him to church, dad didn't go.

Sometimes the pastor would stop by, and dad would always say, “I know what that church wants, just another name, another pledge.

Sometimes there were guest leaders, and they might be at this house also.

Mother would be gracious, but dad would go through his familiar routine, “I know what the church wants...another number, another pledge, they don't care about me.”

There came the time, though when he didn't say, or rather, couldn't say anything at all.
Cancer was eating his throat.

The treatments were painful and unsuccessful.

It was an awful time.

Fred visited, and saw cards and flowers all around the room.

And as he began to read the cards, he discovered that every flower and every card in the stack of cards was from persons or groups within the church.

Dad saw Fred reading a card, and since he couldn't speak, took a pencil and wrote a line from Shakespeare: In this harsh world, draw your breath in pain to tell your story.

Fred asked his father, “What is your story?”

And he wrote, “I was wrong.”

But it took the pain, sorrow, and loneliness of that terrible place to get his attention and turn his life in a different direction, even in his last days and hours.

Our prayer is that the Lord God our Father will not let the horrors of Ben Hinnom be the final word about us and our lives as individuals or corporately.

It doesn't matter whether we have wandered there of our own will, or been brought there by life circumstance ,or by the force of others upon us;  this situation of separation from God and from each other is  terrible.

Rescue us, O Lord! we pray...and he will.

No child of God's creation and love is meant to languish forever in Ben Hinnom.

The treatment may be harsh, but Jesus' exaggerated language is meant to convey the truth that, as Paul says in Romans,

not powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.  [Rom.8:39]

Remember that enigmatic phrase in the Apostles Creed: ...crucified under Pontius Pilate, dead, and buried. He descended into hell.  He rose....

We have often puzzled over the meaning of that phrase...descended into hell.

Perhaps we can understand it as a bit of wonderful Good News that he does so, not just once, but each time that we are in this desperate need.

His determination to rescue us knows no bounds.

He enters those places , confronting evil and death on every front, no matter how cleverly it is disguised or how blatant and overwhelming its effect on us.

Throughout Mark's telling of the Gospel story, we hear this Jesus confronting demons, rebuking devils, healing, driving out all that dehumanizes and degrades.

This he has done, and will continue to do, each time that we need it...and oh my, that is often!

And there is another step.

The church is to be that sort of place that supports and carries on this work of Jesus.

We are to keep on salvaging lives, to rescue people from whatever sort of Ben Hinnom in which they are wandering,

to remind them that they are precious to God, and not destined for the ash heap.

We are called to embody the great Gospel message that the kingdom of God is here, so that each one can be turned around, be brought forward, and be rescued.

There was a community that for years had made one particular spot its informal town dump.

The town experienced an explosion of growth and another church was needed, but the only real estate left was the dump.

So the church bought the parcel, stabilized the ground, and constructed its church building  there.

An outpost of the kingdom of God, in the place others have thrown away.

That's a good image.

Perhaps for us in the coming months, we can understand our work in Family  Promise in this way.

These are families that others would ignore or throw away; they will be for us ones to tell that they are the beloved of the Father, even as we are.

The years fly by so quickly; there is not much time for doing all that is set before us.

Let there be time enough to hear Jesus' stern word, and then his gracious word also.

Quoting the writer William Stringfellow:

The Body of Christ lives in the world on behalf of the world...

For lay folk in the church this means that there is no corner of human existence, however degraded or neglected, into which they may not venture; no person, however beleaguered or possessed, whom they may not befriend and represent....

 Christians are distinguished by their radical esteem for the Incarnation....by their reverence for the life of God in the whole of creation, even, and in a sense, especially, creation in the travail of sin. 

The characteristic place to find Christians is among their enemies. 

The first place to look for Christ is in hell.

Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous, but sinners, Jesus says to the skeptics. [Mk2:17]

And, at the end, he says to Pilate:  

For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.

 Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.  [John 18:37]

It is time.

It is the right time.

It is the needed time, for us and for the world.

Listen, live, and rejoice in this Good News!   Amen.

St. Mark's Lutheran Church

142 Market Street

Williamsport, Pennsylvania

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