Good morning, everyone. Thank you for the warm welcome. We're happy to be here, and I'm glad that Kit and I had the opportunity to switch pulpits. It's something enjoyable to do after synod, especially since we're in meetings from about 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. almost all week long. There's not a lot of time to write a sermon, so. And this is my first time in Oswego. I'm glad to be here. I would invite you to turn with me this morning to our sermon text, which is Zechariah chapter 13. If you have one of the black Bibles that are there, the congregational Bibles, that's found on page 949. Zechariah chapter 13, and we're gonna look at verse seven, only verse seven initially, but then we're gonna pull out the whole flow, the whole theology of Zechariah to understand how verse seven fits into this message. Zechariah chapter 13, verse seven. Let's hear God's word for us this morning. Awake, O sword, against my shepherd, and against the man, my associate, declares the Lord of hosts. Strike the shepherd that the sheep may be scattered, and I will turn my hand towards the little ones. This is God's word for us this morning. So before we get into the text itself, Want to ask you a question. Maybe a little personal. You don't have to answer it, of course. Hypothetical, right? What does your diet look like? If you ask that question. Answer that question to yourself. Not specifically your food diet. That's not what I'm after. Your text diet. How do you read the world? If you think about your text diet on an average day, you maybe work through about 25 Facebook posts or so. Skim quickly through that. Catch the main ones that you're interested in. A dozen news articles that you quickly peruse through to find the main point, and maybe five emails or so, depending on how heavy your workload is. You want to get down to the bottom line. Our text diets in the modern world are large and varied, right? But they're short as well. They're all focused on the present time. One author Reflecting on the text diet of modern Americans in modern America, says that, talking about his own text diet, he says, I'm not proud of it, but I also know I'm far from alone. Your reading habits may not exactly mirror mine at my most dilettante-ish, insatiable, and distracted, but no doubt they've gotten worse over these past few years of increased internet connectivity. Similar, he says, to those old daytime talk shows where parents would let their kids eat large pizzas and hold gallons of ice cream. He says it's all fun and games while it's happening, but then it's all harmless until you find yourself binging on empty online calories every day, reading everything you can get your hands on and quickly doing it. We think it's bad, perhaps, yes, but it gets worse. Researchers now are wondering if the internet and all of the news and information on the internet is changing the way that we relate to thinking or changing the way that we think as humans. So if you're on Google next time, Google this in. Is Google making us stupid? And you'll find an article by a fellow named Nicholas Carr who finds that there is this addictive behavior on internet, this online clicking. We want to click on everything and eat up all of this quick, present-focused Presently focused news articles or stuff like that. And what he says, what Nicholas Carr says, is by doing this constant addictive online clicking, it leads to an exclusive focus on our short-term memory at the expense of our long-term memory. So we focus on the short-term at the expense of the long-term. We stop doing the hard, delicate work of consolidating short information into our long-term memory bank And here's what Carr concludes. He says, the internet is an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to scramble it. Now, I'm not against the internet. I actually love the internet. I do a lot of research on it, and you all do. It's necessary for us as modern Americans or modern humans. But what this article showed me was the human tendency that the internet is feeding off of. How does it work? Or how is it so effective? And what it showed me is that the internet feeds off of our basic human tendency, something that we all have, to prioritize the present and ignore the future. Prioritize the immediate present thing that's going on at the expense of looking at the big picture, how history unfolds. And that's exactly what the minor prophets are trying to do for Israel. The minor prophets are trying to fight against that tendency to focus on the present exclusively at the expense of the big picture. So if you read any of the minor prophets, they're all big picture thinkers. They're all trying to get Israel to stop looking at the present momentary condition and say, well, let's look at the bigger picture. Let's look at the larger narrative, the larger history. And that is, I think, why the prophets are so shocking. Because they look at that long-term, the long-term big picture, and what I think we as Christians ought to take from that approach, that method, is that we ought to see the big picture as the means by which we frame our life and the way we think about life. So who's Zechariah? Really quickly, we meet Zechariah in the book of Ezra Nehemiah. Zechariah comes to us alongside another prophet. Haggai, Zechariah and Haggai, they worked together. Now Ezra and Nehemiah is that time after Israel had been in exile for a little over 70 years, and they were brought back into the land by the Persian government. So the Persian government lets Israel, after judgment, come back into the land. And they come back and they start doing things and working and they start building the temple, but it's not going as well as it probably should have gone. So here comes, Zechariah and Haggai to encourage Israel in building the temple. What does Zechariah do? Specifically, Zechariah's prophecy outlines a program of restoration. Zechariah's book is focused on two things, the temple and the priesthood. But he does a little bit more than this. That focus on temple and priesthood is really found in the first six chapters of the book. In the second half of the book, the last six chapters, about seven chapters of the book, in the second half of the book, he talks less about the present temple and nation, and he begins to discuss the future kingdom and the establishment of the Lord as the king of all nations. We know Zechariah was a priest. He tells us that in chapter 12. And we know he began his prophetic ministry around 520. He was pretty young when he started his ministry. The last six chapters happened likely a few years after the temple was completed. The second temple was completed around, and that was completed in 516. So he's perhaps reflecting on the larger change that's needed. The change of the heart that Israel needs. And our passage, chapter 13, verse 7, is found in the second section of Zechariah, the theme of which is the kingdom of God. Now I want to start by looking at how this all starts, how it begins. So before we get to 13.7, we've got to do some homework and go back and figure out how Zechariah is building his prophecy, how he's communicating this message to you. So if you were to look with me at chapter 9, 9, if you have your Bibles open, chapter 9, verse 9. He starts out and he says, Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout in triumph, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your King is coming to you. He is just and endowed with salvation, humble and mounted on a donkey, even on a colt, the fowl of a donkey. I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem, and the bow of war will be cut off, and he will speak peace to the nations, and his dominion will be from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth." You catch that? When Zechariah introduces the kingdom of God, the in-breaking of God's rule on this earth, he does so in a pretty shocking way. He says, The king will come mounted on a donkey in a humble way, a bringer of peace. And we say, yeah, yeah, yeah, we've heard that story a time or two. We know that the donkey means humility and peace. But sometimes we get so accustomed, so used to the story of the Bible that we don't let the shocking reality of the message seep in, how it's supposed to function, how it's supposed to work. We live in an extremely safe world. There wasn't a single one of you this morning who had a real legitimate fear that someone was going to enter your home and take everything from you to include your family. That's not the world that Israel lived in. We live in a very safe world. We don't have a constant fear of people plundering us, of taking anything that they want from us. And look at even us, how we deal with the small glimmer of unsafety. Compare airport security post-9-11 and pre-9-11. The moment that we had the reality that people could come across our borders and attack us. Compare airport security. That's how we deal with the reality of unsafety. Sometimes we don't take for granted the fact that we live in a very safe world, and this is not the world that Israel lived in, especially when they were in the land after the exile. In the midst of fear, we don't want peace. We want a big king with big guns and big walls. That's what we want when we become afraid. When we are faced with the reality of fear, we want to come out ready to fight. We want a big army behind us. And yet that's not how the kingdom here is established. Think about Israel in the situation that they find themselves. There was always the reality that the surrounding nations would come in and would destroy them. They would want a large army. That's what we would expect, but that's not what Zechariah brings to them. The kingdom is established on the back of a donkey. It is an outright, deliberate rejection of the arrogant trust in human strength. Jerusalem's coming king comes in contrast with men like Alexander the Great, or Cyrus, the king of Persia. Jerusalem's king comes in humility, and he spreads his kingdom, not with a sword. And this, friends, this is shocking. Or it should be. Sometimes we've become so used to the message that we don't see how shocking this is. If we are honest with ourselves and we consider the place of Israel under the control of the Persian regime, they had just suffered the attacks and the oppression by surrounding governors and people. This is a shocking message. Think about it. How do you respond when you're attacked? How do you respond when someone cuts you off? You get angry, right? You want to show them that you're a better driver. How do you respond when you're attacked, maybe in your marriage or brother or sister, when your brother says something to you that you don't particularly like? We want to build the fortresses up, don't we? We want to defend ourselves and show how great we are and how strong we are, and eventually we want to bring out the big guns to destroy the person who attacked us. That's the way we deal with fear as humans. We want to defend ourselves. And what happens when we're attacked? We don't come in peace. We don't show love and sacrifice. We begin building the walls. How often does this happen in marriages, right? Your husband says something to you, or your wife says something to you, and then you start building up that fortress to defend yourself. You don't come in humility and peace. but you come to defend yourself, and then eventually come the big guns, you know, that stuff that you had stockpiled back here in the memory brink for just this moment in time when the attack would come and you can hit right back and cut to the core. And then that just exacerbates the problem. The fight continues to go on and on and on. You see, this approach to us in the midst of fear, in the midst of turmoil, to come in peace on the back of a donkey, to show love and sacrifice. This is unnatural to us insofar as it's our desire to control people around us. Humility and grace is not normal to us as fallen humans. It's something that has to come from outside, that we learn from God. Left to ourselves, we want to destroy everybody around us to prove to ourselves that our illusion that we really are little gods is right, that we really deserve to sit in the throne of God. That's the illusion that fallen humanity has, and we have to prove that to ourselves. And the only way to prove that is to destroy everybody around us. Peace is the admission, the acknowledgement that we are not God, that we are not king, and that we follow a new king. So, the theme then continues, right? This theme of God bringing in the kingdom, it continues in chapter 10, verse 10, where Zechariah says, I will bring them home from the land of Egypt, and I will gather them from Assyria. And now you, all you attentive minds out there, you've immediately kind of said, wait a minute, that's not, that can't be right. Israel's not in Egypt, nor are they in Assyria. They were in the Babylonian captivity, which was taken over by the Persians. Why would Zechariah say that? Perhaps here is because Zechariah is associating the place of God's people, now that they've been even brought out of exile and placed in the land of promise, associating the place of God's people prior to the in-breaking of the kingdom of God with a place of slavery and captivity. So when the chosen one of God comes to lead a deliverance of God's people, that chosen one will also bring with him an exodus to deliver God's people out of bondage. But unfortunately, chapter 11, Zechariah shows us that that shepherd who will be sent by the Lord will be rejected and crushed by the sheep. They would abandon him. They would leave him. And yet God would show grace, chapter 12, verse 10. I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and please for mercy so that when they look on me, on him whom they have pierced, They shall mourn for him as one mourns for an only child and weep bitterly over him as one weeps over a firstborn. You see, God knew that he would be rejected. He knew that in the end, people don't look for peace. The message of peace is a frightening message to humans who want to maintain their control in the world. Peace is a challenge to us and our desire to rule People don't want to give up their right of self-rule. We want to seek to secure our own kingdom. In the end, this challenging king of peace would prove to be too dangerous. And so the sheep would reject him, and they would crush him. And finally, then, we get to our passage. Chapter 13, verse 7. Awake, O sword, against my shepherd, against the man who stands next to me, declares the Lord of hosts. Strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered. It's really an odd verse. It almost seems out of place as you're reading Zechariah chapter 13 and you get to verse seven, you ask yourself the question, where is this coming from? It jumps out off of the page. The first word in the Hebrew section of this verse is sword. It bursts on the scene in an ominous and chilling picture of a shepherd who is in the field caring for his sheep and he turns around as his life flashes before his eyes and a sword punctures the garment in through the skin and tears through the organs. And the sheep scatter. as the shepherd collapses to the ground. And you think, after we had followed the Bible up to this point, this can't be right. This isn't the way it's supposed to work. This is God's associate. This is God's chosen one. This is the bringer of peace. This is the one who's supposed to usher in the kingdom. And there he sits, collapsed on the ground, struck by a sword, as his sheep now run around aimlessly, scattering into the unknown with cries of helplessness and confusion so loud, so deafening, as the sheep scatter and don't know where to go. Perhaps the message of peace doesn't work. Perhaps. the peace of the donkey just leads to destruction, to death. And we flash forward about 500 years and we find Jesus sitting at a table with his disciples and they sing and they walk out the room, and they begin to walk up to the Mount of Olives in Mark chapter 14, verse 27. And out of nowhere, just like Zechariah, as they're walking up the hill to the Mount of Olives, out of nowhere, Jesus says, you will all fall away, for it is written, I will strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered. Where did that come from? There was no precursor. There was no indication that Jesus was, like, following a conversation. It comes out of nowhere in Mark chapter 14. And Peter says, wait, wait, wait, no, no, no, no, no, no. I've been with you to the end, Lord. I've followed you through thick and thin. I've watched you cast out demons. I've been your companion as you have healed. I will not fall away, he says. I will not. Even if I must die with you, I will not fall away. I won't do it. The rest of the sheep might scatter, sure, but I won't. And soon, in a span of merely a few hours, men with swords and clubs and torches and rope arrive in a garden. A space lit only by moonlight until the torches arrive in the garden. And one by one as they arrest Jesus, in all of the commotion, the followers of Jesus begin to slowly drift away. One by one they leave the crowd as Jesus alone with his captors is led into Jerusalem. Only one sheep remains at the moment following Jesus. And as they dragged the creator of heaven and earth through the dusty streets of Jerusalem, as his sandals began to fall apart and the rocks began to pierce through his calloused feet, soon, just as Zechariah had promised 500 years before, and as Jesus proclaimed merely hours before, the shepherd sat in a courtyard, in a kangaroo court, being beaten and spit upon and falsely accused. And this ridiculous demonstration of injustice continues into the late hours of the night. And people start to come up to Peter. And they say, Hey, I know you. I've seen you with him. You know that fellow in there, don't you? And he says, I don't know what you're talking about. And they come up again and they say, no, no, no, no. I'm quite certain I've seen you with him. You're a Galilean. You know that fellow in there. And he says, I don't know what you're talking about. And finally, they says, I know that you know him. And he says, I don't know the man. And the cock crows a second time. And Zechariah's prophecy 500 years before had hit home. All of the sheep had now been scattered. They had all left. They were scattering in confusion and turmoil as the blade was being sharpened to puncture the side of the shepherd. See, Peter's tears when he broke down and wept at the reality that he had just given up on his Lord, they're so real and personal. When you meet Peter in the Gospels, you become so aware of his raw emotion when he deals with the reality of leaving Christ, of abandoning Christ. You see, we all start out our Christian life. We all start out the Christian walk. Sometimes we all start out the year or the week saying, I'm going to follow the Lord. I'm going to fix my life. I will make all the right decisions this time. Surely we say, Lord, I will never fall away from you. I will go with you to the very end. I will follow you to the death. And yet so often as time continues and ticks on, and the weeks go by and the months go by, and the years go by in our Christian walk, we find ourselves, sometimes we've drifted away. Sometimes people don't even know about it. We've done it inside the secret closet of our home, of our life. We've drifted from the Lord. Decisions we thought we would never have made, Places so deep we thought we would never go. A heart so hard we never thought we would get there. A situation in life that we never thought we would find ourselves in. Doubts that have crept in that we never thought we would have. That's always someone else. That's not me. That's not my faith. We always think it happens to someone else until we find ourself in the garden running away from Christ. Or when we find ourself in the courtyard, saying, I don't know the man, and turning around and breaking down in tears. He said, I don't know where any of you are at in life, or what you're going through, or what you've gone through in life. What I do know is that the fall is pervasive, and it affects us, and it tries to drag us away from the Lord, and many times it succeeds. What I do know is that the Christian life has a lot of struggles in it. I don't know what you've been going through, what you're maybe hiding out of fear or shame, or what it is that keeps you up at night, allows you to not be able to sleep. I don't know what your disappointments are, what your failures are, or where your relationship with God is, but I do know this. I do know that God is well aware of it. That God knows you. He knows your failures. He knows your struggles. I do know that the shepherd knows you, and that's why he was struck. I do know that he knows what you're going through and that he loves you abundantly. It's painful when we realize that we've drifted away, when we realize that we have said, I don't know the man and the cock crows a second time. It's painful when Zechariah's prophecy comes to life in our own life. Because, frankly, we have the tendency to stray. We have the tendency to let our relationship with the Lord slip away, let our decisions be dictated by the world sometimes, and say, why did I do that? We have a tendency to follow ourself, to act pridefully, to not show love and humility, to not show grace. We have a tendency to try to be like God and take the throne. as Adam did. The beauty of our faith, though, is that your salvation is not dependent on your works. It's dependent on grace. You are saved by grace. There's nothing that you could do or can do to earn it. Amidst all of your struggles, God saves you because of what He has done, and He carries you through life. There is a reason why our standards say that not only justification but also sanctification is a work of God's free grace. The Christian life is not God saved you, now figure it out. The Christian life is God saved you, now trust and depend on him amidst your struggles and your difficulties. He is there for you and he loves you. You see, the beauty of our faith is that amidst our prodigal times, there is God waiting for us, calling us back to him. The beauty of our faith is seen when we flash backwards 500 years back to Zechariah, to the second half of the verse, which I think should be read in a positive translation. I think the NASB doesn't do it justice here. Strike the shepherd that the sheep may be scattered, but I shall turn my hands to the little ones. The beauty of our faith is that the story doesn't end with a lifeless shepherd lying on the ground. The shepherd was dead and buried and sealed in a tomb for three days. But the beauty of our faith is when the women came back to care for the tomb and the body of Jesus, they returned. and found nothing but a young man in white robes saying, he has risen, he is not here. After the chaos and the prophecies, the clubs and the rope, the beatings, the crown of thorns shoved into the head, the ridicule and the laughter, the human saliva being put in the face of the one who created the human, the long tiring walk up the hill, the muscles about to collapse under the weight of the wood beam. The birds that lift from the nearby tree as the hammer finally hits the nail, and the clang of metal on metal reverberates throughout the empty sky, the wrath of a just God poured out upon his innocent Son. For us, for our sins, and the cry of agony, the Creator of the world, as the body of Christ goes lifeless. the shepherd collapsed. And yet it ends with these three, these words, he has risen. He is not here. You see friends that day, that day that the serpent thought there was certain victory was answered with an empty tomb that day. was not the end of the story. But three days later, the tomb would be empty, and sin would be conquered, and death would be conquered, and that day, the sheep would be gathered. That day, the kingdom would be established, and that day, forgiveness would be made real, and that day, God would turn his hand to the little sheep, to you, to call you to faith. to call you to the shepherd, to unite to his son. And the Lord says to you in the midst of your difficulties, in the midst of this fallen and challenging world, that he sees your struggles. He sees what you go through, the decisions that you would take back or the darkness that you're in, which is sometimes overwhelming. He sees the fear of death. And he says to you through the empty tomb that he has conquered. that death could not hold him. The tomb could not hold the Son of God. Death would not prevail, and the unjust sentence of Rome would be overturned. And in this, he shows to you the promise to you, his children. He shows to you the glory that is promised. He shows through the resurrection how God gathers the scattered sheep. You see, when we feel the weight of the world on our shoulders, chaos and turmoil, the pain of this fallen world. Maybe your job is in jeopardy and you don't know what tomorrow will bring. Maybe your marriage is on the rocks and you're too ashamed to tell anybody about it. or your health is failing, your body's in pain because of this fallen world, your family is struggling in a way that you never thought would happen, you're struggling in school because you can't make the grades that you thought you would, or you're picked on by friends in the neighborhood, questioning if God really hears you and sees your struggles. You see, the fall and the weight of sin and the hurt of the world is answered in the empty tomb. The resurrection reminds us that God is still in control, even if it's not clear to us in the moment. The resurrection gets us out of the present focus and helps us see the big picture. That even in the midst of your present difficulties, you serve a God. Indeed, you are loved by a God that has conquered death and has promised you eternal life. That's what the resurrection shows you. And it calls you to focus not only on the short term, but let that short term seep into the picture of the big term, the big picture. It calls us to embrace the savior whose cry to God in the present received no answer, but found hope in a most unexpected way, an empty tomb. God, the father, raised his son from the dead. It calls us to make changes in our life and to live our life for the peace and the humility that this Savior brought in to establish his kingdom, to forgive as we've been forgiven. This ought to be how we are known as Christians, through humility and through forgiveness, through grace. But most importantly, it calls us to remember that God is the one who did the work for you. You can't earn your salvation. And that's why grace is so amazing. Because God did the work for you and he has called you to him. He has given you grace and he's established a kingdom, the foundation of which is a humble shepherd riding in on the back of a donkey who conquered sin through humility, through forgiveness and love. So this Sunday, as we gather here on the Lord's day, I urge you, to look inside the empty tomb and see that he is not there, but he has ascended into heaven and then hear the words of the gospels. Go and tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you. Follow and embrace the resurrected Savior and live for him in hope in his kingdom. Let's pray together. God, we are thankful. We are thankful, Lord, for your ever-abounding grace in our lives. Lord, the many times that we have struggled this week, we come to you in repentance, but we come in confidence, God, knowing that you welcome us with open arms. We are thankful, God, that you give us comfort in the most difficult circumstances of life. And Lord, we pray that we will find our rest in you today. Lord, give us rest, for we are weary. Give us rest as we continue on in this world as pilgrims, looking forward to the land with heavenly foundations. God, we cry out with your servant, John, that you will come quickly, Lord, because we need you here. And we pray, Lord, that you will use us, that you will use these saints in Oswego to be ambassadors for the kingdom. I pray, God, that you will use each and every saint here to be an example, to be a mirror of your grace, of your humility, so that when the world sees them, they will see the love of God. And I pray, God, for everyone here and any struggles that they are dealing with, for we know that there are many in this world. I pray, Lord, that you will show them the empty tomb and the ascended Christ. God, thank you for saving us. Thank you for loving us. And be exalted in our lives, we pray, in the name of Jesus Christ, the great and resurrected Savior. Amen.