Evil is not hard to see. Today we heard how Cain murdered his brother and tried to disperse any blame on himself. The Lord asks Cain where is his brother and he says, “I don’t know, am I my brother’s keeper.” Cain gave in to sin crouching at his door and then he tries to forget about it as if it never happened. We see the evil and the selfishness so clearly with Cain. He even asks the Lord to protect him as he bears his punishment as a fugitive and wanderer on the earth.
In Psalm 5 we sang: For you are not a God who delights in wickedness; evil may not dwell with you. 5 The boastful shall not stand before your eyes; you hate all evildoers.
6 You destroy those who speak lies; the Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man.
We see clearly that evil and wickedness has no part in God’s kingdom. God is holy, evil has no place in God’s presence. There is a difference between good and evil, and doing what is right and doing what is wrong.
In our Epistle reading St. Paul talks about those who did not come to stand by him, but instead deserted him to avoid conflict. He writes elsewhere about the coppersmith who did him great harm.
But what makes someone do the right thing or the wrong thing? Are some people just good people and some people bad people? In our gospel lesson we have a clue as to who is good and who is evil. The person you thought would be good, the Pharisee who seeks to follow God’s law perfectly, this person turns out to be ensnared by sins of boastfulness and pride. And the tax collector says it himself, He is a sinner, performing dishonest job as a tax collector. The one who is a tax collector is evil, and the one who is a pharisee who works so hard to do all the right things in the sight of God and man is likewise evil. It is not that some are good and some are evil, some live in righteousness and some in wickedness. Instead some repent of the evil in their hearts, and others lie to themselves and to God that they do not have anything wrong with them.
Sometimes we can lose sight of what our worship service teaches and feel like we are good and godly people because we are in church and we are worshipping God. But our right worship of God never involves our feeling good about ourselves and patting ourselves on the back.
Instead, it is through our repentance and our dependence on the mercy of Jesus that we come before God rightly. Our confession and absolution at the start of our worship service gives us the chance to confess that we sin, that we do not love God and others as we should, that we are evil.
We are all evil, but as Jesus taught in the parable, one person goes home from the temple justified and another condemned. What is the difference? Why was Abel’s sacrifice well regarded and not Cains? The difference is as simple as the difference between faith and trust in God in making the sacrifice- and faith and trust in yourself.
It is easy to look at Cain and say, I am not a murdered like him, I must be doing something right. Or to look at the Pharisee in the parable Jesus told and say, I do not pray by listing my accomplishments and putting others down, or making myself the subject of prayers instead of God.
Yet if we look honestly we might realize how often we are thinking of ourselves instead of the Lord Jesus while we are here in worship. We might realize how often we practice anger in our hearts toward our neighbors or say to ourselves, it is not my problem if I have hurt someone else in some way.
And so we are not that different than Cain or the Pharisee, or Abel and the Tax collector, sinners who are in desperate need of God’s mercy. And in this state of desperation we see a Savior come to us who is the one man who is good and without sin. We are near to Jesus when we humble ourselves and look to the goodness of Jesus as our comfort.
We go home justified when we worship Jesus in faith, looking to him instead of looking at ourselves.
So often we look at others in order to measure how we are doing or how we should live. We learn to follow the examples of those saints who inspire us by their life of faith, and we learn to avoid the pitfalls of those who have followed paths of destruction. We can learn from others, but we must be sure to see that it is the righteousness of Christ in others that we are noticing, not whether someone is a good guy or a bad guy.
If we lose sight of Jesus, then we are playing a comparison game that naturally leads to despair as our conscience reminds us over and over of our sin.
At the close of our Collect Prayer we prayed: Forgive us those things of which our conscience is afraid and give us those good things of which we are not worthy to ask.
What does this mean, about things our conscience is afraid of that we need forgiveness from? This is our awareness of our sin that we have in our conscience, as a gift of the Holy Spirit we realize the things that we have done wrong. We fear because we realize how conflicted our motives and thoughts and prayers are. We fear because we know we do not come before God with a right heart, but instead a sinful heart.
This is what it means to fear God, to recognize that because of our sin we need God’s mercy and not punishment. To fear God is to say, “God be merciful to me a sinner.”
And as we ask for mercy, we are asking for those good things that we are not worthy to ask for, good things flowing from forgiveness. What are these good things? They are the marks of the church- new life in Christ through Holy Baptism, Assurance of salvation and strengthening of faith through the Lord’s Supper. Maturity of faith and unconditional love toward one another in our church because we are one body in Christ, called to be a sanctuary of hope to our world.
These are the good things that we will celebrate with our 75th Anniversary in a few Sundays. The Lord in His mercy has not condemned us for our sin, for the evil in our hearts- but instead has ordered our lives around a church where we can live as God’s people set apart from the ways of the world. A place where we live in the righteousness of Christ.
It is easy for us to see good and see evil in the actions of others. But how much richer it is for us to see the righteousness of Christ in His church, and the gifts of hope we can give to the world so that many more would go home justified, relying on the amazing mercy and forgiveness of our Lord Jesus. Amen.