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Please pray with me and for me.
Here I am Lord, I am hurting, I am struggling, I am scared, I am angry, and I am confused. I need you. Amen
In Sunday School we have been having a very thorough study of the life of Jesus' cousin John the Baptist who announced that he baptized with water, but one whose sandals he was not worthy of tying, baptizes with the Holy Spirit.
John the Baptist continued on his ministry baptizing with water and leading those he met to Jesus Christ. As
we who have been called know when we have been called to serve God, the road is never easy.
Open your Bible to Mark 6:21-29
But an opportunity came when Herod on his birthday gave a banquet for his courtiers (those who took care of Herod) and officers and leading men of Galilee. For when
Herodias’ daughter, Herod’s brother’s daughter, came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his guests; and King Herod said to the girl, “Ask me for whatever you wish, and I will grant it.” And King Herod vowed to her, “Whatever you ask me, I will grant give you, even half of my kingdom.” And she went out and said her mother, “What shall I ask?” And her mother said, “The head of John the baptizer.” And the young girl came in immediately with urgency to the king, and asked, saying, “I want you to give me at once the head of John the Baptist on a platter.” And the king was exceedingly sorry; but because of his oaths and his guests he did not want to break his word to her.
And immediately the king sent a soldier of the guard and gave orders to bring him John the Baptist's head. The solider of the guard went and beheaded John the Baptist in prison, and brought John the Baptist head on a platter and gave it to the girl; and the girl gave it to her mother. When the disciples head of it, they came and took John the Baptist body, and laid it in a tomb.
After reading this Scripture, Jim with a look of sadness and disgust asked our Sunday school class, “Why did God let this happen? I don’t understand and I feel sad this happened to such a great man.”
The year is 2006, the month is October which in the Amish society is a festive time,
because dozens of wedding take place on Tuesdays and Thursdays during that season. By early October the Amish children are counting the days until their siblings or cousins are getting married. Amish wedding are happy occasions stretching from early morning until late evening, with three to four hundred people gathered at the brides home. It’s not uncommon for an Amish person to received invitations to a half dozen weddings in a single fall season. Those invited to multiple weddings on the same day circulate from one celebration to another.
The location is Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. His name is Charles Carl Roberts IV. He drives an eighteen wheel milk truck. He is married and he and his wife Amy have three children. After breakfast Amy left with their youngest, an eighteen month-old, for a Mom’s in Touch prayer group meeting at a local Presbyterian Church. Mother’s gathered there weekly in this group to pray for their children, their teachers, school safety, and other issues of concerns in local schools. On this particular morning a young Amish women was caring for preschool children in the children’s nursery.
Back at their modular home Roberts walked his six and eight-year old children to the school bus stop and kissed them goodbye at 8:45AM. Roberts was scheduled for a routine drug test that morning for his trucking license, but he had other plans as he drove his wife’s grandfather’s pickup truck.
Roberts drove the pickup truck to White Oak Road where he backed his pickup truck into an Amish School yard and then made history.
Charles Carl Roberts IV then walked into an Amish school and waving a semi-automatic pistol he ordered the female students to lie face down at the front of the room as he ordered the male students and adults out of the school house nailing the door shut behind them. They went outside and prayed for everyone still in the school house.
He then proceeded to do what the Amish called the Amish 09/11, a senseless tragedy, as Roberts killed five of the girls and critically injured the remaining five girls. Two of the girls were sisters who died separately in their mother’s arms. Or as the Amish stated, the five girls were “safe in the arms of Jesus.”
Before committing such a senseless crime Charles Carl Roberts IV called his wife on his cell phone and told her that he was not coming home and he had left notes for everyone. He was angry at God, he said, for the death of their firstborn daughter, Elsie, who had lived for only twenty minutes after her birth in 1987.
Roberts wrote in a note to his wife, “I’m not worthy of you, you are the perfect wife, you deserve so much better….I’m filled with so much hate towards myself, hate towards God, and an unimaginable emptiness. It seems like every time we do something fun I think about how Elsie wasn’t there to share it with us and I go right back to anger.”
It was this anger that drove Roberts to kill and or wound the innocent Amish girls for in Roberts’s words, “I’m going to make you pay for my daughter.”
Such as in our Scripture lesson this morning, Mark 6:21-29,
Herod promised the young girl, “Whatever you ask me, I will give you, even half of my kingdom,” but the truth be known King Herod did not have a kingdom to give away. Herod was a king with a title and a man full of anger at John the Baptist who had been upset that King Herod could commit incest as a ruler of Israel. Thus John the Baptist was imprisoned and killed.
As with Roberts and King Herod everything appeared to be fine on the outside to the world. Inside his body Roberts was filled with anger unable to live, let alone fine anything worth living for.
Thus Charles Carl Roberts IV committed suicide after he committed such hideous acts against innocent Amish female children.
What happened at Roberts’s funeral to his widow and children is indeed an act of God.
From the book: 'Amish Grace - How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy':
Page 46:
The funeral director recalled the moving moment: “I was lucky enough to be at the cemetery when the Amish families of the children who had been killed came to greet Amy Roberts and offer their forgiveness. And that is something I’ll never forget, not ever. I knew that I was witnessing a miracle.”
A Robert’s family member, also an eyewitness to the “miracle,” described it this way: “About thirty-five or forty Amish came to the burial. They shook our hands and cried. They embraced Amy and the children. There were no grudges, no hard feelings, only forgiveness. It’s just hard to believe that they were able to do that,”
The Amish also offered forgiveness in the form of dollars by establishing the “Nickel Mines Accountability Committee” formed two days after the shooting deciding to forgo the word Amish and instead use Nickel Mines because this was a community tragedy beyond the Amish.
Let’s continue with Page 47:
“These concrete acts of grace were not lost on the widow’s family. “It’s hard to accept what has happened,” said one of Amy’s relatives, “but the kindness of the Amish has helped us tremendously …. It helps us to know they forgive us.” Another relative agreed, echoing what many commentators had already noted: “If this had happened to some of our own (non-Amish) people, there would have been one lawsuit after another…. But this experience brought everybody closer together.
In a public statement released ten days after the shooting, the Roberts family specifically thanked the Amish community: “Your compassion has reached beyond our family, beyond our community, and is changing our world, and we sincerely thank you.” A confidant of the killer’s parents said, “All of the expressions of forgiveness provided a great freedom that enabled them to move on with healing despite all the sadness and sorrow. It gave them hope for the future and released them from the heavy burden.”
Mark 5: 24-32:
And a great crowd followed Jesus and thronged Him (gathered around Jesus). And there was a woman who had a flow of blood for twelve years, and who had suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse. She had heard the reports of Jesus, and came up behind Jesus in the crowd and touched Jesus garment. For she said, “If I touch His garments, I shall be made well.” And immediately the hemorrhaging ceased; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. And Jesus, perceiving in Himself that the power had gone forth from Him, immediately turned about in the crowd, and said, “Who touched my garments?” And the disciples said to Jesus, “You see the crowd pressing around you, and yet you say, “Who touched me?” And Jesus looked around to see who had touched His garments.
It is hard for the world to conceptualize that which they are not use to. In this awestruck moment they are like the crowd with Jesus. The world often could care less about those who are hurting but our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ stopped to look and see who needed Him.
I believe our lives are like the woman who could not stop bleeding. Our bleeding is caused by the anger and un-forgiveness within us that causes us to bleed out emotionally and suffer un-bearable pain while we are searching for something but do not know what.
At this very moment, if you are hemorrhaging with un-forgiveness, dying and feeling hopeless in your anger I strongly invite you to come to the great physician for an inner healing that no doctor of this world can cure you of. For it is only then that you shall realize the truth, the experience of healing. How do I know this to be true? I didn’t learn it in college and or seminary. I’ve lived Mark 5:33-34, in my personal life.
Mark 5: 33-34
But the woman, knowing what had been done to her (she was healed) came in respect and trembling and fell down before Jesus, and told Jesus the truth. And Jesus said to her, “Daughter your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”
We can walk around like a time bomb ready to blow and not understanding why what has happened has happened asking, WHERE WERE YOU GOD WHEN I NEEDED YOU?
I ask you at this moment, are you tired of internal bleeding that has been caused because you are not at peace in your life? Smiling on the outside, joking, interacting, but dying on the inside because you are angry over how circumstances have played out in your life, in the world?
Grace comes to us from God; forgiveness comes from within ourselves to another. The person we are forgiving may never know that we have forgiven them and that is okay. When we forgive another we are freeing ourselves, not the person we are upset with, we are freeing ourselves physically, emotionally and mentally. For only when we have forgiven may we move on with our lives and quit living in the past. Only when we have forgiven another for what they have done to us may we be healed, be healed of your disease, of
un-forgiveness.
How did the Amish decide so quickly to extend forgiveness? That question brought laughter from some Amish people who were interviewed. “You mean some people actually thought we got together to plan forgiveness?” chuckled Katie, a
seventy-five-year-old grandmother, as she worked in her kitchen. “Forgiveness was a decided issue,” explained Bishop Eli. “It’s just what we do as nonresistant people. It was spontaneous. It was automatic. It was not a new kind of thing.”
It is apparent that forgiveness for Roberts and grace for his family had begun as a spontaneous expression of faith, not as mandates from the church.
A father whose daughter was killed at the school house stated that “Forgiveness is not in our words, it’s in our actions; it’s not what we said, but what we did. That was our forgiveness.”
God has forgiven us of our sins through His Son Jesus Christ.
I invite you to come to the altar today as we go into our closing prayer and reach out and touch the garment of Jesus for then and only then will you be truly healed internally. Not healed by your external actions but by your internal desire to forgive one who is in need of forgiveness. To be healed of your disease of hatred, of despair, of anger. Healed by the Great Physician and begin living and enjoying living once again.
Father God, you know who we are internally when only the world sees our exterior. You know how good of an actor and actress we are in our daily lives. I pray Father God that the actors and actresses will stop acting and be free by giving up that which binds them to you Father God. That for once one may quit living like an outsider and belong in freedom as a child of God.
Amen
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