“Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?” (Romans 6:16)

As I studied this passage from Romans this week, a song came to mind. You may know that Bob Dylan became a Christian in the late 1970’s. He released an album in 1979 called Slow Train Coming. The first song, and first single released from that album, is called Serve Somebody. The refrain goes like this:

But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes
Indeed you're gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.

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Jesus said, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul, rather fear him who can kill both body and soul in hell.” (Matthew 9:36)

The word we translate as “hell” is Gehenna. Gehenna was/is a deep ravine next to Jerusalem where they would throw their garbage. Garbage in their day wasn’t paper and plastic. It was the unused parts of animal carcasses and I suppose vegetables. Rather than leave it to rot, they kept it burning with a perpetual fire.

It’s easy then to see how that awful place became associated with their vision of hell, the place of ultimate judgment for sinners. It’s the last place anyone would want to go. And Jesus says to fear the one who can kill body and soul like that.

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When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. (Matthew 9:36)

We’ve seen a lot of crowds the last couple of weeks. Some of what we’ve seen distracts from the compassion we do have. I’d like to separate the peaceful protests from the radical politics, rioting, looting and burning that have infested the opportunity of unrest and try to see where the Gospel will bring healing.

I’m not trying to tell you what to think. We are people of good will and intent. Each of us have our own experience and learning we’ve done, and we all need to learn more, on this and other issues. I expect that we’ll wrestle through the wide variety of opinions and ideas that we have to get work done on solutions. But our expectations should be oriented in the right direction. It occurred to me this week that there is a real disparity between our anti-discrimination laws and all this unrest.

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