The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
There’s a town in Mississippi. Its name is Pass Christian. It’s part of the Gulfport-Biloxi metropolitan area. Its population these days is about 6,300 people. On August 14th in 1969, a tropical storm formed in the Gulf of Mexico just to the west side of Cuba. In one day it turned into a Category 1, which was given the name Camille. On August 16th, Camille turned into a Category 5 hurricane.
As Camille headed in the direction of Gulfport, a group of about 20 people in the Richelieu Apartments decided to hold a hurricane party. The apartment complex was less than 100 yards from the water’s edge, which gave the partygoers an excellent view of the storm as it approached the landmass. The party was in full swing when the local sheriff, Chief Jerry Peralta, drove up to the apartments. He got out and walked under the second-floor balcony, and there on the balcony was a man with a drink in his hand. The sheriff called up to the man: “You all need to clear out of here, and clear out of here as quick as you can. The storm has gotten much worse.” The drinking, titillated individual was immediately joined by others from the party, who then filled the balcony, laughing and mocking the sheriff and his warning.
One of the party boys shouted to the sheriff, “This is my place. If you want me off, you’re gonna have to arrest me.” So the sheriff drove away without making any arrests and without changing anyone’s mind about evacuating the apartments. What he did do was approach each and every one of the partygoers, recorded their names, and asked them to provide the name of their nearest living relative.
The sheriff was serious about recording the names of both the partygoers and their nearest relatives, but the partygoers took it as simply a stop to instill fear, to scare them off and cancel the party altogether.
Well, when the hurricane came ashore, it did so with a vengeance. It ranks as the third worst hurricane in the United States. Its winds peaked at 205 miles an hour, and the waves that struck that apartment building: 20 to 30 feet high. When Camille came on shore on August 17, 1969, the Richelieu Apartments were razed to the ground. Only the substructure of the building was left, and only one survivor: a five-year-old little boy. In that destruction, the dead died because they failed to heed the warning of the sheriff — the watchman of the community.
See, it’s always dangerous when people ignore the watchman’s legitimate words of warning. When they go unheeded, danger increases greatly, and history bears that out.
In the ancient world, watchmen stood vigilant on the towers or city walls to watch for any approaching threat at all, human or otherwise. It was one of the most important jobs in the ancient world. You know, we used to call the security guards “night watchmen,” because that’s when they came out to do their work, for the night is when most bad things tend to happen. Today we call them security guards, and although we’ve handcuffed them, there’s not a whole lot that they can do except to shout out for help, I suppose. Security guards in our day are often viewed as wannabe policemen, and they aren’t well paid — I was one of those, by the way, in seminary. They’re not well trained, and they’re not well respected.
But being a watchman in the ancient world and an ancient city was quite different than being a security guard today. In the ancient world, a watchman was one of the most well-paid, highest-paid people in the city. That helped keep them from being bribed, by the way. He was the first line of defense, and as such he garnered a great deal of respect from both the city fathers and the common citizens. It was his job to keep the cities safe as they slept.
Before the setting of the sun, it was the watchman’s job to station himself in his post, high atop in a tower built for him or on the city wall. There he stood all night. From there he would scan the horizon under the moonlight and the stars. Barely would he see an attacker in the daytime, and if he saw one and blew his ram’s horn, why, that was a signal to everybody working outside the city walls in the fields to make their way as quickly as possible into the city to find protection.
From the moment he saw anything suspicious at all, he was required to pull out his ram’s horn and to blow the signal, so that the men at arms would be ready for any impending attack. Any failure on the part of the watchman could result in the watchman’s own death, the death of many citizens, and perhaps even the whole town being wiped out. If someone got killed because he fell asleep at the switch, because he made a mistake and he failed to do his job, he would be judged and murdered, and the next of kin of his victims would be obligated to avenge the wrongdoing by stoning the watchman to death.
They took their job seriously. As for the people under the care of the watchman, they needed to trust the watchman. They needed to be confident that the watchman was awake at all times. They needed to be confident that he could see clearly and recognize any potential threat coming toward the city. And they had to be absolutely sure that whatever he reported, when he blew that ram’s horn, that it was accurate and the latest of all information.
That’s the way that it was when the Lord God approached the prophet Ezekiel in chapter 33, verse 7: “So you, son of man, I have made a watchman for the house of Israel. Whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give it to them as a warning from me.” 2,600 years ago, God told Ezekiel that he was to be a watchman, a pastor over the flock of God’s people, the church called Israel. The Lord God’s appointment of Ezekiel was supposed to be a great honor, and should have been received with great joy — although the Bible doesn’t say so, I’m pretty sure that it was an honor that Ezekiel would have gladly passed by, for all of the reasons that I have stated above, and one more.
Watchmen from the Lord God, Yahweh Elohim, who preached the law to unrepentant sinners — their lives were always in danger. Most of those people called as watchmen of Israel expressed reluctance when they got the call. When God selected Moses to be the watchman over Israel, Moses did his best to argue with God, to tell and convince God that he, Moses, was not well equipped, and that there were a lot better, other people that would qualify as such a watchman and a shepherd. “Why me?” he basically said. “Show me the better people, more equipped, more intelligent, and certainly more articulate for the job.” After all, Moses was a stutterer.
When God called Elijah to be his watchman, Elijah found himself hunted and all alone, hiding in a cave, complaining about the fact — well, quite honestly, that he was hunted and all alone, hiding in the cave. He didn’t want to go back out of that cave and risk his life to be the watchman of Israel.
When God conscripted Jonah to preach a warning to the people of Nineveh by preaching the law and the gospel, Jonah ran in the opposite direction, away from Nineveh — and you know how that turned out.
There’s lots of reasons why people don’t like to line up to be God’s watchmen. It’s not an easy job. For Noah, being God’s watchman meant that everybody around him were dead men and women walking — they were, all of his neighbors, going to be wiped out by the flood. And it meant decades of construction work, hard labor, while at the same time warning people of the impending doom that would eventually show up — warnings that went unheeded by every single person that heard the word.
For Joseph, being God’s watchman meant being sold as a slave by his brothers into Egypt, ultimately ending up on false charges in prison for years. For the prophet Hosea, being God’s watchman meant that he had to marry a prostitute who didn’t retire once she was married. In this way the Lord God was comparing Israel’s relationship to him to Hosea’s wife’s relationship to the prophet Hosea: one faithful, the other not.
Ezekiel found that being God’s watchman, telling God’s truth, was not an easy task at all. To let people know that they were going to be taken into captivity, and how long they were going to be there, Ezekiel was told that he had to spend a portion of each day — 390 days laying on one side on his bed — and then, once he completed the 390 days, he had to flip over to the other side for 40 more days, so that the people would know that they were going to be hauled off into captivity if they didn’t repent, for a total of 430 days. And so it was.
To show God’s people that during captivity they were going to eat unclean food, Ezekiel was commanded to cook his food over dried cow dung, as an example of what they would ultimately be reduced to.
In the New Testament, being a watchman didn’t get any easier either. Preaching the gospel and calling people to believe, repent, and be baptized cost the New Testament watchmen — pastors, apostles — very dearly. John the Baptist, as you know, was beheaded. Jesus was crucified. The evangelist Matthew was slain with a sword. Mark died after being dragged by a chariot. Luke was crucified, as was Peter and Andrew. James the Greater was beheaded, and James the Lesser beaten to death. Bartholomew was skinned alive. Thomas was run through with a spear. Jude was shot with arrows. And Matthias was stoned — and then, if that wasn’t enough, they cut off his head.
Most of God’s watchmen, when they’re called, are acutely aware that they’re sinners and hardly able to fulfill the requirements. The qualifications are kind of minimal. Paul lays those out in 1 Timothy and Titus, two of the pastoral epistles. He gives us a list: pastors, watchmen, are to be temperate, self-controlled, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness or violence, peaceful and gentle, the husband of one wife, have obedient children, not a lover of money, and having a good reputation with the people who are not in the church — because pastors and watchmen often don’t have good reputations with people in the church.
We’re all in trouble. For all the trouble associated with being a watchman and a called and ordained preacher, the watchman is held accountable for only one thing, and one thing alone: fidelity in preaching and teaching God’s words to the people. He’s responsible for speaking what God has given to him to speak and to do. He’s not responsible for how the message is received. He’s not supposed to be a salesman for the message. It’s not the watchman’s job to modify the words that God gives to him in the Old and New Testament in order to make the law and the gospel more palatable to the hearer. He’s not in charge of marketing God’s message. He’s not God’s publicist. He’s not a religious cruise director making sure there’s enough activities to keep everybody happy and engaged. He’s a conduit between God and man — God’s Word specifically. He speaks what God has given to him: words of warning and judgment, and words of promise and forgiveness. That’s his job. Period. Anything else is all frosting on the cake. But doing that job alone is often more than people can take.
Today, again, verse 7: “So you, son of man, I have made a watchman for the house of Israel. If I say to the wicked one, ‘You shall surely die,’ and you do not speak a warning to the wicked to turn from his way, that wicked person shall die in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand. But if you warn the wicked to turn from his way, and he does not turn from his way, that person shall die in his iniquity, but you will have delivered your soul.”
How people respond to the preaching and teaching, to the worship service filled with God’s very Word, is not the concern of the watchman. His job is to continue to warn, to keep pointing out to the people of the church the enemy, to keep teaching that deliverance is found only in Jesus Christ, the Word of God in flesh, and the words of the Old and the New Testament. The message is all-important. The watchman is nothing. God’s Word of salvation is everything.
That’s how it’s supposed to be. Trust in God’s Word is what allowed three men to face a fiery furnace. It gave Daniel peace in the lion’s den. Knowing the message kept John the Baptizer preaching the law to an adulterous, evil King Herod until the moment of his beheading.
Fidelity to God’s Word and salvation, which comes through only in the faith of the crucified and risen Jesus Christ, is what gave Saint Paul the ability to continue through a storm at sea, a shipwreck, a stoning or two, tempests, trials, and thorns in the flesh. Knowing that he was nothing and the message was everything is what allowed Luther to stand before the greatest powers of the Western world and confess that salvation is by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone, for Christ’s sake alone, apart from good works.
Now the more recent history. For a hundred years, the faithful few watchmen have been warning Christians and church bodies, congregations, about the coming threats that seek to take children from their parents in the church — threats like the philosophy of evolution and progressivism, naturalism, subjectivism, relativism, pluralism, gnosticism, communism, materialism, liberalism, feminism, environmentalism, wokism — all have breached the walls of the church. And up until this present time — my critics — schools have not been built on any scale to bring children into the church and to teach them the truth of God’s Word and, quite frankly, common sense and math.
Watchmen have called out to the people, and church bodies have returned to their congregations, schools, and programs. Only a few returned to the teachings of the history of the Bible. They’ve warned people that the walls have been breached, and our children and grandchildren are being taken captive to the philosophies and thinking and morality of these days — philosophies and moralities of judgment and of death. And like the people of old Israel, the church bodies, the Christian people, they close their ears to the warning. They mock those who warned against such things. They often persecuted. When faithful Christians try to build good schools, they were opposed by their own people. Why? Well, it’s just too much to expect today of modern children.
Or have we fallen from that first Pentecost Sunday? On that first Pentecost Sunday, the people heard the watchmen, and they were cut to the heart, we’re told, and they pleaded, “What shall we do?” And Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, each one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. This promise is for you and your children and all who are far off, all whom the Lord our God will call.”
The same God who speaks and gives the watchmen words of warning and judgment is also the same God who said to the first watchman in the New Testament: “Truly I say to you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose — that is, forgive, let go — on earth shall be loosed — forgiven, let go — in heaven.”
Yes, there is danger, and the wages of sin is danger. In all, we like sheep have gone astray. But there is also, and finally, salvation: words of salvation, the forgiveness of sins, for all those who acknowledge their sins — those they’re aware of and those they do not know. The watchman stands on the post, and he’s blowing the horn. This watchman has been given by Christ the keys to the kingdom of heaven, words of absolution, so that when you speak, your forgiveness — excuse me — your sins: the forgiveness of sins is spoken to you instead, and by the command of my Lord Jesus Christ, I forgive you all your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Words given by Christ himself. Doctrine given by Christ himself. That the watchman is both of the law and of the gospel, and you are a people of the gospel. Your sins are forgiven. Amen.
May the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.