Pastor Gavin's Sermons

Lack of Updates?

2008-12-03T16:38:00.003-06:00

If you're wondering whether I've stopped preaching, I haven't. It's just that my sermon writing style has progressed a bit, and I'm not putting them down on paper in sentence by sentence form anymore, rather I'm writing the sermons as outlines. They are never preached word for word anyways, and this also allows me to move around and away from the pulpit as I don't find myself focusing on saying something in a specific way.

Therefore, I'm not posting sermons here for the time being. If I end up writing a manuscript for a sermon in the future, it will end up here.

Exodus 3:1-15 "A Burning Bush"

2008-08-31T10:00:00.000-05:00

This last week all eyes were upon Denver as the Democratic party nominated Barack Obama as their candidate for President. This coming week eyes will turn to Saint Paul as the Republican party does the same for John McCain.

When we look at the leadership that these two candidate offer this country and we look at Moses who we read about this morning and who was the greatest leader in Israel’s history, we see that there is much that is very different than the leadership they promise and the leadership he offered.

Where Obama is known for his wordcraft and ability to speak eloquently about many topics, Moses didn’t want the leadership job precisely because he didn’t feel that he spoke well at all, and he feared that he could not connect with his people. Where McCain has spent years in service to this country, both in the military and then in the senate, Moses spent his life disconnected from the people he would lead, growing up as a part of the Egyptian ruling family that subjugated his people to slavery and without any leadership experience at all.

But there are also things that both candidates have in common with Moses. Moses, like McCain, entered into his leadership at a late age, Moses was 80 when God came to him in the burning bush. And Moses, like Obama, had someone with him who made up for the areas where he seemed inexperienced. Obama has Biden, Moses had his brother Aaron.

These are interesting comparisons and contrasts to make, but we aren’t going to spend our time today looking at present day politics and seeing what Moses has to tell us about them. Rather, we’re going to look at our own lives, our own journeys with God, and see what Moses has to tell us about following God’s guiding in our lives.

I. From Shepherd to Leader

Chapter 3 of Exodus begins with Moses as a shepherd. It is amazing to me how God continues to go to shepherds and give them such important roles in his story. We have Moses, we have David and of course, we have the shepherds who were the first to see baby Jesus. So Moses is a shepherd, and not a young one. He is 80 years old. He had spent the first 40 years of his life growing up as an Egyptian prince. He was adopted by a daughter of the Pharaoh and lived the life of royalty. But then he struck out at an Egyptian who was mistreating an Israelite slave. And he killed this Egyptian. The Israelites feared him and the Egyptians were after him. He ran away to the Sinai Peninsula. In Sinai he married and became a shepherd and spent the next forty years of his life. And now, after having lived two full and very different lives, Moses was probably ready to sit down and retire. He was probably ready to enjoy the last years of his life in peace and quiet. But as he is caring for his sheep he sees something that amazes him. A bush that seems to be on fire, but that doesn’t burn up. And Moses is curious so he goes to check it out. This is where things begin to get weird for him. For he hears a voice call to him from within the bush, and the voice calls him by name, “Moses! Moses!” And Moses responds, “Here I am.” This is the first thing to notice about Moses’ call, it is a call given directly to him. It is a message for him alone. God calls out to him by name. When we are called to serve God it isn’t always as clear as it was for Moses. I don’t think I know one person in any sort of ministry who has seen a burning bush that called to them by name. But putting that aside, it is worth knowing that God does call us specifically. God doesn’t have a bunch of things he wants done in this world and just pick names out of a hat and assign them. It may sometimes feel like that, after all, we often find ourselves doing this sort of calling at church. We need this many Sunday School teachers and so we are just going to ask people until we get enough people to say yes. But this is not the way that God works. No, God prepares us for ministry and prepares our ministries for us. Everything that Moses had done up to that point was preparing him for leading Israel out of bondage. Moses had gone through much and it was all designed very intentionally to make him ready for what would come. The same is true for us. The joys we’ve had, the struggles we’ve faced, all these are there to prepare us for what is to come in our lives. We can think, like Moses, that we’ve already done everything that is important. Instead we need to be prepared to allow God to send us. And we need to be ready to hear God’s call when it comes, and not ignore it but allow it to speak to us, to call us by name. When you get that call from the Christian Education committee or from the Nominating committee, listen to see if God is speaking to you through them. Is God calling you by name? Is God pushing you to continue a ministry you are involved in or move into a new kind of ministry in your life? How are you going to respond to the call?

Moses responds to God’s calling him by name by saying “here I am”. It is a simple response. It is a safe response. He acknowledges that he is there, in God’s presence, but he hasn’t committed to anything yet. Smart.

II. Holy Ground

But then God asks him to do something unusual and strange, something that doesn’t make sense to us: he asks him to take off his shoes because he is standing on holy ground. God doesn’t start right away with asking Moses to do anything crazy, lead the people out of slavery or anything, not God begins by asking Moses to take off his shoes. “Um, okay God, if you say so.”

But there is an important question here, what is it that makes this ground holy? Is it just holy because of where it is? Are there places in this world that by their very nature are holy? Or is there something more to it. Perhaps it is holy because of the bush that is burning on it. Or perhaps it is because it is a place where God is speaking.

Other people have crossed over that spot of earth since Moses. We can be sure of this. And no bush burned and no voice spoke to them. The place wasn’t holy when they passed over that space in the same way it was holy when God spoke to Moses there. I think what made the place holy is that it was a place where a person met with their God and where God gave that person a mission. God gave Moses a purpose. God gave Moses direction. And I believe that this is what made this into a holy place. A holy act was about to happen, and so God created a holy place for it.

We gather in this sanctuary and worship God here. We like to think of this as a holy place. We treat it different than other places we inhabit. No, we don’t take off our shoes as we enter this place, but there are certain unwritten rules that we follow in the sanctuary. They’re different for each of us. For some of us, we show it’s holiness by the way we dress. For others, we act different in church, more subdued. There are certain things that we would never think of doing in this place. The college I went to had originally been owned by the Catholic Church and was a school for Nuns. The chapel in the college was beautiful. When the nuns were ready to sell it there were two interested parties: our college and a police academy. The police academy wanted to take the chapel and turn it into a shooting range. Even though our college offered less money, the nuns sold it to us because we would continue to treat their chapel as a holy place. What is it that makes this place holy to us? Is it holy to us because it was holy to our parents and grandparents before us? Is it holy to us because we are told that it is holy? Or is it holy to us because it is also a place where we meet our God and where we find our mission?

III. God’s Mission and Moses’ Arguments

And now we come to the part in scripture where we see God give Moses his mission, his call. God doesn’t just tell Moses to go do this. He explains the need to Moses and gives Moses the chance to get behind it. He tells Moses about the suffering of the people of Israel and how he has heard this suffering and is going to act on their behalf. When God calls us he prepares us for this by making the need known to us. He gets us excited about making a difference. He fills us with a passion for that which he sends us to. If he is calling us to mission work, he fills us with a passion for the lost. If he is calling us to ministries of compassion and justice, he fills us with a passion for the poor and the weak. If he is calling us to work with children, he fills us with a passion for the young.

Last spring we watched the movie Amazing Grace on a couple Wednesday nights here at church. The movie is about William Wilberforce and his crusade in 18^th century Britain to end the slave trade. William felt that God called him to this mission and he worked at it year after year of failure and frustration. He almost died because the mission he was on made him so sick. And many of those who he worked with including a black former slave minister, Equiano, died before the mission was realized. It makes me wonder, does God call you to something that he won’t equip you for? I don’t believe so. I believe that God does equip us with every good gift we need to fulfill the mission he has called us to. Sometimes we might not see the results of what he is working through us, but at the same time, God doesn’t send us out there on our own just to watch us fail. God gave Moses the things he needed to lead the people of Israel. He gave William Wilberforce what he needed to put an end to the slave trade in Britain. He will give you what you need to do what he asks of you.

But we, like Moses, can argue with him about this. We can make excuses. We’re too old, we’re too young, we don’t know what we’re doing, nobody will take us seriously, we’ve already got too much going on in our lives with work and family, we cannot commit to something else, anyway that’s that pastor’s job, isn’t it? The list of excuses can go on and on. But if God is really calling us to a ministry, the excuses will not last. I have to say that in seminary I talked to a number of second career pastors who talked about having the call to ministry on their lives long before they accepted that call. They again and again talked about fighting that call in their lives. And they again and again talked about how God eventually wore them down and here they were in training for ministry. And their stories were always told as “don’t let this happen to you” stories. There is no pride in their struggle with God. It is not something that they are happy they did. They all wish they had given in to God’s will sooner. They wish they hadn’t spent so much time arguing with God.

Don’t let the fact that they all ended up going to seminary fool you though, for sometimes that is the place that God calls us, and other times God calls us to other ministry opportunities that are quite different. We are all called to ministry within our church; within our community; within our families. This ministry looks different for each of us. What is God calling for you to do? Don’t believe for a second that God is done with you. He still has a use for each of us. And don’t believe that he only calls some of his children to ministry. We are all called to lives of ministry in all we do. So what is God calling you to? How does he want you to serve him? How are you able to serve? Open yourself up to God’s call. Listen to see where he might send you. And when he calls, follow. Moses discovered that he had no option but to go where God led. He discovered that as God called him to ministry, God provided his resources for him in ministry. God will do the same for you. Perhaps God is calling you to full time ministry. If so, answer this call. But more likely, he is calling you to some other ministry in this church, in this community. Are you going to listen? Are you going to answer his call?

Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30 "Asking Too Much"

2008-07-06T10:00:00.001-05:00

People have been asking about our mission trip and how things went. In the coming weeks you will get the opportunity to hear from those who went on the trip about what it was like and how it affected us. It was a powerful experience for all who went and we all have stories to tell about the trip. There were times of elation and there were times of disappointment. There were times where we realized that we were making a difference. There were times where we wondered whether we were helping at all.

As a group, we were working with each other and with two other church groups and with YouthWorks to do ministry in the community. Some of us worked with a kids club, playing with kids, showing them love that they don’t always experience in their homes, teaching them about Jesus, building relationships. Laurie, for example, had a little girl, Jaz, who would not leave her side each day we were with the kids. Others of us had the opportunity to go and help paint and clean up around some neighborhood houses. On Monday, they finished the second coat on a house that the group had worked on the previous week. Then, on Tuesday and Wednesday they moved on to another house. Unfortunately, rain hit on Wednesday. This kept them from being able to finish the work that they were doing, and the house will be completed next week by another group. The rain also affected the kids club. We were going to have a water day outside and enjoy playing in the water, but instead we had to come up with other plans. Not only that, but instead of the 30 plus kids we’d had the previous two days, only 11 showed up.

So, in the midst of the excitement, in the midst of the ministry that we were all doing, we found ourselves a bit disappointed. We weren’t able to do as much as we’d like. We weren’t able to finish up, and the rain kept kids away from us.

One of the things we’d learned is that there are definite joys in ministry, but there are also struggles and difficulties and at times we find ourselves up against a wall. It is interesting to look at Jesus’ ministry from this perspective. When did he find himself frustrated by the work he was doing? When did he feel overwhelmed? When did it seem like too much? And what did he do when this happened?

I. Difficulties in Ministry

We don’t always like to think about the frustrations that Jesus faced in his time in ministry. He was the Son of God! He had a direct communication with the Father that many of us would dream of. He could do amazing miracles and speak with an authority that we truly cannot understand. And yet he still found himself, at times, butting up against difficulty in ministry. Ministry in Jesus’ day was not easy, and he had an almost impossible task, to help God’s people to see where they’d fallen away and redirect them into right relationship with God; to preach the coming of the Kingdom of God; to prepare his followers for his own death and resurrection.

Now Jesus didn’t have some of the problems that many of us have. Last week we talked about how sometimes God’s followers find themselves reading God and his word wrong and head off in a wrong direction. I talked about how we need to be sure that when we are speaking for God that we are actually speaking God’s word and God’s truth and not our own thoughts. Jesus didn’t need to worry about this. He spoke God’s word and God’s truth each and every day. He was God’s Word. No, for Jesus the problem wasn’t communicating with God. It was communicating with humans.

I mentioned it last week and it is still true. Humans are not always terribly good listeners. God communicates with us, often quite clearly, and we somehow find ourselves getting what he is saying mixed up, confused and backwards. But that isn’t the only problem, either. Sometimes we ask too much of God. Sometimes we set up hurdles that we want God to jump over, tests that we want God to pass. This is what Jesus found himself butting against in today’s scripture.

II. Dancing to the Flute/Mourning to the Dirge

“This generation is like children sitting in the marketplace and calling out to others: ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.’”

You see, the people of Israel, the people that Jesus was trying to reach, would not be happy with what God was giving them. When God reached out to them one way, they complained that he didn’t do something else. So God did something else and they complained that he didn’t do the first. The people were putting God in a box and telling God how they wanted him to connect with them. And when he didn’t meet them the way they wanted, they dismissed him altogether.

They were saying, “we want to play the tune that you will dance to, we want you to meet us where we are at this moment.” They changed the rules so they didn’t have to listen to the messengers of God and could instead do what they wanted.

Jesus goes on to explain what this is about. You see, John the Baptist spent his life of ministry living the life of a hermit out in the desert. He wore clothes made of camels’ hair, he ate locusts and honey. He protested in the way he lived and what he ate against the self-indulgence of the world around him. And he called for people to repent, to turn from their selfish and sinful ways and turn back to God. He had an important message, one that prepared the world for the message of Jesus. And many were convinced by his message. But many others dismissed him and his message. “Look at that wild man living in the desert. He doesn’t eat or drink, he’s crazy, he’s got demons. We don’t need to pay attention to him because he’s crazy.”

And then there was Jesus and his ministry. He didn’t go off to the desert as radically as John the Baptist did, though he did spend some time in the desert. And he ate food and drank wine. Instead of separating himself from the self-indulgent and sinful, Jesus went to them and ate with them and visited with them and encouraged them to change their ways. And, in the same way as John, many were convinced by Jesus’ message, but others dismissed him, “He’s a glutton, he spends too much time hanging out with sinners, he likes sinners and their sins a bit too much, by spending so much time with tax collectors and prostitutes he is saying that their actions are okay. We don’t need to pay attention to him because he’s a glutton.”

And Jesus points out the absurdity of this reasoning. You can’t have it both ways. Stop with the character assassinations and listen to the message that both Jesus and John the Baptist are spreading.

Do you see that Jesus and John the Baptist had the same message? They both called people to repent and turn from their selfish and sinful ways. And yet they had radically different ways of sharing that message. John stood aside from the world and stood up as an example. He distanced himself from the sins so that people could experience the example that he set. Whereas Jesus entered into the dark and dirty world where people lived and met them where they were so that he could call them out. John called to them from a distance, asking them to repent. John stayed stationary and people came to him to hear his words of truth. Jesus traveled among the people and into their towns, to their dinner tables.

III. Ministry / Rest

After making this point, after venting some of his frustrations about the fickle nature of his people, Jesus then proceeded to call woe down upon the cities and towns he was visiting. We didn’t read these woes. We skipped over them. But they’re there, and they’re real. Jesus was frustrated. He and John had both been working to bring God’s truth to these people, and they were staying self-righteous and keeping with their older understanding of truth. They were allowing their own understanding to preempt God’s messengers and Jesus’ ministry.

Jesus prays about this with his Father. He takes his frustration to the Father in an interesting way. He praises God for those wise people who don’t get it, who have had God’s truth hidden from them. He praises God because though the truth is hidden from the wise, it is revealed to children. He celebrates the message that he has, knowing it is from God the Father, knowing that those who follow him will learn God’s truth. And then, in the midst of this discussion about God’s truth being hidden from the wise and revealed to the children, in the midst of this discussion about how God’s truth is only revealed to those for whom Jesus chooses to reveal it, in the midst of this problem that Jesus has with people not taking the message that he has seriously, Jesus speaks some of his most powerful words of comfort and peace: “Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy-burdened, and I will give you rest. I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”

Knowing how ministry sometimes is, I understand this need. I wonder if Jesus himself was reminding himself that God would bring him rest for his soul and then he felt the need to share that rest with his followers. “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,” Jesus says. “This ministry thing, that is so difficult, that can be so complex and hard, that can at times be so frightening and frustrating, take that yoke upon you.”

On the mission trip we realized the need for rest. We were exhausted each day with not enough time to relax or recoup. And yet, as we served, even as we found ourselves frustrated, we realized that Jesus’ yoke is easy and his burden is light. For there is joy in serving God. There is peace in doing his work. There is power in being intentional about seeking God’s will. I encourage you to talk with those who were on the mission trip. Hear their stories, find inspiration in their journeys, and find ways to take Jesus’ yoke in your own life. You may find it frustrating at times, you may find it difficult. But Jesus does promise that he will give rest and there will be joy and peace. Amen.

Exodus 13:17-22 "Leading Me"

2008-06-29T10:00:00.000-05:00

In college I had a girlfriend break up with me at a point where I wasn’t ready for the relationship to be over. She said that God had given her peace about breaking up with me. I felt that God wanted me to pursue the relationship even more, and thus I started a dangerous descent towards becoming a stalker.

You can turn on the TV to Trinity Broadcasting Network and see men and women with too many jewels on their fingers and too much makeup on their faces claiming that God has called them to share the good news that God wants to give you your every want, if you just give them the money you don’t have. I remember watching TBN once in Chicago, during one of their fund drives, where they had a guest preacher come on who only comes on when they’re asking for money. And he said that God had told him that whoever pledged $1000 to the TV station would find themselves completely out of debt within the next month. He told them to pledge $1000 and send in $100 of it right away. And he said that God would erase their debts completely. And then he had the gall to say, “if it doesn’t work, do it again!”

In May of this year, a bishop in the Episcopal church decided to bless a friend’s gay union. When asked about it, he said that it was what he felt God calling him to do. If that wasn’t bad enough, this same bishop, who theologically disagrees with much of the church, has received death threats from Christians who believe that God is calling them to kill him.

The point of this is that a lot of people “hear” God telling them to do things that I’m pretty sure God is actually not telling them to do. Realizing this sometimes can lead you to a difficult place. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire at night that would lead us and guide us so we would know where God was leading? Unfortunately, even this didn’t work for the Israelites when they were in the desert, as they headed off in their own direction even when God was so very clear to them.

I. Easier Said than Done

We believe that God leads us, that he guides us, that he points the way forward for us. This is a part of what we are about as Christians. It is a part of our belief. If we didn’t believe that God guided us, there wouldn’t be much point in following him. During my internship, there were three of us who regularly preached. Pastor Wilson regularly preached messages around the theme that we should obey God. Pastor Nelson regularly preached messages that reminded us to follow God. And I regularly preached messages reminding us to trust God. All of us were talking about letting God guide you and lead you and following his will for your life. And most Christians I know truly want to do this. And yet it is often something that is easier said than done.

Oh, there are certain rules and laws that we can follow to try to make sure that we are obeying God, but even these can be difficult to deal with at times. Jesus himself was attacked by the religious leaders in his day because he didn’t follow the commandments the way that they wanted him to and they thought he was ignoring God’s commands. Matthew 12 gives us a good example of this as we see Jesus breaking the Sabbath laws that the religious leaders followed. He heals on the Sabbath, he eats grain that he himself has picked on the Sabbath. He seems to be ignoring the laws and the commandments. And throughout the history of the church this has been an ongoing thing. Some Christians have done one thing and others have done something else and they both claimed that God was leading and guiding them and they both cannot be right. During the Reformation there were actually groups of Christians killing each other because of the way they baptized.

There are a couple dangers that arise when we realize this. First, some just ignore history altogether. They go ahead and figure that they’ve got it right and the Christians that disagree with them have it wrong and that’s it. This leads to a dogmatism that ignores God’s leading and ignores the Truth of scripture and instead relies on yourself to find truth. This really doesn’t seem like much of a danger until we look at the religious leaders in Jesus’ day and we realize that this is exactly what they were doing. They were putting their own understanding of who God was and what he wanted in place of truly seeking him. And Jesus came along and told them that seeking after God’s kingdom is more than just following a bunch of man-made rules. And trying to follow God’s rules doesn’t always work right either when you let your own understanding get in the way.

Unfortunately, the mantra: “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it!” isn’t quite good enough. If it were we’d be following a whole different set of rules than we are today. But the other extreme is no better.

You see, the other danger is to see the confusion that the Bible sometimes brings and find yourself depressed and hopeless. If Christians throughout history cannot get it right, why should I expect that I am going to get it right? This leads to a pluralism that allows everyone to have equal claim to truth and can lead to not really believing in anything. This is something that can be seen in the New Age movement. It leads to a wishy-washy approach to theology that never stands for anything and allows anyone to believe whatever they want. And it is just as dangerous as the first danger of being too rigid.

II. The Middle Way

So, what do we do? How do we respond to God’s guidance when we have to worry about whether it is actually God that we’re hearing? I remember a professor at college drawing a picture up on the board of a road with a ditch on either side of it. He explained that to be theologically sound, we need to walk the straight and narrow path. But the problem is that there is a deep ditch on either side of the path and it becomes easier and easier to fall into one ditch or the other. Worse, when you are being careful not to fall into one ditch, you find yourself walking closer and closer to the other one. Let’s go back to one of the examples I mentioned in our opening.

Most people here would agree that the Episcopal Bishop who decided to bless a marriage of a gay couple has fallen away from the truth. He has fallen into a ditch on the left side of the path. And many, in response to this have edged more to the right side of the path, trying to stay true to the life that they believe God is calling them, trying to stay true to an orthodox and historic reading of scripture. But some, as they have moved to the right side of the path have fallen into another ditch. Perhaps this ditch is one that accepts that killing homosexuals is okay. Or perhaps it is a theology that many Christians accept that says that homosexuality is a worse sin than other sins, and one that carries a special punishment with it. These beliefs are just as much off of the truth of human sinfulness and God’s love as the blessing of a gay marriage is.

But this straight and narrow path, this middle way, isn’t about compromising. It isn’t about trying to work something out so everybody is happy. It isn’t about denying the truth so that people feel better. No, it is about staying true to God and his kingdom. It is about pursuing Christ in all you do and pursuing Christ’s priorities in the world around you. It is about asking the Holy Spirit to guide you in your study of scripture. It is about coming to the Bible with questions and allowing the Bible to answer them for you instead of trying to fit your answer into the Bible. This is hard to do. It takes humility and it takes practice.

III. Pillars to Guide Us

Today’s scripture tells of the people of Israel fleeing Egypt and preparing to travel through the desert and come to the Promised Land. And God knew that he was going to lead them in a difficult path, and they would have a hard time following him. So God gave them obvious pillars in the day and at night to lead them and guide them. The cloud by day and the fire at night told them that they were following God. The cloud by day and the fire at night told them that it was God who was guiding them, not just humans and definitely not their own desires. The cloud by day and the fire at night reminded them whose will it was that they were to follow and who it was that they should obey and who it was that they could trust.

Sometimes, when I am reading scripture, when I am trying to understand how God would work in today’s world, how God wants me to work in today’s world, I wish that I had a cloud by day and fire at night to guide me. I wish it could be that clear to me what God wanted of me. And yet, when we look at the people of Israel, with God guiding them so clearly, they still seemed to stray. They still went off on their own way. They still messed it up again and again. And I realize that the problem isn’t that God is a bad communicator. He has made it very clear to us what he wants from us. The problem is that we are bad listeners. We let too much get in our way so that we can’t hear God’s word, so that we don’t go where he is sending us, so that we find ourselves heading off on dangerous tracks instead of staying on that middle path.

And so, my prayer today for each of us is that God will give us wisdom to see where he is leading us, that he will give us humility before his scriptures so that we won’t try to read our desires into his truth, and that he will give us strength of conviction to stand true and go where he is sending us. Perhaps he is sending you to an Indian reservation in South Dakota, or perhaps he is sending you next door to a neighbor in need. Wherever he is leading you, trust his guiding voice and go where he calls. Amen.

Matthew 9:35-10:10 "Lord of the Harvest"

2008-06-15T10:00:00.002-05:00

There is a story from the 9^th century about a group of Irish monks found floating in a boat off the shore of England. They are brought to the king, King Alfred, a pretty devout Christian, and asked to explain who they are and where they are going. The monks respond with a powerful statement of faith and trust in God: “We stole away because we wanted for the love of God to be on pilgrimage, we cared not where.”

And so these monks snuck away from their monastery, got in a boat, threw away the oars, and allowed the currents to guide them wherever they led. They wanted to follow God’s call on their lives, and they realized that they couldn’t necessarily do it cloistered amongst a group of Christians; they had to get out into the world. But they didn’t want to allow their own reasoning and reasons to get in the way of where they were going so they left their destination up to God, and trusted that he would send them to a place where they were needed.

These monks were sent out by God to make a difference in the world, and they truly relied totally and completely on him to not only show them the way, but to meet their needs upon the way. These monks lived with a ruthless trust in their heavenly Father: trusting that he would guide them, trusting that he would meet their needs, trusting that he would use them.

This doesn’t seem to be a ministry model that is pushed terribly much in today’s world. In today’s world we do surveys to see where our gifts are, we research communities to see where their needs are. Church plants go through a long and complicated process to make sure that the community the church is being planted in has the means to support the church. Church planters go through a rigorous assessment process as they determine whether they are truly called to do what God is calling them to do. And the earthly resources are hoarded and counted so that we know that we can succeed at the work we are doing.

And somehow, in the midst of this process, the Holy Spirit is ignored, the movement of God is pushed aside, ruthless trust in God is scoffed at.

I. Equipped to Share

Last week we looked at what it means to be God’s ambassadors. We looked at the fact that the people of God (in the Old Testament, the Israelites, in the New Testament and beyond, the church) are called to pursue Christ and to pursue Christ’s priorities. We looked at the fact that we are called to spread Jesus’ love and truth to the world around us, and when we refrain from doing this we are lost and without purpose. We heard the call to return to the purpose that God has placed in our lives, to share the good news with those around us. Here, in today’s scripture, we see Jesus call and equip his twelve disciples to go out and share the good news with the world around them. We see that he calls them to share the good news and we see that he then seems to send them off on their own.

This could be a scary thing for the disciples. It isn’t exactly what they signed up for. After all, they had signed on board to being Jesus’ followers. They had agreed to follow and listen to Jesus, to learn from him. And now, instead of being the followers they hoped to be, they were having the rug pulled out from under them as they were sent off on their own to preach the good news. Jesus sent them away with instructions and he sent them away with the knowledge that they could do what he was asking of them. He told them that their message was specifically for the people of Israel, the lost sheep. He focuses their mission. Jesus knew that his mission and their future mission would include the gentiles and the Samaritans, but he knew that it couldn’t all be done at once, so even though Jesus wanted to see the message of the Kingdom of God get to the whole world, he limited where he was sending the disciples. He told the disciples what their message was to be: “The kingdom of heaven is near.” And then he gave them what they needed to share that message, he told them that they would be able to heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those with leprosy and drive out demons.

II. Freely Give

How would they be able to do this? Because they had received these blessings from God and were told to share them with others. “Freely you have received, freely give,” Jesus says. Know that everything you do is not in your own power but is a gift from God. Know that I have blessed you greatly and now it is time for you to share that blessing with those around you. It isn’t right to hold onto the blessings of God without sharing them. It isn’t right to use the blessings of God just for yourself. Throughout the Bible, whenever anyone is blessed by God, there is the expectation that they will use the blessings to make a difference for others. Freely you have received, freely give.

And then, like the monks in the story I started with this morning, the disciples weren’t to take what they needed with them. They weren’t to plan ahead. They weren’t to even bring extra clothing. Rather they were to head out on the mission that God had given them and rely on God to meet their needs fully as they traveled from town to town. Scary. In today’s world this might mean going on a mission trip before you have raised enough money to do so. Or it might mean that a church should spend more energy and time and money (all of which are precious) to reach out to their community and meet the needs around them instead of focusing on themselves. As individuals it might mean that when you feel that God is calling you in a certain direction, moving you to a certain action, you not allow yourself to second-guess it, but rather begin to head in that direction and allow God to work.

The concept of going around in a boat with no oars is a scary one. Relying on God to point your rudder is much less comfortable than having your own hand on the rudder, guiding you where you need to go. And yet when Jesus calls us to follow him, to go where he sends us, he wants us to allow him to be in control. He promises to provide for us and he reminds us that we shouldn’t rely on ourselves and our own strengths.

III. A Few Workers

But I also want to look a bit at the scripture right before where Jesus sends his disciples out. You see, I believe that in sending his disciples off at this point, Jesus was preparing them for what they would deal with after his death and resurrection. But I also believe that he sent them off because he looked at the world around him and truly saw a world that needed help and he knew that twelve people spreading the good news of the Kingdom of God was better than just one person.

Jesus used a great farming metaphor. “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few.” He looked around and saw that work needed to be done, and he saw that it was more than he could do on his own. It’s like that small window of opportunity that you have to plant, or to harvest. If you don’t get the corn in the ground by a certain time, then even though you are using the same seed, even though you have the same soil, you will lose bushels because you were late getting it in. There is a timing involved in farming, a timing that is important, a timing that sometimes makes it a bit stressful to be a farmer. And Jesus was looking around at the people around him, people in need, people who needed to hear the good news of the kingdom, people who needed to be healed from a world that caused them pain. And Jesus saw their need, he saw that they were ready to hear that good news if only he had enough workers to share it. The time was short and the message needed to get out there. And so he took the disciples, who didn’t feel like they were ready, and he sent them out to share that good news.

I believe that the same is true for us today. God is taking us because once again the people around us are in need, they are needing to hear about the good news of the kingdom of God, they are needing to be healed from a world that causes them pain. And he is ready to send us out to preach the good news, to proclaim that the kingdom of heaven is near. And he wants us to stop relying on ourselves, and worrying about how we’re going to do it. Rather, he wants us to rely on his power, on his guidance, and allow him to work through us. Jesus sent out his disciples because he knew he couldn’t do it alone. He knew there was too much work for just one person to accomplish it all. The same is true today. We cannot rely on the pastor to do it all, we cannot say that the church board is going to do all the work at the church and all we have to do is come. No God is calling all of us to move forward in our faith, to reach out to the world around us, to share the good news of the kingdom of heaven. We might feel overwhelmed; we might feel that we aren’t capable of doing it all. But the disciples felt the same thing, and they relied on God to give them the tools they needed. God will do the same for us if we just go where he is calling us to go. Amen.

Genesis 12:1-9; Hosea 5:15-6:6 "Return to your Purpose"

2008-06-08T10:00:00.000-05:00

In his latest blockbuster adventure, the archeologist, Indiana Jones, finds himself searching for a crystal skull so that he can return it to its resting place. As he fights communists and braves the elements, he fulfills a mission over five hundred years in the making. You see, the crystal skull had been taken from its resting place by Spanish Conquistadors and it needed to be returned. And Indiana Jones and his group of friends and companions took it upon themselves to return it.

It is interesting that a blockbuster about an archeologist who is known more as a grave robber than anything else, as a collector of antiquities, has him trying not to get something but to return something. It is also interesting that the word return shows up so prominently in the movie. Of course the movie is about the return of an action hero who hasn’t been on the screen for 18 years. But Indy’s mission to return something to its proper place is a new kind of mission for him, and an important mission for each of us.

You see, we all have in us a need to return to a place we don’t really know. We all are called to return to right relationship with God, though we have never known that right relationship. And yet we were created to be in that right relationship. We were created to be God’s people, and even though we might have strayed away from that call on our lives, God is calling for us to return to that right relationship. So, that’s right, we’ve got the same call on our lives that Indiana Jones had in his blockbuster movie, “Return”. But instead of returning a nick-knack to its place of origin, we are called to return our very lives to the God who created us.

I. God’s Ambassadors

Throughout the Old Testament, there is a constant call for the people of Israel to return to God, to return to his plan for them, to return to his purpose for their lives. We see that call illustrated in today’s second scripture, found in Hosea. “Come, let us return to the Lord,” it calls! “He has torn us to pieces but he will heal us; has injured us but he will bind up our wounds. He will restore us, that we may live in his presence.”

To understand this scripture, to understand what God is calling his people to, we need to understand the pattern that the people of Israel seemed to fall into. Looking back at the beginning of the Bible, in Genesis 12, we are told of God’s covenant with Abraham. We are told that God will make Abraham into a great nation. And we are told that God will bless Abraham and his descendants. But we are also told that Abraham and his descendants are called to be a blessing to those around them. This is the center of the people of Israel’s identity. It is who they are. They are a people blessed by God so that they can be a blessing to the nations around them. As you look at the first 12 chapters of Genesis, you see that God had created the world, created a good world, and it had been corrupted by sin. Because of the corruption, God was calling for the people of the world to return to right relationship with him, but instead the people were moving farther and farther away from God, falling more and more into their own depravity. Then God tried destroying the world in a flood and starting over, but this didn’t work. And so God decided to infect the world with his goodness in a different way. He decided to take Abraham and make him into a great nation. He decided to take this nation of his followers and use them to bring blessings to the world around them. They would be God’s ambassadors to a world that didn’t know him. “I will make your name great, I will bless you and you will be a blessing.”

And yet the ambassadors for God weren’t interested in being a blessing to the world around them. They were too interested in their own lives and what they could get from God. And if they thought that God wasn’t going to give them what they wanted in this world, then they’d turn wherever they could to get it. And so we see a continuing struggle throughout the Old Testament where God is trying to get his people into right relationship with him so they can begin to share that relationship with those around them.

II. Israel’s Purpose

You see, it’s not just that God wanted a relationship with Israel. It’s that God had a purpose for his people. He had a plan and he was relying on them to carry it out. But they spent most of their lives focused on themselves and not interested in God’s plan at all. Sure they wanted to be blessed, but they had no desire to be a blessing. Sure they wanted God’s favor, but they didn’t feel that they should share that favor with their neighbors. The big struggle that God had with the people of Israel was that he wanted them to fulfill a purpose for him and they just wanted him to bless them and nothing else. The people of Israel had a mentality of “what’s in it for me” and when they thought that God wasn’t delivering for them the way they wanted, they turned away from him and looked for other things that might deliver better. Sometimes these other things were other false gods and idols. At other times these other things were foreign kings who they felt they could rely on for protection. And still other times they would rely on themselves instead of anybody else, because they were all they had.

But in Hosea, and throughout the Old Testament, God is calling for them to return to him. He is calling for them to return to their relationship with him. He is calling for them to return to their purpose. “I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgement of God rather than burnt offerings.” God wants them to acknowledge him, but more than that he wants them to live lives of mercy, to be about the purpose that he has planned for them.

III. Our Purpose

You see, I believe the same is true about us. I think that when we look at the people of Israel in the Old Testament, we will notice that we sometimes find ourselves in the same predicament that they were in. And we find ourselves struggling with the same things they were struggling with. Oh, we might not be worshipping at Asherah Poles or the false god, Baal, but we are allowing ourselves to get away from the purpose that God has for us.

God sent his son, Jesus, to save us. He sent him to bring us into right relationship with God because we are unable to do this ourselves. God sent Jesus to bless us with eternal and abundant life. But many of us seem to think that this is the fullness of the gospel. Many of us seem to think that once we’ve accepted Jesus’ salvation, our job is done. And yet we understand that our purpose is the same purpose that God made known to Abraham so many years ago. We are blessed by God so that we can be a blessing to those around us. We are called to be God’s ambassadors to a world that so desperately needs him.

Our purpose isn’t just to get to heaven. Our purpose isn’t just to survive this world and celebrate eternally in the next. These are things that we get to do, but they aren’t our purpose. God has a purpose for us and we are called to live in it. This means that when we are just focusing on ourselves we are not being about what God has called us to be. This means that when we are caught up in our own world, we are missing out on the plans that God has for us.

I believe that God is saying the same thing to the Church today that Hosea said to the people of Israel in his day. God is calling for the Church today to “return.” God wants us to be about more than just ourselves. God wants us to be about mercy. God wants us to move past just worshiping and sacrificing and instead he wants us to be his ambassadors to the world around us, sharing his truth and his love with those around us. God has blessed his Church. He has given us much. But he doesn’t want the story to end there. He is calling us to be a blessing. He is calling for us to return to our purpose. Amen.

Genesis 1:1-2, 26-28; 2 Corinthians 13:11-14 "Encircle Me"

2008-05-18T10:00:00.000-05:00

Each night, as I put Bronte down to sleep, I take Bronte and cradle her in my arms and pray a blessing over her. It started out somewhat generic, but has become a blessing that rhymes and asks for the Holy Trinity to watch over her. It goes as follows:

May the Holy Trinity encircle you through the night. May your Heavenly Father enfold you in his arms. May Christ Jesus save you from all harms. May the Holy Spirit guide you through the night. That you may wake up fresh in the morning light.

This is an encircling prayer. It is a prayer or blessing designed to remind us of the Trinity and the fact that each part of the Trinity has a role in our lives. We often focus on just the Father or just the Son. Some churches focus on just the Spirit, but that is not a problem we often find in ourselves. And this prayer, this blessing is designed to remind us that we have a relationship with the whole Trinity.

God the Father is our father. Jesus reminds us that we are to call him our father and treat him as our father. And as I stand there, enfolding Bronte in my arms I imagine our heavenly Father doing the same for us.

Jesus, the Son of God, sometimes referred to as the Son of Man, was sent to save us. Usually we think in terms of Jesus saving us from our sins, and Jesus does this; but there are other things in this world and in our lives that we need to be saved from, and Jesus is able to save us from those as well.

The Holy Spirit is sometimes hard to grasp on to and to understand, but the Spirit is our comforter and our guide. The Spirit shows us the way and speaks to us when we need direction.

The Holy Trinity is active and real in our lives. God is not a distant god, God is a god of relationship, within the Godhead and with God’s people. And we are called to be a part of that relationship ourselves.

I. A Confusing Trinity

The church I grew up in until Junior High was Trinity Lutheran Church. I don’t remember many sermons preached there as I grew up, but I do remember the pastor commenting in one of his sermons that it was Trinity Sunday and he felt that because the church was Trinity Lutheran he should probably speak about the Trinity. I also remember him saying that this wasn’t always the easiest thing to do, as talking about the Trinity usually meant you were getting a little to theological in your sermon and not practical enough, and further that the concept of the Trinity is a hard one to wrap our minds around.

As I prepared for this morning’s sermon I realized that much of what my pastor growing up said was true. And yet, here I am preaching about the Trinity today. Hopefully I won’t get too theological at the expense of the practical, and hopefully what I have to share will make sense.

Today is Trinity Sunday. It is the day in the church year where we acknowledge that God is a god of relationship. God is so much a god of relationship that it is not enough that God have relationship with humans, God actually has relationship within the Godhead. The Father, the Son and the Spirit are interconnected, they are one, but at the same time they are three. This is a central part of our belief as Christians, and yet when you look at the Bible, it sometimes can be hard to see the Trinity laid out so very clearly. Don’t get me wrong, it’s in there, but it isn’t laid out as clearly as a textbook or a systematic theology would put it. We see monotheism pushed throughout the Old and New Testament, but there are hints that we see that the monotheism isn’t as clear cut as we’d like to believe. When we look at Genesis we see God hovering above the waters, above the chaos, and we know that this God is one. And yet when God creates humans he decides to create humans in “our own image”. Not “my own image” but “our own image”. And then in the Gospel of John we are told that God was not alone at the creation of the world after all. Rather, the Word was with him and the Word was the way that God went about creating the world. And we are let in on a little secret, that Word that was with God at the beginning of creation, that Word that the Old Testament referred to as Wisdom, comes down to us as Jesus, the Messiah. And we realize that though God is one, there is a complexity there that we just cannot understand.

And the Trinity is most explicitly shown in the Bible in the last line of 2 Corinthians, which we read this morning: “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”

II. Different Roles

This, like the blessing that I say to Bronte each and every night, is a Trinitarian blessing that acknowledges the fact that in the Trinity, God fulfills different roles. The Father loves us, the Son offers us grace and the Spirit brings us fellowship. Now we need to remember that God isn’t totally divided up. We don’t only receive love from the Father, and Jesus isn’t the only one offering grace, but at the same time, there are roles that each part of the Trinity fulfill.

When we usually think of the Father we think of him as the creator, the sustainer of this world. This is fair. This is how God the Father is originally introduced to us. And it is a part of his role that we ought to celebrate and rejoice in. But I fear that we often tend to think of the Father as distant, as set apart, as removed from our day to day lives. I believe we’ve had this conditioned into us in a number of ways. First, when we think of the creator of the universe, we think that God is probably a bit busy running the universe to deal with individual people and their individual problems. Or, perhaps it is that we have the watch-maker vision of the Father, a God who built the clock, set everything in motion, and then wound it up and let it run. But just because God created the world doesn’t mean that God is distant. Jesus shows this to us when he teaches us to pray, when he encourages us to call God “dad.” And Paul, in his Trinitarian blessing does not focus on the creative part of God the Father’s role, rather he focuses on his love. May the Love of God be with you, he says.

Jesus is our Savior. He is the one who offers us grace. He is the one who sacrificed himself for our sake. He lived out the love of the Father in the most powerful way. He died for our sins and offers us salvation. But it isn’t only salvation or grace that Jesus offers. We have other things mentioned throughout the Bible which he brings to us, like peace. That’s right, Jesus is the Prince of Peace and often Paul particularly offers the blessing asking for people to take the peace of Christ with them.

The Holy Spirit is the most confusing part of the Trinity. Not much is explicitly said about him, but we are told that he is our counselor, that he will stand up for us when we need someone to do so. We are told that he is our guide and our teacher, greater at leading us on the right path than our conscience could ever be. And we are told that the Spirit offers fruits and gifts to God’s people, so that we can live in union, in community, with each other and with God. The Spirit of God offers us fellowship with God and with each other, as we are made into the beings that God designed us to be.

III. Relationships

When we look at the Holy Trinity, when we look at what God is about being three and yet one, we realize that God is at his center a God of relationships. There is a reason that God decides that humans shouldn’t be alone, because, though God is one God, God is not alone either. God is a God of relationship and we see this in the way that the different parts of the Trinity work together. We see this in Jesus and his life on this earth as he talked about the Spirit of God being upon him and as he talked about God being his father.

In Genesis, God says that humans are going to be made in the image of God. Some people have taken this to mean that God has two eyes, two arms and a mouth. Many have realized that this is not what God meant when he said that humans would be in his image. Others have argued that being in God’s image means that we have a spiritual life, that we have a soul. And they would argue that this is what separates us from the rest of the world around us. And this has often been the Christian answer as to what it means to be in God’s image. But there is another possibility, as well. What if being in God’s image means that just like God we are beings of relationship as well. What if just like God we have a desire to create, to sustain, to offer grace to those around us, to live in fellowship. This is an amazing and powerful idea, because it means that we even have more reason to work out our relationships in Christ. It means that we have a divine imperative to work with each other, to come together, to find unity and strength in each other.

God has a special relationship going on within the Trinity, within the godhead. The Father and the Son and the Spirit are working together and loving together and sharing together. And then they invite us to be a part of that. They say that they want relationship with us, that they want to welcome us in, that we are allowed and able to join in with them in their work in this world. And so, how are we caring for the creation? How are we sharing God’s love with those around us? How are we offering the grace of Christ and the peace of Christ to those who have not experienced it? And how are we offering fellowship to each other? When we begin to do these things, then we find that we too are acting as we were made, in the image of God. And this is a wonderful place to be. Amen.

John 8:31-36 "Set You Free"

2008-05-11T10:00:00.000-05:00

As I have mentioned many times before, I grew up Lutheran. Leaving the Lutheran church to go to a Covenant Seminary and join the ministerium of the Covenant Church was not an easy decision, nor was it one I took lightly. People have asked me why I left the Lutheran church and I have had to explain that it was not a repudiation of Lutheran theology. I believe much the same as I did when I was Lutheran. It was not a repudiation of Lutheran worship, either, at least mostly.

My deep dark secret is that I love Lutheran liturgy. When you listen to what is being said through the worship, the praise of God, the confession of sins, the statement of belief; there is power there. I love the fact that on a weekly basis, in the Lutheran liturgy, we are asked to confess our sins in a group and we are reminded of God’s love and forgiveness, and we are encouraged to turn from those sins. This is something that I feel is lacking in much contemporary worship, and in many non-liturgical settings.

And yet I always felt that people were rattling off the words of the liturgy and saying what it said without allowing the words to truly mean anything to them and inhabit them. This is not a problem that is only found in liturgical settings, though. It is just as possible and just as much a problem in contemporary worship; that we have great worship songs with powerful meaning and powerful words, and the people never allow themselves to connect with what they are saying.

No, the real reason I left the Lutheran church and joined the Covenant was that in Covenant theology and in Covenant practice I found a more real connection to the Lutheran theology and practice that I loved, and I found a separation from some of the dangers that I saw inherent in Lutheran theology and practice.

One of the dangers that I saw in Lutheran practice is a danger that is found in many faiths. It is the danger of believing that you can inherit your Christian faith; that it can be handed down from father to son, from mother to daughter. But we believe that faith is something that you need to have for yourself. It is a personal, not private but personal, relationship with God through his Son, Jesus. Lutheran theology says the same thing, and yet growing up I found people believing that their faith was something they inherited from their parents, something that was more a part of their culture than a part of them. And I found this sad and difficult.

I. Preaching to the Jews

A couple weeks ago I talked about how the gospel message had to be spoken in the language of the people hearing it. I shared the story of Paul preaching in Athens and using the very idols that he despised to bring the people of Athens to a place where they could hear about the God who created the whole world. Paul spoke in the language of the people to bring them to an understanding of the gospel. When Paul shared the gospel with the Greeks he needed to use things that mattered to them and talk a language that made sense to them. He couldn’t start with where he wanted them to be, he needed to start with where they were and allow them to be moved to where they needed to go.

Preaching to the Greeks can be difficult, and yet it can sometimes even be more difficult to preach to the Jews. You see, sometimes we need to preach to the religious. Sometimes we need to tell the people that are going through the motions that they need something more. Sometimes we need to remind each other that going to church is not enough, that faith isn’t something that you’ve inherited but rather something that needs to grab you and hold you and change you. Sometimes we need to reach out to the church-goers and tell them that there is something more.

This is the message that Jesus found himself having to share again and again. You see, Paul reached out to the heathens to tell them of the gospel, but Jesus was reaching out to the faithful, and Jesus often found that this was even more difficult. Jesus discovered that the sinners and the outcast found it easier to repent because they were better able to see their own sins. But the religious people, the ones who did their best to follow the commandments thought they were going the right way. And in today’s scripture we see Jesus bluntly challenge them on this. He goes farther after where we quit reading. He actually refers to them as children of the devil, though they believe that they are children of Abraham.

II. Children of Abraham

The religious people that Jesus is talking to believe that their ancestry gives them what they need. They believe that the faith of their fathers and mothers and great grandfathers and great great grandmothers will earn them salvation. They believe that because they are descended from Abraham, because of what their forefathers, the patriarchs, did, they are freed from sins. This is not a Biblical understanding of the world that they have. It does not fit with reality. Throughout the Old Testament God is always, again and again, calling his people back to him and hoping that they will learn to follow him on their own instead of relying on the faith that has gone before. And yet the people seemed to never truly get this message.

And here, in today’s scripture, Jesus tells us that we are called not just to be descendants of the faithful or children of Abraham, but his disciples. And Jesus tells us how to be his disciples as well, and it isn’t necessarily what we’d expect. “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.”

If we hold to Jesus’ teachings, if we follow what it is that he calls us to do, how it is that he calls us to live, then we will know the truth and be his disciples. And if we know the truth we will be set free.

It is interesting what the response to this is by the faithful. Their response was that they were children of Abraham. They were already free. They hadn’t ever been slaves and they didn’t need to be set free. This, to me, epitomizes the false security held by many who are religious, who are comfortable, who have accepted their faith without question from their parents and grandparents. I am a Christian; I am the child of a Christian; I grew up going to church; I don’t need to be saved from anything.

Don’t misunderstand me here. I’m not putting this on Lutherans. I know people of every stripe and every faith who allow their faith to be cultural, allow it to seep down to them from their parents, who never make their faith their own. One thing that shocked me was when I discovered that this wasn’t only true of Christians, but of other religions as well.

We have heard so much about militant Muslims in the last years that we don’t always realize that there are also cultural Muslims. When I lived in Chicago and worked with developmentally disabled adults, we had a large group of men and women from Nigeria who worked for us. Many of them were Muslim. And yet they did not follow their faith terribly well. I heard about their parties, and I know they ignored the command to avoid alcohol that the Muslim faith requires. And I remember talking with one lady who had just completed Hajj, her trip to Mecca that is required of every Muslim at least once in their life, if at all possible. I was asking her what the experience was like and it didn’t seem to be much of a religious experience for her, rather a social and cultural one. I asked her how serious about her faith she was and she said she was pretty committed to it, “but if I found a good Christian man, I’d convert to Christianity so that I could marry him.” She was just one example of a whole group who were Muslim because that was what they were raised to be and not because that was what they necessarily believed. And I realized that there are many of all faiths and religions that go to church and go through the motions not because they believe, but because it is what is culturally expected of them, because it is what is easiest. They believe that because of what their parents and grandparents believed, they need to believe the same thing in the same way and thus they are saved.

III. Set Free

But Jesus has a different message: a message that tells us that being the children of Christians is not enough; a message that tells us that we cannot inherit salvation. Jesus tells us that we are all slaves. Unfortunately, this is what we have inherited from Adam and Eve. And we cannot blame this only on inheritance, either, for we each have sinned and therefore are slaves to sin. But we don’t need to live as slaves. If we follow Jesus’ teachings we will be his disciples and we will know the truth and the truth will set us free.

I find it kind of ironic that I am preaching about this today on Mothers’ Day. Mothers’ Day is the day we remember the mothers who have gone before us, and for many of us it is our mothers who so aptly and strongly encouraged us in the faith. And here I am, saying that this is not enough. Here I am saying that relying on our mother’s faith is not going to get us anywhere, that we need our own faith.

But I think that what I am saying this morning, what Jesus says in today’s scripture, actually does honor our mothers and the faith that they have brought us. You see, those who have gone before us don’t want us to just follow their faith blindly. They don’t want us to inherit a faith that is not our own. Rather they want us to make the faith that they brought us up in our own. They want to give us the chance to own it for ourselves, to accept it and believe it and live it in our lives. When we do this, when we allow the faith to inhabit our lives completely, then we discover that we too are Jesus’ disciples and we are living the life he called us to. And as the truth has set our mothers free it can set us free as well. Amen.

Acts 17:16-34 "Destroying/Using Idols"

2008-04-27T10:00:00.001-05:00

I. Christendom Ends

How do we interact with a world around us that doesn’t believe the same things we do? Unfortunately, this is a question that we are going to have to ask ourselves more and more often in the coming years. The world is becoming less and less Christian and moving into a post-Christian time. Don’t get me wrong. Jesus and his message still matter, our faith still has something powerful to say to the world around it, but Christians may not be the ones in charge in the world as much anymore.

This isn’t all bad. Christianity is at its best when it is persecuted. Christians who have to fight for their very lives, Christians who have to daily pick up their cross to follow Christ and face the possibility of prison or death, often have a much deeper faith than Christians who are born into a faith that doesn’t mean terribly much to them. And when you look through the New Testament, through the teachings of Jesus particularly and even the teachings of Paul and the apostles, you will discover that there is very little about how to rule and much more about how to survive in a world that is turned against you.

And unfortunately, this is the direction that we are facing as a society. This is where Europe is already and if things don’t change, it is where America is headed as well. And yet there is hope for us as well. First, we will see that people who are involved in church, who are alive in their faith, are there because of what Jesus has done for them and not because it is expected of them. And second, now, as Christians, we have something that is different to offer those around us. We can stand up and show how living as a Christian is different than not living as a Christian. We can show how there is something special about following Christ. We stand out in our faith and our actions, and we can make a difference in the world around us. And, in truth, we can interact with the world around us in much the same way that the first Christians interacted with the world around them.

II. Preaching to the Greeks

When you look at the book of Acts, you see that Paul and the early apostles used different techniques to reach different groups of people with the good news of the Gospel. Paul tells us that he tried to be all things to all people. This means that he would reach out to people where they were instead of expecting them to become more like him before he talked with them. The first Christians shared their message with the Jews. They were preaching the good news of new life in Christ to people who had grown up believing in God, who were religious. They were preaching to the churchgoers who didn’t yet have a personal relationship with Christ. This in some ways is easy, and in some ways it is difficult. It is easy in that you are speaking the same language as the person you are sharing the Gospel with. The terminology makes sense to them, the message is there.

But then we see other instances where the Gospel needs to be explained from scratch. This is the situation that Paul finds himself in in Athens in today’s scripture. He is sharing the Gospel with people who do not have the same starting point as he does. They don’t believe in Yahweh. Instead, they surround themselves with idols and false gods. And Paul finds himself uncomfortable with this.

The story of Paul in Athens begins by sharing some of Paul’s frustrations. He has come to Athens and he looks around and he sees the idols around him. He is frustrated because he realizes that these idols will pull people away from Christ. He is frustrated because he knows that idol worship is wrong, a sin, and it cannot be tolerated. He is frustrated because he realizes that as he speaks the Word of God, he is going to be drowned out by all the voices speaking up for other religions and other gods.

So, Paul is frustrated, but he doesn’t let this stop him. He sees the idols around him, but he doesn’t allow them to silence him. Instead he begins to reason with Jews and God fearing gentiles in Athens. And he catches the ears of the Greek philosophers. I love the way they are described in this passage, I hope you catch the disdain here, “All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.”

These are academics of the worst kind. They are people who like to hear new ideas for the sake of hearing them. These are people who are more interested in hearing that something is new than hearing that it is true. When I was in college, more so than when I was in seminary, when we had to write papers for Bible classes, we were told that we had to use journal articles in our research that were less than two years old. The idea was that we had to see what the most recent thoughts were on the topic we were studying. And the underlying conceit was that the more recent scholarship, being more fresh, being newer, somehow had something more to offer than writings that were older.

I remember complaining about this to a couple professors, and being told that despite my complaints, I still had to use new research for my papers. Oh well.

I have often admired N.T. Wright, a Bishop in England and a very wise Bible scholar, whose new books usually find themselves on my to-read list. He spoke at a convention at North Park Seminary while I was there, and I found much wisdom in what he said. But I also discovered something else about him. He could talk the language of the Biblical skeptics. He could use the lingo that the Jesus Seminar people, who try to disprove Jesus’ divinity, would use. And he would use it to support a Biblical understanding of Jesus and his work in this world. I remember watching a special on TV around Easter one year and there were people speaking up against the resurrection and then N.T. Wright spoke up, and happened to receive the last word. He argued that when you look at the disciples, the way their lives were changed, the way they went from timid fishermen to evangelists, you have to realize that something miraculous happened in their lives, and in his mind, the only explanation for this is the resurrection. It is an argument that has stayed with me ever since, because it talked in the language of the skeptics, but it brought Biblical truth.

III. Speaking their Own Language

Paul finds himself in a similar situation in today’s scripture. Paul cannot share the Gospel in his own words, in his own language, because the people would not hear it. He couldn’t just come out and tell them that idol worship was evil and they should stop it because they had no reason to listen to what he had to say. Instead, Paul found a creative and unusual way to speak the truth to the people of Athens while at the same time honoring them and their quest for knowledge, their quest for truth.

Paul knew that he had to lead the people of Athens from their idol worship and their relativity in what they believed to a Biblical understanding of Jesus and his Gospel. Paul knew that he had to begin where they were and move them towards the truth. He ends up with a call for them to repent of their idol worship. But this isn’t where he began. He began by acknowledging their idols and even using one of them as an illustration point to point them towards God. Basically, he began by speaking their own language and speaking to them where they were.

I think we can learn much from Paul’s approach here. I think we can learn to be observant like Paul was, and even when we see sins around us, we don’t need to come out first and foremost in speaking against those sins, but rather use them as a place of contact with the lost. Of course, just as Paul does, we do need to point people towards God and his love as well as his commands for our lives, but this isn’t necessarily the place to start. Instead we can reach out and figure out where people think their needs are.

We know that those around us need Jesus. But they don’t often realize this themselves. But instead of shouting at them and telling them how much they need Jesus, we can reach out with the things they think they need, and use that as an opportunity to share Jesus with them.

A few weeks ago our church board had a retreat where we talked about how to reach out to our community. And we talked about needs in the community around us and how we can reach them. And we realized that there are many needs of those around us that just aren’t getting met. And we decided that we want to start meeting some of those needs. So we decided to find ways to be a resource to those around us. Sharing with them areas where they need help, offering resources to people who don’t have them. We decided that we want to meet people where they are instead of where we want them to be. And we believe that God can use us through this to bring them to where he wants them to be. You see, if we speak their language, the language of their needs, then soon they will begin to speak our language and the Holy Spirit will begin to work in them and through them and they will become new creations. This is what we are about as God’s church. Let us enter into this with excitement and joy as we reach out to those around us who need Jesus. Amen.

Mark 14:32-41 "Not My Will But Yours"

2008-04-20T10:00:00.000-05:00

I recently realized that it has been quite some time since I have mentioned my love for comic books in one of my sermons. I’m sure this is something that you all have been quite thankful for, but it is something that I’m going to change this morning. You see, I want to talk a bit about Batman today.

Batman was created as a character in 1939. That means that next year he will be seventy years old. And in the last seventy years he has gone through a number of changes, some of them good some of them bad. My first experience of Batman was reruns of the ‘60s television series that was campy and silly, and as a child I took it very seriously. But later on, in high school, I began to read the comics that told of Batman and discovered a darker, more complex person.

Batman suffered a great tragedy as a child. His parents were killed in a random shooting, in front of his eyes. And Batman is affected by this and decides that he is going to do what he can to make sure that this doesn’t happen to anyone else. Some have said that Batman is about vengeance, trying to get even with evil. But this is just not true. Vengeance can only get you so far, and Batman has a code that the follows that shows that he isn’t just about vengeance. What Batman is about is justice. He is about justice and self-sacrifice.

But recently, in the comic books that tell the stories of Batman, the authors have lost this. They have decided that Batman dressing up and trying to make the world a better place is not a normal thing, that perhaps Batman is a little deranged. And so, they end up treating him in a more negative way.

But I want to say that justice and self-sacrifice is heroic. Deciding to give up your own happiness so that you can help others is not something that someone who is deranged will necessarily do. Putting the happiness and welfare of those around you, even strangers around you, before your own, is actually something that is worthwhile. We can learn something from Batman when we realize this.

I. Doing what Feels Good

The whole discussion I just had about Batman was there to make a point that I think we sometimes miss. The culture that we live in has changed and headed in a direction that many of us aren’t comfortable with. Now it is easy to point out one issue or topic that seems to prove this point and rail on some specific sin that we see the world around us being permissive of, but I actually believe that the problem is more insidious than just one issue or sin. I believe that there has been a radical shift in our values as a culture, and it is a shift that could lead us to a dangerous place.

The shift is this: what used to be valued was self-sacrifice. Our culture and our society used to value someone who laid down their wants or desires for the sake of others; someone who gave up on their dreams so that they could help people around them. It used to be honorable to sacrifice for those around you, your family, your children, your neighbors, your country. But this value has shifted. And now in our culture, if you sacrifice your wants or your desires for those around you, you aren’t being true to yourself. Nowadays, what is valued is doing what feels good for yourself. We don’t put it in such strong language, but basically, what our society is telling us is that your happiness is the ultimate good. We might say it in different ways: be true to yourself, follow your heart, but it basically means that we are supposed to be selfish.

This might not seem like much, but it pervades our culture and our world, and is quite dangerous. It means that we are told that we should be focused on ourselves first. It means that our first goal in life is to find happiness, and happiness sought after is always outside of our reach. And when we do this, when we focus on this we end up making decisions that hurt those around us. When we focus too much on trying to make sure that we are happy, we end up walking into sin and broken relationship. People walk away from their families because they don’t feel happy in them anymore. People enter lives of sin because it feels good, and let me tell you that many sins feel good.

Now, it might seem like the right response to this is to encourage people to seek after their own happiness as long as it doesn’t hurt the happiness of those around them. This is the compromise that many make. But this is still buying into the value that our culture around us is pushing, that happiness is the ultimate good.

II. Jesus’ Prayer

But Jesus gives us an example in today’s scripture that is quite different. It is the example of a servant; it is the example of someone who puts God’s will before their own happiness. And when we contrast it to the disciples, who are more interested in sleeping than supporting their Lord, or our own lives where we are more interested in our own happiness than anything else, we see how radical and powerful Jesus’ self-sacrifice was.

Jesus was facing a difficult time. He knew what was coming for him, and he knew how horribly difficult it would be for him. If he had bought into our belief that you’ve got to do what feels good, you’ve got to chase after your own happiness; he’d never be where he was. But he knew that there was something more important than his own happiness at stake, and so he prayed.

Jesus’ prayer here is powerful. It is powerful because it helps us to see what it is like to face difficult times. It helps us see what our priorities should be. Jesus didn’t want to go to the cross. He didn’t want to face such a horrible death. He hoped and longed for another way. He asked God to deliver him from what it was he was about to face. But he didn’t leave it there. He wanted to be delivered from it, but he put his will in God’s will. “Not my will, but thine be done.” Jesus let his requests be known to God. He told God what it was that he desired; what it was that he hoped for. But then he made it clear that he would follow God’s path for him, wherever that may lead. Jesus’ priority was not his own will. His priority, rather was to follow where God was leading him.

III. Our Purpose

Happiness was not the ultimate end that Jesus was seeking, neither his nor others. What was the ultimate end for him was following God’s will. Do we find ourselves following Jesus’ example. When we face a question, when we face a problem, when we are tempted by sin, what is it that we ask ourselves? Is this going to make me happy? Or what is God’s will?

Our society has decided that the second question is not the right question to ask. There are even churches that have as their message the idea that God’s will can be simply stated in that he wants us to be happy. And therefore you don’t need to choose between the two. But this is not what the Bible says. Sometimes seeking after your own well being, sometimes seeking after your own happiness, will send you down the wrong path. It will find you turned in on yourself and serving yourself. But if we choose to seek God’s will for our lives. If we choose to follow Jesus’ example in the garden, to tell God that it isn’t our will that counts, but his, then we will find our purpose.

That is a deep truth that Christians and the church need to be sharing with the world around us, and it is not a popular one. The truth is that our purpose in life, our goal in life, shouldn’t just be to be happy. If we seek after only happiness we will discover that we have harmed those around us and even ourselves trying to find it. And the happiness that we do find will be fleeting and never be enough for us. But if we instead seek after God’s will, we will find ourselves in places where we don’t necessarily feel happy, but we will find joy and we will find peace.

Now, it’s hard to say that Jesus found joy in what he faced in the Garden of Gethsemane, but he did find peace. When he gave his will over to his Father, he found peace and strength to go on, to face the unfaceable. And his death and resurrection did bring joy not only for him but for all who trust in him, for the whole world.

This is a difficult message to share because it doesn’t come across terribly well. “Don’t seek after happiness.” It truly goes against what our culture tells us we should seek after. But when we explain that seeking after happiness only brings fleeting happiness and seeking after God’s will brings heavenly joy, when we explain that the quest for happiness is a false quest that will send us in the wrong direction, then perhaps we realize what is truly important in this world, and in doing so we realize what it is that we are called to do. Jesus gives us the example in Gethsemane. Seek after God’s will, not our own. It may not be easy, but it is what God calls us to. Amen.

Luke 15:1-7 "Lord of the Outcasts"

2008-04-13T10:00:00.001-05:00

How many of you grew up in a church? Not necessarily this church but a church? As you can see, that’s most of us… pretty close to all of us, actually. There are wonderful things about growing up in the faith. There are wonderful things about being surrounded by the things of God from an early age so that they become a large part of you. But there are dangers that come with it as well. One danger is that you sometimes begin to believe that the “church” things that you do are what make you a Christian, a follower of Christ. You have a part of yourself that is Christian and follows the faith because that is what your parents taught you to do. This can be dangerous because it causes us to forget that our journey of faith must be our own. We cannot believe because that’s what someone else wants us to do. We need to believe and follow because of our own relationship with God.

But that’s not really the issue that I want to talk about this morning. No, I want to talk about another danger that comes with growing up in the church and being immersed in the Christian culture. That is that we all have our own language we speak. We’ve heard the Bible stories ever since we were children and we know them so well and we know the theological terms so well that often we don’t communicate them terribly well with others, we assume they are speaking the same language we are, or sometimes we miss altogether the revolutionary nature of our faith. Because Jesus’ teachings are so familiar to us we don’t get how radical they really are.

Let me give you a couple examples of this to help you see what I’m talking about. In the church context, what do we mean when we talk about someone being saved? Think about it for a moment. We think of someone having their sins forgiven and receiving eternal life. But what does it mean to be saved in a non-church context? Something a bit different. Something a little more situational. Someone who was a slave or a captive would think of being saved as someone taking them away from their captivity. Someone in massive debt would think of being saved as being freed from their debt. Someone having a heart attack would think of CPR and medical procedures that could save them.

Here’s another one: If I said someone was a Samaritan, what would you think of them? You’d think that they were someone who helped out a stranger. You’d think that they were someone who went out of their way to do something positive for someone else. And yet this is not the original meaning of a Samaritan. In fact, it is pretty much the opposite. In Jesus’ day a Samaritan was someone to be reviled, to be avoided at all costs, to be hated. And so when a Samaritan does the right thing and is good to someone, people find this shocking. And when Jesus talks with a Samaritan woman his disciples don’t know what to do.

Jesus’ message was radical, more radical than we often give him credit for. And when we realize the context that his message was in it sometimes can have the awesome power of changing the way we see the world we are in and how we are supposed to interact with it.

I. Pharisee

Well, we’ve looked at being saved and being a Samaritan and we’ve seen how our Christian culture has influenced how we respond to those words. I want to look at two other words today even a bit more closely, two words that are found in today’s scripture. These are lost and Pharisee.

We’ll begin with Pharisee. Just like with Samaritan, we almost have a gut reaction when we hear the word Pharisee. At least I know I do. I automatically put the Pharisee in a box of being someone who isn’t good. I automatically feel negative thoughts about him. If I wanted to insult a person I might call them a Pharisee. And it’d be a pretty meaningful insult. If I called someone a Pharisee I’d be saying that they are just going through the motions. I’d be saying that they probably act like they’re better Christians than others and puff out their chests a bit too much when talking about the good things they do. I’d call someone a Pharisee that I thought was too legalistic, following the letter of the law and not getting to the meaning behind it. It would be a derogatory term.

This would be a fair understanding of Pharisee based on the gospels that we have. But I don’t think it’s a fair understanding of Pharisee at all when we look at them in the context of the world they were in. You see, the gospels, and the message of Jesus that they contain were about turning things upside down. Jesus elevates the hated Samaritans to a place of honor and he lowers the honored Pharisees to a place of scorn.

To understand what the Pharisees were about we need to see that they weren’t all haughty and lording it over the “sinners”. Rather, they were the religious people in Jesus’ day. They weren’t the bad guys, they were the good guys. They were the ones who had grown up in the church. They were the ones who didn’t drink or smoke or go with girls who did. Basically, they were us. Why is it important to spend time on this? Because I think that we spend too much time looking at the Pharisees with disdain instead of recognizing ourselves in them. Jesus didn’t dismiss the Pharisees. No, they are the ones who dismissed him. You will see that throughout his ministry he tried to connect with them and teach them and save them, but they would not listen to what he had to say because they were too busy trying to be good.

And the message in today’s scripture is the one that eventually got Jesus killed. It is the message that God doesn’t just care for the good people. Rather God cares for all people. And God is willing to put effort and energy and love and as many resources as he can into reaching out to those who the good people probably want nothing to do with.

II. Lost

Today’s scripture comes at the beginning of three parables that Jesus tells about finding lost things. First we have this one, the parable of the lost sheep. I’m not going to spend much time on the parable itself. Its message, to me, seems pretty self explanatory. A shepherd has 100 sheep and loses one of them. His response is to hunt after that one and save it. And when he does he celebrates. The second parable is much the same. A woman loses a coin and searches after it. And she eventually finds it and again celebrates. The third story is even more powerful when we see it in this context. It is often referred to as the parable of the prodigal son, but in this context it is much better to see it as the parable of the lost son. The father in the parable loses his son, and waits for him and when he returns the father rejoices and celebrates because he was found.

All of these parables talk about something being lost and then being found. Now, again, I believe that our Christian culture does us a disservice, because we have a theological understanding of what it means to be lost. We automatically think that it means to not have that relationship with Jesus yet. And we believe that God seeks after the lost and eventually some are found and we rejoice when we hear of that happening. But I wonder if we’re selling God short a bit when we allow our understanding of lost to be so narrowly defined. Perhaps being lost doesn’t only refer to “the lost” but it might refer to all of us who have lost our way at one time or another. Perhaps it may refer to those who have already found Christ but are not walking with him completely yet, or, to use the language of our church’s mission statement, they may be believers but not yet disciples. Whatever it means to be lost, though, we do realize when we look at Jesus and his ministry that Jesus is focused on the lost even more so than he is on the “good” people.

III. Outcasts

The Pharisees and the teachers of the law didn’t like the fact that Jesus was spending so much time with tax collectors and “sinners”. They talked among themselves about this. They complained about it. They eventually killed him because of it. They wanted God to be focused on them, not on the sinners. They wanted God to reward them for all the ways that they had been faithful to him throughout their lives. They had worked hard at this faith thing and now this Messiah guy was ignoring them and going out and hanging out with the undesirables, the outcasts, the losers, the failures. This didn’t seem right to them. It didn’t seem fair or just. In fact it was downright shameful. How dare someone who claims to speak for God show more interest in those horrible people than he shows in me?

I believe that this is a common refrain in our churches today? We’re the ones who have been faithful to God. We’re the ones who have lived righteously while the culture around us has gone to pot. So how about a little destruction and wrath for all those sinful people, while we can sit back and enjoy the barbeque. But that’s not the message that Jesus had and it’s not the way that he lived. Jesus reached out to the outcast. He showed love to the unlovable. Today it wouldn’t be tax collectors that Jesus was hanging out with, it’d be homosexuals. Those Goth kids that so many are scared of? Jesus would be right there with them, sharing God’s love. Jesus was about breaking down the barriers that humans are so much into building up. He was about reaching out to those we wouldn’t want anything to do with. And you know what? Jesus would want to see the same from us, his body.

Jesus didn’t despise the Pharisees. He just believed that his time was better spent with those who didn’t have a relationship with God. They were being told by the Pharisees, by the church of their day that they were too sinful to have a relationship with God. Jesus proved this wrong. Let us make sure that we aren’t giving the “sinners” around us the same message that the Pharisees gave them. Rather let us share with them the message that Jesus shared. That God loves them and wants relationship with them.

This is what Bringing my World to Christ is about. It is an opportunity for us to think of those in our lives, those who we know, who need to know Jesus. Perhaps they’re loved ones that we care about very much. Perhaps they’re people who we dismiss with nary a thought. Either way they need our prayers. Not that God will fix them or make them good, but that they can experience the power that comes from knowing Jesus; that they can be found by Christ; that Jesus can save them, not just from eternal damnation, but from the problems in this world that assail them.

So I encourage you to take time today to write down the names of those who you are willing to pray for. Write two copies, one to leave on the altar and one to take home with you. And pray for these people. Believe that God can work in their lives; that Jesus can connect with them like he did with the tax collectors. But also look for ways that you can reach out and share with them as well.

Luke 24:13-35 "The Road"

2008-04-06T10:00:00.000-05:00

In sixth century Ireland there was a legend about a group of monks who traveled in a small boat made out of leather. These monks were led by their abbot, Brendan the Navigator. The legend of Brendan tells of a seven year voyage around the North Atlantic Ocean where Brendan and his companions possibly come to America 1000 years before Columbus. The legend has many far-fetched elements to it and is obviously being written to teach spiritual truth as much as to tell a story of something that actually happened.

One of the events during the voyage happened on Easter morning. Brendan and his companions came to a rocky shore and brought the boat ashore. They spread out to pray and observe Easter individually with the understanding that at noon they would come together and share in a feast. As they prepared the fire to start cooking the meal, the island began to move, then it began to sink. The monks, well they freaked out. They ran back to the boat as fast as they could and got in it watching the “island” swim away.

What had just happened to them, islands don’t swim, nor do they sink. They were very frightened and did not know what to make of their experience. Brendan explained to the rest of the monks what had happened, for he had had a dream the night before explaining it to him. They were not actually on an island, like they though. Really, they had landed on the back of a giant whale named Jasconius. Everything they thought they understood about the ocean, about the island they had been on, was wrong. The world was very different than what they believed it to be. And this frightened them.

What is amazing is that in the legend, each Easter the monks came back to the same whale and celebrated Easter on its back. They remembered the fear, they remembered the fact that their understanding of the world had been wrong.

Easter is a time where the world is turned on its side. We look at what seemed to be the greatest defeat in the history of God’s relationship with humanity. God sent his son to the world, to be the Messiah, and the very people who Jesus came to killed him and he hung defeated on a cross. But this horrendous defeat is actually the greatest victory… and this happens with the Resurrection. We, like the monks on the back of the whale, see that the world is not how we understood it to be. God, through the resurrection, has given us a change in perspective… Like Brendan and his companions, we are right to be a bit fearful at the majesty and wonder of God. But then we can celebrate and rejoice, for Christ has risen from the dead… and that changes the way we see everything.

I. Wrapping your mind around the Resurrection

In the scripture read this morning we are introduced to a couple of the followers of Jesus who are traveling along the road to Emmaus. They are discussing the amazing things that they have just witnessed and heard of. They are trying to wrap their minds around the things that have happened. Like the monks in the story I just told… they are in need of an explanation that re-focuses their understanding of the world around them… they are in need of an explanation that re-focuses their understanding of their religion. They had grown up reading the scriptures a certain way and understanding what it was the Messiah was about.

Was the scripture that they had been reading their whole lives wrong? No. The truth was in the scripture… it had been there from the beginning, but their worldview… the things they had been taught… the things going on in the world around them caused them to interpret scripture in a certain way. And they interpreted it wrong. What they expected from God in the world around them is not what they got. And this frightened and confused them.

It took revelation from God… it took God’s Word in the flesh for them to understand the words they knew.

So these two disciples walk and discuss and they come upon a stranger who joins them in their walk. Now we know something that they don’t, this stranger is the Word of God, himself. It is Jesus. But these two disciples, these two followers of Jesus are unable to recognize him.

The stranger asks these two what it is they are talking about, what it is that troubles them. They respond by telling the stranger about the strange things that have happened in their lives. They tell of following Jesus because they believe that he is to redeem Israel. They tell of the horror of his death and how shocking and painful it was to them. They tell of the seemingly amazing resurrection that they have heard about but not seen.

Then the revelation comes. The stranger, who they still don’t recognize, tells them how what has happened fits into the scripture and is actually the very thing that that they should have been expecting. Jesus explains to these two what it is that scripture said about the Messiah and they were amazed. They were unable to see the truth in the Scripture until God gave them inspiration.

II. Inspiriation

We like to talk about the inspired word of God, the Bible, our scripture. Yet it is possible to read the Bible without inspiration. It is possible to use the very word of God to bring harm to God’s kingdom. And this seems to happen when we forget to rely on God, and instead rely on our own understanding. I have heard people preach hate from the Bible, I have heard people preach a pseudo-love from the Bible that tells us that God loves the world so much that he is going to leave each of us the way we are without bringing change in us. Neither of these are true to the message that is really there. When people take God’s word and use it to their own ends without allowing God to be present at their reading of scripture… this is a desecration of the very thing we hold so high.

Scripture is so much more than a place to go to find a text to back up a point that we want to make. This is what was done by the religious leaders of Jesus’ day… and they ended up killing Jesus because of it.

God honored the disciples desire to know the truth. They came with questions and God gave them answers. God gave them answers that transcended their culture, their teachings and their understanding.

As the disciples on the road to Emmaus searched for the truth the Word of God appeared to them, though they did not recognize him and answered the questions that they had. If they had tried playing games with him they would not have listened. If they had argued with him, they would not have listened. If they had held onto their own pre-conceived notions… they would not have listened. Instead, they humbly listened to the Word of God, and found truth.

Today, are we willing to humbly listen to God? Are we willing to put our preconceptions at the side so that we might sit and listen to the Word? God is ready and willing to teach us and is just waiting for us to listen. And how do we do this? I’m going to quickly give you three ways and they will sound familiar: reading scripture, prayer, and Christian community.

III. Three Tools

Reading Scripture: Don’t just sit down with the Bible and turn to your favorite passage… don’t read individual verses as proof texts. Read chunks of the Bible. Read the passages in context. Before you begin reading pray that God might speak to you and honestly open yourself up that the Holy Spirit might bring God’s word to you anew and fresh. Be ready to learn something new, be ready to see something in a different way. Let God be the one to speak through scripture… not yourself.

2. Prayer: When we pray we like to talk… we like to tell God what is going on in our lives and what our needs are. This is all well and good, but most conversations I enjoy are two sided ones. Actually, one sided conversations can be quite annoying. Thankfully, I have a wife to poke me when I start dominating a conversation and remind me that if I really want to participate in a conversation I need to take a breath and let others talk. Yet when we approach God in prayer we seem to think that we are to talk and talk and talk… Instead we can take time and listen. Try praying with your Bible in front of you… After saying some prayers spend time reading scripture. Then pray some more, then read some more scripture. Try spending time in silence. Open your heart to God and let God speak to you in the silence. Yes, talk to God in prayer… but listen to God in the midst of the prayer also.

3. Christian community: When I was in college, after a very difficult time in my life, I found myself very hurt, bitter and depressed. It is Christian community that helped me the most through this. I had people to keep me honest. I had friends to help me through the depression. One friend in particular had a nasty way of continuing to point me towards God. One night I was particularly feeling bad for myself and wanted to talk about what had happened. I wanted to talk and talk and I wanted pity. He let me talk, but then he led me towards God. Our evening ended in the chapel at my college and he left me in peace before God. That was the night that the most healing happened for me, because I had a friend who directed me away from myself and towards God. That is part of what we are to be for each other. We are there for each other to encourage and to point on the right path. We are there for each other to support each other in difficult times and to celebrate with each other in the joyous times. God will speak to each of us through each other, if we are willing to listen.

The disciples on the road to Emmaus were willing to listen and heard God’s revelation, God’s word spoken directly to them. And then they recognized Jesus when he broke bread. Let us pray that as we seek him in scripture, in prayer and in Christian community, we will also recognize him as our risen Lord. Amen.

John 20:19-31 - Thomas: Doubter and Follower

2008-03-30T10:00:00.000-05:00

I. A Follower of Christ

When we normally think of Thomas we give him the classification Doubting Thomas. He is most famous for the story we read this morning, where he didn’t believe in the resurrection because he had not seen it for himself. We tend to look down on him because of his lack of faith, because of his doubt. Even Jesus seems to give him a backhanded compliment that doesn’t actually put him down, but tells us that blind faith is a bit better than his faith. “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
And yet, the moral of this story isn’t for us to never doubt God, doubt Jesus, doubt our faith. Rather, what we see here is an example of Jesus dealing with the doubts of one of his followers, putting them to rest, and allowing them to move into belief.

To understand this better, I want to take us back to an earlier story that talks about Thomas. We don’t hear much from him or about him in the gospels. But he does show up in one earlier story with some illuminating words. It is in the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead and it can be found in John 11. If you remember, Lazarus was in Bethany, about two miles outside Jerusalem, he grew sick and died. Someone sent a messenger to Jesus and the disciples to encourage them to come, but Jesus did not come until after Lazarus had passed away. When Jesus did tell his disciples that he was going to head up to Bethany, they tried to stop him, “But Rabbi, a short while ago they tried to stone you, and yet you are going back there?” The disciples didn’t want to go up to Jerusalem because they knew it was dangerous. They knew that he would be facing his death by doing so. Which, as we have observed and celebrated these last weeks, is precisely what happened.

So the disciples don’t want Jesus to go. But Jesus tells them that he is going to go. Now, you have to read between the lines a bit here, but it is here nonetheless. It seems that some of the disciples must have wondered whether they should follow Jesus. They didn’t believe it was safe to head up to Jerusalem, and perhaps they thought that it would be better to just stay where they were, where it was safe. But then we hear the words of Thomas, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

Take that in for a minute. Thomas isn’t a doubter here. He is a man who is so dedicated to Jesus and his message that he is ready to go with him and die for him. As Jesus himself says in John 15:13, “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” Here Thomas isn’t plagued with doubts, he is set on a path. And the path could even lead to his death. But because of his love for Jesus, because of his belief in Jesus and everything Jesus stands for, he is ready to go with Jesus to the very end.

This is important to understand because it helps us to see that Thomas is not just a doubter. He is a true follower of Christ. And as we see in John 11 through 20, Thomas was not far off. He and the other disciples did follow Jesus into Jerusalem and watch as Jesus was taken, tortured and killed. Though Thomas was ready in John 11 to die with Jesus, he didn’t find that strength when Jesus was actually taken, but rather hid with the other disciples. And Jesus was crucified.

II. Doubts

But then some of the disciples start telling Thomas that they have seen Jesus raised from the dead. He just cannot believe them. It seems too good to be true.

Imagine yourself in Thomas’ shoes for a moment. Imagine grieving with him at the loss of Jesus. Imagine going through all that he had gone through this last week. And then, something happens that is beyond your greatest hope. He who was dead is now alive. You don’t want to trust it. You don’t want to get your hopes up. You don’t want to be disappointed yet again. You just aren’t sure that this could really be happening. You almost don’t want to let your hopes get up because it just might be true. And you aren’t sure whether you could really handle that.

It’s the way we’re built. We protect ourselves by preparing ourselves for the worst so that when it happens we are better able to handle it. We figure if we prepare ourselves to be disappointed, then when we are disappointed we are ready for it at least… and if, for some reason, things do go our way then we will be able to enjoy it all the more because we aren’t really expecting things to go our way at all. It is a self-defense mechanism that we all learn to build into ourselves. It starts when you are a child with your first crush, when you find out that person you like doesn’t like you back; and it continues when you apply for a job and don’t get it. The disappointments in your life help you to build up a wall of skepticism and pessimism that is designed to keep you from getting hurt. But this is not what the resurrection is about. For when the resurrection happens we discover that not only can the best happen, it does happen.

But Thomas wasn’t willing to accept that. He wanted more than words from the other disciples, he wanted to experience the risen Christ in his own life, only then would he believe. Only then would he accept the resurrection. This isn’t doubt for the sake of it. This isn’t doubt just because it’s the thing to do. This is real doubt from a follower of Christ who just cannot wrap their mind around God’s true power. And there’s nothing wrong with this kind of doubt. It is honest doubt. It is real doubt. It cannot be shut away and hid because if it is it will grow and fester and destroy the person trying to hide it.

I fear that when people come to us with difficult questions about our faith and we just tell them to ignore the questions, we are not doing them service. Rather by telling people that they cannot doubt, we are hurting their faith.

III. Jesus’ Answer

I believe that Jesus gives us a good example of how to deal with doubt here. He doesn’t attack Thomas for it, he doesn’t put him down and tell him that his faith and faithfulness doesn’t matter because of his doubts. Instead, Jesus answers Thomas’ doubts. Thomas says that unless he sees the nail marks in Jesus’ hands and puts his finger where the nails were, and puts his hand into his side, he will not believe. These are pretty tough requirements that Thomas has put forward. Some might say that he is asking too much of God. Some might say that he is testing God.

And yet we are told that a week later Jesus does appear to the disciples and to Thomas and Jesus gives Thomas exactly what he asks for, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”

Jesus doesn’t just tell him to stop doubting, to believe. No, Jesus gives him what he asked for and then tells him to believe. I think this is important. It shows that when doubts are real, when they matter, Jesus will answer them and allow us to see the truth. It tells me that Jesus doesn’t hold our doubts against us but gives us the answers to move past them.

A number of weeks ago one of the adult Bible studies talked about Gideon in the Old Testament and his testing of God. And they asked whether it was sinful to test, to question, God. Many of us seem to have it in our head that it is. I think we get this from Jesus and his response to the devil when he is tempted in the desert and he tells the devil, quoting scripture, that you should not put the Lord your God to the test.

And yet Gideon’s questioning of God is not put down in the Bible, and Thomas’ testing of God is not put down here. And I realized that there needs to be a distinction. There is testing of God, there is questioning of what he’s about, that is harmful and dangerous and a faith killer, and then there’s questioning and testing that is honored by God and answered by God. Both Gideon and Thomas were followers of God. Thomas, as we saw earlier, was ready to die for his Lord. And yet, when God was working miraculously in events around them, they could not bring themselves to believe. Perhaps they did not trust themselves. Perhaps they did not trust the world around them. And God honored their doubts by answering them. I believe that we can learn from them. Doubting the tenants of your faith is not the same as testing God. And doubt does not need to lead us to unbelief. It didn’t for Gideon, it didn’t for Thomas.

Rather, if you have questions that you cannot find easy answers to, I encourage you to take those questions to God, to lay them at his feet and to allow him to answer. I cannot tell you how he will, for God tends to work in different and unusual ways. But I do believe that he will answer those questions and bring resolution to your doubts. So that, as Jesus said to Thomas he will also say to you, “Stop doubting and believe.” Not because your doubts were wrong, not because they were unfounded, but because he has answered them.

And then you can join Thomas in his confession of faith, in his realization that Jesus had answered his doubts, and you can join him in his words of worship as he turned to Jesus and called him “my Lord and my God.” May you find a path from doubt to worship; may you find a path from questions to answers; may you find a path from uncertainty to faith and faithfulness. Amen.

Ephesians 5:8-14 "Seeing in the Dark"

2008-03-02T10:00:00.000-06:00

As a child I used to find myself scared while I lay in bed. Maybe it was a movie I had seen a part of that scared me, or maybe it was a weird shadow in the window, or a noise I heard under the bed. I used to lay in bed, shivering, afraid. I remember that as a young child it was monsters and witches I was afraid of, but as I got older it was demons. I guess my fears became more Christian as I got older. But in ways, the fears became more real. I found myself truly afraid of the dark, afraid of what I could not see, afraid of what could be lurking somewhere in the darkness, ready to get me.

But I discovered a trick that put an end to these fears. The trick was to turn to God. The trick was to pray. When I went to God in prayer, when I asked for his protection, I realized that I was protected and I didn’t need to fear the darkness anymore. “Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” With Christ shining on me, there was nothing in the darkness to fear. When I was focused on God, when I was praying to Jesus, the fears of darkness no longer held any power over me.

This is what it means to no longer live in the darkness. This is what it means to wake up and allow Christ to shine on us. Even when we’re surrounded by darkness, even when we feel that we’re blind, we don’t have to have anything to do with the darkness around us. Instead we can focus on the Light. Instead we can focus on Christ. And when we do this, he will deliver us from the darkness that surrounds us

I. Children of Light

Ephesians 5 tells us that we no longer live in darkness. Now we are in the light of the Lord. But then it tells us that we have a choice of how to live. Are we going to live like we did when we lived in darkness or are we going to live as children of light? Ephesians 5 tells us what it looks like to live as children of light. It tells us that the fruit of the light is goodness, righteousness and truth. It tells us that living in the light is doing things that please God. When I look at darkness and light, I believe, though, that there is something else that is inherent in being children of light. If we are living as children of light, if we are showing the fruits of light, then we will no longer live fearful lives, afraid of the world around us, afraid of things that go bump in the night. Instead we will live with confidence and courage. We will trust that God is caring for us, that he will meet our needs. And we will find ourselves able to do things that we didn’t think we could do.

Now I’ve been talking a lot about actual darkness, and actual fear of the darkness a lot so far, but to truly allow this message from Ephesians 5 to penetrate our lives, we need to move past the literal. When we look at the darkness of this world, when we look at the things going on around us in our culture, in our lives, we often find ourselves responding with fear. We worry about a whole lot, from terrorist attacks to the collapse of our economy. We worry about what our children and grandchildren are going to come in contact with in school, and we worry about whether we’re going to be able to pay our bills. Spiritually, we worry about a culture around us that seems to like darkness a little too much and seems to be ready to fall off the ledge into the abyss of moral and spiritual decay.

But as children of the light, as children of God, we are called to stand against the darkness, we are called to shine the light of truth into those dark places. And we no longer need to live in fear of the things around us. Fear is never a good reason to make decisions. Oh, fear helps you make good short term decisions, usually decisions about survival. But fear doesn’t give you the tools you need to make decisions about what God has planned for your life. It is never good to decide large things in your life because of your fear. When you allow fear to be central in your decision making process, you are living in darkness. But when you allow God to be central to your decision making process, then you are truly living as a child of the light.

II. No Fear

But what does life without fear look like? Does it mean that we are foolhardy or overconfident? No, life lived trusting in God looks exactly like Ephesians 5 says it looks. It is a life centered in goodness, righteousness and truth. When your decisions aren’t centered around your fears, then you start deciding based on what is good, on what is right and on what is true. Whether it’s a decision about whether to cheat on a test at school or whether to share your faith with a friend, once you stop fearing failure, once you stop worrying about what people will think, then you start deciding to do what is right. This is living in the light.

When we live in the light, we sometimes do things that may look foolhardy to those around us, but we aren’t being reckless. Rather we’re being responsible with the gifts that God has given us and the directions that God has given us. God can use us to make a difference in the world, but only if we don’t allow ourselves to be afraid of the world, only if we don’t allow ourselves to be afraid of failure.

God has brought light to the world. In doing so he has conquered the darkness, and therefore we just don’t have to live in fear of darkness any more. The culture around us that is turned against God, it has no power over us. We can confront it and trust that God will get us through. We can believe that God will work with and through us to shine a light on the darkness and break it down.

And yet, so many Christians do live in fear of the darkness. So many of us do allow ourselves to see the godless world around us as something that we need to hide from, that we need to protect ourselves and our families from. But, as Ephesians 5 tells us, we no longer live in the darkness. We now live in the light. We need to begin acting like this were true. We need to begin to live courageously. We need to allow God to truly be bigger than the things we are scared of, the things of this world that keep us down. Our fears are truly nothing in relation to God’s power and his plans for us and his light.

III. Night Walks

I began this morning talking about how as a child I found myself irrationally afraid of the dark. Through the message we have gone from talking about literal darkness to the spiritual darkness that surrounds us. But I want to end this morning by talking again about literal darkness. You see, having spent time praying I found that I had conquered my fear of the dark. Not only am I no longer afraid of the dark, I now somewhat enjoy it. Through high school, I would regularly go out at night, after dark, and find a place where I could sit in the darkness and stare at the sky, enjoying the many stars in the heavens. Something that is much easier to do when you’re not afraid of the dark. And in college, I had a friend and we would occasionally go out for night walks. We would drive up (in his car, I was carless at the time) to the foothills and the mountains a half hour up the highway from our college and we would find some forest road and drive out to it until we found a path. One time we got extremely lucky and found a wonderful dried up river bed. Yes, we almost got his car stuck trying to get to it, but it was the greatest adventure. We didn’t take any flashlights. Instead we let our eyes adjust to the moonlight, and then we started hiking up the dried up river bed. It was truly beautiful. It was absolutely amazing. The forest noises weren’t scary but rather were wondrous. The darkness did not hide dangers from us, rather it gave us the opportunity to discover the beauty of God’s creation in a different light. It was an amazing and beautiful night as we walked up that river bed exploring the nighttime forest.

It is the kind of experience that I wouldn’t have been able to have if I allowed my fear of the dark to keep me from going. That is what fears do. They hold us back. They keep us from experiencing what it is that God has given us. So, this day, be a child of the light. Don’t live as if you still lived in the darkness. Live in the light. Let go of your fears. And allow God to show you new and wonderful things. “Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”

Revelation 3:14-22 "Knocking on the Door"

2008-02-24T10:00:00.000-06:00

I. Standing at the Door

Last week we looked at the letter from Jesus to the church in Philadelphia. In this letter Jesus talked a bit about doors. He talked about the fact that he was holding a door open for us, his people, and when he held it open no one could close it on our face. In today’s scripture he again uses the door imagery but twists it around in a wonderful and powerful way.

Take a moment, if you will, to look at the windows around the church. You will notice that the full window pictures all have scenes from Jesus’ life on them. We have his birth, him welcoming the children and him praying in the garden of Gethsemane. And then we have a picture of him standing at a door, knocking. This isn’t actually a representation of an actual event that we find in the gospels. Oh, I’m sure he knocked on doors at some point in his life. But we know that this is symbolic, that it represents Jesus standing that the door to our hearts. It represents the scripture that we read this morning. Jesus is standing at our door knocking, wanting to enter into relationship with us, wanting to feast with us.

It’s a powerful image. It is one that truly makes sense to us. Jesus doesn’t force himself into our lives. He instead stands at our door and knocks, and he waits for us to come out and invite him in. Jesus could open the door himself and keep it open so no-one could ever close it. But he chooses, as he does so many times, the humble path of waiting for us.

Sometimes I wish God were a bit more forceful in his pursuit of his people. I wish he would do a bit more than knock. Some people, myself included, sometimes need to be woken up, to be shook around a bit to get our attention. Knocking at the door doesn’t always seem like it is enough. And yet it is what Jesus does. He gives us the choice. “Do you want to follow me? If so, let me in.” It’s an important choice, it’s a life changing choice. But what is it he offers if we do let him in? He offers to feast with us, to share food and fellowship with us, to nourish us with living water and the bread of life.

But when we talk about this powerful image of Jesus knocking at the door, we usually talk about the door being the door to our hearts. We individualize this passage and see it as something that we as individuals all have the opportunity to do. And this is a fair reading of this. But when we look at it closer we see that Jesus isn’t talking to individuals, he is talking to a group, to a church. And he is knocking on the door to their church, waiting for them to open up and let him in.

II. Lukewarm

Jesus also confronts the church in today’s letter. He accuses them of being lukewarm, neither hot nor cold. Now for us today this takes on a certain imagery. We think of someone who is lukewarm as someone who is wishy-washy. We think someone who is lukewarm in their faith is not terribly set on what it is they believe. I had a friend who accused the Covenant Church of being lukewarm because, in her understanding, the Covenant Church allows you to believe whatever you want, we don’t make people make decisions on things that aren’t clear in the Bible.

But this is not what Jesus is talking about in this scripture. Oh, certain truths are important to God, they are so important to God that he asks all of his followers, all of his children to accept them and believe them. We know what these truths are. They are the truth that we are all sinful people. We cannot earn our way to heaven on our own. We need help. They are the truth that God sent his Son to be that help for us, to take away our sins and offer us eternal life. They are the truth that if we believe in Christ, God is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. That we need a personal relationship with God, that we are called to accept Jesus as both our Savior and Lord. To be a Christian, you must believe in some real things. You must believe in the resurrection. If Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead, then everything we do really has not much meaning. These truths that all Christians agree on, that we all accept can best be found in the apostle’s creed, certain things that we believe about God, about Jesus, about the Holy Spirit and about what it means to be a part of God’s church.

But there are other things that are not as clear in the Bible. These things are not as obvious, and sometimes the Bible even seems to contradict itself in these areas. The Bible isn’t clear about baptism. On one hand, it tells people to repent from their sins and be baptized if they want to follow Christ. On the other hand, it talks about people not just being baptized themselves but having their whole household baptized, children, servants, everybody. And the Bible was written by and initially to first generation Christians. It did not talk about what to do with the next generation of Christian. So we as a denomination say that there is a legitimate argument that can be made on either side of this issue and we’re going to let individuals and churches baptize how they want to. Is this being lukewarm? Is this failing to stay true to the gospel? I don’t believe so.

Let me explain: Growing up, we had a neighbor who had a pool in their backyard. And the pool had a hot tub right next to it. We would swim around in the pool for a while, then we would hop into the hot tub. I remember we’d dare each other to hop from the hot tub into the pool. It was a shocking thing when you first did it, but it reinvigorated you like nothing else.

You see, Laodicea was in a place where there were hot-springs. People came from all around to Laodicea to experience the healing and comfort of the hot-springs. There were pools that were heated from underground volcanoes so they were hot to the touch. But Laodicea had a shortage of cold water, running water, drinking water.

But a spring that is neither hot nor cold, this is pointless and worthless and unusable to the people of Laodicea. It doesn’t offer healing to the people as hot water offers, and it doesn’t offer nourishment to people like cold drinking water does. So, when Jesus confronts the people in the church from Laodicea for being lukewarm, he isn’t necessarily complaining about them being wishy-washy theologically, rather he is talking about how they interact with the world around them.

Jesus finds them lukewarm and therefore will spit them out of his mouth. If they were hot they would be offering healing to the world around them, if they were cold they would offer nourishment. Hot water and cold water are useful to God and to the world around them. Lukewarm water is not useful. And God wants his church to be useful. Jesus tells us “those whom I love I rebuke and discipline.” He is pushing the church to be useful because he cares for them, because he loves them, because he truly desires for them to be about what it is that he is about.

III. Many Letters, One Message

We have spent five weeks looking at five of the seven letters to the early churches in the book of Revelation. I hope you have seen some common themes, have found something to take away from these letters. We discover that the individual churches were all dealing with different things and had different things that God was saying to them, but there were certain things that were important to them all. God truly wants his people to be active. He wants us to be making a difference in the world around us. Whether it is him confronting a church with being lukewarm, neither offering healing nor nourishment to the people around it; or telling a sleeping church that they need to wake up so that they can complete the deeds he has planned for them; or encouraging a church that has been a faithful witness; we see that God wants faith from his people but he also wants faithfulness. He wants our actions to match our words. He wants us to be doers of the word and not just hearers.

At different points we see ourselves in these seven early churches. And we see that we have many of the same strengths and weaknesses they have. And we are called to the same life of witness that they are called to. Jesus tells them that it’s not going to be easy. There are rough times ahead. But he also promises that there is a great reward ahead. For those of us who are faithful, who are true, God has great and wonderful things planned. We will sit at his throne. We will spend eternity in his presence. We will feast with him. We will be given new names. We will be given the morning star. Jesus will acknowledge our names before the Father. It’s all somewhat mystical and confusing, but when we look at it together, we realize that if we do allow Christ in, if we do open that door that he is knocking on, he offers us something wonderful, something powerful, something eternal. I know that I am thankful I opened the door for him and invited him into my life. And I believe that he continually knocks. I believe that he may be knocking on your door today. Are you going to answer it? Amen.

Revelation 3:7-13 "I Have Loved You"

2008-02-17T10:00:00.001-06:00

I. Two Churches

Two weeks ago we looked at a letter from Jesus to a church that was dying. And Jesus had an important message for them, “Wake Up!” He still had plans for them, he still had a mission for them, he still had a purpose for them. Today, we are looking at a letter to a church that is awake and alive and about God’s business in this world and Jesus has a message of comfort for them, a message of hope.

It is interesting to look at these two letters side by side, because some of what Jesus says is the same in them. In both letters Jesus talks about returning, about coming soon. But when he is talking to the sleeping church it is not something that is good for them. When he is talking to a group who is on track with him, though, it is truly wonderful news.

When I was at Midwinter back in January, we went to a session about the end times and it was interesting because as we talked about Jesus coming again, about his return, there were different people who had different hopes about it. Some truly saw the world as a difficult place, a place of trouble, a place where Jesus’ return was truly needed to make things right. But there were others among us who have often found ourselves not quite ready for Jesus to return. We still had things we wanted to do in this world. When I look at Bronte, I’m not crazy about Jesus returning tomorrow because I want to see her grow up and experience this world. I know others who have someone close to them that they want to see come to Christ. I think that these both are good reasons that we should want Jesus to wait before he returns. But there are selfish reasons as well. As a kid I didn’t want him to return until I could grow up and get married. There were parts of this world, of this life, that I wanted to experience. And I feared that if Jesus returned too quickly, he would take those things away from me.

The good news that Jesus gives this church in Philadelphia did not necessarily seem like good news to me. But there were others in our session, people who grew up struggling, people who grew up without the things that I grew up with. These were people who knew suffering in their lives and their communities, and they found true strength and hope in the promises of Christ. They truly believed that when Christ returned that he would make all things better, and they truly sought this, desired it with all their heart, longed for it.

The question I wonder about, the fear that I have, is whether we are so comfortable in this world, whether we enjoy the things this culture offers us so much, whether we’re so tied to the things of this earth that we aren’t really being about the things of God and his kingdom. My fear is that we are much more like the church we talked about two weeks ago, the church that was more interested in their image than their relationship with God.

God and his message is all about good news. Jesus is about bringing good news to those who need it. The danger is that we sometimes don’t realize that we are in need of the good news that Jesus offers. And when this is the case, we do find ourselves more like the church we read about two weeks ago and less like the church we read about this morning.

II. Strength to Go On

But today’s letter holds hope for us even still. “I know that you have little strength, yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.” Sometimes, though we feel weak, though we don’t think we can do it on our own, we somehow find the strength to move on, to follow, to go where God is calling us. Sometimes we are finding that we need to stand strong. Sometimes we are confronted with a difficult world around us, and we wonder how we are going to continue. Where are we going to find the strength to go on?

That is where the letter to the Philadelphians makes all the difference. In this letter God acknowledges the weakness of the people of Philadelphia. He realizes that they have a difficult road ahead of them. But he offers them hope. They have stayed strong and he will give them what they need to continue to stay strong. He promises to place an open door before them that no one can close. God knows that the people cannot do it themselves, and yet they persist in following him, and so he promises to help them, to lend them strength, to hold the door open for them so that no-one can close it on their face.

Jesus not only commends the people of Philadelphia for their faithfulness, he offers them strength to be faithful. And God offers us that same strength. As we, as a church, look forward to new missions that we want to be about, as we try new ministries that will reach out to the community around us, God will see this and will be thankful for it, but he will also give us the strength to do things that we aren’t necessarily thinking we’re ready to do.

I have found myself again and again surprised as I have stepped out in faith to do something that I don’t feel ready or prepared for, to find that God is able to use me in ways that I could not possibly imagine. And yet, I still find myself fearing that step of stepping out. I still find myself thinking that I’m not ready or able to do what God is clearly calling me to. One thing I can tell you for certain is that as long as you don’t step out in faith and trust him to hold the door open for you, you will not ever have the opportunity to actually see God working through you. It’s only when we trust in him and reach out that he is able to truly show us what it is that he can do through us, how it is that he can use us.

III. God’s Love

There is something else, though, that is mentioned in this letter that gives strength when strength seems lost. They are simple words, words that are worth hearing the Sunday after Valentine’s Day: “I have loved you.” Now in this letter they are being spoken in relation to someone else. There are people who are set against the Christians. These people set against them believe that they are better following God than the Christians, and they accuse the Christians of having fallen away from their faith. And Jesus promises that he will make these others acknowledge that God does love the Christians, that they have been faithful, that they have been true. Jesus promises that in the end they will be vindicated. The life they have lived, the faith they have been faithful to, will be shown to be true. Not only will they know, but all around them will know that God has loved them.

This is truly something that gives strength. Do you know that God loves you? Do you truly believe that he is coming back so that he can be with you again? We often push this truth away because it is hard to truly accept. Oh yes, he loves us all. He sort of has to, that’s his job. But it is truly deeper than that. God truly and deeply loves you. He created you, he knows you, and he loves you. Jesus tells the people of Philadelphia right here: I know that you have little strength. He knows your weaknesses, the things you struggle with. He knows your secret sins and those things that keep you away from him. And even so, he loves you. If this doesn’t give you strength to go on, I don’t know what will. Believe in God’s love. Trust that it is a real thing that is directed towards you. Know that when Jesus promises that he is returning again, it isn’t to keep you from having fun, it is so that he can be with you again. Find strength in this. Find purpose in it. And use that strength, that purpose to do great things in God’s name. Amen.

Revelation 3:1-6 - Wake Up!

2008-02-03T10:00:00.000-06:00

It is usually Lisa who wakes Bronte up either in the morning or after her nap. But sometimes I get that joy. Sometimes, Bronte is already awake and I just have to go into her room and see her smiling at me. Recently, she’s been pulling herself to a standing position in her crib, so that when Lisa or I go in there, she’s standing, holding on to the rail as she smiles at us.

But sometimes we have to wake Bronte up and she’s not awake yet. It’s a different story, though not terribly bad. We go in and turn on her light and then go and stand over her. She usually begins to stir and stretch and wake up. Sometimes she spends a couple minutes stretching out and trying to wake up. Sometimes her eyes just open and she’s ready to go. But there have been times where I’ve gone in to wake her up and she hasn’t been terribly happy about it. Then she wakes up crying and it is not terribly fun.

I know that there’s an art form to waking someone up, one that Lisa and I are going to have to learn or we’re going to be having difficulty as Bronte gets older. I had a friend in college who helped at a camp that had a wonderful way to wake people up. In the morning, as it was time to wake up, this would blare over the sound system:

Listen to In the Morning Time

From what I hear, it wasn’t a pretty sight. People don’t like being awakened in such a cheery way when they aren’t feeling that themselves. But, sometimes people have to be woken up from where they’re at. Today’s scripture is designed to wake a church up from their current ways, and I wonder how much we have in common with this church? Do we need to be awakened as well?

I. Reputation/Reality

The people of Sardis had a good reputation. They were known as a church that had it together, that was heading in the right direction, that was following God. They had a reputation for being a place where God was working, but this wasn’t their reality. In truth they were near death. In truth, they were just going through the motions. In truth, they were falling away from the faith they had once had. It may be that they once were the church that their reputation said they were. Maybe they had been a church that was alive and faithful, and had lost this, began resting on their past laurels, blamed their fall on things that they had no control over. Or maybe they were just a church that was good at going through the motions and pretending they were something that they were not. I tend to think that it is the first of these, that their reputation is there for a reason, that they once were an alive and vibrant church, but they have now fallen asleep. They are now content to just continue on with what they are doing, and hope that Jesus returns before they completely die out as a church.

But this isn’t what Jesus wants for his church. He tells them to wake up. He wants to see them be the church that they are reputed to be. Jesus finds that the deeds of the church are uncompleted. That is a loaded phrase that we are going to have to spend some time talking about. He warns them, he threatens them almost, that he is coming like a thief. He will come for them, and if they aren’t awake, if they aren’t alive, they will not like his coming. A dead church, a sleeping church, isn’t going to like Jesus’ return. It is not going to find the joy in it that a living, Spirit filled church will find.

But those who are awake, those whose faith is alive, they will walk with Jesus in garments of white. They will know what it is like to walk with Christ in the new world. Now it is clear which group you want to be a part of. Do you want to be a part of the sleeping church that will fear Jesus’ coming because with that coming will come judgment? Or do you want to be a part of the church that is alive and unsoiled, that looks forward to Jesus’ coming because when it happens you will be able to walk with Jesus in a new heaven and on a new earth. I know where I want to be.

And yet I sometimes look at our church, and I wonder where we are. Are we just going through the motions, waiting for our church to die, allowing ourselves to sleep through the work that we are called to do in this world?

II. Uncompleted Deeds

I mentioned a bit earlier that Jesus finds the deeds of the church unfinished. This is an interesting turn of phrase, and maybe it might work better to put it in a way that we might better understand. Jesus is saying that the church hasn’t met the purpose that he has given them. He is saying that he’s not done using them. He’s saying that there’s still work to do. And he sees them as dead because they aren’t doing that which he has put before them.

Again, I have to ask these questions about our church. What is God calling for us to do? What are his plans for us? Are we here just to care for each other? Are we here just to worship God and study scripture, so that Christians can, hopefully, grow deeper in their faith? This is actually a good thing, to see people grow deeper in their faiths. But it is only a starting point. As a church we are also called, just like every church, to reach out to those around us with love and truth. We are called to help those around us in need, to love our neighbors as ourselves. And we are called to share the good news of salvation with those around us. Does waking up mean that we need to be looking outside of ourselves? Does waking up mean that we need to be reaching out in love to the community and the people around us? Does waking up mean that maybe we need to move outside where we’re comfortable as individuals and as a church and step out in faith to make a difference in this world? Does waking up mean that we need to take risks, do things that we may not have done before, risking failure because we are truly taking on more than we can handle? Does it mean that we have to rely on God to give us the resources we need to bring about his plan for us?

III. A Wakeup Call

My friend’s wakeup song is so jarring because it is so loud and obnoxious and cheery, when loud, obnoxious and cheery are the last thing you want to be dealing with. Someone who is asleep does not like things that are loud. Someone who is asleep definitely does not want to deal with something that is obnoxious. And someone who is asleep doesn’t want to see someone else be so happy and wonderful, especially when all they can think about is trying to go back to sleep. And what’s with trumpets in the morning, they should be illegal until after lunch at least.

And yet the jolt is precisely what some of us need to wake us up. We need to be awakened from our slumber before it is too late. We need to find a way to get back on track. We need to find out how to become the church that some people think we are; that we hope to be. We cannot do it ourselves. If we rely on our own strength, we’ll just fall back asleep. We need to allow Christ to give us the energy we need to truly wake up and make a difference where it needs to be made.

Does our church need a wake-up call? Do we? Are we falling asleep? If we are we definitely need to be worried about this. God doesn’t look too kindly on sleeping churches. When churches sleep they die. And when churches die they quit doing the things that God has planned for them.

What is our purpose as a church, here in Albert City? Are we just here to take care of our own? Or does God have greater things planned for us? Does God want to continue to use us to make a difference in this community or should we just roll over and go back to sleep? I think we should wake up. I think that Jesus is giving us a wakeup call, and we need to respond.

And I think the previous letters we’ve looked at give us a good idea of how we can wake up. First, we need to rediscover our first love. First, we need to remember the passion that we once had for mission and ministry. As we discover that passion, as we remember the things that we have done in the past, we must realize that we aren’t just going to be able to do things the same way again. Something that worked to bring our community to Christ in the past won’t necessarily work again. But we can find new ways to bring our world to Christ today, finding the same passion and joy that we once had. And when ministry is happening, when you are involved in something that is making a difference, you realize how wonderful it is; you find that it no longer feels like a burden to spend time and energy bringing Christ’s love and truth to those around you. You go home tired but excited, having worked hard, but worked for something that is so very fulfilling. You rediscover your first love.

And second, we need to learn how to reach out to a culture, a world, that isn’t where we’d like it to be. When we see the difference between where we are as Christians and where those around us are, we find that we long to show them how to come where we are. When this longing begins, we will find that we are awake in a way that we hadn’t been for a long time.

And so, are we ready to wake up? Are we ready to bring God’s love and truth to those around us? Are we ready to make a difference for God in our world? This is what we’re called to. We cannot flee this pull on our lives. It might feel good to roll over and cover our ears and try to go back to sleep, but this is not what God wants from us, this is not the place for us to go. Let us awaken to the mighty plans that God has for us. Amen.

Revelation 2:12-17 - Living Where Satan Is

2008-01-27T10:00:00.000-06:00

When I was ten my family went on a trip to the South Pacific. I believe I’ve mentioned it before. Seeing the joy in the hearts of the people of Tonga who really had nothing was a life-changing moment for me. But it wasn’t all joy like that. Throughout the trip we would go from country to country, Tonga, Tahiti, Australia and New Zealand and at each place we would sit down at a restaurant and my dad would ask for ketchup. “I’m sorry, we don’t have any.” Well, on the last day of our trip we’re sitting in a restaurant and we look over at a table near us; there’s a bottle of ketchup. My dad asks the waiter if we could have some ketchup. “I’m sorry, we don’t have any.” My dad points across at the bottle on the other table. “Oh, you mean tomato sauce? Right away.”

One neat thing, though, was that we flew into New Zealand and spent a couple days there at the beginning of our trip, and then another couple days at the end, before we headed home. As we flew into New Zealand, the pilot came over the radio, informed us of the weather and welcomed us to Auckland. “You are now entering New Zealand, set your watches back twenty years.”

And the pilot was right. It was a different world. Things were much slower, and we happened to be staying there over a Sunday, and pretty much the only thing open on that Sunday was our hotel. We walked around town near our hotel and no restaurants were open, we turned on the television and watched sheep dog herding and lawn bowling and there were no commercials on Sundays. Life stopped on Sundays so that people could celebrate the Sabbath.

It used to be that being American meant that it was mostly assumed that you were a Christian. It used to be that on Sundays nothing was open and nothing was done so that people could go to church and not break the Sabbath. What a different world we live in today, what a different pace we live at, and what different expectations we have for Sundays.

I. Where Satan Lives

Many Christians bemoan the loss of the Christian values of our country. Many Christians look with longing at the times past where Christians were deciding the values of the culture. But there are some who think that this might actually be something that will be good for Christianity. They will say that it is good that as a Church we are competing with so many other things in people’s lives. They will say that it is good that our faith doesn’t make us fit in with the culture around us, but rather causes us to stand out, to be different.

I must admit that I like the theology that says this; I like the idea of standing out as Christians and being a prophetic voice to the world and the culture around us. But, practically, this is much harder. When we compete with the entertainment and self-centeredness that the culture around us glorifies, we find it much harder to be heard. Life in the majority is a lot easier than life in the minority.

A Muslim scholar, someone who is pretty wise, actually, pointed out that reading through the New Testament, he could not find anything that talked about living life as a Christian where Christianity was in charge of the culture. Whereas, when he read through the Koran he could not find anything that talked about how to live as a Muslim as part of the minority. This is an interesting point to be made. Islam, as a religion, one that we believe was made up by humans, was designed to be in charge, to control and rule over a culture, to shape that culture into what it wanted the culture to be. But Christianity, a religion that we believe was handed to us by God, was lived out for us in the words and works of Jesus, doesn’t talk about ruling over people but rather talks about what it is like to live in a culture that may not accept you, that may disagree with you about what it means to follow God, that may attack you or punish you for your faith.

And when we look at the church throughout history, when we look at the church in the world today, it is precisely where the church is persecuted, where people are dying for their faith that God is really working and that Christianity is so very alive.

Today’s scripture, another letter from Jesus to an early church, this time in Pergamum, talks about what it means to be a part of God’s kingdom even when the earthly culture around you is turned against God. Jesus tells the Christians of Pergamum that he knows where they live. He tells them that they live in the place that Satan has his throne. Wow, they are living in the center of evil. And yet he is thankful that they are remaining true to his name, that they do not renounce their faith in him.

Jesus wasn’t just being symbolic; he wasn’t just being poetic when he talked about Satan having his throne in Pergamum. It was the city that was the center of emperor worship in Asia Minor. This was the place where people went to worship the emperor. This is where there was a temple set up to the emperor, the real sign of power in the day. And yet, even in this haven of evil, even in this center of, well, Satan’s power there were Christians, meeting, praying, praising, and remaining faithful. It is in the places of darkness that the light can truly shine so very brightly.

II. My Faithful Witness

We would love to see the world go back to a place where Christians were completely in charge of our culture. But perhaps we can be a stronger voice by standing up and telling those around us, not that they have to live the way we want them to live, but rather telling them that there is an option, that there is a better way to live.

Many in the culture around us look down on Evangelicals. They think that we’re hypocrites who want to push our agenda and our values on the people around us. And some of their attacks on us are fair. But if we started taking a different approach, if we began to look at the world around us and stop treating it like we were living in the New Jerusalem but rather realized that we were living where Satan had his throne, then we could truly make a difference to the world around us. And we could put an end to the complaints people have about Evangelicals.

What if we were telling those around us not that they had to live the way we thought they should, but rather that there was something worthwhile about living this way. What if we were standing out as an example of a better way to live, what if we were being faithful witnesses for God. It is interesting because Jesus does mention a faithful witness by name, Antipas. And the reason Antipas is mentioned by name is that he was killed for his faith. Is this something that we are willing to give up for our faith, our very lives? It’s hard to figure because it’s just a question to us; it is one that is not based in reality around us. But, it helps us to see that having faith, being faithful, isn’t always going to be easy for us, sometimes it will mean that we need to sacrifice. Faith that doesn’t sacrifice isn’t necessarily faith at all. And so we can learn from the people of Pergamum. We can learn what it means to live in a place that is not welcoming to our faith. We can learn how to follow Jesus when it is not the popular thing, the expected thing to do.

III. Cultural Compliance

But God criticizes the people of Pergamum as well. They are standing out, they are living amongst a culture that does not accept them, they are being a light in the darkness, but they are also giving in to the culture around them. They are allowing themselves to be influenced, to be changed, to be tempted by the culture around them. This, of course, is the danger of being that light in the midst of the darkness. The danger is that you might start accepting the darkness as light. The danger is that your eyes might adjust enough that you don’t realize that you’re living in darkness at all anymore.

We are called to be faithful. We are called to shine in the darkness. We are called to live in a way that might not be popular and in doing so, encourage others towards this path. This means that the way we live may not match up with the way that the culture around us lives. This means that we cannot expect the culture around us to change, but we can invite people to live like us instead of living as our culture suggests. What if, instead of telling those around us that they must be faithful to their spouses, we instead showed them how faithful living truly can be better for them. When talking to our youth, encouraging them to wait until they’re married, instead of telling them just to do it because it’s what God commands, we can explain to them that it truly will lead to a better relationship with their future spouse. Instead of trying to get our culture to become what we want it to be, we can show those around us that sometimes it is better to live in a different way than the culture around us lives. We can be faithful witnesses by showing the contrast, by living faithfully in a world where faithfulness to God is not the norm. This is what the people of Pergamum dealt with, and this is what we have the opportunity to deal with. How are we going to follow God in the coming decades? As our culture continues to move away from faithfulness in God? Are we going to be that light? Are we going to shine Jesus’ truth out to those around us? Or are we going to comply with the norms and the beliefs of the culture around us? Perhaps, instead of putting our energy into trying to change the world into the way we want it to be, we can stand up against the world and teach those around us what it truly means to follow Christ. Amen.

Revelation 1:17-2:7 - Remember Your First Love

2008-01-20T10:00:00.000-06:00

I. Important Teachings in Revelation

I have mentioned before that the book of Revelation is a difficult book to look at. It is full of confusing and difficult sayings and many a Christian has found him or herself falling off track as they try to figure out what Revelation is about to the point of ignoring the other, important teachings of the Bible. That being said, there is an important section of the book of Revelation, that moves away from the apocalyptical writing and basically talks to real people struggling with real issues as they are parts of real churches. I believe that Revelation 2 and 3 are the real power of the book of Revelation, not because they avoid apocalyptic writings but because they are surrounded by apocalyptic writings.

Revelation 2 and 3 spend time talking to seven churches that were going while Revelation was being written. And these chapters look at these churches and commend what they are doing right and correct when they are off track. In taking time to look at the problems and joys in these individual churches in the midst of a book talking about the end times, God is making it very clear where his priorities are.

Now I, like many Christians before me, believe that these were letters written to specific churches with specific problems that are being addressed. But I also believe that they have greater truths that speak not only to the church receiving the letter but to all Christians. So I believe that it is worthwhile to look at these letters to the angels of the seven churches to see what they say to us. Some of these will speak more to us than others. Some will show us that we, as a church and as Christians, are on the right track and we can rejoice in that. Other letters will challenge us where it hurts and help us to realize that we are falling short in our call to follow God as his people. Whatever we get from these letters from Jesus to these early churches, we know that they will not hit us all at the same place. But when we look at what Jesus rejoiced about in his early church and what he was disappointed by, we can better understand how to be a part of his church today.

II. The Ephesians

The first letter that we come across in the book of Revelation is to the church in Ephesus. This is a church that we know something about, after all, we have a letter to this church from Paul.

And here, like with Paul, the letter begins by commending the people of Ephesus. They have been faithful, they have worked hard at their faith, they have stayed true to good theology. You see, in the early church, much like today, there were different ideas going around about what it meant to be a Christian. There were different leaders who focused on different things. For some one thing was more important, for others something else was. And some Christian leaders, even back then, would head off on the wrong track. They would head in a direction that was taking them away from the faith. The Nicolaitans are mentioned in this passage. They were people who wanted to make Christianity too much like the culture around it. They felt that it was fine to eat food that had been sacrificed to idols, they felt that it was okay if you went ahead and denied Jesus verbally, because what really mattered was what was in your heart. They believed that the Christian faith could accommodate the culture around it to the point that it didn’t look any different from the culture around it. But the people of Ephesus rejected this teaching. And they are commended for it.

The truth that we find here is that we are called out as Christians to be different. We cannot allow ourselves to accommodate to what we think the world around us wants us to be. No, we have to stay true to what God is calling us to be, even when this means hardship for us. Even when this means that we might not be treated in the same way as those around us. We aren’t offered food that had been sacrificed to idols anymore, and we might wonder why this was a problem in the early church, but when you realize that the restaurants all served food that had been sacrificed, and when you realize that that was where people would go to do business, all of a sudden you realize that the people weren’t able to do business the way that those around them did, they were giving up something important so they could stay true to what the Gospel asked of them.

The Ephesians were doing the right things. They were testing those who came to them, they were making sure that their theology was on track. They were studying not only God’s word but also the teachings of the apostles. And the Ephesians are commended for this. They are on track. They are heading in the right direction. But they are missing something. There is something lacking in their faith, in their walk with the Lord.

III. Your First Love

What is it that is missing? It is put so eloquently in verse 4. “You have forgotten your first love.” What is the first love that Jesus is talking about? I believe that it is twofold. The first love is the love you have for God when you really understand what it is that he has done for you. And the first love is also the love that you have for things of God like church and missions and doing God’s will. Jesus goes on to tell the people of Ephesus to remember the heights that they’ve fallen from. And I think it is worthwhile for us to remember what our faith used to be like.

Remember how excited you used to be about the gospel? Remember how you just devoured scripture because it was new to you and you couldn’t get enough? Remember what it felt like at camp when you walked down that isle to accept Christ into your life because you realized that you wanted to take the next step? Remember when you lost track of time because you were worshipping God and you had caught a glimpse of heaven? Remember when you looked forward to every opportunity you had to get together with other Christians because there was something exciting about talking about God with others.

But that excitement, that joy, that exuberance doesn’t seem to last and we end up finding ourselves going through the motions. We end up having to drag ourselves to church because we’d much rather sleep in. Some people blame this loss of the excitement on the church and they will try a different church that will be new and exciting once again, but that doesn’t last, either. Others dismiss their excitement for the Gospel and the things of God as youthful exuberance. They dismiss it as something that they cannot ever get back. They’ve had their honeymoon with God and now the relationship has moved past that stage.

But in his message to the Ephesians, Jesus tells them how to remember their first love. He doesn’t just tell them to do it, he tells them how. He tells them to do the things they used to do. It’s the way we’re built. Our emotions, our feelings are affected by what we do. We like to look at it the other way and we like to allow our actions to be decided by our emotions, but it can happen the other way around. People who feel like their relationships are going downhill and don’t see much joy in them anymore often allow their emotions, their lack of love, to keep them from working towards growing those relationships. And yet, if they started doing things that would help the relationships grow stronger, they would find that their feelings would follow. We often wait for our feelings, when what we need to do is start living as if our feelings were different and we would find them changing.

The summer between high school and college, I was working at a grocery store as a box boy. It was a good job that I quite enjoyed, though I’ve got to say that you can only talk about the weather so many times a day as you take people’s groceries out to their cars. One day I came to work very upset and very depressed. My girlfriend had broken up with me the night before. But my job was such that I had to smile and make light conversation with strangers, though I didn’t feel like it at all. At the beginning of the day, I felt that I had a fake smile plastered on my face when I was around people, and it would disappear when there was nobody around. But as the day progressed the fake smile became real, as I made the effort to be friendly and have conversations with people, my heart started warming up.

I think this can be true in many ways with our relationships. When we don’t feel like things are going well, we can start acting as if they are and discover that things can and will turn around. And I believe that this can happen in our relationship with God. We need to rediscover our first love. This doesn’t mean that we have to wait until we hear a song we like. It doesn’t mean that we need to find a church that matches our worship style. What it means is that we need to begin treating God as if he were first in our lives again. And we just may discover that when we begin to do this, God will take that place in our world and in our lives once again.

Matthew 2:1-12; Isaiah 60:1-6 - Following a Star

2008-01-06T10:00:00.000-06:00

I. Astrologers

The Christmas story is full of familiarity. It is something that we are used to. It is something that we know. Because of this I find that I often don’t pay attention to the things in the story that should stand out and make me wonder. We’re used to Jesus being born in a stable so we don’t realize what it must have truly been like for Mary and Joseph as they entered Bethlehem. We’re used to the angels appearing to the shepherds, so we don’t catch the power of the moment, the fear that the shepherds first had, then the excitement as they went to see this thing that they had heard about. We’re used to the star in the sky and the three kings coming from the east and we miss the real strangeness of their arrival.

And so, this morning, I’m going to set you straight a bit by going back and looking at the magi and what they bring to the Christmas story. First of all, I need to correct a few misconceptions about them. I feel that I end up correcting these misconceptions every year and so they might be getting old to you, but I’m going to do so anyway. First, there weren’t necessarily three of them and they definitely weren’t kings. The wise men who came to visit Jesus were Magi. We’ll talk a bit about what that means in a minute. But first we need to talk a bit about the timing. You see, the Magi didn’t come on Christmas Eve, or even on Christmas Day to worship Jesus. They came sometime in the first two years of Jesus’ life. How do we know this? Because when they visited Jesus he was living in a house with Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem. The first day he was in a stable. And also, Herod wanted to have Jesus killed and so he ordered all boys under two years old in Bethlehem and its vicinity to be killed. Another thing that helps us to see this is that when Jesus was dedicated when he was 40 days old, his parents had to give the offerings of the poor, showing that they were without means at the time. After the Magi gave gifts of gold, frankincense & myrrh, they most likely would have used this to buy a better offering to give for Jesus’ dedication.

And so the story is not exactly how we see it in our Christmas programs. And yet it definitely has something to teach us. But to understand the message of the Magi, we need to understand who they were. Think about it for a bit. Can you think of an English word that begins with Magi? Perhaps magic or magician? That’s what the Magi were, magicians. And not the kind who do tricks, either. These were people who were known as wise men, who were advisors to kings, who used astrology to come up with their predictions of the future.

The Magi who visited Jesus to welcome him to earth were astrologers. Let that sink in for a moment. They weren’t Bible scholars, they weren’t kings or rulers, they were people who looked at the sky and attempted to tell the future based on what it said. They were charlatans who practiced a form of sorcery that is outlawed in the Bible. They were pagans, or a better word for it today, witches.

II. Following a Star

You see, this is what makes the story of the Magi visiting baby Jesus stand out to me: the fact that the very people to welcome Jesus when he is born are people whose job is one that God doesn’t approve of. Most synagogues in Jesus’ time would have the same reaction. They would refer to them as sinners and pagans and believers in superstitions and would do what they could to keep them away. And yet these are the people that God reaches out to in his own way by putting a star in the sky that will draw them to Jesus. God sees these Magi not as someone to keep away from his Son, but instead pulls them to his Son. God calls out to the Magi in their superstitions and brings truth to them. And when they come to see Jesus they are welcomed by Jesus and the holy family, and God even speaks to them in a dream on the way home. God’s response to the Magi in the story of their visit to see Jesus is exactly the opposite response to superstitions or pagans that I see in the church today. We do all we can to avoid superstitions. We do all we can to avoid things that seem to be not of God. And in doing so we end up excluding people who do practice these things.

Now I’m not suggesting that you should begin reading the horoscope. I’m not suggesting that you should take up witchcraft. We don’t need these things because we have God in our lives. But we shouldn’t be scared of these things either. Instead, we should be finding ways to reach out to people who believe differently than us. Instead we should be finding ways to invite them in to the relationship we have with God. This is what God did in Jesus’ birth. He came to people who weren’t ready for him. He came to people where they were, in their own belief system, in a way that made sense to them, and he took away the superstitions they believed, and pointed them to scripture and led them to Bethlehem. It should be noted that the star, the astrology didn’t lead them to Bethlehem. It wasn’t until the Magi consulted scripture that they found the path to Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem. We, as Christians, are called to move people past their own beliefs, past their own superstitions, and lead them to Jesus as well.

III. Epiphany

We are celebrating Epiphany today. I am making somewhat of an effort this year to spend time focused on the church year calendar. I think it’s interesting to follow the church calendar and see where it takes us. And Epiphany is about the coming of the Wise Men, the Magi after we have finished celebrating Christmas, the coming of the Savior. And Epiphany is symbolized in the church calendar by a focus on light. We are reminded that Jesus is the light of the world. We are reminded that it is light that allows us to see. We are reminded that light pierces the darkness, causing it to end completely. Darkness cannot swallow light. Rather, the opposite happens. You can go into the darkest place and when you light a light, the darkness will dissipate. And if the light is strong enough, the darkness will disappear completely.

We believe that Jesus is the light of the world and we believe that we are called to carry that light into the places where there is darkness. And yet we seem to be afraid that the darkness will overtake us. We seem to think that if a place is too dark, Jesus won’t be able to shine enough to keep us in the light. And so we hold our light, and huddle in a room with other people holding lights, living lives that are afraid of the dark.

But if we live our lives in fear of the world around us, how can we reach out to the world around us at all? No, we are called to shine the light that God has given us, to illuminate the darkness, to bring those around us out of the darkness.

In seminary, a professor talked about it this way. He said that the mindset in Jesus’ day was that sin was contagious. All the purity laws that the people of Jesus’ day followed were designed to keep yourself from being infected by the sins of those around you. Sin was like a germ, and you didn’t want to get what it might give you. But Jesus in his life wasn’t about avoiding germs. No, Jesus lived a life where he went out and lived among the sinners. He ate with them. He drank with them. He stayed at their places. The Pharisees derided him for this, we often think that they did so because they thought he might give people the wrong impression. I mean, if he was fellowshipping with prostitutes, how could he prove that he wasn’t doing something else with them as well. But this isn’t really the problem that the Pharisees had with Jesus spending all his time with the sinners. He wasn’t living a holy life in their eyes. He was surrounding himself with sin, and it was going to get him. He was going to be contaminated by it.

But Jesus didn’t see sin in this way. He saw it not as a disease that was contagious but as darkness that could be dispersed by the light of the world. When Jesus spent time with prostitutes, they were the ones that were changed by it. When he ate with tax collectors, they were the ones that went away different. Jesus, instead of being scared of sin and darkness, reached out to sinners and people living in the darkness and brought them light. And this is what Jesus calls us to do as well.

Don’t live in fear of witches, instead talk with them and show them they don’t need superstition and spells when they can have a God who will hear their prayers. Don’t live in fear of astrology, instead point the astrologers to the one true light, Jesus. Don’t live in fear of people who are different than you, instead, introduce them to Christ so that you may have something, the most important thing, in common. Don’t live in fear of the kids these days who do all sorts of strange things and dress so very weird. Instead shine a light in their darkness so that they can come in contact with Jesus. It’s what Jesus did, it’s what God did through the Magi. Our light has come. Light doesn’t grow weaker when it is shared, instead it grows stronger. Let’s share the light this year with those around us so that it can truly become stronger and illuminate this whole town and this whole area with Jesus’ light. Amen.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-13 - A Time To...

2007-12-30T10:00:00.000-06:00

There is a saying, you could even maybe call it a proverb, that says that the reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once. Sometimes, when you look back at certain times in your life it feels that everything is happening at once. Other times, you may look and wonder if anything is really happening in your life at all.

Christmas Day was one of those times where it seemed everything was happening at once. We were trying to celebrate Christmas, we had our 7am Christmas service at the church, Lisa’s parents were arriving in the evening, and Bronte chose this day and this time to come down with her first stomach flu. It was not pretty, and it was not great timing at all. We had about three or four Christmas themed outfits that we kept changing her into after she vomited on the one before. It took us a while to figure out that we were dealing with more than a little spit-up. We would put her in an outfit and we’d head back under the tree to play with presents with her and next thing we knew, we’d need to find another outfit for her. I guess the reason we didn’t catch on right away was that Bronte wasn’t acting sick at all, she was her usual, cheery, smiley self so we figured she couldn’t really be sick. She didn’t begin to act sick until the next morning.

I ended up spending a chunk of the afternoon on Christmas Day driving around Storm Lake looking for something that might be open so that I could get some Pedialyte, a water with electrolytes in it, basically Gatorade for babies, which the Emergency Room nurse suggested we feed her. Of course, since it was Christmas Day, nothing at all was open and so I eventually found myself at the Emergency Room begging them for some Pedialyte to get us through the night. They were very gracious and did that very thing for us, truly saving us from having to bring Bronte to the hospital to keep her from dehydrating.

Bronte’s first sickness was not exactly fun for us and it clearly wasn’t fun for her, but it wasn’t a horrible crisis either. We are thankful that things weren’t any worse. But the whole experience reminded me how time works. It reminded me that we can have the best laid plans and be all set up to do what it is that we are planning to do, and then something will happen that will change everything. Ecclesiastes 3 tells us that there are different times in our lives, different seasons. It tells us there are times to love, celebrate, plant, heal, dance and mend. But there are also times to hate, die, mourn, weep, tear down and even (though it doesn’t say it in these words) be sick.

We are in the middle of the Christmas Season. We are celebrating the incarnation of our Lord and Savior, Jesus. And we are also celebrating the turning of the year: the ending of 2007 and the beginning of 2008. What season are you in? And what are you going to do with the season that you are in? We can learn from the author of Ecclesiastes, that we can accept the season we are living through and find ways to thrive in it, for everything that God puts before us, no matter how difficult and trying it may be, is there to strengthen us and help us through.

I. The Problem with Prosperity Gospel

I must admit that I continue to struggle with people who say that if you are a Christian, then nothing bad will ever happen to you. This message, which is quite vocally preached in some Christian circles, tells us that we are called to live victoriously as Christians and therefore if there are any problems in our lives, we are doing something wrong with our faith. This message comes from an understanding of the faith that I’m not terribly crazy about. It looks at our faith as something that is about receiving from God instead of truly being a relationship with God. If faith is only about receiving blessings from God, then it becomes an issue of asking God, “What have you done for me recently?” And this is not one of the questions I believe that we should be asking God.

I don’t think much of this prosperity gospel because it doesn’t line up with the faith that I have found in my life. It doesn’t line up with the God I know and it doesn’t line up with scripture either. The fact is that our lives have seasons. They have times of plenty and times of want. They have times where things seem to be going well and they have times where you wonder if God is really with you. And this is captured so beautifully in Ecclesiastes 3.

There is something terribly poetic about Ecclesiastes 3: the contrasts between the good times and the bad; the juxtaposition of the two is just beautiful. I truly wish some of the bad things weren’t in the list. Many people wish there wasn’t a time for weeping or mourning in the list. But I wish there was never a time for war. I wish there was never a time to hate. But this is a part of the world we live in. It is a part of what we experience in the world. And just by listing it out, Ecclesiastes allows us to find meaning in the difficult times as well as the joyous ones. Without war could we truly appreciate peace? Without mourning could we know the joys of dancing?

When we accept that all of this is a part of the world we live in we can find strength through it all to help us move forward in the difficult times and help us to remember God in the good times. I’ve said before that it seems to me that when everything is going well, when you are in the times of joy and dancing and laughter, you sometimes forget about God. You begin to rely on yourself a bit too much. You begin to believe that all your fortunes are of your own making.

II. The Dark Night of the Soul

But sometimes we have the opposite happen. Sometimes we go through a long time of mourning. Sometimes we look around and we wonder if peace will ever come again. These times are an important part of the world we live in. I would even go as far as to say that they are an important part of the Christian life. Some Christians have even come up with a name for these difficult times. St. John of the Cross, a 16^th century priest referred to the difficult time as the dark night of the soul. The term has stuck and it is still talked about in those terms today. For St. John of the Cross, the dark night of the soul is a time where God seems distant, where problems seem overwhelming, where questions seem abundant, where faith is difficult. St. John of the Cross spoke of the dark night of the soul as a time where prayer became difficult and God seemed unrelatable. But he also believed that in the midst of the crisis of faith there was blessing. He believed that instead of just being a test of faith, the dark night was a time for the faith to grow and prosper and become even deeper.

If you spend time praying when praying seems impossible, if you cast your cares upon God when God seems unrelatable, if you allow yourself to surrender to a God who you aren’t sure you believe in, then you will find strength and growth. And when God reveals himself to you once again you will find yourself on even more sure footing.

This concept of the dark night of the soul has been translated to a modern context in the overly pithy poem “Footprints in the Sand”. The poem talks about a person complaining because they looked at their life and saw two sets of footprints in the sand, one set for themselves and one for Jesus, who was walking beside them. But at the difficult times in their lives, they would only see one set of footprints. The author of the poem asked why Jesus abandoned him during those difficult times. And of course, Jesus responds by saying that he didn’t abandon in the times of trial. Rather, the reason you only see one set of footprints is that Jesus was carrying him through the difficult times.

III. What do we do

But Ecclesiastes 3 doesn’t just spend time focusing on the juxtaposition between good things and bad things happening in their seasons. It comes up with an understanding of the world that at first seems somewhat depressing or maybe just pragmatic. Ecclesiastes as a book talks about the fact that there is so much that we just don’t have control over, it is better for us just to live our lives to the best of our ability and let God sort it out. Ecclesiastes seems to be telling us that if we’re searching for meaning to our lives. If we’re searching for understanding or greater purpose, we may just find ourselves disappointed.

But I’m not sure that the book is trying to actually be depressing as it asks this question. I think that it might actually be a good question to ask, and the answer that is found in chapter 3, if you really let it sink in is quite powerful. It begins at verse 12: “I know that there is nothing better for us than to be happy and do good while we live. That everyone may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God.”

Sometimes I think we are looking for a little too much from God, from our faith, from our lives. We sometimes think that we are all destined to some sort of greatness. And we are, but the true greatness that we receive doesn’t happen here on this earth. It happens when life on this earth is over and we are in eternity. What we have to look forward to in this world is that we can eat, drink, and find satisfaction in the work that we do. Ecclesiastes tells us that this is a gift from God. Are we willing to accept that gift? Are we willing to take it and find meaning, find purpose in it? Do we find satisfaction in what we do? Are we finding ways to experience joy in our lives and do good? This is what we are called to each and every season of our lives. And if we live this out, we will find joy and strength in the good times and the bad: when Bronte is vomiting up on Christmas Day as well as when she’s being her sweet, good-natured, normal self; when we find ourselves in times of mourning as well as when we find ourselves in times of laughter.

God does have a plan for you. He does have a purpose for your life. Know this, accept it, believe it. And find joy and happiness in your life, it isn’t worth spending too much time on the negative. And if you cannot find happiness right now, be about doing good, for if you seek out ways to do good, the happiness will come. And God will be with you, even if it doesn’t seem like it. And he promises a great eternity ahead. But for today, for this life, do as the author of Ecclesiastes recommends: eat, drink and do things that bring you satisfaction. This is truly a gift from God. Amen.

Luke 2 (Christmas Morning) - Mary: Woman of Contemplation

2007-12-25T07:00:00.000-06:00

I. Making Sense of It All

When you are working your way through life, sometimes it just doesn’t make sense to you. Things happen in a way where you just cannot see God working through it. But then, when you look back at what happened, you begin to make sense of it and you can clearly see God’s hand in it.

I finished my studies at North Park Seminary in 2001. I was looking for a place to do my internship and not having much luck. I was wondering what God’s plan was for me. I had a couple interviews with churches to see if I could intern there and have the internship turn into full-time ministry. But none of these things worked out. Then I fell into a full time job working with developmentally disabled adults in Chicago and worked out a part-time internship at the church I was attending, one that I didn’t get paid for. It seemed that my plans for my life were being put on hold. It seemed like things weren’t going where I wanted to see them go. I wondered how God was working his plan for my life, or perhaps, if I were on my own. Now, looking back, it is easy to see God at work in my two extra years in Chicago. My work with the developmentally disabled adults was a real blessing to me, and my internship was a great experience. And when my internship was done and I could graduate, I was called here to minister in Albert City.

I wonder this Christmas morning if Mary had a similar experience. She had been told by God that her son would be the Son of God. She had been told that he would be the Messiah, whom the people of Israel had been waiting for for centuries. And then she found herself traveling to a distant town, away from home and family right around when she was due. When she got there there was no place for her to give birth and so she ended up in a stable, surrounded by animals, laying her newborn son, the future king of Israel, in a cattle trough.

I wonder what she thought of this turn of events. You see, we know the Christmas story so well, we hear it year after year and it is a part of the fabric of our celebration of the holiday. But for Mary it was all new. She didn’t know what to expect. She didn’t know what was to come. And things sure didn’t seem to be going the way that she would have expected.

And then a group of dirty shepherds show up and tell her that angels appeared to them. Wow, maybe God is at work after all, even though what he is doing doesn’t seem to make sense. And later on, maybe even a year later, magi from the east show up with gold, incense and myrrh. Maybe Jesus actually will be king. But then Mary and her family have to flee to Egypt to protect Jesus from being killed. Life doesn’t go as we plan it, does it?

II. Pondering

There is a recurring phrase, though, throughout Luke’s telling of the Christmas story and Jesus’ childhood. The recurring phrase is that “Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.”

Mary knew there was something special about her son. She knew Jesus was going on to special things. And so everything that she saw that was unusual, everything that didn’t really make sense to her, she remembered and thought about. And then, looking back at these things later, understanding them in context with each other, she was able to make sense of God’s plan through Jesus. This is the life of contemplation. This is what is valuable about spending time thinking on the things of God. Contemplation, thinking on the things of God, allows us to catch a glimpse of God truly working in this world. It is not enough, I believe, to go about doing the things of God. It is not enough, I believe, to just trust that God is working in the events around your life and so then just go about your life expecting to never understand what is going on. No, God wants us to think on the things that he is doing. He wants us to spend time seeking out his will and focusing on what it is that he is doing for and through us. The book Experiencing God, which one of our adult Bible studies on Sunday mornings is studying, talks about it this way, find out what it is that God is doing in the world, and then get involved in that. And the way to see what God is doing in the world is to do what Mary did. Treasure up the things you see going on. Study the work of God. Learn from it and watch as God makes sense of the world to you. This is what Mary did as she watched God work in unusual and unique ways with Jesus.

III. God’s Plan

But what was God’s plan? Why did Jesus come as a poor baby? Why did Jesus come to die a criminal’s death at a much too young age of thirty-three? It doesn’t make terribly much sense.

Lisa and I had our own nativity about nine months ago. We didn’t have to travel a terribly long distance, though we did have to drive through the fog in the middle of the night. And we didn’t have to go to a stable to give birth, instead of a stable, we had a wonderful maternity ward at the Storm Lake hospital. Seeing the difference between what we experienced and what Jesus experienced in his birth reminds me of how great God’s sacrifice was in sending his Son as a baby. Babies are about as helpless as you can possibly be. When Jesus was born about the only thing he could do was cry. God chose to send his Son in a way where he would be totally and completely reliant upon Mary and Joseph. And he allowed him to be born in a cattle shed. And we see a little later, when Jesus was dedicated in the temple when he was 40 days old, that Mary and Joseph give the offering that the poor would give. Mary and Joseph were not people of means. They were truly poor. This is the way that God chose to enter the world. It really doesn’t make much sense.

But, again and again, after experiencing something that just didn’t make sense in any way, God would do something that would show Mary that he was really at work in Jesus’ life. The birth in a stable didn’t make sense for God’s Son, but the angel-song and the magi showed that God was truly at work. Jesus’ death didn’t make much sense but his resurrection showed that God was at work.

This Christmas morning I want to encourage you to spend some time looking at the way that God has worked in your life. Things may not make sense for you; they may seem to go against what your plans for your life were. But God is at work. He is doing great things, even today. So I encourage you to follow Mary’s example and treasure up the things of God in your heart and ponder them. See what God is doing and get behind it. Study the ways of God and see how it is that he is working in and through you. Let this contemplation of God allow you to see him at work even in the most confusing things. God could just surprise you with shepherds, with magi, with a prophetess speaking words of wisdom to you, or even with resurrection when all you can see is death. Amen.

Luke 1:39-56 - Mary: Woman of Justice

2007-12-23T10:00:00.000-06:00

As the choir sang about this morning, the shepherds witnessed something miraculous and marvelous that Christmas night. Angels appeared before them and glory shone round about them. And the angels sang praise to God and offered peace on earth. Every Christmas people dream of peace on earth. And every Christmas we realize that we have a long way to go to get there.

Peace between nations is far off. Back in the eighties we saw the end of the cold war and we thought this might be a coming peace. But since that time we have not known peace at all. And once again, this year, we have troops on the other side of the world, celebrating Christmas away from their families and their loved ones. I am sure that they are praying for peace on earth this Christmas, just as they are trying to bring peace to Iraq themselves.

Peace between individuals is far away also. We have broken homes and broken relationships all around us. People are hurting and suffering alone and the pretend at peace, but it is really not there.

But the angels talked of peace on earth and I wish it were something that we could find in this world. I look around and it seems forever distant. And yet it was sung of that Christmas night. Jesus was meant to bring peace to this world, even though we don’t see it. To understand the peace that Jesus brings we need to look a little earlier in the Christmas story than the nativity or the shepherds. We need to look back at Mary’s song and the justice that she knew God would bring.

I. Banned

The song of Mary which we read this morning is often known as the Magnificat. This is the first word in the song in Latin. The Magnificat plays an important role in more liturgical churches, particularly the Catholic Church. It gets sung regularly in worship as it is the first real song of praise to God that we find in the New Testament. And it is a song written by Mary. Obviously the Catholics are going to like it. And yet, I was shocked to find out that in the 80s, in Guatemala, a country that at the time was between 75 and 80 percent Catholic, it was illegal to speak the Magnificat in public. That’s right; the government of Guatemala found gentle Mary’s song so subversive, so dangerous, that they banned it.

Now I must admit, I expect this kind of thing in certain governments. Governments that are autocratic, governments that try to reduce freedom will often try to take people’s religion from them. In some Islamic countries in the Middle East and in Africa it is illegal to convert from Islam to Christianity. Communist Russia outlawed Christianity in all forms and Communist China has a husk of Christianity allowed so they can say that they support religious freedom though it is clear through their practices that they don’t. The government of Guatemala was in the midst of revolution in the 80s and has never been a stable government. So maybe it makes sense for them to try to take people’s faith away from them.

But it wasn’t people’s faith that the Guatemalan government was trying to steal from them. They were allowed to remain whatever religion they wanted. They didn’t have their Bibles removed from them, they weren’t told they couldn’t worship, they were just not allowed to recite the Magnificat, the song of Mary in public.

The government of Guatemala found something dangerous in Mary’s song. They found something powerful in the way that the people were responding to it. And they were scared of it.

As we continue our Advent look at Mary, Jesus’ mother, we will look at her song this morning. What do we find revolutionary in it? Does it have the power in it that the government of Guatemala was so scared of? Or is it just a nice song written by a young woman who was praising God for what he was going to do?

II. Mary’s World

Mary’s song and the danger seen in it by the wicked and the rulers becomes clear, once again, when we look at it in the context of Mary’s world. Mary and her people lived lives of subjugation. They were ruled over by people whom they didn’t want ruling over them. Rome controlled the world. It is because of Roman rule that Mary ended up not being able to give birth at home, but rather in Bethlehem, because of a census. Because of the rule of the Romans, Mary and all of her people felt helpless and week. They could not live the way they wanted. Their worship had to conform to the expectations of their Roman masters. And Rome had placed King Herod in charge of the area that Mary lived in. King Herod was not a kind ruler. When Mary sings that the Lord “has brought down rulers from their thrones”, anybody hearing this would know what rulers she was talking about. She was talking about Herod the great. And here was a teen aged, unwed pregnant girl singing a song that proclaimed the end of Herod’s reign. This takes courage. It takes willpower. It takes a great faith in the power of God to bring about his will.

Think forward a little bit in the Christmas story for a moment, if you will. The Magi come from the east, to King Herod the Great, and tell him of a great king that they see coming to Israel. What is Herod’s response? It is to murder children around the country, to protect his throne. This is the kind of ruler that Herod is. He will do anything to retain his power. He even killed his own family to make sure that he would remain king. He was ruthless and hard. And Mary, a young girl, stands up to him, through song, as she acknowledges what it is that she believes God is going to do through her son, Jesus. Scot McKnight puts it so well in his book, The Real Mary:

If you were a first-century poor woman, if you were hungry and oppressed, if you had experienced the injustices of Herod the Great, and if you stood up in Jerusalem and announced that the proud and rulers and the rich would be yanked down from their high places, it is likely you’d be tried for treason and put to death for disturbing the “peace.”

If you were Herod or one of his twelve wives or one of his many sons with hopes of the throne, you would have heard these words as an act of protest, if not revolution or rebellion. Even if you, as Mary, were to argue with your accusers that these are words straight out of the Bible, you’d be accused of subversion, of wanting your son to become the next king. You just might end up crucified. (McKnight, 23)

But Mary’s subversion is not an earthly subversion. Her treasonous words weren’t to round up people to revolt. No, Mary saw God as the worker in these things. She saw God as someone who was on the side of justice. She saw God as the one acting to bring about this reversal in fortunes. She sees God as the one who will give food to the hungry, and she understands this because she herself is hungry. She sees God as the one who will put an end to the current problems in the world, the current injustices, the current pains.

But Mary didn’t understand all the details. We need to realize that, along with most of God’s people, she didn’t get what God was doing initially. Mary didn’t know at the beginning that God was sending his Son to die on a cross. She believed that her son would probably be an earthly king. She believed that God was going to put an end to the reign of Herod and begin the reign of Jesus. She didn’t know how God was going to change the world through her son, she just knew that he was. And she believed that this offered hope to the weak and the downtrodden and the poor. She believed this because God was using a poor young girl to bring about his coming kingdom. She believed this because she truly believed in the justice of God.

III. God of Justice

You see, both sides of the political stream get this wrong. The conservatives believe that it is the individual’s role to give food to themselves. They believe that everybody has the opportunity to make it and those who have failed have only themselves to blame. They’re wrong. It is not the individual who is responsible for taking care of themselves, it is God who reaches down to care for them.

The liberal believes that it is the government’s role to help the hungry. Actually, they’re closer to the truth in this area than the conservative. For, again and again, throughout the Old Testament prophets and even here, God is promising to come in and make right the things that the government has failed at. But, though they may be more on the right path, here, they still have it wrong. For, once again, Mary says it so clearly, it is God who will bring justice to this world. God is the only one capable of it. God is the only one who will not let self-interest get in the way of justice.

Mary was a woman of justice in that she pointed the way to a God of justice. Mary believed that God was going to do great things through her coming son. She had hope that God would bring an end to the suffering of her people. She had faith that God would stay true to his promises. And so she sang a song and prayed a prayer praising God for something that he had not yet done.

But here we are, two thousand years later, and the poor are still poor and there are still hopeless people out there. Was Mary’s song of justice just a fleeting hope, or is it more than that? Well, I believe that the fact that the song was banned in the 80s in Guatemala shows that it is more than just a fleeting hope.

There is power in Mary’s song. It is the power of speaking something into existence. Justice is still needed in places around this world. Sometimes, justice is needed even here in America. And we believe that Jesus can bring it. But how?

Are we willing to wait for Jesus’ second coming? Are we willing to accept that justice will never be on this earth until he comes again? I’m not willing to admit that. Oh, deep down I know that in a way it is true. As long as sin is in this world we will never know justice completely. The powerful will always lord it over the weak. Those who have will always take advantage of those who don’t.

But we do believe that Jesus came to this earth 2000 years ago and his coming made a difference. We believe that he came to save us from our sins and give us eternal life, but he must have come to save us from the earthly results of sin as well. I think he did. And he did in this way. We are told in scripture that we are the body of Christ. As the church, God is using us to work his will in this world. We are God’s hands, feet and voice. God is still a God of justice, but he has a new way to bring it. We, like Mary in her day, are called as the people of God to bring justice to the world around us. It’s an overwhelming job that God’s given us. But he’s given us the resources to do. We are told that he has given us his Holy Spirit to empower us and to move us forward in our faith.

People talk a lot at Christmastime about peace on earth. It’s in a lot of songs and on many banners. It’s something that is worthwhile to focus on each and every Christmas. It was proclaimed by the angels on that first Christmas night. How will we ever find peace on earth? When justice reigns. So, this Christmas, take a cue from Mary and do what you can to bring justice to your world; in song, in word, or in deed. God is ready to work justice through you as he did through Mary.

Luke 1:26-38 "Mary: Woman of Faith"

2007-12-09T10:00:00.000-06:00

Well, we ended up canceling church last Sunday because of ice. So my Advent season is going to be very short. Next week we are having our children's Christmas program and then we have one more Sunday in Advent. I will finish up this series on Christmas Morning with our Christmas service. This sermon is somewhat racy as it talks about an unwed mother. Also, I mention it in the text, but I'm using Scot McKnight's The Real Mary quite seriously in this sermon series.

I. Why Mary

This year I plan to spend the Advent season looking at Jesus’ mother, Mary. This can be a dangerous place to go. Catholics through the centuries have built Mary up to such a place, put her on such a pedestal, that she is barely human anymore. They have called her the mother of God, they have prayed to her, they have talked about her faith being perfect in a way that human faith cannot ever be. They have exempted her from original sin, which afflicts every human. But Protestants have protested this goddess worship of Mary and have gotten back to a more scriptural version of a young woman who was chosen by God for great things. But in rejecting the Catholic extra-biblical ideas about Mary, many of us Protestants have rejected Mary altogether. We don’t want to make the same mistakes that the Catholic church made in regard to Mary so we’ll avoid spending much time talking about her.

And yet Mary is the center of the Christmas story. It is her faith that allows Christmas to happen in the first place. We are told throughout the Gospel of Luke that Mary pondered these things in her heart and we realize that Luke is telling us that he talked to Mary when writing the Gospel, giving her a chance to tell of Jesus’ birth as she experienced it. When, in the fullness of time, God was ready to send his Son, it was Mary whom he chose to be Jesus’ mother. Mary was not a goddess, but she was special.

I am reading a book by Scot McKnight, a professor at North Park University, called The Real Mary: Why Evangelical Christians Can Embrace the Mother of Jesus and it truly is an inspiring book. In the book we see that when we don’t place Mary on such a high pedestal, we discover that we can learn from her faith and her life. We can see how she was faithful to God and God was able to use this to bring about great things in the world.

So, this Advent season, let’s set aside our fear of being too Catholic and instead look at Mary and see what she can offer to us as Christians. We can definitely learn from her and grow in faith as we see that she was a woman of strong faith and great faithfulness.

II. A Difficult Situation

I don’t think we truly allow ourselves to understand Mary’s great faith until we allow ourselves to understand the world she lived in. The fact that she went along with what Gabriel told her in today’s scripture is quite amazing. You see, by agreeing to be the mother of Jesus, Mary was agreeing to begin a path down a long and difficult road, one that would make her an outcast, one that would eventually lead to her watching her son die on a cross at the young age of thirty-three. Of course she didn’t know that she would experience her son’s death. She probably believed that her son would be an earthly king, just as so many others believed.

But she did know that she would be ostracized and gossiped about when people found out that she, an unwed and engaged mother, was pregnant. You see, life has changed much in the last 2000 years. We treat unwed mothers much differently than they were treated in Jesus’ day. In fact, in Jesus’ day the laws were set that if a woman was pregnant outside of wedlock, they could be killed for this.

So, when Mary agreed to be Jesus’ mother, she was acting out in faith and facing death to do so. It gets a bit worse, though. You see, in Mary’s day, women would argue that they weren’t responsible for their pregnancy, and when they argued this they would be forced to participate in the bitter waters test. The bitter waters test was not a pleasant one. Mary, if Joseph had asked it, would have been brought before the priest, and be placed under oath and told to drink “bitter waters”: a mixture of dust, holy water, and a written curse that the priest would have written out in ink and put in the water. The written curse would say this, “may the Lord cause you to become a curse among your people when he makes your womb to miscarry and your abdomen swell.” It was believed that if the woman was guilty she would become sick. If she didn’t become sick, it was believed that she was not guilty of adultery.

But this also isn’t the worst of it. You see, in Mary’s day, this was practiced in front of large groups of people and the suspected adulteress would be paraded in front of them in full humiliation. Furthermore, the bitter waters that they would drink would often cause them to become sick and even miscarry.

By agreeing to God’s plan to bring Jesus into the world in such an unusual way, Mary was face this possibility in her life. But Mary trusted God. She trusted that God would not ask something of her and then betray her. And so she responded to Gabriel with words of faith: “may it be to me as you have said.”

III. Great Faith allows God to do Great Things

There are two traps that people tend to fall into when they see this faith of Mary. One is to take it for granted and undervalue it. We do that when we ignore the risks she was willing to take to be faithful to God. We do that when we convince ourselves that anybody in Mary’s situation would have done the same thing. We do that when we allow ourselves to think that Mary’s faith was easy. Having faith, being faithful to God when circumstances are against you, is not meant to be easy. It is meant to be difficult. It is meant to be work, to be hard. Faith is not supposed to be simple. It asks much from us, sometimes our very lives.

The second trap that some fall into is to elevate Mary’s faith up to such a height that we put her in a place that no other mortal could possibly reach. We elevate her to the place of goddess and look at her faith and faithfulness as superhuman. When we do this we miss the truth that we are all called to this great faith that Mary showed when Gabriel appeared to her.

You see, Mary isn’t someone to look up to as the perfect example that we can never reach. Instead, when we see her step out in faith, we realize that we are called to the same kind of life-risking faith. Without faith Mary would not have accepted the words that Gabriel had for her. She would have told God that she was too young or not ready. She would have said no to God’s great plan for her life and Jesus wouldn’t have been born. Think about that for a minute. God relied on the faith of one woman, Mary, and because of her faith he was able to bring us his Son, Jesus.

When we step out in faith, when we respond to God in the way Mary did, saying “may it be,” God is able to bring around great things in our world as well. It’s a strange thing, the way God works. He continually looks for ways to find faithful followers to work through. He continues to call to people and ask them to step out in faith and move forward. And when they do he then uses their faith to change the world, to save it. He did it for Mary. He saved the world through her. And he can do it for us as well.

And so we can look at Mary and see her as a woman of true faith. We can see her resolve in a difficult situation. We can see that she was willing to step out in faith even though it would take her to a very difficult place. And we can find it in ourselves to do the same thing. Maybe we might not have an angel appear to us and tell us we are going to be the parent of the Savior of the world. But we do have God asking us to step out in faith. How are we going to respond? Amen.

An Introduction to my Advent Sermons

2007-11-30T17:00:00.000-06:00

Assuming that we don't get snowed out this weekend (it's looking possible), I am going to have three sermons this Advent season. The third week of Advent will be our annual Christmas program put on by the Sunday School. We then will be having a worship service on Christmas morning as well, but I haven't decided whether I'm going to continue from my sermon series or just do a traditional Christmas message that morning. Anyway, this is my article for the church newsletter introducing the theme of the Advent sermons.

As Evangelicals, we tend to not spend much time thinking about Mary, the mother of Jesus. We don’t want to elevate her too high or begin to believe a number of extra-biblical things about her. So we relegate her to our manger scenes, where she sits serenely (having just given birth) and remains fairly quiet.

But I think there is something we can learn from Mary. There is an inner strength that we find in her when we read about her in scripture. There is a deep faith, a great love for Jesus, and a contemplative spirit that treasures the experiences that God has given her. Scot McKnight, a professor at North Park University, has written a book about Mary entitled The Real Mary: Why Evangelical Christians Can Embrace the Mother of Jesus. In the book (which is very good), he argues that Mary is not only a woman of faith, but a woman of justice, of wonder, of sorrow, of faithfulness and a woman to remember.

This Advent season we are going to be spending some time looking at Mary during worship. We are not going to be spending time looking at the controversies that surround her and I’m definitely not going to encourage anyone to pray to her. Instead we are going to look at her faith, her sense of justice and her sense of wonder and see what we can learn from them. We can learn to have a faith like Mary’s, one which faces great peril to do what God has asked. We can learn from Mary’s sense of justice, she saw God as a God who could overturn sin in the world and bring justice to the poor and the weak. And we can learn to ponder the ways God works in our life with the wonder that Mary had. In Luke there is a common refrain in the stories we hear about Jesus’ birth and childhood: Mary pondered these things in her heart. We can learn to do the same.

So I encourage you to come on a journey with me this Advent season. I encourage you to come back 2000 years with me as we look at the life of a young woman who answered God’s call to a life of faithfulness. We will see that it was a difficult path that Mary took. We will see that when she said “yes” to God, she gave up a lot in her life. She would eventually see her son die a horrible death at too young an age. But Mary’s faith is what allowed God to send his Son into the world and for this we are very grateful. So, let us follow the path that Mary trod. Let us learn from her, not because she is better than us, but because she is one of us, one of us who allowed God to truly work in her life. And let us hope to do the same in our lives.

Revelation 1:4-8 "Jesus Is Coming"

2007-11-25T10:00:00.000-06:00

I did not like this sermon terribly well on paper. It did not flow and I was a bit worried about preaching it. But, as usual, I was surprised when I did preach it as it really did preach well. Of course, some things were changed as I preached the message. I spent more time on the idea of worship being connected to heaven (as the story of the Orthodox Church coming to Russia led me). But here is the sermon in its written (somewhat weak) form.

My mother doesn’t like watching movies with sad endings. Her reasoning behind this is quite simple. She feels that she has enough bad things that she has to deal with in real life, enough things to make her feel bad about the world around her. This is especially true as she works at a hospital and often sees people in bad situations. When she wants to take a break from the world, when she wants to relax and sit down to something that she hopes she will enjoy, she wants it to end on a positive note.

When we have watched a movie that we wanted her to see, often the movie will have a part of it where things aren’t going well, but if we assure her that the movie ends well, she will often be able to make it through the difficult parts. And a good, strong, happy ending often makes the hard times in a movie or a book well worth it.

Today we are celebrating “Christ the King” Sunday. This is the week that we celebrate that Jesus is going to return to this earth in power and in glory. He is going to right all the wrongs and put an end to sin and evil. This is the week where we look forward to what is to come and allow ourselves to hold fast to the promise. Like my mom and movies, we can find strength through the difficult times in our lives because we know that there is a happy ending. We know that Jesus is triumphant; we know that we have picked the winning side. And hopefully this gives us strength, hopefully this gives us courage, hopefully this allows us what we need to make it through the difficult times, the hard times in our lives.

Let us open in prayer

I. The Beginning and the End

The book of Revelation can be confusing. It can be so confusing that it actually comes with a warning label. Now, when you go to a store and look at music or DVDs you will see them rated so you know what it is you will get. The book of Revelation is sort of like this. Except the warning label isn’t on the cover, it’s at the end of the book, after you’ve read it. It tells us that if you hear the words of prophecy in this book and add to them or subtract from them, the same will happen to you. And yet I know of a lot of people who have added or subtracted from the words and prophecies of Revelation. It is hard to read the book of Revelation without adding to it or subtracting from it, without working through it to try to make it make sense in some way. Many churches have avoided this by avoiding the book altogether, but this also can be dangerous, as the book of Revelation has something important to say to each of us.

But I know that it took me a while to find out what the important thing that Revelation had to say was. Eventually, though, it did come to me, and I don’t mean that it came to me through some great revelation or great epiphany, it came to me as I studied the book with fellow students in college. We discovered and we realized that the book of Revelation isn’t as much about laying out the future as it is about worshipping God and Jesus. It is a book about worship. John, when he receives this great vision tries to kneel down and worship the angel who is sharing this vision with him, and the angel says to worship God alone.

Throughout Revelation people are worshipping all sorts of things, and the true church, the real Christians are the ones who worship God alone. And, I think this is where it becomes most clear, this vision was given to a church who was facing persecution and even death for their faith. If they chose not to follow the worship practices of the world around them, they could die for this. And Revelation offers real and strong hope to them. It tells them that the world will seem to get horrible, but in the end they will join with all of God’s saints in worshipping Jesus at the foot of his throne.

The beginning and the end of the book talk about the fact that Jesus is coming again. The book automatically shows us that God’s idea of time is a bit different from ours, because Jesus says that he is coming back soon, and it’s been 1900 years since this was written. But this does not mean that we can ignore the promise here at the beginning and the end of the book. Jesus will come back again, he will come back in glory and bring an end to the evil in this world. This becomes very real and a very important part of the book when we realize what it is that the people the book was being sent to were going through. We see how important it is when we notice that the words we read this morning from Revelation 1, specifically verses seven and eight are repeated, at some points almost word for word, in Revelation 22, verses 12-13, “Behold, I am coming soon! My reward is with me, and I will give to everyone according to what he has done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.” And then, at the very, absolute end of the book, at verse 20, again we here, “He who testifies to these things says, ‘Yes, I am coming soon.’ Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.”

When all else is said and done, when you’ve plugged in the maps of how the last days are going to work themselves out, when you’re done trying to figure out who the Anti-Christ is or the ten headed dragon or the new city of Babylon, the center of this book is there right at the beginning and right at the end. Jesus is coming back. He will return with a great reward and all people will bow before him. And here we are, in the midst of everything in this world, and we have the opportunity to bow before him now.

II. Why Worship

One might ask why it is that we worship God. After all, why do we need to sing him praise, without our songs of worship and praise is God any less holy or righteous or great? Of course not. But we worship him because it is a response to what he has done for us. I like to tell people that the reason for worship is that we are responding to the great things that God has done. We are saying thank you, we are reminding each other of how great our God is, we are reminding ourselves of God’s work in this world. Worship is our time to think back on the ways that God has been faithful to us and remind ourselves of the great things that God has done.

We are about to reset the clock on the church year and prepare to celebrate Christ’s coming and birth. Next Sunday will be the first Sunday of Advent and we remember those who awaited the coming of the Messiah with bated breath. And we remember that with the knowledge that the Messiah did come and did great things in his time on this planet. And at Eastertide we celebrate Jesus’ greatest accomplishment, his resurrection from the dead. In worship we remember the great things that God has done. We act them out in unique and powerful ways.

But we also remember that the story isn’t over, we aren’t just remembering that Christ came 2000 years ago, born of a virgin, teaching and preaching around Galilee, suffering and dying for our sins, being raised from the dead to reign with God the Father. The Bible tells a great story of God interacting with God’s people again and again and continuing to work in their lives to bring them closer to him. But the story presented in the Bible, is not over. We haven’t yet seen the ending. Today we celebrate that the ending is yet to come, and a glorious ending will it be. You see, we worship God because of what he has done, but that isn’t the only reason we worship him. We also worship him because of what he is yet to do.

Not only that, worship is a piece of how we experience heaven. The story is told of how Christianity was introduced to Russia. More than 1000 years ago Grand Duke Vladimir of Kiev was interested in selecting an appropriate religion for his new nation. His emissaries investigated the main religions of the day, including Roman Catholicism and Islam. But it was only after visiting the church in Constantinople, where the Orthodox Church was based that they found what they were looking for. In their report to the duke, the emissaries noted that in Orthodox worship there was such solemn splendor that they had a hard time knowing whether they were in heaven or on earth.

Now we can argue about the concept of a leader of a country deciding the religion and faith of his people and we can argue a bit about the wonders of the Orthodox faith, but this story does give us a great example of what our worship has the opportunity to be. It is our chance to not only remember the past and what God has done for us, but it also is the opportunity for us to experience a glimpse of heaven even now.

III. The New Heaven and the New Earth

Jesus is coming again. It could be today, it could be another 1000 years from now. We don’t know the day nor the hour, but we do know that he will return, and it will be glorious. Do you see the hope that this offers us? We have a happy ending to look forward to and so we can face whatever difficulties we worry about. The concerns, the pains, the trials that are so very real to you today, that seem overwhelming, will be as nothing compared to the joy and contentment you will experience when Jesus returns. Though this present earth is messed up and full of evil, the new earth will truly be a glorious thing.

We worship a king who will be a just and mighty ruler. We worship a king who will protect us from all evil and keep us from all pain. We worship a king who will not lord it over us but will welcome us along with all of his subjects to the great banquet feast. Heaven is a wonderful thing to look forward to; it is a glorious future for us. And it is really in or future. It isn’t some myth that we’re being sold. It isn’t a placebo to help us get through our difficult lives. It is a true hope of what is to come.

So let us live our lives looking forward. Let us catch a glimpse of Christ, our King, who will take us to a better place: a place of glory, a place of peace. Let us worship God today knowing that we will join with all people to worship him on that last day. And let us catch a glimpse of that great promise, that Christ is coming again and we have something amazing and wonderful to look forward to. Amen.

Luke 6:20-31 "What's a Saint?"

2007-11-04T10:00:00.000-06:00

I. A Saint?

A question I like to ask myself about this time every year is, “What is a saint?” Now there are a couple ways to answer the question. The first, most obvious answer is that a Saint is a member of a football team located in New Orleans. Of course, this is not the answer I’m looking for. Others will look at the proper, catholic definition for a saint: someone who has passed away who was a strong Christian through their lives, and who had some miracle attributed to them by the Catholic Church after their death. I’m not terribly comfortable with this definition either. Though the Catholic Church is fairly rigorous with their desire for proof for miracles, I’m not sure miracles play any role in the qualifications for sainthood. And what’s up with the whole having miracles attributed to you after your death. How can they prove that you are connected to the miracle after you’ve gone on to be in Jesus’ presence? I figure the real saints are going to be too busy worshiping God to spend too much time worried about doing miracles down here on earth.

So, I guess I’m stuck with the good ol’ protestant definition of saint: someone who is a child of God, someone who has been saved by Christ. The early Protestants did a good job of democratizing our understanding of sainthood. They said that there aren’t different levels of Christianity. There aren’t normal Christians and Super Christians. Instead, once we have accepted Christ, we are all saved and we are all, therefore, saints. A saint isn’t a perfect person, a saint is a forgiven sinner. And today, as we celebrate All Saints Day, we remember the saints who have gone before us, guiding our path with their witness, and we look at our own calling as saints as well.

II. Qualifications

Well, since the concept of saint has been brought to the masses, since we recognize that all of us are saints we might choose to allow ourselves the easy way out. We might allow ourselves to figure that since we’ve been saved, since we’ve prayed the prayer, we’re where we need to be and don’t need to do much else. If we allow ourselves to live this way, I believe that we are making a mistake.

You see, I don’t think that it’s an accident that the scripture for All Saints Sunday comes from Luke 6. Jesus is describing here what it is that he calls us to be as his followers. Jesus is telling us what the qualifications for a saint are. Jesus is reminding us of what it means to be a child of God. There’s nothing in here about praying a prayer or accepting Jesus into your heart. No, Jesus is calling us to something deeper and more meaningful. Jesus is calling us to faith and faithfulness. Here, in Luke 6, we have a description of what a child of God looks like; here we have qualifications if we are interested in taking that on in our lives. I think it’s important, with our protestant theology, to realize that this description, these qualifications, aren’t just for a few, they are for all saints, all Christians.

And so we look at them and find ourselves wanting:

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven.

Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also. If someone takes your cloak, do not stop him from taking your tunic. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you.

I squirm when I read these verses. First of all there’s the whole part about hungering and weeping and being poor. It seems here that God wants his children to be poor. This doesn’t match what I’ve been taught about Christianity. Doesn’t God want the best for me? Well, yes, but the best doesn’t necessarily have to do with money. It is much easier to read Matthews sermon where Jesus talks about being poor in spirit and hungering for righteousness. And I know that Jesus taught using those words some times. But other times, Jesus taught using these words and I find them a bit harder to accept. Being poor, weeping, hungering, these are good things. God makes promises to those who endure these things because he honors people who go through them. In Jesus’ eyes, being a saint is about suffering for God. Again, I squirm when I read this. I’m not comfortable with this message, but that is what it is.

This is not the Christianity that I was sold. There was nothing in it about suffering. Oh, there are Christians in other parts of the world who have to suffer for their faith, there are Christians in the past who were persecuted because of what they believed, and we can look up to these martyrs, but we also thank God that we don’t have to deal with the things they deal with.

And then we come to this passage, telling us that God blesses those who are persecuted, telling us that the riches the world has to offer aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, telling us that suffering for the sake of Christ is actually a good thing.

Jesus didn’t just preach this, he lived it. He lived a life of suffering. Jesus could have come to earth as a king. He could have ruled from a palace with many servants. But he chose the life of a homeless man during his three year ministry. He chose to travel from town to town and learn to rely on those around him to meet his needs. He could encourage his disciples to ask God for their daily bread because that is the way that he lived. So he wasn’t looking down at the poor when he told them they would be blessed. He wasn’t giving platitudes from on high. He was speaking from among them.

Jesus knew what hunger was as well, he knew what it was to weep. These were real things to him. And Jesus knew what it meant to suffer for his message. For, he suffered in the ultimate way as he headed to the cross. These were real things to him. This is the way that he lived. And he told his disciples, and I believe, us as well, that this is the way that the child of God is to live.

III. A Cloud of Witnesses

Have you turned your life over to Jesus? Terrific! Did you pray a prayer asking Jesus into your heart? Wonderful! Now, find a way to start living it. Being a saint, which we all are, means that we are called to a difficult life. It means that life can and often will be difficult. It means a life of sacrifice. It means that you can’t always put your own needs first. Often we forget about the work involved in being a saint, and yet, there it is. There aren’t levels of Christianity. There aren’t normal Christians and then Super Christians who really have to work at it. We are all called to work at it in our own way in our own lives.

Think back to those saints who have gone before. Think back to those parents and grandparents that truly lived the life. Think of the example that they have been to you. And remember how much they put into their faith. Remember how God came first in their lives. And know that if we want to truly honor them then we are called to the same life of sacrifice for our faith. We will find the same blessing in Jesus’ eyes that they found when we are willing to suffer for God.

Paul tells us that we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. He reminds us that we are not alone in our faith. We can remember those who have gone before, we know that there are children of God around the world today. He offers this comfort. But it is not only comfort. It is also encouragement for us to struggle on. Since we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, we can struggle on in the faith. Since we have saints who have gone before us, since we are standing on their shoulders, we cannot just sit back on our laurels and allow our faith to be simple and easy. So let us seek to be the children of God that Jesus calls us to be. Let us seek to be the saints that Jesus calls us to be. It isn’t easy, but we’re in good company, and we have many saints who have gone before cheering us on and encouraging us forward. Amen.

John 2:13-22 "Jesus and Reformation"

2007-10-28T10:00:00.000-05:00

I. Luther’s Reformation

About 500 years ago there was a problem in the church. People did not have access to God’s word and basically took the church at their word. And people in power in the church took advantage of this. And Martin Luther entered into this story by seeing that the church was abusing its power and doing what he could to put an end to that abuse. Martin Luther didn’t want to break off from the Catholic Church, at least initially, he wanted to see that church reform and take back the truth that they had once held to.

But truths that seemed obvious to Luther as he studied scripture were not as obvious to those in charge and the Catholic Church decided that it wasn’t in need of reform. And therefore Luther broke off from the Catholic Church and began a pattern that has continued for 500 years that when people disagree with what the church says about something, they leave and start over.

I actually find this kind of sad. On the one hand, Luther’s complaints about the church were real and needed to be heard and the changes he suggested were changes that needed to be made. It was more than necessary for people to have access to Scripture in their own language so they could learn from it themselves instead of relying on others to tell them what it meant. And the horrible idea of indulgences, that you can buy forgiveness from your sins, is definitely something that needed to fall by the wayside. But it is sad that the church had to fracture. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could say that there is one church and we are all a part of it together? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could disagree about some of the things that the Bible talks about without feeling the need to exclude those around us because they don’t agree with us?

Luther brought reformation to the church, which it needed, but in the process he fractured the church. And I believe that there has to be a better way. The Covenant Church is also a church that separated from the church that went before it. It separated from the Lutheran church, specifically the Swedish Lutheran church. It separated from the Swedish Lutheran church because at the time Swedes were born Lutheran and you didn’t have to do much more than be born to consider yourself a Christian. The early Mission Friends believed that faith needed to be something more than this. They believed that the Swedish Lutheran Church had fallen away from truth much as Luther believed the Catholic Church had fallen away from truth. They believed that personal relationship with Jesus was necessary to faith and to religion. And again, they were right. Most Lutherans I know today would agree with that, just as most Catholics I know today agree that indulgences are wrong.

But one thing I love about the Covenant Church is that we don’t exclude others. We don’t try to teach that we are the only ones with access to truth. We see ourselves as a part of the bigger, greater church of God. And yet, as individuals, I fear that we sometimes forget this. I fear that we sometimes do think that we might have a tighter rein on truth than other churches around us. We might look down on them for their inaccuracies or problems. This is a dangerous place for us to go. This is not where reformation should lead.

II. Jesus’ Reformation

During his ministry, Jesus saw problems with the way that God’s people were worshipping God. He saw problems in their understanding of their faith and their practice of their religion and he was troubled by this. People were often too focused on following the letter of the laws instead of catching the truth behind the laws that God had given them.

It is funny because often when I hear people talk about the spirit behind a law they are doing so to explain why they did not choose to follow the law. They say that though they did not follow the letter of the law, their actions were in line with the spirit of it. Very few of us follow the letter of the law when it comes to driving the speed limit. But many of us will follow the spirit of that same law by being sure that we are driving safely and in control of our vehicle.

But when Jesus teaches people about following the spirit of the law, he doesn’t use this as an excuse to sin. No, the spirit of a law, for Jesus is more important and often harder to follow than the letter of that law. And the spirit behind all of God’s laws is to love God and love others. If you truly follow this way of life you will find yourself keeping God’s commandments in every way.

But this wasn’t the only problem that God’s people had in Jesus’ day; that they were too interested in being legalistic about God’s laws. They also weren’t worshipping right. In today’s scripture we see Jesus clearing out the temple with a whip. He is upset because he came to the temple hoping to find a place where people were worshipping God in truth and love and instead he found a marketplace. He was hoping that it would be a place where God was exalted but instead he found it to be a place where money and profit were exalted. Those in power, the religious leaders, instead of wanting to make God and worship available to everyone, were interested in figuring out how they could profit from the people’s faith. When people are trying to profit from other’s faith, there is a problem. This is obvious in today’s story, when Jesus saw people selling animals for sacrifice in the temple grounds. But it is also something that happens in other ways. Politicians on both sides of the isle use the faith of the voters to encourage them to vote for them. They are profiting from people’s religion. The Christian music industry has had the same problem. It started out being people who wanted to allow music to worship and serve God and in some places it has turned into a place where musicians can be discovered, their faith is serving their desire to be famous. They are profiting from their faith.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t allow people to make money in Christian enterprises. God put together a system in the Old Testament for the priests to be able to lead in worship without having to find other work so that they could dedicate their lives to him. But when our religion tries to combine with something else, one always ends up serving the other; be it money or politics or music or power. And unfortunately the case is that people head into the arena with the idea that power or politics or money will serve their faith and it gets turned around somehow and they end up selling out, not intentionally, not even realizing it sometimes, and their faith ends up being second to them after whatever else it is they are serving.

In his cleansing of the temple Jesus spoke very clearly against this. He made it clear that God’s house wasn’t to be a means to an end, but rather an end in itself. What is interesting is that later in the New Testament we are told that our bodies are temples to the Lord, that we are God’s house. When we realize this Jesus’ cleansing of the temple takes on a whole new meaning. By clearing out all that is turning the temple away from focusing on God, Jesus is showing what he does in each of us when we allow ourselves to be his temple. It’s a powerful image, and one we need to pay attention to; as individuals and as a church.

III. Reformation Today

You see, even though we have the Holy Spirit, for some reason the church and God’s people continue to get away from the truths that God has. In Jesus’ time it was related to money. People were using worship to make money. In Luther’s time part of the problem was also money. The church wanted to make money from their people and so came up with the horrible idea of indulgences. But money isn’t the only thing that has turned God’s people away from truth. People in power often do everything they can to hold on to it. And corruption happens.

The fact is that sin can be just as strong in and among God’s people and God’s church and we should be on guard to keep our church from getting off track. Reformation happened when Jesus tried to tell the people of his day how to worship God in truth. It happened 500 years ago when Martin Luther saw that the Catholic Church was heading the wrong direction. It happened 130 years ago when the Mission Friends saw that the Swedish Lutheran Church was only a husk of what it was supposed to be and formed their own denomination, the Covenant. And reformation happens today each and every time that God’s people stand up for truth instead of letting those in leadership over them tell them what to believe and how to worship.

Reformation has this protestant, old, sound to it. It sounds a bit stuffy, even. And we don’t always like to focus on the parts of our faith and our faith heritage that sound stuffy. But reformation is important in the church. It is the time when the church refocuses on what’s important. It is the time when the church gets back on track. It is the time when God’s people decide to be serious about following God in their worship and in their whole lives. And God’s people are in constant need of reformation. But perhaps we need to have a different term for it. Instead of calling it reformation, maybe we need to look at it as revival. Revival is when God’s people get back on track, back to the basics, back to loving God and loving others. Often when we think of revival, we think of tent meetings and we think of people becoming Christians. But that is not what revival is. Revival is when the church is revived. It is when those who are already Christians get on the right track, when they get back to what is important.

This is what Martin Luther wanted to see the church get back to in his day. This is so much what the early Mission Friends were about when they started meeting for their Bible studies. And this is what Jesus was about as he taught throughout Judea and Jerusalem and when he cleansed the temple, trying to get God’s people and their leaders back on track. This is what we are called to be about as well. And we need to look at ourselves and see if we are fulfilling the purpose that God has called us to. If we are, then that is wonderful and we need to continue on the path we are headed. But if we are not centered on loving God and loving others, then we need to have our temple cleansed, we need revival among ourselves, we need to be reformed into what God has called us to be.

Genesis 32:22-30; Luke 18:1-8a “Struggling with the Lord”

2007-10-21T10:00:00.000-05:00

I feel like I’m being a bit bi-polar in my last three sermons. I’m moving from one extreme to the other. Two weeks ago I spent time talking about finding God in the bad times. I talked about how sometimes bad things happen to good people and this can help us to grow closer to God. And then last week we looked at the importance of being thankful for all that God has given us. And now this week I’m looking again at struggling with God as we read about Jacob as he wrestled with God and the woman who pestered the judge until she received what she wanted.

I must explain that the reason I’m going from one extreme to the other has nothing to do with me. Rather, I have been following the church lectionary and preaching on passages that are suggested to preach on each Sunday. And so, it is not necessarily my fault that we are going from extreme to extreme. And yet, it is not the lectionary that tells me what to preach out of the scripture, it just suggests what scripture to preach from. So it is partially me who is seeing such divergent things in the scriptures week to week.

But I like to believe that I am not writing my sermons by myself, but am speaking words that the Holy Spirit has given me. I believe that as the Holy Spirit convicts me and helps me to see God’s Holy Word in new light, I can share this with you.

And when I look at these diverse scriptures I see that though I am talking one week about what to do when bad things happen, the next week about thanking God for his gifts and provisions, and then the third week talking about struggling with God; in the midst of all this, God’s word does not contradict itself. Instead, we see God at work in different ways at different times. We see that God reaches out to his people in a way that they can understand and he meets them where their needs are. And so, today, let us pray that God meets us wherever we are and whatever our needs are.

Let us open in prayer

I. Fighting God

Have you ever felt that life was really a struggle? Have you felt that you were fighting an uphill battle and the world around you seemed set to keep you from succeeding?

What do you do when you find yourself in this kind of situation? Do you give up and stop struggling and let the forces around you decide your fate? Or do you fight on and attempt to overcome?

Often, when I find myself in this sort of situation; when ends aren’t meeting and everything seems to be set against me; I turn to God and ask for his help. Often it is when I am struggling against the impossible that I realize that it is God that I need to rely on, not myself.

But there are times where this is not possible. These are the times where my struggle isn’t against the world, but rather is against God himself. Now you can look at me and say that I’m a pastor so I don’t struggle against God. But this is not true. I think we all, at times, find ourselves in a struggle against God. We all, at times, find ourselves seeking our own desires and our own wants instead of truly trying to live as God has called us. We all find ourselves desiring control over our own lives instead of allowing God to be our pilot. We want Jesus sitting next to us in our car as our co-pilot, telling us where to turn, but we have the choice whether to turn where he tells us. But God doesn’t want to be our co-pilot, he wants us to hand the keys over to him so that we are allowing him to take us where he wants.

There’s something about the way we are as humans. Some might like to call it a part of human nature. I think a better description is that it is a part of our sin nature. But in the end, we like to be in charge. This gives us strength. It allows us to do things and go places that we wouldn’t necessarily be able to do if we just went with the flow. But when we are constantly trying to be in charge we forget that Christ is not only our Savior but also our Lord and King. And when we spend our whole life struggling, we will find ourselves growing weary, much like Jacob.

II. Being in Charge

Jacob, in today’s first scripture, was someone who liked to be in charge. He spent his whole life fighting with people. He spent his whole life scheming against those around him. He didn’t necessarily do this because he wanted to fight with people, though sometimes it might feel that way. No, he struggled because it was the only way he was going to make it in the world. The world is a difficult place and if you aren’t looking out for yourself, no-one will. This is what he believed and this is how he lived. He was the second born of two brothers and so the inheritance and the blessing that his father had to share was destined to go to his older twin brother, leaving him with nothing. And so he schemed and plotted and made sure that his father blessed him and his brother sold him his inheritance rights.

His father-in-law tricked him by having him marry the wrong daughter after seven years of work so that he could marry the love of his life. Jacob had to deal with the fact that his father-in-law was scheming to get the best of him and so he had to always be one step ahead of him to make sure that he wouldn’t be taken advantage of again.

Jacob’s second wife, the one he loved, schemed to steal idols from her father as Jacob and his family left to head back to his homeland, putting Jacob and his family at serious risk of dangerous retribution from her father. Life was not easy for Jacob and he had to struggle just to make it.

And so, one night, Jacob was by himself, having sent his family ahead to meet his brother from whom he had stolen his birthright. And that night was spent wrestling with God. And most people might go ahead and give up and stop wrestling. But not Jacob. He wrestled through the night and would not yield. And as daylight came, God, or an angel of God, the Bible isn’t clear, cheated in the way that only God can. He caused Jacob’s hip to be wrenched as he fought. But still Jacob fought on. He didn’t know how to do anything else. And in a way, Jacob won the fight. For God, or the angel, or whatever it was, wanted Jacob to let him go, but Jacob refused unless he received a blessing. And God blessed Jacob with a new name, Israel.

In hearing this story from the Old Testament, my first thought is to belittle Jacob for continuing to fight with God, for continuing to wrestle. Couldn’t life have been so much easier for him if he had just let God win on that night in the desert? But he is blessed and God seems to think that the struggle is worthwhile.

Is the struggle worthwhile? Is it okay to fight with God? To better understand the answer to this question we need to turn to the next scripture that we read this morning, Luke 18. This parable by Jesus tells of a woman, a widow, who kept pestering a judge who was not just that she might receive justice. And because she does not give up, because she continues the good fight, the struggle, the judge hears her and gives her what she asks. And Jesus tells us that here is an example of a corrupt judge doing what is right because she continued to struggle with him, how much more will a just God do what is right if we are persistent?

What we discover when we look at this scripture and others that tell of people struggling against God is that God actually does want us to struggle in certain instances. When what we are standing for is just and merciful, he wants us to stand up to everybody, even him. And therefore you have Moses talking God out of destroying the people of Israel, reminding God of his mercy. And here you have the widow asking for justice. Perhaps God wants us to own the issues of justice and mercy more than we do, and so he causes us to have to fight for these things in our world and in our lives.

III. Stop Struggling

But when we are struggling because we want to be in control, then the struggle is not a healthy one. When we are struggling against God because we don’t like where he is taking us or what he is calling us to do, then our struggle is a sin. When we find ourselves struggling with God for control of our lives, we need to turn away from this. This isn’t always easy to do. Sometimes you have to be somewhat creative in finding a way to do this.

A Christian singer knew how much he wanted to have control over his own life and how much he wanted to be in control. He also knew that God was calling him to turn his whole life over to him. And so he did something drastic. He was making good money as a Christian singer and he knew that if he received his paychecks, he would end up using them in an unhealthy way. But if he put himself on an allowance and had a board of trustees decide what to do with the rest of his money, where to donate it, then he wouldn’t find himself struggling with God over his finances. Instead he would be able to obey God and allow God to guide him completely. By taking the opportunity to rebel away from himself, he was able to do what he felt God was calling him to do.

This is just one example of someone making sure that they don’t spend their lives fighting God in areas where they shouldn’t. There are others. Maybe giving God control means removing temptations from your life. Maybe it means giving up things in your life that distract you from your relationship with him. Maybe it just means that you need to lay down your arms and surrender to him. Surrender is never easy. It doesn’t feel very right. When you surrender it feels like you have lost. And yet, when you surrender to God you aren’t losing at all. Instead you will discover that by surrendering to him you will win something greater than the control that you lost. You will win peace of mind and strength to get you through.

In what areas of your life are you fighting God? What parts of your life have you not let go of? Where do you need to invite God in and allow him to have control? Life is so much more work when you spend it fighting God. It is much easier once you give in and allow him control. Ask God for help. Ask him to be more than your co-pilot. Allow him to be your Lord and King. With God in charge you will discover that you don’t need to fight quite so hard. And you will discover that life without the fighting is much simpler. So give over control to him. It is well worth it.

Luke 17:11-19 “Thankful Hearts”

2007-10-14T10:00:00.001-05:00

A new book that came out this month is threatening to be the next self-help superstar. The book is entitled Thank You Power and argues that the secret to life, the secret to success and blessing, is saying “thank you.” In the book we are told that by focusing on the things that are going well and being thankful about them, we will begin to see life as a more positive experience and by seeing the world as more positive, we will find more to enjoy and therefore be thankful for.

Now, I am usually fairly critical of the self-help craze and every scheme that someone comes up with that ensures good living. Self-help books have come and gone and this one is just going to be one in a long line of books designed to help people have more positive thinking.

But looking at the theme of the book and some of the basic things it says and realizing that I have not read it, only read about it, I find the truth here to be an important one, though it is definitely not a new one. You see, the concept of being thankful for what you have is a concept that goes way back throughout the history of the world. And it is an important part of the Christian faith.

Now you may wonder what makes being thankful an important part of being a Christian. If I asked a large group of Christians what it meant to be a Christian, I am sure that none of them would put being thankful up on the top of the list of things that show that someone is a Christian. Actually, Christians often have the stereotype of not being very thankful. But it is central to our faith and our belief that we live lives of thanksgiving. When we realize that life is a gift from God we then realize that we do truly have much to be thankful for. And even when things don’t seem to be going as well as we’d like, there is still much to be thankful for. So, today we are going to give thanks to God, for he has done marvelous things and is worthy to be praised.

Let us open in prayer

I. Healing

We all know that Jesus heals throughout the gospels. He sees people in need and he reaches out to them with his healing hands. When people ask for help, he offers it. Jesus shows us God’s love again and again throughout his ministry by touching someone’s life with healing where they need it most. I believe that this doesn’t end at the end of the gospels, but rather it continues to present day. I believe that Jesus is still in the business of healing people. But, I’m not sure that Jesus is quite as obvious about healing as he was when he walked the earth.

Actually, I need to take that back. Jesus never made a big deal about healing people. Often, as he healed people, he told them not to tell anyone what had happened to them. He tried, back when he was walking on the earth, to keep his healing quiet, and I believe that the same is true today. Though Jesus reached out in love and compassion towards people in need, he didn’t want healing to be the center of his ministry. He had something more important to bring the world. And so Jesus did heal, but he kept it quiet and he focused more on his teachings than on his healings. He actually got upset with people when they focused too much on the signs and wonders he did, he would much rather have them focus on his words. And yet he continued to do signs and wonders and he continued to heal throughout his ministry and life, and I believe, ever since.

I also believe that the healings that Jesus does today aren’t always the way that people expect to be healed. Sometimes Jesus reaches out his healing hand and heals broken relationships or brings peace to people in times of crisis. Healing doesn’t necessarily have to be physical to be healing.

The scripture we read today is one of many stories about healing. It is a story about Jesus reaching out in compassion to a group of men who were suffering from leprosy. They cried out for him to heal them and he did. Often this is where the stories of Jesus’ healings ended. Jesus healed people and then went on his way. But this time someone does something unusual. One of the men who was healed came back to Jesus. This man came back to Jesus and thanked him. We are told that when he saw that he was healed, he came back, praising God in a loud voice. He threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him.

We are also told that this man was a Samaritan, someone who the Jews of Jesus’ day did not get along with and whom they did not think much of. For a Samaritan to do something right was unusual to say the least. But this Samaritan did something right. He came to Jesus and thanked him for healing him.

II. A Thankless Society

It seems like such a minor thing, coming back to Jesus and saying “thank you.” It seems so minor that only one of the ten people Jesus healed felt the need to do it. Were the others grateful? I’m sure they were. But they didn’t think to come back and show their gratitude to Jesus. Instead they got caught up in the excitement of their newfound health and focused on that. They had just been healed, they needed to share this with friends and family; they needed to get on with the life that Leprosy had taken from them. And in the process they forgot to thank Jesus for what he had done for them.

I truly believe that this is a central part of the problem that faces our society today. We are too busy working for what we want and then enjoying it all so much that we forget to thank God for all that we have. I remember when I was ten I traveled with my parents to the South Pacific. We spent some time on the Island Kingdom of Tonga. We had the opportunity to worship with the people of Tonga and we went home with a man and visited his house. I was shocked by the house that he and his family lived in. It was a one room hut with some rolled up mats for the floor. That was everything they owned. It was everything they had. And the people of Tonga had a joy about them, a thankful, grateful spirit that I have never seen in America. Whereas here in America people continue to complain about the problems in the world and long for more than they currently have, and as they complain and grumble they miss out on the many things that God has gifted them with. The people of Tonga know that they have much to be thankful for because they rely on God to meet their daily needs and give them their daily bread. And when the daily bread was more than they expected, they would feast and celebrate. And when it was less than they needed they would pray and ask God to step in with more.

I wonder if this sounds familiar to you. This way of life is what God prescribed for the people of Israel as they wandered through the wilderness, learning to rely on God for their needs, and sometimes finding joy in the small gifts that God gave them.

But we rely not on God but on ourselves. We convince ourselves that we are the ones responsible for the good things that happen to us as well as the bad things that happen to us. And so when someone is down on their luck, we say that it is their own fault and when someone is truly blessed, we credit it to them. But the truth is that we are less masters of this world than we’d like to believe. And when we realize that by giving thanks we will break through this and begin to see that God is a good and gracious master, the King of Love, the Gifting Giver.

III. Thank You

But what does this saying “thank you” look like? How can we practice it? The author of the book, Thank You Power says that she had a notebook which she takes around with her everywhere she goes and she writes down three or four things each day that she is thankful for. This actually is a good start. But it is only a start.

Do you spend much time in your prayer life saying “thank you” or do you just get to the things that you want from God? Do you remember that life and love and relationships are a blessing from God and therefore thank him for them? I believe that one small step to healthier families, healthier relationships, healthier marriages, is remembering that they are a gift from God and thanking God for our loved ones. When you begin thanking God for those around you, you will discover that your attitude will change toward them and you will begin to see the blessing that they are instead of all the troubles they bring.

The same, I believe, can be true about our work. No job is wonderful all the time. All jobs have their ups and downs. But when we thank God for our work, and the way that he has blessed us, we remember the good things in our job and it makes the bad just that much more bearable.

With thankful hearts we discover that God is at work in the world around us. He is continuing to heal. He is continuing to make a difference. And when we focus on thanking him for these things, when we live lives of gratitude, we will find that we will enjoy life all the more. We will also find that our relationship with God will grow.

Jesus healed ten men of leprosy that day. They all had an amazing miracle in their lives that Jesus brought to them. But only one of them really connected with Jesus in relationship. And that is the one who came back to say thank you. That man, a Samaritan, was able to connect in relationship with Jesus in a wonderful way. And in the end, that is what saying “thank you” really does for us. Yes it helps adjust our attitude so we might not be as cynical and troubled about the world around us. But more importantly, it connects us to God, to Jesus in a powerful way. It deepens our relationship with God by giving us an opportunity to communicate with him. It reminds us of who it is that is responsible for all we have and all we are.

So I encourage you today to give it a try. Try remembering who it is who is responsible for the good in your life. Try going before him and saying “thank you.” You will be blessed through this and your relationship with God will grow through this.

Lamentations 3:19-26; 2 Timothy 1:8-12 "Faithfulness & Suffering"

2007-10-07T10:00:00.000-05:00

Sometimes life surprises you with wonderful things. Sometimes you find that there is so much to enjoy and celebrate you don’t know what to do with yourself. Sometimes everything seems to be going right and you truly feel blessed.

But sometimes it seems that someone’s got it out for you. Sometimes life just doesn’t go as you plan. Sometimes, it seems that no matter how hard you try, things just don’t seem to be going right and you are at a loss of how to fix it all.

Sometimes you find yourself asking, “Why, God? Why me, why this, why now?” And sometimes you begin to wonder if God is really answering you at all. If you have had times in your life where you have experienced this, you know how difficult it can be.

My parents have been going through a difficult year and a half. Without getting into specifics, part of their yard, a part of it that they had been taking care of for the last 30 years, was surveyed and it was discovered that it belonged to their neighbor; a neighbor who they don’t particularly get along with. They have been in the process of a lawsuit trying to reclaim this land for almost a year and a half. They have been stressed out and fed up and really upset through this whole process. I spent this last week visiting them as the case went to court…

Did this bad thing happen to them because they were bad people? Or did they just find out that God sends the rain on the righteous and unrighteous alike?

You know, there are pastors in churches and on television who tell us that God doesn’t want bad things to happen to us. And they tell us that if we have enough faith and believe the right things and pray the right way, we can all find ourselves enjoying life all the time. Suffering is a sign that you aren’t right with God, they will say.

Well, I say, and more importantly, the Bible says, that this is just not true. Suffering, though it can be hard, is a real part of life that we have to deal with. Because there is sin in the world the world now has suffering in it and we all have to deal with it at certain times in our lives. But there is hope for us in our times of suffering. The hope is in God’s faithfulness. He will deliver us. He will protect us. He will give us the things we need spiritually, emotionally and physically, to face the difficult times as well as the good times in our lives. God is faithful, in spite of our suffering, and sometimes, even because of it.

Let us open in prayer

I. The Judges Cycle

There is an interesting pattern that plays out again and again in the Old Testament. It shows up particularly strong in the book of Judges and is hard to miss. It particularly stands out for me because I remember having to learn the pattern of it in school and in confirmation and then in college. This pattern is a cycle that the people of Israel went through again and again. And the cycle wasn’t a good one. In the cycle the people would turn away from God. They would get distracted by the things around them. They would start worshipping the gods that their neighbors worshipped. They would quit worshipping and following the one living God.

Because of their turning from faith and obedience, God would deliver them into the hands of their enemies. They would be terrorized or attacked by nations and peoples around them who were stronger than them and who would steal their crops and destroy their villages. And the cycle would continue. The people would, in their time of crisis and desperation, turn to God and seek him out. God would hear their cries for deliverance and send a judge, someone who would deliver them from their bondage. The judge would then rule over them and they would prosper, but then the judge would die and the whole cycle would begin again.

We see this cycle play out again and again through judges, and in many ways, it plays out throughout the whole Bible, though not always with the same specifics. Now, there are certain parts of this cycle that make a lot of sense to me and there are other parts that I don’t really like. I don’t like the fact that as we look through this cycle we see that God is continually turning over his people to destruction because of their sins. On the other hand I do like that they call out to God for help and he always finds a way to deliver them. But one aspect of this cycle I don’t think gets enough focus is where we start it and end it. We start with the people turning away from God. And we end it with the people prospering. For it to be a true cycle, we need to see that the prospering leads into the turning away from God.

Here is a truth that I don’t think we always pay enough attention to. It is when we prosper; it is when things are going well for us that we sometimes find it easiest to ignore what God is doing in our lives. Doesn’t that seem backwards? It is when God is providing for us and meeting not only our needs but also our desires and wants that we tend to forget about the very God who is meeting those needs.

I believe that this was true in the time of the judges and I believe that this is true in today’s world as well. When things are going well, when we are making ends meet, when life is going along as we want it to, we often find ourselves forgetting about God.

When everything is going fine, we maybe go to church but we allow ourselves to be caught up in the busy world around us and forget about the God who provides for us. But when troubles arrive, when life becomes difficult we then turn to God in our time of need. This is a sad state of affairs, but unfortunately it is very much the way we are built. And God continually is trying to break through it.

People ask why there is suffering in the world, especially for good people, and I know it is a bit more complicated than this, after all we need to understand how sin has destroyed the natural order of things, but one reason there is suffering in the world is that it keeps us reliant upon God.

II. Lamentations

The book of Lamentations can be a hard book to read. It is a book where we see someone at their bitter end. It is a book where we see someone at times in despair because of the way the world has treated him and his people. He is crying out in agony and pain because all seems lost, but then in chapter 3, in the midst of the pain and suffering, the Lamenter mentions hope. “Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”

In the midst of the pain and suffering the writer of Lamentations finds hope. In the midst of trial, the Lamentations look forward to God’s deliverance. Hope is found because though it doesn’t seem so at the moment, God is faithful and just and will bring salvation and deliverance.

One of our great hymns is born out of this scripture. “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” was written by Thomas Obediah Chisholm and first published in 1923. Thomas Chisholm wrote the lyrics of the song having experienced difficult times in his own life. He had poor health and was having to regularly give up what he was doing, quit his job or his ministry because of his health. And he realized that he had to rely not on his own strength but on God’s faithfulness. And thus a great song of Christianity was born.

Eventually we realize that it is through suffering that we come in contact with the faithfulness of God. It is through suffering that we are able to see that it is God’s provision that gets us through and not our own strength or perseverance.

III. A Step Further

Paul takes the idea of rejoicing in suffering a step further. He encourages us to suffer on behalf of God. He reminds us that God not only helps people in their times of suffering and is faithful to them through their suffering, but he sent Jesus to suffer on our behalf and to reveal grace through this suffering. Paul tells us that suffering is not something to be ashamed of. And again, I must point out that Paul knows what he is talking about. He is spending the end of his life in chains, a prisoner because of his faith. Paul is taking this a step further because he isn’t just saying to believe despite your suffering, he is saying that sometimes when you believe it will cause suffering. Paul is telling us that sometimes we have to suffer, not despite our faith but because of it.

This is a different message than much of what I hear in Christian circles today. Often I hear about how God wants to bless us (which he does) and prosper us and we should expect life to go well for us because of our faith. Often I hear that God is going to bring hard times on unbelievers but believers are going to experience God’s protection against evil. And yet, here in Paul, we get a different message. Here the message is that sometimes we will suffer for our faith. Sometimes life will take us horrible places because of what we believe. Sometimes it will seem that God is not protecting us but is allowing us to be fed to the wolves. When that happens we can learn from Paul who finds something powerful in suffering for God. We can learn from Lamentations, which reminds us to hold on to God’s promises and God’s faithfulness. And we can learn from the judges, who remind us that it is in suffering that we have open and teachable hearts and it is when we suffer that we are most willing to be changed by God and grow in him.

So let us learn from our suffering. Let us grow closer to God. And let us remember that God is a faithful God whose blessings are new every morning, even when we cannot see them. Amen.

Luke 11:1-13 "Teach Us To Pray"

2007-07-29T10:00:00.000-05:00

When I was a child, I would regularly go over to my grandma’s house and spend the night with her. In the morning, when I would wake up and be getting ready for school, she would have been up long before me and would have an absolutely amazing breakfast ready for me and my sister.

What was even more amazing to me was that my grandmother would have already spent about an hour in prayer that morning, when she had first awakened.

I always admired the fact that my grandma spent an hour every morning in prayer. I know for a fact that the reason I didn’t get into a number of messes that I should have gotten into was because I had my grandma praying for me each day. My grandma’s hour of prayer every morning is what elevated her into the role of saint in my young mind, though since then, I have discovered that many children think of their grandparents as saints.

But, as I grew older I discovered how difficult it truly is to pray for an hour each morning. I just, honestly, don’t have that much to say. I talk to God for about five minutes and I’m repeating myself or rambling on. How did my grandma do it?

Well, I discovered that my grandma was Catholic, and therefore, she had pre-written prayers that she would pray. She would work her way through a rosary, then she would read from a book of prayers.

Does this mean that her prayers were not her own? Does it mean that the prayers don’t count because she did not write them? No, I know for a fact that her prayers very much did count, they made a difference in the world and they made a difference in her own life.

We in the Evangelical Church are often suspicious of written prayers. We are afraid that if we read prayers written by someone else, we won’t mean what we’re saying and we’ll fall into the trap of vain repetition. But Jesus prayed prayers that he had memorized from his childhood, and he taught his disciples a prayer that the church would take and pray regularly.

1. Context

I want to begin this morning by reminding you where this teaching comes in the gospel of Luke. You see, it is easier to see the importance of prayer when you look at the context that it comes in. It also helps that we have been looking at the scriptures before this one these last two weeks. Two weeks ago we looked at the parable that Jesus told about the Good Samaritan. In it, Jesus told us that we are called to be good neighbors, and the way to do this is to help those around us, the poor and the stranger, when they are in need. In the story we see someone who does this very thing, not because he planned to, but because the situation arose before him and he, on the spur of the moment, decided to do the right thing, though it might inconvenience or even hurt him. And we look at the story of the Good Samaritan, and we wonder how we can become people like him. I mean, sometimes we are able to do good deeds and sometimes our best sides show, but so often we are so caught up in our own little worlds that we let those opportunities disappear around us.

And so the gospel continues with Jesus visiting the house of a woman named Martha. Here is a woman trying to act out the Good Samaritan, inviting a stranger and his followers to stay with her, probably at the spur of the moment. And her sister is sitting at his feet while she takes care of all the preparations. And Jesus tells Martha that her sister has it right. He tells her that there is one thing that is important in the world, of utmost importance. And this one thing is sitting at the Master’s feet. And so, we realize that if we want to have the hearts of the Good Samaritan, if we want to learn to be good neighbors, we need to learn to sit at the Master’s feet. And then, in today’s scripture Jesus is teaching his disciples how to sit at the Master’s feet.

2. Sacred Rhythms

If we see prayer as sitting at the Master’s feet and not as listing off a bunch of things that we want from God, it changes how we’re going to pray, doesn’t it? Prayer becomes less about us and more about God. And yet, so often, our times of prayer are more about us and our needs or the needs of those around us. Spending an hour in prayer every morning talking about myself is not a productive thing. Spending an hour in prayer every morning thinking on God, now that is something holy.

Jesus prayed prayers that were written down and memorized. We know this because the Bible has a whole book devoted to these prayers, the Psalms. And Jesus knows and even quotes the Psalms. One of Jesus’ famous sayings from the cross, “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?” was the first line of Psalm 22. He wasn’t asking why God forsook him, he was praying a psalm he had known.

Actually, during Jesus’ time, the Jews were known to stop everything and pray three times a day, in the morning, around noon and in the evening. It seems clear that Jesus followed this practice. And we know the early church followed this practice as well. And yet, when you look at religions today who have regular prayer times, the only one that comes to mind for me is Islam. Why did we give regular prayer up to them? Why do we look down at those around us who pray with other people’s words.

In his book, Praying With the Church, Scot McKnight suggests that we need to reclaim communal prayer as Evangelicals. We need to realize that prayers that are memorized, praying the psalms for example, bring strength to us, they bring rhythm to our lives, they support us in our times of need. Maybe I don’t have the right words to say to really pray for a long time. But prayer isn’t about what I’m saying, it’s about sitting at the Master’s feet and learning from him.

I think we can learn from this. I think this is something that we need to accept as Christians. There is power in prayer. Jesus makes this clear. In today’s scripture he teaches his disciples the Lord’s prayer and then tells them that if you nag someone who doesn’t want to help you enough you will get them to help you, so if you lift your requests before God, he will surely help you. And we like to focus on what we can get out of prayer. But, Jesus didn’t just focus on what he got out of prayer. This is clear throughout his ministry because he put so much into prayer. He constantly went away from those around him and prayed. And he constantly prayed with those around him as well. He lived such a life of prayer that his disciples specifically asked him to teach them about prayer. He didn’t all of a sudden say, “hey, I’d better teach you how to pray,” no, they asked him for instruction. Prayer was important for him, and not just so he could get something out of it. It is what gave him the strength to do what he did. It is what helped him through his difficult times. It is what allowed him to work his way toward the cross.

III. Faded Memories

I want to end this morning by going back to a story about my grandmother. It is not a happy story, but I think it is a powerful one. Near the end of her life, my grandma had had a stroke and wasn’t much able to communicate. It was obviously frustrating to her that she would want to say something and couldn’t get the right words out. One time, when we visited her, we decided to pray together. I said a prayer for my grandma and then my dad suggested that we do the Lord’s Prayer. My grandma was able to say every word of it along with us. She had prayed this prayer daily for most of her life, and though she could not communicate very well, she was able to say this because it was so much a part of her.

Jesus taught a prayer to his disciples 2000 years ago and here it was bringing comfort to my grandmother at a time where very little would. It wasn’t that it had powerful words in it. It wasn’t that it was a prayer that Jesus had taught, though both of those things are true. What gave the prayer power for my grandma at the end of her life was that it was something that was so much a part of her, and the reason it was so much a part of her is that she lived with it her whole life. Through the Lord’s Prayer, my grandmother was able to sit at the Master’s feet and find the one thing that was important. Hopefully, through the Lord’s prayer, but also through spending time in God’s presence in other ways, we can also find out what is important. Amen.

Luke 10:38-42 "Only One Thing"

2007-07-22T10:00:00.000-05:00

I love that today’s scripture, the story of Mary and Martha, comes in the Bible right after the parable of the Samaritan who is a good neighbor. Why? Because it is a good counterpoint to it. Today’s scripture helps to take the parable of the Good Samaritan and put it in proper perspective.

Last week, when I preached on the Good Samaritan, a couple people came up to me afterward to share with me their own Samaritan stories: times where they went out of their way to help someone in need. A couple of these stories were of how people were taken advantage of in their goodness. This happens and therefore it is worth noting that Jesus calls us to be wise in scripture and not just doormats to be walked over by those around us.

But today’s scripture comes right after the parable of the Good Samaritan and I wonder if perhaps the main character in it, Martha, happened to be there hearing Jesus tell of the Good Samaritan. And I wonder if Martha was moved into action by this parable that she heard. You see, Jesus had just told those around him to care for those in need, and the next thing we know, Martha and her sister Mary are inviting Jesus and his disciples to stay with them. This doesn’t seem like the safest thing to do, but maybe she is going out on a limb, trying to “go and do likewise” as Jesus asked those around him to. This I understand.

You see, when I am really into something, I find I want to do something about it with my hands. I’m sure that I get this from my dad. This means that as a kid I built models of planes and spaceships that I liked. It means that in college I would spend a lot of time drawing, and what I would draw would change based on what my interests at the time were. It means that I am constantly looking for a way to act out my interest in something.

Last August, I read a new book by a favorite author of mine where he retells the story of Robin Hood. Next thing I knew, I was pulling out my old bow and arrow and trying to shoot again, something that I hadn’t done since childhood. This is an interesting reaction to my environment. It means that I need to be extra careful after seeing a movie with a lot of action or fast driving in it because I just may find myself trying to act it out. And that can be dangerous.

All this is to tell you that I understand where Martha is coming from in today’s story. She, like me, likes to do things to show what is important to her. She had been out and about and had heard this great teacher preaching amazing things. She invited him to stay with her and her sister along with his disciples. He had moved her with his teachings and her response was to want to make sure that he was cared for.

But Martha, in her desire to do something for Jesus, in her desire to act out her excitement about his teachings, misses out on what is really important. She misses out on a true experience of Jesus. But worse than this, she is forever associated as someone who is a busybody, who works too hard, who is so busy taking care of others that she doesn’t allow herself to be taken care of.

1. Hierarchy

I truly believe that Martha gets a bad rap in today’s scripture. It sure seems like laziness is what Jesus is honoring here. It sure seems like hard work and devotion are being put down. I mean, if Martha hadn’t been running around making sure that everything was okay, her sister Mary couldn’t have sat at Jesus’ feet. Martha’s self-sacrifice allowed Mary to experience that which was truly important. And yet Martha is the one who is attacked by Jesus, who is corrected, who is put in her place. We know that this is the beginning of an important friendship. Martha and Mary both stay close to Jesus throughout the rest of his ministry and he comes to think of them as friends. Each year, as he travels to Jerusalem for the Passover, he goes through their town and spends time with them. Martha’s invitation for Jesus to stay with them has a long-lasting effect on her and her sister’s lives. So, I think we need to look at this story in its broader context to understand it fully.

The context that helps us to understand this story is that Jesus really believes that some things are more important than others. Throughout his teaching, Jesus continues to tell us that taking care of others is more important than taking care of yourself. On the one hand, Jesus tells people not to worry about what they’re going to eat or drink or wear, because God will provide for them. Then, later on he tells them to provide for those who aren’t able to take care of themselves. He encourages them to be about caring for the poor and the needy. Well, why don’t the poor and needy just trust in God and he will provide for them? Well, that’s not the way God chooses to work. Instead, he chooses to use us to provide for the needs of others. And when we take these two teachings of Jesus and see them in context with each other, we see that Jesus is trying to teach his disciples, he is trying to teach us, that we should not spend our time worrying about ourselves, but rather worrying about how we can help those around us.

But this isn’t then end of Jesus’ teaching. It gets weirder. You see, at another point, Jesus is eating a meal at someone’s house and a woman comes in and pores oil all over his feet. Those around him are troubled by this waste. Maybe she should have sold the oil and given the proceeds to the poor. Jesus’ response to this has always troubled me. His response is to say that “the poor will always be among you, and you can help them whenever you want. But you only have me a short time.”

This seems particularly harsh. After all Jesus’ teachings about the poor, here her dismisses them as something that will always be around and not terribly important. And that’s where the context comes into the story. You see, in all Jesus’ other teachings, caring for the poor is extremely important, but honoring Jesus is more important than the poor. Here, again we see the hierarchy of importance in Jesus’ teachings. The poor are more important than yourself. But Jesus is more important than the poor.

2. Becoming…

And that takes us back to today’s scripture. Jesus isn’t saying to Martha that it isn’t important to take care of the things that need to be taken care of. He isn’t saying that preparations for having guests are not important. He is just saying that there are more important things.

As I already mentioned, Jesus has just preached one of his great parables, encouraging people to be good neighbors to all they come in contact with. He shared a story of someone who, at the spur of the moment, decided to do the right thing. But there’s a process that gets us to the point where we are the kind of person who chooses to do the right thing. Again, being a good neighbor is not about what you plan out, it is about what you do at the spur of the moment, and this means that it is showing who you are as a person. And we are constantly going through a process where God is molding us into the people he calls us to be. Here, in the story of Mary and Martha, we are given a glimpse of how to become the kind of person who will help the stranger in need. How do we become that sort of person? By sitting at the feet of the Master. By sitting at Jesus’ feet.

Now, lets look at context again. What comes after the story of Martha and Mary? Instructions on how we are to sit at the feet of the Master. Jesus teaches his disciples about prayer. And we are going to look at those teachings next week. But, again, it tells us what is truly important. You see, we don’t have Jesus physically present at our home, we don’t have the ability to physically sit at his feet and hang on his every word. But that doesn’t mean that Jesus hasn’t given us a tool to grow. The tool that we have, the way that we are allowed to sit at the Master’s feet, is the tool of prayer.

So, let us look at the hierarchy again. First of all, there is the truth that we are called to care for others as much as we care for ourselves. We aren’t supposed to worry about our own needs, instead we need to be worrying about the needs of others. We are to care for the poor and the strangers. And above all of this, we are called to sit at the Master’s feet. If we sit at Jesus’ feet, we will become the kind of people who hold these other things important. And the way to sit at Jesus’ feet is to learn to pray.

Where are your priorities on this continuum? Where do you fit in? I, honestly, find myself pretty low on it quite often. Thankfully, there is a path that God has given us to move up this list. When we learn to put Jesus first, and when we discover the power that comes with prayer, a power not only to change the world, but to change ourselves, then we will find ourselves with our priorities right, just like Mary did. And we will learn when to put down all our activities and all the busy things we do, for ourselves, for those around us, for the church, and we will learn to sit at the feet of Jesus, we will learn to be in the presence of Jesus. And this will change us in wonderful and powerful ways.

Luke 10:25-37 "So Who Is My Neighbor?"

2007-07-15T10:00:00.000-05:00

You know, one of the problems with being raised in the church is that the completely shocking and horrifying things that Jesus said throughout his ministry and God did throughout the history of the world don’t hold their impact.

Jesus’ teachings were revolutionary for their time and many of them, if taken seriously, would completely change the way we lived today. And yet, because we have grown up knowing the stories and hearing the teachings, they don’t hold the impact, they don’t have the punch, that they should have.

Imagine if you will, hearing Jesus’ teaching for the first time. He tells us not to worry about what we are going to eat or what we are going to wear. He tells us not to save up for a rainy day but to trust that God will provide for all of our needs. He tells us that when someone tries to steal something from us, to give them more than they ask for. He tells us that if someone attacks you, don’t fight back, instead allow them to have their way with you.

These are just a few of Jesus’ teachings; some of the ones that don’t much make sense to us. These are teachings that we read and hear, but file away as not really relevant to our world today.

And then, there are the teachings that do make sense to us, that we take very seriously, but still don’t hold their wow-factor. I think of the story of the prodigal son, an incredible story of a father’s love that shows how much God truly loves us and will accept us no matter how far we’ll stray. And yet, I am loath to hear someone preach on it because I’ve heard it preached on so many times.

And that is sort of where I am with the story of the Good Samaritan. It is a story I’ve heard so many times and heard so many sermons about that it seems somewhat pointless to preach about it myself. And yet, here we are, preaching about it today, seeing if it has anything new to tell us.

I. Moving Purses

My mother, since I was born, works the evening shift at the hospital. She would go to work about 3:30 or so and would get home after midnight. My parents decided to do this so that there were just a couple hours during the day where my sister and I would have to be with a babysitter. One night when I was in high school, my mom was driving home from work. There was a purse sitting in the middle of the road. She stopped to pick it up so that she could find who it belonged to and return it. She pulled over to the side of the road, left the car running and the lights on, got out of the car to get the purse. As she reached for it, it moved across the road to the other side. She screamed, ran back to the car, got in the drivers seat and began heading home. Suddenly she realized that someone could very well be sitting in the back seat of her car right now. She raced home, ran upstairs and got my dad, and they went out to check the car. There was nobody there. It must have been some kids playing pranks through the night.

II. The Good Islamofascist

The biggest obstacle to our understanding of the story of the Good Samaritan is not our familiarity with it, though. I think the biggest obstacle to our understanding of it is the fact that it is about Israelites and Samaritans two thousand years ago. The fact is that saying Good Samaritan does not seem like an oxymoron to us. Actually, we sometimes even shorten it up and when we see someone who is doing good for someone else, we refer to them as a Samaritan. There’s actually a superhero I like named the Samaritan. And he was created with all the positive baggage that that name comes with.

So even though we know that to the Jews of Jesus’ day, a Samaritan was considered a bad person, we don’t necessarily read it that way. If Jesus were telling this story in Israel today to the people of Israel today, he would tell the story of a Good Palestinian. And if Jesus were telling this story today to Americans in our world, it wouldn’t be about Samaritans at all, it would be titled the Good Islamofascist.

You see, for the Israelites of Jesus’ day the Samaritans were the enemy. They were the ones they were brought up to hate. They were taught to not see any redeeming qualities in them. And so when Jesus tells a story where someone gets injured and two upstanding citizens ignore the man because they are afraid of the consequences, it is the enemy, it is someone most unlikely, who comes to the rescue. And this is the neighbor that Jesus tells those around him to love.

The point of this distinction is, first of all, for shock value. Jesus was trying to say something shocking. He was trying to show that even an enemy could show kindness. He was trying to get those who were listening to him to move outside their comfort zones and think beyond their preconceptions. Even the people in the Middle East, who are daily trying to come up with ways to kill us, even the ones who want to take away our freedom of religion and force us all to worship Allah, even they are our neighbors. But there is something else going on in Jesus’ story as well. You see, the Good Islamofascist, the Good Samaritan, wasn’t good intrinsically. He wasn’t good because he was necessarily raised that way. He wasn’t good because he was a Samaritan. No, the reason he was neighbor to the man on the side of the road who was wounded was that he had a situation arise in front of him and he decided to do the right thing.

The Good Samaritan didn’t plan to do a good deed that day. This is not something he learned or trained for. It is not something that he could possible prepare himself for. It is great when someone can come up with some good deed to do for someone else, and plan it out and act upon that plan. But this is not the situation that is before us in this parable. No, the Samaritan was wandering down the road, minding his own business, when a situation rose before him. He was given a spur of the moment decision to make and he chose to help the man.

III. Quick Decisions

Being a good neighbor, which is what this scripture is all about, doesn’t have to do with what you plan out. It doesn’t have to do with all the good things you can think to do to show those around you how great you are. No, it has to do with those situations that arise spur of the moment, where you have to decide whether to do the right thing or not. These are the moments where we are called to be good neighbors. These are the moments where we are called to put the needs of others before our own needs. The priest and the scholar both were turned in on themselves. When they saw the man laying on the side of the road, they worried about what would happen to them if they tried to help this man. The Samaritan worried about the man on the side of the road instead of worrying about himself. This is not the smart decision, it is not the safe decision, but it is the right decision.

This last February, the evening of the great blizzard, Lisa and I were settling in. It was our first real blizzard since we’d moved to Iowa and we had plenty of supplies to get us through the weekend, so we were looking forward to sitting back and enjoying the weather. And that is precisely what we did until we got a phone call. It was police dispatch. There had been a driver trying to get to Sioux City and he got stuck in a drift about three miles from the intersection of Highway 3 and 29. They were looking for a place for him to stay for the night.

Lisa and I looked at each other. We weren’t exactly sure what to do. On the one hand it is nice to be able to help someone in need. That’s what the Bible tells us to do and all, but on the other hand. Lisa was getting close to being eight months pregnant. Someone foolish enough to try to drive in the blizzard probably didn’t always make the best decisions. Surely they could find someone else who would be more comfortable housing a stranger. The dispatcher told me that they were just asking and we could easily say no, they wouldn’t hold it against us.

It was a true Good Samaritan moment. There were so many reasons that it would be easier and better to say, “Sorry, we can’t help you this time.” But we knew what the right thing to do was.

So we got the guest room made up, turned on the porch light, grabbed my sword and put it next to our bed, just in case, and waited for this stranger to come to our house.

We had a wonderful visit with the gentleman who visited and hopefully began a friendship with him that will continue. Because we were open to taking even a small risk to help someone in need, we were blessed by this experience in a number of ways. And, I hope, God taught us not to be as stingy with all that he has given us.

The wise thing to do is be distrustful of strange situations like purses in the middle of the road. The smart thing to do is to just leave things there so you don’t open yourself up to getting hurt. But the parable that Jesus told us says that protecting yourself is not the most important thing in life. Sometimes being a good neighbor means that we are called to go out on a limb for someone else; even someone who hates us. When we are doing that we then answering the call that Jesus has put before us. When we are doing that, then we find that God can use us in ways that we didn’t even think possible.

Being a good neighbor isn’t about planning and working at goodness. It is about being open to God’s leading when certain situations arise. It is about putting others above your fears and trusting, truly trusting, that God will protect you. This is the life that God calls us to. It sounds scary, but it also is freeing. It means we don’t need to live in bondage to our fears. It means we can live much fuller and healthier lives. It means that God can work through us in ways we can only begin to imagine.

Hosea 11.1-11 "Gomer"

2007-02-11T10:00:00.000-06:00

When I was in high school we were in American history class and studying the history of slavery. The story was told of Nat Turner, a slave who had visions from God that told him to lead a revolt against his masters and lead his people to freedom. Unfortunately, Nat Turner’s revolt failed and he was hanged. Everybody in my class took this at face value. I rose my hand and asked the question that nobody else seemed to think of. “Did Nat Turner really receive visions from God telling him to revolt?” The teacher looked at me, confused. My classmates looked at me, confused. This was a Christian school, mind you, we would talk about faith and religion in our classes pretty regularly.

The teacher and the class seemed perfectly willing to accept that God told Nat Turner to revolt. But I had a harder time accepting this because the revolt failed. I could accept Nat Turner following his understanding of what God desires and fighting for freedom because there was no other way to live in accordance with God’s word. I buy that. I buy him being convicted by his faith and knowing that he must fight against oppression. Many other slave revolts were started by very devout Christians for precisely that reason. And those I bought. But if God gave a man a vision saying that he should revolt and win and then he lost, could that vision truly be from God?

In the discussion that we had, I seemed to be the only one seeing it from my perspective, yet the teacher did make a good point that justice did increase through this event as the plight of the slaves reached more and more people because of what Nat Turner did and though he didn’t get the freedom he longed for, he did pave the way for a future freedom for his people.

You see, God didn’t promise Nat Turner victory. What he promised him was a continued struggle for what is right. This is the same thing that God promises each of us. This is the same thing that God commands for each of us to do. But God offers us something as well, he offers us his love and he offers to be with us as we fight for what is right.

I. A Difficult Marriage

The book of Hosea is a difficult one to read, at first because it gives us this strange life acted out by the prophet. You see, Hosea is commanded to live out his life in a somewhat difficult way. He isn’t asked to fight as Nat Turner was, rather he is asked to love the unlovable. And in doing so, he is able to understand God’s desire for God’s people in a real way and we catch a glimpse of that understanding when we read Hosea 11. But before we get to Hosea 11 and God’s relationship, and love, for his people, I’d like to look a little bit at Hosea’s relationship with his wife… you, know, it being Valentine’s Day this Wednesday and all.

Unfortunately, Hosea’s life and his relationship is not the kind that you’d think of celebrating on Valentine’s Day. The first three chapters of Hosea tell us, in somewhat graphic detail, about his relationship with his wife, Gomer, and it’s not a pretty picture.

You see, Hosea’s wife cheated on him. She cheated on him and she left him and that was it. After they were married, Gomer had three children. The first, Jezreel, was Hosea’s son. But the following daughter and then son were not even his children. And worst of all, it seems that Hosea was told to marry this woman by God. Now I’ve got to be a bit honest with you, I’m somewhat skeptical of when God starts telling someone what to do with their romantic lives. I mean as a pastor, if someone came to me and told me that God had told them to marry someone else, I would have a hard time taking them seriously. It’s just that I feel that we can sometimes mistake our own emotions for God’s call on our lives. I’ve mentioned before that when it comes to hearing God speak, I am very cautious of my own emotions. I’ve distinctly heard God telling me something in the past only later to discover that it wasn’t God speaking, but my own desires. So I come into Hosea 1 somewhat skeptical. When Hosea states that God told him to marry a woman who was going to be unfaithful to him, I wonder if he might be imagining it. But then in Hosea 3 God comes to him again and tells him to go find his wife, who has left him and has become a slave, and buy her freedom for her and welcome her back… and here’s the clincher… and love her!

Now this is what truly convinces me that Hosea is following God’s command. I’ve seen too many relationships end badly and when somebody has been treated by their spouse as poorly as Hosea was, they aren’t going to find it in themself to love that spouse again. And so we see that God gives Hosea a command. He must take back his wife. He must love her again. But God never gives a command without giving the ability to fulfill that command. So not only did God give Hosea the command to love Gomer, he gave him the love for her he needed. And he did this by showing his own love to his own people, who had been and continued to be unfaithful to him.

God actually does the same for us, showing his love for us even though we are unfaithful to him. He loves us and calls us to join him in that love. Hosea understood this because of the relationship he had with Gomer and therefore he was able to catch a glimpse of God’s love for his people in a way that others haven’t been able to do. We see that love fully displayed in Hosea 11.

II. God’s Love

Hosea 11 begins by telling us about God’s love for his people, particularly Israel. It is truly looked upon as the love of a parent for his child. It even comes across as a motherly love in many ways. “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. But the more they were called, the more they went away from me. They sacrificed to the Baals and they burned incense to images. It was I who taught Ephraim (a name for Israel… one of Jacob’s sons, particularly, and the tribe that now ruled over Israel) to walk, taking them by the arms; but they did not realize it was I who healed them. I led them with cords of human kindness, with ties of love. To them I was like one who lifts a little child to the cheek and I bent down to feed them.”

Do you get the energy in that? Do you get the pathos? Do you feel the emotions? God is really hurt when we take him for granted. It pains him. And, just like Israel in the past, we do take God for granted.

II. What God Wants

Hosea talked about two ways that Israel took God for granted, and I fear that we make these same mistakes, though in a slightly different way. First, the people of Israel, though they worshipped God, also worshipped other gods, idols, Baals. Now we don’t necessarily have idols in our homes and offer sacrifices to them, but when you look at what worship really is, you will see that we do allow ourselves to worship things other than God. When someone asks what it is that you worship, the best way to answer this question is by seeing what it is that you spend your time and energy on. We claim to worship God, but many of us only make time for him for an hour on Sunday morning. How is this truly worshipping him with our whole being? We are willing to spend how much time in front of the television, or at a movie theater, or watching sports, or working, or having fun… but we find it difficult to commit to the things of God. So what is it that we worship? Well, I have to work, I have to make a living, I have to support my family. Of course we do, but how many of the things we have are really needed? We live lives where we expect to have things that our parents or grandparents never dreamed of. And then we wear ourselves out so that we can afford these things. And we don’t have the energy for God or for our family because all our energy is going into these things. So, what do we worship?

But worshipping things, putting our time and our energy into things, other than God is not the only sin that Hosea spoke against. He also was angry at Israel for trying to find their deliverance from places other than God. Israel sought out other countries around them to protect them and keep them safe. They paid bribes so that they would not be overtaken by enemies. God didn’t want them to make political deals, rather he just desired that they would trust in him and his way. God wants us to rely on him; not on ourselves, not on our jobs, not on our pastors, not on our political leaders, not on politics in general, but on him.

But, unfortunately, this is something that we are not good at at all. We find ways to take care of ourselves. We feel that it is our responsibility to make sure that we, and our families, are going to be okay. But God has something else in mind. He wants us to turn our troubles and our worries over to him and allow him to be the master of our futures. He wants us to know, truly know, that we are in good hands when we are in his hands.

I was awakened at 2am one morning by a phone message machine. I think that perhaps they thought they were calling a church and not a parsonage. I picked up the phone and listened as a machine told me of what trouble the church today is in. We are beset at every side by the wicked ways of the world around us and if we don’t stand up and fight there will be no next generation of Christians. We need to fight the world around us. We need to battle against these evil people around us ready to do us in. We need to give money to politicians that will help our cause, we need to boycott television shows that encourage godlessness, if we don’t do our job, Christianity is going to fail. There is something of truth in what was being said, but it missed the point. God is not going to fail. He isn’t going to give us a mission where we will not succeed. And he doesn’t want us to rely on boycotts and politicians for his truth to reach the rest of the world. That’s right up there with buying off the Assyrians so they won’t attack us. Rather, God wants us to trust him because he loves us. He wants us to share his message of love with those around us. And once we realize that our lives and our future are in his hands, then we can seek his will to see what is next for us.

For Christmas, Lisa and I got a game from my parents: Dread Pirate. It’s a board game where you roll dice and move across a board and attempt to get jewels and gold from your opponents. It’s a fun game with really fancy parts. I looked up a couple reviews of the game online. People complained about it totally. They liked the production values, but they felt that it was just a dice shoot. They felt that everything was chance and you really had no control over it yourself. They complained because anybody could win it and you really couldn’t come in with a strategy that would help you. I disagree, you can choose to play the game aggressively and take a lot of risks or you can choose to play it conservatively, without as many risks. You can approach the game either way. But unfortunately you never know whether being aggressive or conservative is the right answer for you, because you don’t know what the dice are going to do. This is the truth of our lives as well, we have choices we can make, we can choose how we are going to live, but there are certain things that are completely outside our control. But we aren’t relying on dice and luck… we need to realize that we can rely on God in these circumstances. And more than that, we are relying on a God who loves us in a way that we cannot possibly comprehend. He tells us in Hosea 11:9 that he is God, not a human being. His ways are greater and more wonderful than ours. Are you willing to put yourself in his hands? Are you willing to rely on his love?

Amos 7.7-21 "Plumb Line"

2007-02-04T10:00:00.000-06:00

I. Not about Telling the Future

Usually, when you hear about prophecy in the Bible, the first thing you think of is someone telling the future. When we look at prophecy, and therefore prophets, we figure that we are going to find out something about what is going to happen. If you went to a class on “prophecy” this is what you would expect… especially if the class was called “end times prophecy”.

But I’m going to let you in on a secret of the Bible. Okay, it’s not really a secret, but it might as well be one because we sure don’t seem to get it as modern day Christians. The secret is this: the purpose of prophecy in the Bible isn’t to tell the future. Actually, getting the future told is something that is outlawed in scripture. It’s called fortune telling and it is not something that God wants his children to do. Instead, what God desires is for us, his children, to trust the future into his hands. Jesus’ words on this are very clear: “So do not worry, saying, ‘what shall we eat?’ or ‘what shall we drink?’ or ‘what shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.” (Matthew 6:31-34)

So, if prophecy isn’t about finding out the future, what is it for? Well, first of all, sometimes prophets do predict the future. This is a part of their message to the people. But it is by no means the center of their message. Kind of like how Jesus healed the sick, but this wasn’t the center of his mission on this earth. And prophecy that predicts the future never does this just for the sake of doing so. No, the predictions are there to help the rest of the prophet’s message. And the rest of the prophet’s message is the important part. What is the rest of the prophet’s message? What is prophecy really about? It is about God communicating his will, his desire, his priorities to his people. The prophet comes to a group of people to tell them what God desires from them. Sometimes they listen to the prophet, other times they don’t. The prophet has many different tools that they may use. Some prophets would heal. Others would tell stories. And many would talk about what will happen to people if they don’t turn from their ways. A prophet doesn’t tell the future just to show off. No, they tell it so that people can know the consequences of their actions and they tell it so that people can know the love of God.

Amos does both these things. He prophecies horrible things that will happen to the nation of Israel if they do not turn from their ways. And at the end of the book, in chapter 9, he prophecies that God will save a group of them, bring them out of their time of trial and give them a wonderful future. Why? Because he loves his people. And so, we see a prophet in the midst of his prophesying, predicting the future, but this is not the center of his message. And yet, when we look at prophecy in the Bible, we often look at it to try to discover what it will say about the future or the present. By doing this we are missing the point. Yes, scripture tells us the future, but again it is made very clear that we cannot expect to understand prophecy until it has already come to pass. But God did want prophecy to show up in scripture, it has a place there, it has a reason. And the reason is to help us understand what it is that God desires from us, his people. And so, as we look at Amos, that we read a piece of today, we can see what it is that God desires from us.

II. A Shepherd Prophet

Now, Amos was by no means the first of the prophets to the people of Israel. We have Elijah, Elisha, Samuel and many more that came before him. And there were actually schools in Amos’ day where people trained to be prophets. Again, people weren’t being trained to tell the future, but to share God’s truth with God’s people. Basically, the prophet schools were like seminary and the “sons of prophets” were seminary students. But Amos did bring something new to his message. He was the first writer prophet. He shared his message orally, speaking it out to those who needed to hear it. But then he went back home and wrote down his message as well, perhaps realizing that the message God had given him was for more than just those who he had spoken it to. And it is a good thing, for when we look at Amos’ message we see that it speaks to us, here, today.

Amos was not popular with the religious leaders in his day. We read this morning about a priest who came to him telling him to go back home and make his living in his own town. This is where Amos made it clear that he wasn’t a prophet by his own choice. It wasn’t a living for him. Instead, it was a call that had been put upon his heart by God. He wasn’t giving his message to make money or to make himself famous. He hadn’t gone to school to become a prophet. No, God had given him a message, and as God’s follower, as God’s child, he could do nothing but share that message. And so a shepherd found himself preaching God’s truth to people who did not want to hear it.

We all aren’t called to be prophets, but God does put a call on our lives as well. I go back to 1^st Corinthians 12 where we are told that the Holy Spirit gives different gifts to each of us, his children. What are you doing with the gift God has given you? You could just go back to what you’ve done your whole life or you could step out like Amos did and use that gift, whatever it may be, to further God’s kingdom.

III. Measuring Up

Amos has an important question for the people of his day. And I think it’s an important question that we need to ask today. The question is this: Do you measure up?

Are you living the life that God has called you to? Oh, you’re here at church. You sing your worship. You make sacrifices. But are you measuring up? Amos has some harsh words for us. He tells us that God hates religious feasts and assemblies when the people are not living out God’s call in their lives. That’s a pretty harsh word, “hate”. He uses another one, “despise”. You see, the people of the day were worshipping God and doing the things they thought they should do with their spiritual lives. But they weren’t letting their worship of God carry over to the rest of their lives. They took advantage of the poor. They thought that since life was good it meant that God was blessing them and they could do anything they wanted. So they sold people who owed them money into slavery. They took bribes from the rich so they could do whatever they wanted. They treated the wealthy with justice, but justice did not extend to the poor. And because they did not let true justice rule them, their worship was meaningless to God.

Amos says that God is holding up a plumb line to us, to our structure to our faith, to our devotion. He is checking to see if we are built straight. Now, this is a dangerous message because it seems to go against our understanding of the gospel. It can possibly come across as some sort of works righteousness. But it is not. Works righteousness tells us that we are saved by doing things. Amos isn’t talking about our salvation. Rather, he is talking about something much more important. More important than salvation? How can that be? No, what Amos is talking about is whether we are truly following God. What Amos is checking us for is to see if we are living the life that God calls us to. The people in Amos’ day did not measure up. They were worshipping good, but they did not live out the justice they claimed to follow. Do we as individuals measure up? Do we as a church measure up? Do we as a society measure up? I don’t believe so. But I don’t think it is because of all the moral sins in the society around us. I think it is because we don’t allow God’s justice to rule our decision-making. I think we are making the same mistake that the people of Amos’ day made. We think that the stuff we have is proof that God approves of our lifestyle. It doesn’t. I move you back to that plumb line. Do you measure up? Are you built straight? Are you built on the rock that is Jesus? Many of us have faith in Christ but it is built on sand. You may ask how can that be, if the faith is in Christ how can it be built on sand? I think that a large part of it is that many people’s faith is built on fear, and fear is a sandy foundation, one that will not last. Perhaps we come to faith because we are afraid of some sin we may have committed. Perhaps we come to faith because we are afraid of the unknown. Most likely we come to faith because we are afraid of what will happen to us when we die.

But there is a much better call to faith than fear. Of course, this is God’s love through Jesus. When we realize that God loves us for who we are. When we realize that God loves all people, then our faith is built on the solid rock. Then we will find that we are sturdy and strong and we will find ourselves living out the life that God has called us to. Our response to Jesus, the rock, will be to love others as we love ourselves. We will be able to do this because we will know God’s love for us. And when our faith is built on God’s love then we will live the lives of justice that Amos, the shepherd prophet, calls us to. Amen.

Luke 4.14-21

2007-01-28T10:00:00.000-06:00

Last Sunday we cancelled church due to weather. Therefore this is the sermon that would have been preached last week.

When I was in seminary we had a dear professor, a brilliant man, named John Weborg. It was funny because he was, and is, one of those amazingly brilliant but also humble persons whose every word and phrase was filled with wisdom. Dr. Weborg had suffered through, and nearly died of polio as a child and this affected him physically. He was nearing retirement age while I was at Seminary, but his body was much more frail than someone in their early sixties. Dr. Weborg had this spectacular office up in a corner of the Seminary building, filled with shelves and shelves of books with a window looking over the campus. When you walked into his office you felt that you were traveling to an old English college town, to Oxford, a couple hundred years ago. But he had to move his office down to the first floor so he didn’t have to deal with the stairs. My second or third year at Seminary, they put in a chair-lift in the building stairways mainly to help Dr. Weborg get to classrooms that were on the second floor. And then I remember him getting to the point where he needed to sit as he taught the class. He apologized to the class for this, for sitting in front of us as he taught us. Unfortunately, this is all that his body could do. But whether he stood or sat, his words continued to be full of great wisdom, words that you could just hang on to because of their depth.

I remember telling him, though, that he shouldn’t apologize for having to sit as he taught us. You see, in Jesus’ day that is what was done. When someone was going to read scripture they would stand, but if they were going to teach or discuss that scripture they would sit in front of the assembly. Therefore, Dr. Weborg was just going back to an older form of teaching, where he would sit down and we could all listen to what it is that he had to say.

Of course, we do it differently today, and I think we’ve got it figured out better than they did. I know that if I was able to sit down while I preached, you’d never be able to stop me from talking. But in today’s scripture we are told that Jesus got up and read scripture and then he sat down. As we listen to what it is that Jesus had to teach the assemblies in his day, let us listen with the intensity that the people of Nazareth had as they listened to him.

I. Hometown Boy

The different gospels focus on different parts of Jesus’ ministry. They weave around each other as they focus on different important events in Jesus’ ministry and as we read them we get a bigger picture about who Jesus was and what he was about. Matthew, Mark & Luke all talk about Jesus being baptized then going into the wilderness for forty days to be tempted by the devil. But then, when Jesus returns from his time in the desert they each pick up in different places, with Matthew and Mark both skipping ahead to Jesus traveling to Galilee and beginning to teach there. But Luke, Luke tells us that Jesus first returned to his hometown, to Nazareth, where he had grown up, and he preached in the synagogue there. Now Jesus had difficulty in Nazareth. People didn’t want to take him seriously. If you go past what we read this morning you discover that people really were upset by what they heard Jesus say. Why? Because they had known him since childhood and didn’t think much of him. He was an ordinary guy to them, with an ordinary life. He was Joseph’s son; just a carpenter. Why was he getting delusions of grandeur?

But we are let in on the truth. We are told that he had the power of the Spirit of God upon him and his words were more than human words, but holy words; and his teachings were telling the people the mind of God.

And so, the people in Jesus’ hometown gathered together on the Sabbath and they came together in the Synagogue to worship. And Jesus got up and took out a scroll, for their scripture wasn’t written in books like ours, but in long scrolls. He rolled the scroll to the right passage and he began to read. “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” After reading from the scroll, Jesus sat down. This seems odd to us today because we are used to a person who is speaking in front of a group standing. But, as I mentioned earlier, in Jesus’ day the common practice was to sit when you taught an assembly. And so, when Jesus sat down all the eyes in the assembly were on him. He was going to teach them and they wanted to know what it was that he was going to say.

And Jesus’ words were powerful. “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

II. Fulfilled

Jesus is claiming to be the answer to Isaiah’s promise. The scripture that Jesus quoted was the beginning of Isaiah 61, where God is promising to bring an end to the pain that God’s people feel. The people of Jesus’ day knew that the Day of the Lord would come and they knew that it would be a day where wrongs would be righted. Throughout the Old Testament prophets we see the Day of the Lord talked about and it is talked about in different ways in different places. Sometimes it is mentioned as something to fear. That’s how it is treated in Amos, for example. People should fear the Day of the Lord if they have taken advantage of others, they will be getting their comeuppance. But there are others who should look forward to the Day of the Lord. And who are these? They are the poor, the prisoner, the brokenhearted, the captives, those who mourn, the weak. And these are the people that Jesus seems to be claiming here to come for.

The scripture that Jesus is quoting says that the Spirit of the Lord is upon him and therefore those who need help are going to have their wrongs made right. Now there are a couple things this does for us today. First, it reminds us something that the Bible is continually reminding us, something that I feel I am continually pointing out, and that is that Jesus, that God, doesn’t like to meet our expectations. Out of all the expectations that the people of Jesus’ day had for a Messiah, caring for the poor was pretty low on their list. No, they were much more interested in what the Messiah, what Jesus could do for them. And they were much more interested in what he would do for them politically. What do I mean by that? That they wanted the Messiah to come in and rule over them and vanquish the Roman soldiers, the Roman rulers, from their land. But in identifying with this scripture, Jesus is instead focusing not on the political desires of the people of Israel, instead he is focusing on something more real. Jesus says that he is going to bring comfort to those who need it. In other places through the gospels Jesus says similar, somewhat crazy things. He tells the people around him that the well don’t need a doctor, it is the sick who do. Therefore he is here not for the righteous but for the sinners. The Pharisees could not believe that Jesus was the Messiah, not necessarily because he didn’t conquer Rome, but because he hung out with sinners. We often look down at them for this, but their reasoning makes sense. If God came to this earth today wouldn’t we expect him to hang out with us here at church? Wouldn’t we expect him to spend his time with those of us who have been faithful and doing our best to follow his path in our daily lives? But Jesus didn’t do this, instead he went out to the troublemakers and spent his time with them.

At another point in the gospels, John the Baptist sends some of his followers to ask Jesus if he is the Messiah. Even John the Baptist, the one who is preparing the way for him, is confused about this issue. Jesus’ response is thus: “The blind are able to see, the hungry are being fed, the lame are walking, so, what do you think? Am I the Messiah?” Jesus sees himself connected to this prophecy in Isaiah. He believes that the Spirit of the Lord is calling him to help the helpless.

III. Helping the Helpless

And that brings us to the second thing that this scripture tells us today: that when the Spirit of the Lord comes, that Spirit is about helping those who are unable to take care of themselves. Last Sunday we talked about how the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Lord, gives different gifts to different people. We looked at 1 Corinthians 12 where we see that the Holy Spirit has different things planned for each of us to do and we cannot spend all our time focused on how much better we are at things than those around us or how we are lacking gifts or skills that we wish we had. Instead we are called to use the gifts that we have to help those around us, to show God’s love to those around us. We can go a step further and remind ourselves that as Christ’s church we are a body and we are all called to work together and share our gifts and pick up where those around us are lacking.

But today’s scripture truly reminds us what it is that these gifts we get from the Spirit are for. They are to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, and to release the oppressed.

You see, as the church, as the Body of Christ, we are anointed with the same Spirit that Jesus was and we are called to reach out in the same way that he did. We all have different ways we do this, we all have different gifts that God has given us for this, but in whatever way we do it, we need to be sure that we are doing what God has called us to do, through his Holy Spirit, following in the footsteps of our Savior, Jesus. Amen.

I Corinthans 12:1-11 "Many Gifts"

2007-01-14T10:00:00.000-06:00

In high school I went to a concert by a Christian singer named Carman. I discovered later that he is what people in music refer to as a poser. He would jump from style to style and do music that “the kids these days” were into, be it rock, hip hop, rap, so that he could present the gospel. Basically, for him, music wasn’t about the art but rather it was about the opportunity for evangelism. This is something that I have grown away from as I grew older but at the time I’ve got to say that I was totally and completely into his music.

The concert was also pretty great. It was powerful music, the message he gave in the middle was an important one… I thought I was going to a concert and instead we got church. It was good stuff. Then, a couple months later, I went with my youth group to a camp and we were talking with another youth group at the camp. The other youth group had gone to see Carman also. I started gushing about how awesome the concert was. And they said that it was good, but they had people sitting in front of them who started arguing with them about whether they were saved or not. The people in front of them told them that because they didn’t speak in tongues, they weren’t actually saved. Since that time, I have heard this argument given multiple times by various people. And since that time I have turned to today’s scripture to answer that claim. “Now to each on the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good. To one there is given through the Spirit the message of wisdom, to another the message of knowledge by means of the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by that one Spirit, to another miraculous powers, to another prophecy, to another distinguishing between spirits, to another speaking in different kinds of tongues, and to still another the interpretation of tongues. All these are the work of one and the same Spirit, and he gives them to each one, just as he determines.”

I. Scorn

Sometimes we like to look down at other Christians who don’t do things the same as us. We like to look at them with pity or scorn and think about the fact that we are doing a better job of following Christ than they are. This can be dangerous. Now I have to admit, I remember being on the receiving end of this more often than on the giving end. But it is easy to notice when you are being scorned, it’s a bit harder to notice when you are looking down on those around you. In truth, though, this dangerous approach to the world, this approach of thinking that everybody should relate to God in the same way that you are, doesn’t usually show itself in such an obvious way. Rather people find themselves looking at other Christians who practice their faiths in different ways and thinking that if they knew better, they’d do Christianity more like you. I had a friend in high school who spoke in tongues. We talked about the speaking-in-tongues issue quite a bit. She bought into what scripture had to say in 1 Corinthians 12 about the different spiritual gifts. She believed that there were different spiritual gifts for different people, but when in came to speaking in tongues, she believed that anyone could, and should, have this gift. This was a gift, in her mind, that was available to anyone who asked for it, and not something that only some received. Therefore, in her mind, if someone didn’t speak in tongues, they weren’t living up to their full potential as a Christian.

This is an easy trap to fall into. I don’t agree with her about speaking in tongues, but I do about faith. There’s a certain threshold of faith that I believe someone should have. If they ask too many questions about the Gospel, if they are too cynical, then I sort of write them off as not being the Christian they should be. I sometimes find myself feeling the same way about biblical knowledge. I hear somebody say something that they think is biblical and truth from God that I know isn’t actually as clear in the Bible as they think it is and I tend to look down on them as lacking in their faith. And yet, here we have scripture that tells us that the Holy Spirit gives different gifts to different people and we cannot expect everybody to be exactly the same in the way that they worship God and the gifts that they exhibit as we are.

II. Envy

Sometimes we have the opposite happen, though. We look at others with different, “better” gifts than us, and we wonder why we cannot be like them. When I hear a musician really make glorious music, there is a part of me that finds myself jealous of them. When I see a beautiful work of art by an artist, I find myself wishing that I had the skills I see in them. It’s bad enough with hobbies that I have. It becomes even worse when we deal with my chosen field of ministry. I have mentioned before that I tend to listen to pastors and speakers with a critical ear. This comes, I believe, from my time in Seminary, where we picked apart each other’s sermons to offer constructive criticism. When I am listening to someone giving a sermon, I tend to be cataloguing what I think they’re doing right and what I think they’re doing wrong in their message. I also tend to be very critical of what they are saying and find myself looking closely at their message to see if it is in line with what the scripture says. Being my snooty self, I often find pastors on television to be wanting, not as much in their presentation but in their message.

But every now and then someone starts sharing a message that moves past my criticism and I find myself blown away by the truth that I am hearing and God enters my life through the message and begins to work his work to change me. It is an awesome thing when this happens and I truly wish it happened more often. But, at the same time, I find myself filled with envy when I do see it happen.

I must say that I don’t enjoy seeing the envy show itself in my life, but it happens. I feel that there might be something wrong with me because I am not showing the same giftedness that others show. I feel that maybe there is something lacking in my spiritual life because I am not able to communicate the Gospel in the same way that these people communicate the Gospel. I fear that I’m not the Christian I should be because I’m not up to a certain level in my spiritual gifts. I’m sharing this, not because I want people to come up to me and tell me I’m wrong but because I believe this is a common thought among people. We read of missionaries or prayer warriors who live up to a Christian life that we can hardly comprehend; we look at our pastors and our own spiritual leaders and wonder why it is that we cannot be more like them, and we feel that we must be missing something. Perhaps if we prayed more and asked with more conviction God would give us the same spiritual gifts that these people have.

Again, today’s scripture speaks against this inferiority complex that we each have in different ways. We are each given different gifts by God and therefore we should not expect to be as good as or the best at something. The Holy Spirit gives different gifts to different people as they are needed. And if you look at these different gifts, you’ll discover that God gives us different gifts so that we will learn to rely on each other and, thus, rely on him in our spiritual walks.

III. Same Spirit

So, today’s scripture tells us that we shouldn’t be filled with scorn for those who experience God differently than we do. It tells us that we shouldn’t be envious of those who experience God differently either. Instead it tells us that God, the Holy Spirit, interacts with each of us differently and gifts each of us differently. We are told that it is the same Spirit of God that teaches us that Jesus is Lord and that gives the gifts of the Spirit to us in unique and different ways. We are told not to stand around comparing our spiritual lives and our spiritual gifts with others. We’re not racing against each other, we’re not going to be judged against each other. God doesn’t have a percentage of people that are going to make it, he’s not grading on a curve. Rather God sends the Holy Spirit to meet the needs that we have individually and he sends the Spirit to help us work on our lives and grow in him at the rate and pace that he has planned for us. God isn’t comparing us to those around us, he’s comparing us to ourselves, calling for each of us to continue to grow in him and learn from him and follow him. And when our spiritual gifts do take into account those around us, it’s not to compare ourselves to them to see who’s better, rather it is to see how gifts can work together to help each other.

I believe that today’s scripture truly catches a center of what the Covenant Church is about. Let me explain. We, as a denomination, don’t want to claim that our reading of scripture is the only reading of scripture. We, as a denomination, are open to God’s leading different people in different ways as long as they are faithful to the essentials, that Jesus died for our sins and wants relationship with us. We, as a denomination, “covenant” together (that’s how we came up with our name) to allow our different spiritual gifts to work together to further God’s kingdom.

Not everybody is called to be a missionary. But some are able to support mission work in different ways than others. Not everybody is called to be a preacher, but some have other ways they can share the faith. What spiritual gifts has the Spirit given you? How are you using them? Don’t think that because you aren’t doing what someone else is doing that you don’t matter. We all matter to God, and God calls for each of us to use the gifts he has given us to the best of our ability. This is what it is to be a part of the Covenant. This is what it is to be a part of the church. This year let us as a church take the gifts of the Holy Spirit seriously and see what God can do through us. Amen.

Isaiah 43:1-7; Psalm 29:1-5a,10,11 "A New Year's Promise"

2007-01-07T10:00:00.000-06:00

One spring when I was around twelve or so, our family took a week, during our spring break, to go sailing. This was pretty normal for us at the time, doing our sailing on my parents boat during the spring and fall, as my parents chartered the boat out for others to use during the summer. The problem with sailing in the Pacific Northwest in the spring and fall is that the weather changes quite drastically in a short amount of time. And sometimes, even when you are listening to the weather reports, you can be surprised by what it is that Mother Nature puts in your way.

We had left port and were heading out to one of my parents favorite stops. It was a somewhat breezy day, perfect sailing weather. Suddenly the weather picked up quite a bit. The wind went from twenty or so knot winds to forty or fifty knot winds; something our boat is just not made to be out in. We thought about turning around and heading back into port. Unfortunately, the wind was blowing the other direction and our motor would not push us fast enough to beat the wind and waves coming against us. So, we did what we could. We put our sails up partially and headed with the wind. Let me tell you, I’ve never seen that boat move that fast… we were heading over ten knots and the rollers of the wind were still going faster than us. We have a dingy; a little boat that we trail behind our sailboat so that when we anchor or tie up to a buoy, we could row ashore. The dingy was surfing down the waves and catching up to us and then it would slow down as we went up the next rolling wave. We ducked into a harbor on a private island that we were heading towards. My dad, through his time in the Coast Guard, knew the caretaker at the island and they allowed us to stay at their dock until the weather cleared.

It was, honestly, pretty exhilarating for me… not as much for my parents who understood the danger better than I did. You see, I trusted that my parents knew what they were doing. I trusted that I was in safe hands and at twelve years old you feel invincible, so the danger never really registered to me. But the exhilaration and joy I felt was not matched by my parents, nor was it matched by my sister. For them, this was a scary and dangerous trip that we took. They knew the danger and they realized that they were not in control as they would like to be. I knew that I was not in control, but I was sure that my parents were. But that’s the great thing about the sea, it helps you to realize that you are not in control, that the control belongs to another.

I. Dangerous Waters

For many people, the New Year is a time of contemplation. It is a time where we look back at what has gone before and we look forward to what is to come. That is why I think it is so worthwhile to look at Isaiah 43 at the beginning of the year. Isaiah 43 shares with us a promise that God made to his people; Israel… one that we can see applies to us as well. His promise is that he will be with us. “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you.”

Water was not the most pleasant thing in those days. Open water was dangerous. People feared it. They believed in great sea monsters, like the leviathan, that would destroy them in the deeps. The leviathan is mentioned a few places throughout the Bible and is presented as a creature so fierce that humans cannot stand against it. In another place in Isaiah, the leviathan is mentioned, in chapter 27, where we are told that God will destroy the leviathan. The leviathan often in scripture is being mentioned metaphorically. It isn’t that God is going to come down and hunt sea monsters. Rather, what Isaiah is promising is that everything that the leviathan represents will be put to an end by God. So, the question is what it is that the leviathan represented to the people of Isaiah’s day. The leviathan represented the ocean, the water that it ruled over. And that ocean, that water, represented chaos and destruction. And it wasn’t just the ocean that the people feared, the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee, the two bodies of water that were in the land of Israel, were known for the great storms that came upon them. They were known to be extremely dangerous. Even the people who made their livings on the water knew the wisdom of fearing the water. They new the dangers of passing through the waters. Water represented chaos and it represented their own lack of control over their circumstances.

Let’s face it, when you are in a boat out on the water, you truly realize how much you are not in control. And it’s worse if you don’t have a boat. Currents and winds can change, the water can become something that can and will kill. I know there are people here who have been on the water in times of danger and have felt their true lack of control over their own lives.

And if you haven’t been at this point physically, I mean, truthfully, water isn’t the danger here in Iowa that it is in the Pacific Ocean, if you haven’t been at this point physically, I know that you have been at this point spiritually. There are times where you feel fully how much life is outside your own control.

II. Through the Fire

Isaiah 43 goes on and gives us another example, one different than the water. “When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze.” Fire, in many ways is the other extreme. Water, the floods, can sweep you away. Water can take you places you aren’t ready to go. You can drown in water. But fire does something much different. It burns you. Now, I don’t know how many of you have ever been burned. Again, I’m at this point talking physically, not metaphorically. In high school, a friend and I did some crazy things in our Chemistry class. He burned his eyebrows off the day of his senior pictures as some homemade gunpowder went up in his face… I swear I had nothing to do with that… really. Well, we were told that you could pour rubbing alcohol on your hand and light it on fire and it would burn up before it did any damage to your hand. I thought this was a pretty cool idea and convinced him to catch my hand on fire after we poured some rubbing alcohol on it from the burners we used in chemistry class. Now, just for those of you who might think this is a cool idea, like I did, it’s not. I ended up with 2^nd degree burns all over my hand. It seems that the chemistry teacher had run out of rubbing alcohol and was using something else in the burners. The point is, getting burned is not fun. It is quite painful. Walking through fire is not something I would recommend to anyone. And yet God tells us here in Isaiah that if we do walk through the fire, he will be with us.

Now, for most of us, this is a metaphorical statement. For most of us don’t walk through literal fire and need for God to protect us. Most of us do have different kinds of fires that we have to make it through. But there is a story in the Bible, in the book of Daniel, where three young men do walk through literal fire and as people look in at them in the fire the people see that they are not alone, that there is someone with them. And when they come out of the fire, it has not done anything to them.

If God could be with three Hebrew boys known as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah) in a literal furnace, he can be with you in whatever fire it is that you face.

III. God’s Promise

And so, we enter the New Year, not knowing what lies ahead. We hope for great things and we fear horrible things. But, mostly, we hold onto this great promise that God gives us: He will be with you. No matter what you face, bee it fire or flood, God will be with you. He will give you the strength you need to make it through. God is greater than the chaos of the sea. In Psalm 29, which we read earlier this morning, we see that God’s voice lies over the chaos of the waters. If water represents the absolute worst chaos, if it represents everything that we do not have control over; God sits enthroned over it. God has control over it. You can trust God to be with you in the mist of it. And if fire represents the pain and suffering that we all face at different times in our lives, God will bring you through it, he will be there with you in the fire and you will come through it.

But God’s promise continues in Isaiah 43. And I want to look at it in a slightly different way. It says, “For I am the Lord, your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior; I give Egypt for your ransom, Cush and Seba in your stead. Since you are precious and honored in my sight, and because I love you. I will give men in exchange for you, and people in exchange for your life.”

Now I have to admit, this is talking in an Old Testament way and it is talking about Old Testament style ransoms. And it is saying that God cares for his people, Israel and will sacrifice the people around them for their own well-being. It almost seems like God is saying that he loves them more than the other people around them. This is a fair way to read this, you wouldn’t get any argument from any Old Testament scholars if you chose to read it this way. But I choose to read this verse in light of the whole story of God and God’s people. I choose to read this verse in light of the cross. God, because he loves his people, because he loves us, will give others in our place to be ransomed on our behalf. Who does God give on our behalf? Is it people who he loves less than us? No, it is his own Son that he gives on our behalf as ransom; his beloved, only begotten Son.

I think this understanding of this verse needs to be tied to God’s promise to be with us no matter what. God will be with us in the chaos. God will bring us through the pain and suffering. God was with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace and he suffered great pain on our behalf upon the cross.

God’s promise isn’t that life is going to be roses. It isn’t that life is going to be peachy-keen. His promise is to be with us and be that rudder that we need when we are out of control. His promise is to suffer alongside of us and take that suffering that we cannot bear upon himself for our sake.

Take this promise from God. I will be with you. I love you. I will not abandon you. I am in control. Believe it, accept it, know it in your heart of hearts. It will bring you peace in this New Year. It will bring you strength. Amen.