The passages are Isaiah 7 and Matthew 1: 18-25
The two passages we read today are some of the most amazing words we read in the Bible and not just because it means that Jesus Christ has come to be with us. They are amazing in many other ways as well. If today, someone told you that a virgin gave birth to a child, we would laugh and say, “It’s impossible”. If today, someone came up to you and said that an angel came to me and told me to do this” we would tell them they are hallucinating and need to take it easy for a few days.
This is not a world where miracles are welcomed. This is not a world where people believe in the mystical or intangible. If you poll most people in America today, they will tell you that they have a more spiritual belief rather than a firm religion. But I have come to believe that they do not mean spiritual as you or I would think of. No, I would define most Americans’ idea of spiritual as the ability to vaguely believe in God without letting that belief interrupt their daily lives and desires.
Jesus Christ blows that right out of the water. Jesus is all about interrupting human life. We often call Jesus the Great Peacemaker but he’s more of a trouble maker at times. Jesus came not to bring peace because in Matthew 10:34 Jesus distinctly says, “I do not come to bring peace, but a sword.” But let’s get back to Jesus being the Great Interrupter rather than the Great Peacemaker.
The whole idea of Immanuel, which means God with us, is that God comes into our world. It means that God broke into history to be here with us. When we think of God we have to acknowledge that every word we use to describe God is completely ineffectual. All these words and adjectives and verbs and nouns that we have to explain who God is and what God means and her characteristics are just pale imitational words for what God really is. We can’t grasp God. We can’t hold onto this concept of who God is for very long. It hurts the mind, the idea of God bends all rules and laws of nature and science. And so it hurts our very logical and scientific minds to try to figure out God.
And that is why we NEEDED Jesus Christ. Jesus is God, made flesh. Jesus is God, made understood. Jesus brings light where before there was darkness. He brings understanding of who God is and what God has done for us. Jesus being born, to a lowly carpenter and his virgin wife means that God interrupted human history to help us, to save us from ourselves and to show us who God is.
How amazing! How extraordinary! This is exciting stuff! The baby in the manger is the God who rules the universe. The baby in the manger is the one who takes away all our sins and that baby loves you so much that He will grow up and sacrifice Himself to save you. If that isn’t amazing, then I don’t know what is.
The older I get, the more convinced I am that God uses all of us to make Himself visible to the rest of the world. There is a reason that Jesus’ last words to the disciples before his ascension into Heaven are to go forth into the world and preach the Good News. God wants us to witness to what he is doing in this world. God wants us to help others to see His glory and majesty by sharing the great things he does for us with those around us.
The example I’m about to share with all of you about how God breaks into the world through ordinary people is more than a little controversial. But just as Jesus did not come to bring peace, I’m here to witness to God despite controversy. I’m here to show you where I see Jesus Christ working, and this is where I have seen Him. The news broke late last night that Don’t ask, Don’t tell has been repealed. That means that men and women in the armed forces who happen to be gay will now be able to freely serve without fear of being dismissed.
President Obama had these words to say about it, "It is time to recognize that sacrifice, valor and integrity are no more defined by sexual orientation than they are by race or gender, religion or creed." I couldn’t sum it up more perfectly than he does there. (SAY AGAIN) That is God working through human beings. God rights injustice and he doesn’t always do it peacefully, but he does it powerfully. No matter how anyone feels about homosexuality, we need to recognize that there are many gays who have given their lives so that we can sit here today and peacefully worship. That is worth honoring them by letting them give their lives not under false pretenses but instead by accepting them as they are.
Jesus tells us to not judge, but instead we are to love one another. So whether we feel a person’s lifestyle is right or wrong, we are here to love them. After all, when Immanuel came all the Jews thought that he would be this Great King who would ride a white horse and round up all the Romans and cast them from Jerusalem. Instead, Jesus was poor and a carpenter, he rode a donkey and told the people to give to Caesar what was Caesar’s and give to God what is God’s. God does not always give us exactly what we want, but the Lord always gives us what we need.
We needed this law to pass so that injustice could be stamped out. We needed Jesus to come so that we could be saved, so that we could know that God is truly here with us. We needed to know that when we are dirty and tired and sweating, that God knows exactly how we feel because he has been there as well. Jesus got dirty. Jesus got tired and yes, Jesus would even sweat! He was walking in the desert after all and was also human so of course he would sweat.
As human beings we are not always capable of understanding the depths and wonders of our God. But as Christians we are given glimpses into God’s nature through Jesus Christ. We see and understand more about ourselves the more we understand Jesus. God has given us a great gift, the greatest of all gifts! He has given Himself, his Son so that we may know and understand and love.
That is where our peace lays. With God. With Jesus. The one who came not to bring peace, but a sword. The one who cuts out all injustice so that festering wounds may finally heal. The methods are not always pretty because as anyone with an infected cut can tell you, the way a doctor will lance an infection is often painful and gross, but it is always effective. Sometimes we must submit to God lancing our own wounds. It is painful, but change usually is painful even when it is absolutely necessary.
This Christmas I hope that you are able to find peace even if your life is in upheaval. I hope you are able to see where the Lord is working in your life. I pray that God shows you that although the paths you travel down are often long and filled with obstacles, that it is worth it because Jesus is with you each step you take. God has broken into this world, he has interrupted history and time so that he may take this journey with you. I hope that this Christmas as you celebrate with your family, you will also remember to celebrate with Jesus and find peace that God is with us.
Amen.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Week 3 of Advent - Joy of the Redeemed
The passages are Isaiah 35 and James 5
When I read in Isaiah 35 about the Highway called the Way of Holiness, it reminded me of a couple songs I’ve heard over the years about highways. One of my favorite bands, AC-DC, sang a song called Highway to Hell. The lyrics go like this:
Living easy, living free
Season ticket on a one-way ride
Asking nothing, leave me be
Taking everything in my stride
Don’t need reason, don’t need rhyme
Aint nothing I'd rather do
Going down, party time
My friends are gonna be there too, yeah
I’m on the highway to hell.
The other song I always enjoyed is called Life is a Highway by Tom Cochrane. Some of the lyrics to this one are:
There’s no load I can’t hold,
Road so rough, this I know,
I’ll be there when the lights come in,
Tell them we’re survivors.
When I was thinking about these two songs and their lyrics I realized that there is a reason Isaiah chose to speak to the people about highways. Highways are a wonderful invention made by humans to get from point A to point B more quickly and with fewer problems. Highways may go around bends or up slight hills but for the most part, we try to make them as straight and smooth as possible to make our travel faster and safer. The lives we lead may be considered a journey and on our journey we have many highways and roads to choose from.
For this reason, we can call ourselves pilgrims, and as we go about our daily lives, we choose different paths for different reasons. Sometimes we choose a path because our best friend or spouse is on that road. Sometimes we choose a path because we know at the end we will have something we desire or need. There are other times when we may choose a path not knowing where it will lead us, but we felt like that was where we supposed to be right now. Sometimes the paths we choose are good for us, things we needed to do to become stronger individuals. But sometimes the path leads us to hardship and pain.
It is when we get to the end of one highway and we are about to choose another that the two songs I mentioned become important. One speaks about life being a real party. Things are easy; the person is living free with nothing to impede him. The other person talks about how sometimes this highway is rough, but he has confidence that there is nothing he can’t do because he’s a survivor.
I have to admit, I’m rather drawn to this idea of life being one big party. Of everything coming easily, with little work or fuss. Wouldn’t it be nice to just wake up every morning without worries or cares? To no longer stress out about paying bills or figure out how to resolve the fight from the night before? To not care what happened yesterday or what is going to happen today? The person in the song doesn’t even care that he’s on a Highway straight to Hell. Matter of fact, he tells everyone to leave him be because he doesn’t care about that. He’s too busy having a good time now.
Don’t we all know someone who doesn’t really care about tomorrow or who they’ve hurt in their life? They live for today and they live for themselves. It can be easy to envy someone who is so free spirited. It can be easy to want to emulate their actions in the hope of making our own messy lives less complicated. However, there is something about this type of life that is not worth envying at all.
The only problem with life being a constant party is that someone always has to clean it up when it’s over. Someone has to take responsibility for what has happened or what is done during that time. If you lead a life without worries or cares, that just means someone else will be picking up the slack for you. Perhaps it is your parents or your siblings or your children. But someone always ends up paying the price. For Christians, it is Jesus Christ.
Verse four in Isaiah 35 says, “Be strong, do not fear; your God will come, he will come with vengeance; with divine retribution he will come to save you.” The result of the Lord coming to be with us is then described in the rest of the chapter. It says, “Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then will the lame leap like a deer and the mute tongue shout for joy. Water will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert. The burning sand will become a pool, the thirsty ground bubbling springs”.
What is being described here is a gift only God could give to a people of the desert. These people had known many hardships because at this point in Isaiah the Israelites were captured slaves and indentured servants to the Babylonians. They were poor and without the comforts of home. So to hear that the Lord would come to save them, it meant that their needs would be satisfied. They would have enough water to drink, they would have food to fill their bellies, and those that were in pain and suffering would be healed.
And to insure all of this happened, Isaiah 35 talks about a highway called the Way of Holiness where only the saved will be able to walk. This is a special highway reserved for those who know God. As Christians we know the only way to know God is to know Jesus Christ. We have invited Jesus into our hearts and his Spirit rests within us every day and because of that, we know God. We have been blessed with this great gift just as the Israelites had been blessed.
We are not alone on this journey. Jesus Christ journeys with us. He lights the way like a lamp to our feet. He is always guiding us and helping us around obstacles. Jesus is the Way of Holiness, that highway Isaiah speaks of. He is the one that smoothes out the rough patches where life has created potholes. He is the one that straightens our crooked ways so that we can get back to place we are supposed to be. With God. Our place is with God. Our whole being longs to be with Him.
Isn’t that what we proclaim during Advent? Isn’t this what we look forward to each and every year? For a little child to be born, a child who is so much more. The promise of a Savior who comes to be with His people. God in the flesh. Because as John 1 says, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling place among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth”.
Let this advent be a time of joy for each of you as you wait for the coming of your Messiah. As you wait for the One who is full of grace and truth, the One who lights our way as we journey down life’s path. Let us give him glory and honor and praise, for God is with us.
Amen.
When I read in Isaiah 35 about the Highway called the Way of Holiness, it reminded me of a couple songs I’ve heard over the years about highways. One of my favorite bands, AC-DC, sang a song called Highway to Hell. The lyrics go like this:
Season ticket on a one-way ride
Asking nothing, leave me be
Taking everything in my stride
Don’t need reason, don’t need rhyme
Aint nothing I'd rather do
Going down, party time
My friends are gonna be there too, yeah
I’m on the highway to hell.
The other song I always enjoyed is called Life is a Highway by Tom Cochrane. Some of the lyrics to this one are:
Road so rough, this I know,
I’ll be there when the lights come in,
Tell them we’re survivors.
When I was thinking about these two songs and their lyrics I realized that there is a reason Isaiah chose to speak to the people about highways. Highways are a wonderful invention made by humans to get from point A to point B more quickly and with fewer problems. Highways may go around bends or up slight hills but for the most part, we try to make them as straight and smooth as possible to make our travel faster and safer. The lives we lead may be considered a journey and on our journey we have many highways and roads to choose from.
For this reason, we can call ourselves pilgrims, and as we go about our daily lives, we choose different paths for different reasons. Sometimes we choose a path because our best friend or spouse is on that road. Sometimes we choose a path because we know at the end we will have something we desire or need. There are other times when we may choose a path not knowing where it will lead us, but we felt like that was where we supposed to be right now. Sometimes the paths we choose are good for us, things we needed to do to become stronger individuals. But sometimes the path leads us to hardship and pain.
It is when we get to the end of one highway and we are about to choose another that the two songs I mentioned become important. One speaks about life being a real party. Things are easy; the person is living free with nothing to impede him. The other person talks about how sometimes this highway is rough, but he has confidence that there is nothing he can’t do because he’s a survivor.
I have to admit, I’m rather drawn to this idea of life being one big party. Of everything coming easily, with little work or fuss. Wouldn’t it be nice to just wake up every morning without worries or cares? To no longer stress out about paying bills or figure out how to resolve the fight from the night before? To not care what happened yesterday or what is going to happen today? The person in the song doesn’t even care that he’s on a Highway straight to Hell. Matter of fact, he tells everyone to leave him be because he doesn’t care about that. He’s too busy having a good time now.
Don’t we all know someone who doesn’t really care about tomorrow or who they’ve hurt in their life? They live for today and they live for themselves. It can be easy to envy someone who is so free spirited. It can be easy to want to emulate their actions in the hope of making our own messy lives less complicated. However, there is something about this type of life that is not worth envying at all.
The only problem with life being a constant party is that someone always has to clean it up when it’s over. Someone has to take responsibility for what has happened or what is done during that time. If you lead a life without worries or cares, that just means someone else will be picking up the slack for you. Perhaps it is your parents or your siblings or your children. But someone always ends up paying the price. For Christians, it is Jesus Christ.
Verse four in Isaiah 35 says, “Be strong, do not fear; your God will come, he will come with vengeance; with divine retribution he will come to save you.” The result of the Lord coming to be with us is then described in the rest of the chapter. It says, “Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then will the lame leap like a deer and the mute tongue shout for joy. Water will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert. The burning sand will become a pool, the thirsty ground bubbling springs”.
What is being described here is a gift only God could give to a people of the desert. These people had known many hardships because at this point in Isaiah the Israelites were captured slaves and indentured servants to the Babylonians. They were poor and without the comforts of home. So to hear that the Lord would come to save them, it meant that their needs would be satisfied. They would have enough water to drink, they would have food to fill their bellies, and those that were in pain and suffering would be healed.
And to insure all of this happened, Isaiah 35 talks about a highway called the Way of Holiness where only the saved will be able to walk. This is a special highway reserved for those who know God. As Christians we know the only way to know God is to know Jesus Christ. We have invited Jesus into our hearts and his Spirit rests within us every day and because of that, we know God. We have been blessed with this great gift just as the Israelites had been blessed.
We are not alone on this journey. Jesus Christ journeys with us. He lights the way like a lamp to our feet. He is always guiding us and helping us around obstacles. Jesus is the Way of Holiness, that highway Isaiah speaks of. He is the one that smoothes out the rough patches where life has created potholes. He is the one that straightens our crooked ways so that we can get back to place we are supposed to be. With God. Our place is with God. Our whole being longs to be with Him.
Isn’t that what we proclaim during Advent? Isn’t this what we look forward to each and every year? For a little child to be born, a child who is so much more. The promise of a Savior who comes to be with His people. God in the flesh. Because as John 1 says, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling place among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth”.
Let this advent be a time of joy for each of you as you wait for the coming of your Messiah. As you wait for the One who is full of grace and truth, the One who lights our way as we journey down life’s path. Let us give him glory and honor and praise, for God is with us.
Amen.
Week 2 of Advent - Loving Acceptance
Passages are Isaiah 11 and Romans 15.
I knew a woman a few year ago who had a teenage daughter that had behavioral issues. She was full of anger and bitterness and would refuse to speak to anyone. She had been this way since she was a little girl, but the older she got, the worse her behavior became. She began to act out, had awful fits of temper and would hit and bite and scream at whoever was near her. Her mother didn’t know what to do to help her. Finally, she sent her to visit for a few weeks with her aunt who was a counselor. Before she left, the teenage girl looked at her mom and said, “How could you give me away?”
I am telling you this because during the Advent season we are told to think of all the good things in life. To remember to be hopeful and expectant, to look at one another with love and compassion, to experience joy in the coming Savior and to feel peace on Christmas Eve. But for some people this season is about pain and loneliness and despair. This season reminds them of what has gone wrong in their life. It reminds this mother that for some reason, her child is deeply troubled, but she cannot help her.
The question the teenage girl asked her mom is one I often ask God about His Son, Jesus. How could God give Jesus to us? How could God bear to know the pain His Son would soon experience? Did Jesus ever want to ask, “How could you give me away?”
We live in darkness. Every day we are surrounded by pain whether it is our own or other people’s. We have created things to bring us happiness, but it only works on a superficial basis because the only happiness that lasts is happiness based upon God. There is a reason that pastors are always telling their congregations to be thankful for their blessings. We know that happiness comes only from God and that it begins with our own thankfulness for what we have been given. God gave us His Son. He gave us Jesus because we are deeply troubled and we needed a lighthouse, we needed a beacon to guide us safely home.
Jesus provides that light. Jesus comes as the promise of light at night. He was born at night. And that’s where his spirit meets ours. I can’t say what this will mean for me, much less for you. But Advent asks that we face any night within or around us, and come to see it as the birthplace of unexpected opportunity, a chance to find hope and love in a world filled with pain and hurt.
Let me tell you what happened to the teenage girl while she was with her aunt. She spent several weeks with her aunt. She didn’t talk at first so her aunt took her places and talked to her. Eventually, the teenager opened up bit by bit and began to speak of the darkness inside her. She felt all alone. She was scared of who she was and what she had done to her family. But just having a chance to speak about how she felt released some of that anger and bitterness. It was like for a brief moment the sun burst from the clouds and she could see the world around her, she could see her family was not her enemy.
Advent is a special time for us. We hope and wait, we watch and listen. But we are also supposed to talk. Talking releases those dark emotions so that the light can trickle in. Too often these days, Christians are afraid to speak out about their faith. Especially at Christmas time. Has anyone heard about the two billboards that have gone up about Christmas? One was put up by Atheists that says, “You KNOW it’s not real. This season believe in reason.” And the other billboard was put up by Catholics that says, “You KNOW it’s real. This season believe in Jesus”.
Is it any wonder our young people are confused? Is it any wonder so many people have chosen to not speak out about their Christian faith or have ignored their faith to the point where they have no faith at all? Christmas is no longer about anything but economics and rivalry. Who can put up the most lights on their house? Who will hold the best party? Will your Christmas bonus come in time for you to buy all those presents for your family?
The reality is that Christmas is not about any of those things. Christmas is about reminding all people and all nations that we have been given a gift without price. We have been given Jesus Christ, without any strings attached and there is nothing we have done or could do to have earned such a remarkable gift as our Savior. Because we are loved, a love so deep and bountiful that nothing we do could mar it, and because of that love we will know eternal life.
The teenage girl that asked, “How could you give me away” eventually got to come home to her mother. The first thing her mom did was hug her close, kissing her and not letting her go for several long minutes. Finally, the teenager pulled away and looked at her and said, “Could you ever love me again?”
This is the question we often end up asking God. “Lord, will you still love me even though I lied? Will you still care about me even though I cheated? Lord, how can you still love me when I’m so sinful?”
But just as that mother looked at her daughter and said, “I never stopped”, God looks at each of us and says the same. Because of Jesus Christ, we know that God will never stop loving us, God will always accept us and will never let us go. Sometimes it feels like God has left us. Sometimes it feels like the darkness in our lives will consume us until nothing is left. We forget that God is here with us, that God is listening to us and willing to help us. Like that teenage girl, we bottle everything up inside of us, not daring to speak until everything explodes and we are left with shattered dreams and broken hearts. Then we pray to God for help.
But Advent reminds us that we are not alone. Advent reminds us that Jesus Christ has redeemed us in God’s eyes and that when he looks at us he sees the love we have for Jesus and God loves that about His people. Advent is about Jesus Christ, the long awaited Savior who cements are relationship with God the Father so that in Christ we are forgiven. In and with Christ we are able to do good things and to be the people God wants us to be.
This Advent let us all remember that God is with us. That the Lord has never left us. Let us speak out about our faith. Let us not be afraid to love one another, lets not be afraid to believe in more than what we can see and touch. Let us raise our voices in song, in praise, and in prayer as we wait for the coming of our Savior. For God has given us a gift beyond compare, one that insures us everlasting life. I’ll leave you with these final words from Paul who wrote in Romans 15:14, May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
I knew a woman a few year ago who had a teenage daughter that had behavioral issues. She was full of anger and bitterness and would refuse to speak to anyone. She had been this way since she was a little girl, but the older she got, the worse her behavior became. She began to act out, had awful fits of temper and would hit and bite and scream at whoever was near her. Her mother didn’t know what to do to help her. Finally, she sent her to visit for a few weeks with her aunt who was a counselor. Before she left, the teenage girl looked at her mom and said, “How could you give me away?”
I am telling you this because during the Advent season we are told to think of all the good things in life. To remember to be hopeful and expectant, to look at one another with love and compassion, to experience joy in the coming Savior and to feel peace on Christmas Eve. But for some people this season is about pain and loneliness and despair. This season reminds them of what has gone wrong in their life. It reminds this mother that for some reason, her child is deeply troubled, but she cannot help her.
The question the teenage girl asked her mom is one I often ask God about His Son, Jesus. How could God give Jesus to us? How could God bear to know the pain His Son would soon experience? Did Jesus ever want to ask, “How could you give me away?”
We live in darkness. Every day we are surrounded by pain whether it is our own or other people’s. We have created things to bring us happiness, but it only works on a superficial basis because the only happiness that lasts is happiness based upon God. There is a reason that pastors are always telling their congregations to be thankful for their blessings. We know that happiness comes only from God and that it begins with our own thankfulness for what we have been given. God gave us His Son. He gave us Jesus because we are deeply troubled and we needed a lighthouse, we needed a beacon to guide us safely home.
Jesus provides that light. Jesus comes as the promise of light at night. He was born at night. And that’s where his spirit meets ours. I can’t say what this will mean for me, much less for you. But Advent asks that we face any night within or around us, and come to see it as the birthplace of unexpected opportunity, a chance to find hope and love in a world filled with pain and hurt.
Let me tell you what happened to the teenage girl while she was with her aunt. She spent several weeks with her aunt. She didn’t talk at first so her aunt took her places and talked to her. Eventually, the teenager opened up bit by bit and began to speak of the darkness inside her. She felt all alone. She was scared of who she was and what she had done to her family. But just having a chance to speak about how she felt released some of that anger and bitterness. It was like for a brief moment the sun burst from the clouds and she could see the world around her, she could see her family was not her enemy.
Advent is a special time for us. We hope and wait, we watch and listen. But we are also supposed to talk. Talking releases those dark emotions so that the light can trickle in. Too often these days, Christians are afraid to speak out about their faith. Especially at Christmas time. Has anyone heard about the two billboards that have gone up about Christmas? One was put up by Atheists that says, “You KNOW it’s not real. This season believe in reason.” And the other billboard was put up by Catholics that says, “You KNOW it’s real. This season believe in Jesus”.
Is it any wonder our young people are confused? Is it any wonder so many people have chosen to not speak out about their Christian faith or have ignored their faith to the point where they have no faith at all? Christmas is no longer about anything but economics and rivalry. Who can put up the most lights on their house? Who will hold the best party? Will your Christmas bonus come in time for you to buy all those presents for your family?
The reality is that Christmas is not about any of those things. Christmas is about reminding all people and all nations that we have been given a gift without price. We have been given Jesus Christ, without any strings attached and there is nothing we have done or could do to have earned such a remarkable gift as our Savior. Because we are loved, a love so deep and bountiful that nothing we do could mar it, and because of that love we will know eternal life.
The teenage girl that asked, “How could you give me away” eventually got to come home to her mother. The first thing her mom did was hug her close, kissing her and not letting her go for several long minutes. Finally, the teenager pulled away and looked at her and said, “Could you ever love me again?”
This is the question we often end up asking God. “Lord, will you still love me even though I lied? Will you still care about me even though I cheated? Lord, how can you still love me when I’m so sinful?”
But just as that mother looked at her daughter and said, “I never stopped”, God looks at each of us and says the same. Because of Jesus Christ, we know that God will never stop loving us, God will always accept us and will never let us go. Sometimes it feels like God has left us. Sometimes it feels like the darkness in our lives will consume us until nothing is left. We forget that God is here with us, that God is listening to us and willing to help us. Like that teenage girl, we bottle everything up inside of us, not daring to speak until everything explodes and we are left with shattered dreams and broken hearts. Then we pray to God for help.
But Advent reminds us that we are not alone. Advent reminds us that Jesus Christ has redeemed us in God’s eyes and that when he looks at us he sees the love we have for Jesus and God loves that about His people. Advent is about Jesus Christ, the long awaited Savior who cements are relationship with God the Father so that in Christ we are forgiven. In and with Christ we are able to do good things and to be the people God wants us to be.
This Advent let us all remember that God is with us. That the Lord has never left us. Let us speak out about our faith. Let us not be afraid to love one another, lets not be afraid to believe in more than what we can see and touch. Let us raise our voices in song, in praise, and in prayer as we wait for the coming of our Savior. For God has given us a gift beyond compare, one that insures us everlasting life. I’ll leave you with these final words from Paul who wrote in Romans 15:14, May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Hope of Advent
The first week of Advent symbolizes the hope we have for a Savior. The hope we experience in the coming of the Christ child, a messiah who will bring goodness to the world and restore our relationship with God to what it was before Adam and Eve fell from grace.
Something I’ve always found interesting about hope is that it requires us to wait. We often hope for things. Perhaps this year you hope to get a raise. Perhaps you hope to lose some weight in the new year. Perhaps you hope to start a family. Or perhaps your hope is that this year you’ll finally go back to school like you’ve always wanted to.
But hope is about believing with confidence that what is hoped for will be received. As Christians, we look forward to the coming of Christ because we know we can believe in God’s promises. We know that the Lord loves us and that gives us confidence to believe that there could be something as miraculous as a baby born to a virgin who will save a world of people from their sinfulness. It’s an audacious claim, ridiculous in this day and age of logic and technology and people who will only believe in what they can see and touch.
But we know the truth is that the Lord did come to earth. God gave to us his only Son so that we might have eternal life. And so the hope we have during Advent is not just for Christ to come, but we hope IN Christ, WITH Christ for everything we need in our lives. We are children of God because of Jesus Christ. We may have confidence and trust in our eternal salvation because of Him. Thanks be to God. Thanks be to Jesus Christ. Amen.
Something I’ve always found interesting about hope is that it requires us to wait. We often hope for things. Perhaps this year you hope to get a raise. Perhaps you hope to lose some weight in the new year. Perhaps you hope to start a family. Or perhaps your hope is that this year you’ll finally go back to school like you’ve always wanted to.
But hope is about believing with confidence that what is hoped for will be received. As Christians, we look forward to the coming of Christ because we know we can believe in God’s promises. We know that the Lord loves us and that gives us confidence to believe that there could be something as miraculous as a baby born to a virgin who will save a world of people from their sinfulness. It’s an audacious claim, ridiculous in this day and age of logic and technology and people who will only believe in what they can see and touch.
But we know the truth is that the Lord did come to earth. God gave to us his only Son so that we might have eternal life. And so the hope we have during Advent is not just for Christ to come, but we hope IN Christ, WITH Christ for everything we need in our lives. We are children of God because of Jesus Christ. We may have confidence and trust in our eternal salvation because of Him. Thanks be to God. Thanks be to Jesus Christ. Amen.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Walls and Foundations
Matthew 7: 24-29
24"Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. 26But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash."
28When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching, 29because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law.
Fifty years ago, a natural gas company laid down gas lines made out of steel along a sparsely populated stretch of land. Throughout the country the standard procedure was to use steel pipes for gas, steam and oil lines. It was thought to be the safest and least likely to cause problems for a long period of time. In the last twenty years the government has realized that steel pipes will not last forever, matter of fact they only last about fifty years.
However, they let utility companies regulate their own pipelines and only made it priority in 2002 that companies must inspect lines running through heavily populated areas, but still left it up to the individual company to inspect the pipelines. And because our population is constantly growing, areas that were rural fifty years ago are now suburbs or parts of expanded cities.
And then a couple weeks ago in California, a natural gas line became corroded and caused an explosion that killed four people. It was a terrible tragedy and thank God more people didn’t die. From this tragedy, an article was published that said there are quite a few natural gas lines in the US that need replacing and many of them are located in cities and towns. This is only the latest in infrastructure failures that have been happening all over America. A few years ago a bridge collapsed and when boroughs began to inspect their bridges they found that many of them required work.
Tragedies like these occur because of a lack of foresight and neglect. It’s easy to blame the government and businesses in charge of these things, but the truth is we all carry a little of the blame when something like this happens. We are content to let others take care of the big problems. We are content with voting once every couple years for someone else to change the world and then muttering about them when it doesn’t happen right away.
Our lives are not about sitting back and letting others do all the work for us. During his ministry, Jesus was not someone who let others do the work. He was right there spreading the good news and teaching others. Eventually he sent out his disciples to preach and teach the Word, but not without extensively working with them until they began to understand the Kingdom of God is not about what you can receive, but about what you have to offer.
We are here on this earth not to see how much wealth and material good we can accumulate. We are here because the Lord has great things in store for all of us. Our lives are a building block to the Kingdom of God. Our foundation, if we are wise builders, should be Jesus Christ. Only foolish people will build their life on something other than the Lord because when tough times come calling – and they will – everything they have worked for can be swept away in the blink of an eye.
A person’s life is like a house. Every thought is like a piece of lumber in our house of life, every habit is like a beam, every imagination like a window, whether it be well or badly placed; and they all gather into some kind of unity, seemly or grotesque. Of the two builders in the Gospel message, one is a thoughtful man who deliberately plans his house with an eye to the future, the other is not a bad man but he is thoughtless, and casually begins to build in the easiest way. The one is earnest; the other is content with a careless and unexamined life.
Christ is not only the foundation but also the architect of our house. The passage tells us, “Who so ever hears these words of mine and does them” Only on His truth can life or a church stand. This passage declares the authority of Jesus as absolute. He is our Lord and Savior. He is the one that redeems us, he is the one that brings us to the Father and delivers eternal salvation.
The wise person listens to Jesus Christ. The wise person understands that only through and with Christ are we able to live a life pleasing to God the Father. Our house built on the rock of Jesus is built day by day. I heard a proverb one time of a rich man who hired a contractor to build him a house. He told the man that no expense should be spared and the contractor was very pleased with the finished house. Then the rich man told him, “The house is yours, but you must live in it if you want to keep it”. It was only then that the builder could see the areas that were poorly put together when he was forced to call the house a home. We too must live in what we build out of our lives.
We decide what foundation is good enough; we decide what walls to put around us. We are the ones that either create a house that will stand the test of time or will wash away in the first hard rain. We decide whether to listen to Jesus and follow his example or to ignore his truth and go our own way.
There are many people in this world that choose their own way rather than Jesus Christ’s. Then when things go wrong they ask themselves and others, “Why is God doing this to me? Why is God punishing me?” The truth is that God didn’t do this to them. They chose their path; they chose to ignore the Lord and what he has taught them because it was easier.
Isn’t that the real truth of why we do something or not? What’s the easiest way? If I tithe ten percent or more of my income then I won’t be able to buy that big screen television this year. If I volunteer at the community shelter on Saturdays then I won’t be able to play golf or have lunch with my friends. If I write a letter to Congress about that bill I don’t like being passed they’ll just send back a form letter, so I’m not going to even bother.
We choose not to care. We choose to live a life of indifference and then when something atrocious happens we are all upset and riled up. Out of the four people that died in the California gas explosion a few weeks back, one of them was a woman that had worked on getting the natural gas companies to regulate old gas lines. She inadvertently died because of the very thing she had worked her whole life to fix. Talk about irony. There are always going to be cynical people that say she dedicated her life to a cause and then died for nothing. But the truth is she knew there was a problem and she wasn’t afraid to stand up for what she believed in. In the end she died from what she was warning this country about, but now the whole world knows it. And now there will be changes made because tragedies like this one need to be avoided.
The Lord offers us a choice. We can stand up for Him and sometimes be put down or hurt, or we can take the easy way out and everyone around us will get hurt instead. What Jesus’ parable doesn’t tell us is what happens after the flooding of the foolish man’s house. The foolish builder probably had a family. Did they die in the flood because of his mistake? Did they go hungry while he worked and scrimped to build a new place? Our actions don’t only affect us, they have a ripple affect.
The truth is that when we do things God’s way, fewer people are hurt. When we build our lives around the foundation of Jesus Christ even when our whole world seems to come crumbling down, we have God to help us rebuild again. There is no guarantee in life that we won’t have to rebuild. Many people have found that out during this recession. People that have worked in the same company for twenty years were told they were no longer needed. They had to find new ways to support their loved ones. The Lord has never promised our road will be easy, but he did and does promise that He will be with us every step of the way.
What this story comes down to is that every house is tested. Spring and summer do not last forever, eventually winter will come again. Our lives are not without temptation. To understand how sweet the fruit of our faithfulness is we must at times taste the bitterness of our failures. There will be times when ‘flash floods’ test the foundation of our lives. Whose house will continue to stand no matter how fast the storm approaches?
Jesus tells us here that those who build on surface values, those who forget the truth in his words will know more than the bitterness of failure. Their whole lives will be swept away. This is a challenge for all of us to not be apathetic to the crises of this world. This is a warning to stand up for what we believe in and to let those around us know we are Christians and that means something. It is not just a label for the census bureau.
It is not just ‘any old way’ of living – we are a people that choose to live with the ideals and values of Jesus Christ. We choose not just to be Christ-like we profess and proclaim to be children of God because Jesus Christ has redeemed us. Jesus is our foundation; he is the way, the truth and the life we center our own lives around. When the Father looks upon us, he sees His Son because we have been brought into that relationship between Father and Son.
That is what it means when we say that Jesus Christ is our foundation, our rock and refuge. We couldn’t make ourselves worthy of salvation, so Jesus did it for us. Our RESPONSE to that is thankfulness and praise. Our actions need to reflect our new status as brothers and sisters in Christ. The only way for that to happen is to keep our lives centered on Jesus. The only way we live a life pleasing to God is by constantly seeking the truth in the world – we must look to see what Jesus is doing in this world and follow Him.
This can only be done if we allow Jesus to be the foundation of this church and our lives. Carrie Underwood had a song out a few years back that said, “Jesus take the wheel”. We need to do that – to let Jesus take control of our lives and steer us to the right paths. Jesus Christ has promised us all eternal salvation if only we would believe in Him. Belief means we must trust him with every part of our lives, not just the easy stuff. Trust in the Lord to see you safely home.
Amen.
24"Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. 26But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash."
28When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching, 29because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law.
Fifty years ago, a natural gas company laid down gas lines made out of steel along a sparsely populated stretch of land. Throughout the country the standard procedure was to use steel pipes for gas, steam and oil lines. It was thought to be the safest and least likely to cause problems for a long period of time. In the last twenty years the government has realized that steel pipes will not last forever, matter of fact they only last about fifty years.
However, they let utility companies regulate their own pipelines and only made it priority in 2002 that companies must inspect lines running through heavily populated areas, but still left it up to the individual company to inspect the pipelines. And because our population is constantly growing, areas that were rural fifty years ago are now suburbs or parts of expanded cities.
And then a couple weeks ago in California, a natural gas line became corroded and caused an explosion that killed four people. It was a terrible tragedy and thank God more people didn’t die. From this tragedy, an article was published that said there are quite a few natural gas lines in the US that need replacing and many of them are located in cities and towns. This is only the latest in infrastructure failures that have been happening all over America. A few years ago a bridge collapsed and when boroughs began to inspect their bridges they found that many of them required work.
Tragedies like these occur because of a lack of foresight and neglect. It’s easy to blame the government and businesses in charge of these things, but the truth is we all carry a little of the blame when something like this happens. We are content to let others take care of the big problems. We are content with voting once every couple years for someone else to change the world and then muttering about them when it doesn’t happen right away.
Our lives are not about sitting back and letting others do all the work for us. During his ministry, Jesus was not someone who let others do the work. He was right there spreading the good news and teaching others. Eventually he sent out his disciples to preach and teach the Word, but not without extensively working with them until they began to understand the Kingdom of God is not about what you can receive, but about what you have to offer.
We are here on this earth not to see how much wealth and material good we can accumulate. We are here because the Lord has great things in store for all of us. Our lives are a building block to the Kingdom of God. Our foundation, if we are wise builders, should be Jesus Christ. Only foolish people will build their life on something other than the Lord because when tough times come calling – and they will – everything they have worked for can be swept away in the blink of an eye.
A person’s life is like a house. Every thought is like a piece of lumber in our house of life, every habit is like a beam, every imagination like a window, whether it be well or badly placed; and they all gather into some kind of unity, seemly or grotesque. Of the two builders in the Gospel message, one is a thoughtful man who deliberately plans his house with an eye to the future, the other is not a bad man but he is thoughtless, and casually begins to build in the easiest way. The one is earnest; the other is content with a careless and unexamined life.
Christ is not only the foundation but also the architect of our house. The passage tells us, “Who so ever hears these words of mine and does them” Only on His truth can life or a church stand. This passage declares the authority of Jesus as absolute. He is our Lord and Savior. He is the one that redeems us, he is the one that brings us to the Father and delivers eternal salvation.
The wise person listens to Jesus Christ. The wise person understands that only through and with Christ are we able to live a life pleasing to God the Father. Our house built on the rock of Jesus is built day by day. I heard a proverb one time of a rich man who hired a contractor to build him a house. He told the man that no expense should be spared and the contractor was very pleased with the finished house. Then the rich man told him, “The house is yours, but you must live in it if you want to keep it”. It was only then that the builder could see the areas that were poorly put together when he was forced to call the house a home. We too must live in what we build out of our lives.
We decide what foundation is good enough; we decide what walls to put around us. We are the ones that either create a house that will stand the test of time or will wash away in the first hard rain. We decide whether to listen to Jesus and follow his example or to ignore his truth and go our own way.
There are many people in this world that choose their own way rather than Jesus Christ’s. Then when things go wrong they ask themselves and others, “Why is God doing this to me? Why is God punishing me?” The truth is that God didn’t do this to them. They chose their path; they chose to ignore the Lord and what he has taught them because it was easier.
Isn’t that the real truth of why we do something or not? What’s the easiest way? If I tithe ten percent or more of my income then I won’t be able to buy that big screen television this year. If I volunteer at the community shelter on Saturdays then I won’t be able to play golf or have lunch with my friends. If I write a letter to Congress about that bill I don’t like being passed they’ll just send back a form letter, so I’m not going to even bother.
We choose not to care. We choose to live a life of indifference and then when something atrocious happens we are all upset and riled up. Out of the four people that died in the California gas explosion a few weeks back, one of them was a woman that had worked on getting the natural gas companies to regulate old gas lines. She inadvertently died because of the very thing she had worked her whole life to fix. Talk about irony. There are always going to be cynical people that say she dedicated her life to a cause and then died for nothing. But the truth is she knew there was a problem and she wasn’t afraid to stand up for what she believed in. In the end she died from what she was warning this country about, but now the whole world knows it. And now there will be changes made because tragedies like this one need to be avoided.
The Lord offers us a choice. We can stand up for Him and sometimes be put down or hurt, or we can take the easy way out and everyone around us will get hurt instead. What Jesus’ parable doesn’t tell us is what happens after the flooding of the foolish man’s house. The foolish builder probably had a family. Did they die in the flood because of his mistake? Did they go hungry while he worked and scrimped to build a new place? Our actions don’t only affect us, they have a ripple affect.
The truth is that when we do things God’s way, fewer people are hurt. When we build our lives around the foundation of Jesus Christ even when our whole world seems to come crumbling down, we have God to help us rebuild again. There is no guarantee in life that we won’t have to rebuild. Many people have found that out during this recession. People that have worked in the same company for twenty years were told they were no longer needed. They had to find new ways to support their loved ones. The Lord has never promised our road will be easy, but he did and does promise that He will be with us every step of the way.
What this story comes down to is that every house is tested. Spring and summer do not last forever, eventually winter will come again. Our lives are not without temptation. To understand how sweet the fruit of our faithfulness is we must at times taste the bitterness of our failures. There will be times when ‘flash floods’ test the foundation of our lives. Whose house will continue to stand no matter how fast the storm approaches?
Jesus tells us here that those who build on surface values, those who forget the truth in his words will know more than the bitterness of failure. Their whole lives will be swept away. This is a challenge for all of us to not be apathetic to the crises of this world. This is a warning to stand up for what we believe in and to let those around us know we are Christians and that means something. It is not just a label for the census bureau.
It is not just ‘any old way’ of living – we are a people that choose to live with the ideals and values of Jesus Christ. We choose not just to be Christ-like we profess and proclaim to be children of God because Jesus Christ has redeemed us. Jesus is our foundation; he is the way, the truth and the life we center our own lives around. When the Father looks upon us, he sees His Son because we have been brought into that relationship between Father and Son.
That is what it means when we say that Jesus Christ is our foundation, our rock and refuge. We couldn’t make ourselves worthy of salvation, so Jesus did it for us. Our RESPONSE to that is thankfulness and praise. Our actions need to reflect our new status as brothers and sisters in Christ. The only way for that to happen is to keep our lives centered on Jesus. The only way we live a life pleasing to God is by constantly seeking the truth in the world – we must look to see what Jesus is doing in this world and follow Him.
This can only be done if we allow Jesus to be the foundation of this church and our lives. Carrie Underwood had a song out a few years back that said, “Jesus take the wheel”. We need to do that – to let Jesus take control of our lives and steer us to the right paths. Jesus Christ has promised us all eternal salvation if only we would believe in Him. Belief means we must trust him with every part of our lives, not just the easy stuff. Trust in the Lord to see you safely home.
Amen.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
A Disciple Knows How to Share
In the Gospel reading of John 13, Jesus gives us a new commandment – to love one another so the world may know we are disciples of Jesus Christ. Peter is the first disciple to understand how radical the love of God can be. In Acts 11 God gives Peter a vision and tells him all things and all people are clean (which means pure) because Jesus has made it so with his death and resurrection.
This is radical because if we look at the first five books of the Old Testament, we will see that they are filled with laws about what makes animals and people clean or unclean. The whole Jewish religion is based on these purification and ritualistic laws. However, when Jesus came and died for humanity everything changed.
It is no wonder that Peter first says no to God – this was unlike anything done before. Peter’s world as well as Christianity, were about to take a radical new turn, one where the Holy Spirit led the way, one where grace and love became the new “law” of the land. No longer would Christianity be fore the Jewish people only – it was now also for the Gentiles. These were people that knew nothing about purification and maybe not even about the Ten Commandments – so how were they to be made clean and worthy of the Lord?
God answered Peter in reminding him of what Jesus once said, “John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit”. Laws and rules were no longer the way a person became obedient to the Lord – baptism and the working of the Holy Spirit inside of them was all that was needed.
You may ask why the Lord did not do this sooner. Why use the Jewish people at all? It’s about a calling. The Lord calls us, the Lord chooses each one of us. Six thousand years ago the Lord chose certain people, the Israelites, to be the light to all nations and they answered the call. They heard the Lord and they obeyed.
However, the Lord is not done calling people. Every one of you in the pews today are here for a reason. The Lord has been working on you, refining you so that as you live your lives you answer the call he has for you. What does our Lord ask of us? “You should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples”.
This is what our calling is because when we love each other we witness to the love God has for us. We show the world that just as Jesus sacrificed his life for us, we give ourselves to Him. When we give ourselves to Jesus, when we allow the Holy Spirit to refine us into loving disciples, the Lord becomes the beginning and end of our lives.
It no longer matters how much money we make or if Jane is dating John, or any other thing we like to use to distract us from our calling. No, what becomes important is Jesus Christ. We begin to ask ourselves, “What is Jesus doing in my life?” We learn to see God even in the bad things that happen. So when a tragedy like the earthquake in Haiti happens or the flooding in Pakistan or the oil spill in the Gulf or the Yellow Sea, Christians look past the pain, destruction and death and begin to look for Jesus.
We open our eyes to the working of the Holy Spirit even in places of despair. We see God in the thousands of relief workers, we see the Lord in the people that send money or adopt children that have become orphaned. We see Jesus in the way the Haitians and other victims of these disasters do not become bitter, but instead they accept what they cannot change and begin to rebuild their lives with love in their hearts.
What Christians realize and what we are supposed to witness to is what the Father has promised us in Revelation. “Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more” because the Lord is creating a new heaven and earth. Jesus’ life and death, his resurrection and ascension have made this all possible. His blood and tears wipe away our own, his sinless life has given us the chance at a new life.
While we all must eventually shed this first body, Jesus has given us hope – for He has promised us new bodies and a new life. But first we must proclaim ourselves His disciples by loving one another, by witnessing to these truths – that we have LIFE in Jesus Christ.
Our new life should begin now. Jesus told us to love one another because it opens us up to what he is doing. When we care about people we pay more attention to them. Think about when a person meets their first love. As they become attracted to them, each person begins to notice more about each other and the more they pay attention to likes and dislikes, the more they each begin to care about who the other is as an individual. Jesus wants us to care. He wants us to be interested in those around us and to pay attention to who they are and love them for it.
It’s not easy. It’s not supposed to be. We are called to care, to love and to witness to God’s mercy and goodness. The Lord has blessed us by giving us his love and grace. He has not done this so we can be greedy and not share these blessings with everyone. If Peter had not listened to God the Father’s vision, none of us would be here today because we are the gentiles that have been giving the great blessing of Peter sharing the Word of God with us.
We were once the Gentiles. Now, the Gentiles are all those people we meet who know nothing about Jesus. As disciples of Jesus Christ we are given the task of telling all those people about Jesus and his love for everyone. Jesus, the Lord came to set us all free from sin and death. When we share this wonderful blessing we need to do so with both our words and our actions.
No one wants to listen to a hypocrite preach about loving everyone when they have no love in their own heart. We cannot speak about forgiveness and grace if we are unwilling to forgive. We cannot tell others to give to the poor if we do not. We need to be genuine. People know when they are being lied and manipulated and if we do not act like Christ, then we should not say we are Christians.
We are here for a reason. God has called all of us. We must begin to look at the world with love, sharing our hope for a new life in Christ with those around us. The Lord is present in our lives; let us bear witness to it. Let us live truly in Christ as Christ lives in us.
This is radical because if we look at the first five books of the Old Testament, we will see that they are filled with laws about what makes animals and people clean or unclean. The whole Jewish religion is based on these purification and ritualistic laws. However, when Jesus came and died for humanity everything changed.
It is no wonder that Peter first says no to God – this was unlike anything done before. Peter’s world as well as Christianity, were about to take a radical new turn, one where the Holy Spirit led the way, one where grace and love became the new “law” of the land. No longer would Christianity be fore the Jewish people only – it was now also for the Gentiles. These were people that knew nothing about purification and maybe not even about the Ten Commandments – so how were they to be made clean and worthy of the Lord?
God answered Peter in reminding him of what Jesus once said, “John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit”. Laws and rules were no longer the way a person became obedient to the Lord – baptism and the working of the Holy Spirit inside of them was all that was needed.
You may ask why the Lord did not do this sooner. Why use the Jewish people at all? It’s about a calling. The Lord calls us, the Lord chooses each one of us. Six thousand years ago the Lord chose certain people, the Israelites, to be the light to all nations and they answered the call. They heard the Lord and they obeyed.
However, the Lord is not done calling people. Every one of you in the pews today are here for a reason. The Lord has been working on you, refining you so that as you live your lives you answer the call he has for you. What does our Lord ask of us? “You should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples”.
This is what our calling is because when we love each other we witness to the love God has for us. We show the world that just as Jesus sacrificed his life for us, we give ourselves to Him. When we give ourselves to Jesus, when we allow the Holy Spirit to refine us into loving disciples, the Lord becomes the beginning and end of our lives.
It no longer matters how much money we make or if Jane is dating John, or any other thing we like to use to distract us from our calling. No, what becomes important is Jesus Christ. We begin to ask ourselves, “What is Jesus doing in my life?” We learn to see God even in the bad things that happen. So when a tragedy like the earthquake in Haiti happens or the flooding in Pakistan or the oil spill in the Gulf or the Yellow Sea, Christians look past the pain, destruction and death and begin to look for Jesus.
We open our eyes to the working of the Holy Spirit even in places of despair. We see God in the thousands of relief workers, we see the Lord in the people that send money or adopt children that have become orphaned. We see Jesus in the way the Haitians and other victims of these disasters do not become bitter, but instead they accept what they cannot change and begin to rebuild their lives with love in their hearts.
What Christians realize and what we are supposed to witness to is what the Father has promised us in Revelation. “Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more” because the Lord is creating a new heaven and earth. Jesus’ life and death, his resurrection and ascension have made this all possible. His blood and tears wipe away our own, his sinless life has given us the chance at a new life.
While we all must eventually shed this first body, Jesus has given us hope – for He has promised us new bodies and a new life. But first we must proclaim ourselves His disciples by loving one another, by witnessing to these truths – that we have LIFE in Jesus Christ.
Our new life should begin now. Jesus told us to love one another because it opens us up to what he is doing. When we care about people we pay more attention to them. Think about when a person meets their first love. As they become attracted to them, each person begins to notice more about each other and the more they pay attention to likes and dislikes, the more they each begin to care about who the other is as an individual. Jesus wants us to care. He wants us to be interested in those around us and to pay attention to who they are and love them for it.
It’s not easy. It’s not supposed to be. We are called to care, to love and to witness to God’s mercy and goodness. The Lord has blessed us by giving us his love and grace. He has not done this so we can be greedy and not share these blessings with everyone. If Peter had not listened to God the Father’s vision, none of us would be here today because we are the gentiles that have been giving the great blessing of Peter sharing the Word of God with us.
We were once the Gentiles. Now, the Gentiles are all those people we meet who know nothing about Jesus. As disciples of Jesus Christ we are given the task of telling all those people about Jesus and his love for everyone. Jesus, the Lord came to set us all free from sin and death. When we share this wonderful blessing we need to do so with both our words and our actions.
No one wants to listen to a hypocrite preach about loving everyone when they have no love in their own heart. We cannot speak about forgiveness and grace if we are unwilling to forgive. We cannot tell others to give to the poor if we do not. We need to be genuine. People know when they are being lied and manipulated and if we do not act like Christ, then we should not say we are Christians.
We are here for a reason. God has called all of us. We must begin to look at the world with love, sharing our hope for a new life in Christ with those around us. The Lord is present in our lives; let us bear witness to it. Let us live truly in Christ as Christ lives in us.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Acting on Faith
Luke 11: 1-13
One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, "Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples."
2He said to them, "When you pray, say:
" 'Father,[a]
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come.[b]
3Give us each day our daily bread.
4Forgive us our sins,
for we also forgive everyone who sins against us.[c]
And lead us not into temptation.[d]' "
5Then he said to them, "Suppose one of you has a friend, and he goes to him at midnight and says, 'Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, 6because a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have nothing to set before him.'
7"Then the one inside answers, 'Don't bother me. The door is already locked, and my children are with me in bed. I can't get up and give you anything.' 8I tell you, though he will not get up and give him the bread because he is his friend, yet because of the man's boldness[e] he will get up and give him as much as he needs.
9"So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. 10For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.
11"Which of you fathers, if your son asks for[f] a fish, will give him a snake instead? 12Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? 13If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!"
Jesus never does anything in half measures. When the disciples would ask him how to do something or to explain a parable to them, Jesus would always give them more than they had bargained for with their question. They asked Jesus, “Teach us how to pray” and not only did he tell them how, he also told them what will happen when they do it.
Two weeks ago I told you that the Lord should hold the reigns of this church. That His will be done and that requires something from us. It does not mean we remain passive, but instead we must act. But how do we know how to act? How do we know what is the Lord’s will?
When Jesus tells the disciples how to pray, he tells them how prayer is a powerful tool. It is a link between you and the Father. It is the way we communicate with God. We’re lucky because Jesus mediates our prayer which means even before we begin to pray, Jesus is praying for us. And as we pray, Jesus continues to pray for us, mediating what we need and desire and what we are feeling to God the Father. And then Jesus brings the Father’s response to us in the gift of the Holy Spirit.
That means prayer helps us to become better mothers and fathers, better brothers and sisters and better friends – in general we become better people. Prayer opens our eyes to the spiritual life, to what before our eyes could not see. It is all done through Jesus Christ. When he became a man who is also God, he created a means for God the Father to understand our humanity in a whole new way – because now God the Father experiences exactly what it means to be human through Jesus Christ. As Jesus prays for you because you lost your job, he also prays that your belly will always have food and that your children will have clean clothes because Jesus knows what it is to hunger and to be dirty. And now God the Father knows too.
When Jesus mediates our prayer, it means that not only does the Father get to experience humanity, but we get to experience the Lord because the Holy Spirit is inside each of us. That is what it means to be a Christian – the Lord has set up shop in each of our hearts. And he’s in for the long-haul.
The more we pray, the more we strengthen that relationship, and the more we affirm the bonds that Jesus created two millennia ago. Let’s look and see how that happens by turning back to Luke.
According to Jesus’ outline, a prayer should always begin with praise and thanksgiving. This is where we show our appreciation for all the things God has given to us in our lives. And on the days when we feel as if nothing is good, then we thank him for our very breath that we breathe and that we can come to him like we can with no one else in our lives.
Then Jesus tells us to ask for what we need. The Lord does not expect us to be able to always know the answers to life’s questions and he understand that sometimes the things we need are very basic – like bread to fill our stomachs and clean water to drink. We get to ask for what we need even before we ask for forgiveness for all the things we’ve done wrong.
Jesus puts asking for forgiveness as the very last thing in a prayer, but being Jesus he also adds a little addendum. “As we forgive those who sin against us”. We say the words glibly these days, but Jesus was pointing out that if we want to be forgiven then we must be willing to forgive ourselves. That was essential to so many of his parables, that we do for others what we ask for in return. We shouldn’t ask God to save our house if we are unwilling to let a friend sleep in our bed when he needs a place to stay.
As I said before, prayer strengthens our relationship with the Father, a unique bond that was created by Jesus Christ. The reason the bond is unique is because before Jesus the Israelites had a relationship with God, but it was different from what we have today.
In 2 Chronicles 33:1-13 Manasseh was a bad person. We could make excuses for him and say he had a lot of responsibility thrust upon him at a very young age – not many 12 year olds are ready to run a country. However, Manasseh was lacking something more than age, he was lacking knowledge of God. All of these Jewish laws he broke went directly against the Lord. He desecrated what God had made sacred by putting up shrines to idols in the holy temples of the Lord. He was blaspheming in ways that the people God kicked out of Israel had not even done!
But when Manasseh ended up with his back against a wall, a hook in his nose and shackles on his feet, he had nowhere to turn except the one God he had never paid attention to. He had been so busy searching elsewhere for the answers that he never saw the truth that was staring him in the face. So finally, Manasseh turned to the God he had ignored, blasphemed against and began to pray. He prayed not just with his head, but with his heart and soul. He humbled himself for the first time and the Lord was MOVED by his entreaty and LISTENED to his plea and he ANSWERED Manasseh’s prayer.
The Lord showed Manasseh forgiveness and it was only then, through an answered prayer that Manasseh learned that the Lord is God. This is something we already know, this is a gift we have been given by Jesus Christ. We know that the Lord is God because Jesus has chosen to reveal the Father to us just as he promised in Matthew that none but the Son knows the Father and all those he chooses to reveal Him too.
We do not need to search among false idols or to look anywhere but to the Lord for what we need. We know that our Lord, Jesus Christ, is God. Manasseh committed a lot of evil before he learned this truth and began to follow God’s will. What is our excuse?
Psalm 24 told us that the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it and all who live here are also the Lord’s because he created the earth. The Lord, therefore, is more powerful than anything we can imagine and he has proven it to us all in different ways. When we pray to the Lord, when we give him heartfelt prayers and act according to His Word – we receive the blessing of His Holy Spirit. The Lord has promised to give us everything we need.
The problem for humanity in general and for Christians in particular is that believing this promise takes a lot of trust. It takes a lot of faith on our part. We have to humble ourselves as Manasseh did and not let our pride and wayward thoughts to take us from the path of Jesus Christ. When we pray the prayer Jesus has given to us we do so because Jesus is the center of this church. He is the shepherd that guides his flock and any shepherd worth his salt will make sure all of his sheep are well fed and have a place to rest.
Even though we know this, sometimes it seems impossible to believe that a prayer can change so much in our lives. Perhaps it is because we cannot see the Lord. We all believe he is present here today in this church and yet if you look around, his physical body does not seem to be here. It’s hard to constantly believe in someone that we cannot touch or see. That is where our faith comes in.
In Hebrews we are told that faith is being sure of what we hope for and we are certain of what we do not see. Just as the Lord made the earth out of nothing but words spoken, our faith is a belief in what we cannot always see with our physical eyes. This is what Manasseh learned about faith, but it took almost being destroyed before we could learn to depend on the Lord, to know that the Lord is God. He learned that without faith it is impossible to please God because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that God rewards those who earnestly seek him.
We know that prayer is our connection to the Lord God. We know that our relationship with the Father is being mediated through His Son and that we have the Holy Spirit living inside of us. All of us here have been given an immeasurable gift because when we pray, we can be certain that we are heard. Your voice lifted in prayer means something. Your faith in God’s response also means something.
If you want to know how to act according to God’s will, if you want to know that you’re listening to God – then you need to believe that God is listening to you. You need to open your spiritual eyes to new truths, ones that may not be obvious at first. The Lord is speaking to you. The Lord is never done working. It is time to take a moment and make sure that you are still speaking to the Lord in the way He taught us to pray. It is time to take a moment and make sure you have not given up because I promise you, the Lord has not given up on you.
Amen.
One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, "Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples."
2He said to them, "When you pray, say:
" 'Father,[a]
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come.[b]
3Give us each day our daily bread.
4Forgive us our sins,
for we also forgive everyone who sins against us.[c]
And lead us not into temptation.[d]' "
5Then he said to them, "Suppose one of you has a friend, and he goes to him at midnight and says, 'Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, 6because a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have nothing to set before him.'
7"Then the one inside answers, 'Don't bother me. The door is already locked, and my children are with me in bed. I can't get up and give you anything.' 8I tell you, though he will not get up and give him the bread because he is his friend, yet because of the man's boldness[e] he will get up and give him as much as he needs.
9"So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. 10For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.
11"Which of you fathers, if your son asks for[f] a fish, will give him a snake instead? 12Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? 13If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!"
Jesus never does anything in half measures. When the disciples would ask him how to do something or to explain a parable to them, Jesus would always give them more than they had bargained for with their question. They asked Jesus, “Teach us how to pray” and not only did he tell them how, he also told them what will happen when they do it.
Two weeks ago I told you that the Lord should hold the reigns of this church. That His will be done and that requires something from us. It does not mean we remain passive, but instead we must act. But how do we know how to act? How do we know what is the Lord’s will?
When Jesus tells the disciples how to pray, he tells them how prayer is a powerful tool. It is a link between you and the Father. It is the way we communicate with God. We’re lucky because Jesus mediates our prayer which means even before we begin to pray, Jesus is praying for us. And as we pray, Jesus continues to pray for us, mediating what we need and desire and what we are feeling to God the Father. And then Jesus brings the Father’s response to us in the gift of the Holy Spirit.
That means prayer helps us to become better mothers and fathers, better brothers and sisters and better friends – in general we become better people. Prayer opens our eyes to the spiritual life, to what before our eyes could not see. It is all done through Jesus Christ. When he became a man who is also God, he created a means for God the Father to understand our humanity in a whole new way – because now God the Father experiences exactly what it means to be human through Jesus Christ. As Jesus prays for you because you lost your job, he also prays that your belly will always have food and that your children will have clean clothes because Jesus knows what it is to hunger and to be dirty. And now God the Father knows too.
When Jesus mediates our prayer, it means that not only does the Father get to experience humanity, but we get to experience the Lord because the Holy Spirit is inside each of us. That is what it means to be a Christian – the Lord has set up shop in each of our hearts. And he’s in for the long-haul.
The more we pray, the more we strengthen that relationship, and the more we affirm the bonds that Jesus created two millennia ago. Let’s look and see how that happens by turning back to Luke.
According to Jesus’ outline, a prayer should always begin with praise and thanksgiving. This is where we show our appreciation for all the things God has given to us in our lives. And on the days when we feel as if nothing is good, then we thank him for our very breath that we breathe and that we can come to him like we can with no one else in our lives.
Then Jesus tells us to ask for what we need. The Lord does not expect us to be able to always know the answers to life’s questions and he understand that sometimes the things we need are very basic – like bread to fill our stomachs and clean water to drink. We get to ask for what we need even before we ask for forgiveness for all the things we’ve done wrong.
Jesus puts asking for forgiveness as the very last thing in a prayer, but being Jesus he also adds a little addendum. “As we forgive those who sin against us”. We say the words glibly these days, but Jesus was pointing out that if we want to be forgiven then we must be willing to forgive ourselves. That was essential to so many of his parables, that we do for others what we ask for in return. We shouldn’t ask God to save our house if we are unwilling to let a friend sleep in our bed when he needs a place to stay.
As I said before, prayer strengthens our relationship with the Father, a unique bond that was created by Jesus Christ. The reason the bond is unique is because before Jesus the Israelites had a relationship with God, but it was different from what we have today.
In 2 Chronicles 33:1-13 Manasseh was a bad person. We could make excuses for him and say he had a lot of responsibility thrust upon him at a very young age – not many 12 year olds are ready to run a country. However, Manasseh was lacking something more than age, he was lacking knowledge of God. All of these Jewish laws he broke went directly against the Lord. He desecrated what God had made sacred by putting up shrines to idols in the holy temples of the Lord. He was blaspheming in ways that the people God kicked out of Israel had not even done!
But when Manasseh ended up with his back against a wall, a hook in his nose and shackles on his feet, he had nowhere to turn except the one God he had never paid attention to. He had been so busy searching elsewhere for the answers that he never saw the truth that was staring him in the face. So finally, Manasseh turned to the God he had ignored, blasphemed against and began to pray. He prayed not just with his head, but with his heart and soul. He humbled himself for the first time and the Lord was MOVED by his entreaty and LISTENED to his plea and he ANSWERED Manasseh’s prayer.
The Lord showed Manasseh forgiveness and it was only then, through an answered prayer that Manasseh learned that the Lord is God. This is something we already know, this is a gift we have been given by Jesus Christ. We know that the Lord is God because Jesus has chosen to reveal the Father to us just as he promised in Matthew that none but the Son knows the Father and all those he chooses to reveal Him too.
We do not need to search among false idols or to look anywhere but to the Lord for what we need. We know that our Lord, Jesus Christ, is God. Manasseh committed a lot of evil before he learned this truth and began to follow God’s will. What is our excuse?
Psalm 24 told us that the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it and all who live here are also the Lord’s because he created the earth. The Lord, therefore, is more powerful than anything we can imagine and he has proven it to us all in different ways. When we pray to the Lord, when we give him heartfelt prayers and act according to His Word – we receive the blessing of His Holy Spirit. The Lord has promised to give us everything we need.
The problem for humanity in general and for Christians in particular is that believing this promise takes a lot of trust. It takes a lot of faith on our part. We have to humble ourselves as Manasseh did and not let our pride and wayward thoughts to take us from the path of Jesus Christ. When we pray the prayer Jesus has given to us we do so because Jesus is the center of this church. He is the shepherd that guides his flock and any shepherd worth his salt will make sure all of his sheep are well fed and have a place to rest.
Even though we know this, sometimes it seems impossible to believe that a prayer can change so much in our lives. Perhaps it is because we cannot see the Lord. We all believe he is present here today in this church and yet if you look around, his physical body does not seem to be here. It’s hard to constantly believe in someone that we cannot touch or see. That is where our faith comes in.
In Hebrews we are told that faith is being sure of what we hope for and we are certain of what we do not see. Just as the Lord made the earth out of nothing but words spoken, our faith is a belief in what we cannot always see with our physical eyes. This is what Manasseh learned about faith, but it took almost being destroyed before we could learn to depend on the Lord, to know that the Lord is God. He learned that without faith it is impossible to please God because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that God rewards those who earnestly seek him.
We know that prayer is our connection to the Lord God. We know that our relationship with the Father is being mediated through His Son and that we have the Holy Spirit living inside of us. All of us here have been given an immeasurable gift because when we pray, we can be certain that we are heard. Your voice lifted in prayer means something. Your faith in God’s response also means something.
If you want to know how to act according to God’s will, if you want to know that you’re listening to God – then you need to believe that God is listening to you. You need to open your spiritual eyes to new truths, ones that may not be obvious at first. The Lord is speaking to you. The Lord is never done working. It is time to take a moment and make sure that you are still speaking to the Lord in the way He taught us to pray. It is time to take a moment and make sure you have not given up because I promise you, the Lord has not given up on you.
Amen.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Taken Over
18"Why do you call me good?" Jesus answered. "No one is good—except God alone. 19You know the commandments: 'Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, do not defraud, honor your father and mother.'[d]"
20"Teacher," he declared, "all these I have kept since I was a boy."
21Jesus looked at him and loved him. "One thing you lack," he said. "Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."
22At this the man's face fell. He went away sad, because he had great wealth.
23Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, "How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!"
24The disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus said again, "Children, how hard it is[e] to enter the kingdom of God! 25It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."
26The disciples were even more amazed, and said to each other, "Who then can be saved?"
27Jesus looked at them and said, "With man this is impossible, but not with God; all things are possible with God."
Many times when we read this story about the Rich Young Ruler in Mark 10:17-31 we are told that everyone should learn to share, to give, not to count possessions as important.
But what if material wealth isn’t the thing you don’t want to give up? Every person in the world has a vice or addiction or attachment that means more to them than it should. Perhaps it is your baseball card collection from when you were young. Maybe it is your mother’s fine china, handed down through four generations. Perhaps it’s those fudge pops that your wife keeps buying even though you can eat four in one night. Perhaps it is alcohol, drugs or you watch too much television.
There is nothing wrong with enjoying what God has given to us. We would be miserable people if we did not take time to enjoy life’s simple pleasures. When we work hard all our lives, we deserve the chance to take the weekend and go to the beach or somewhere nice every once in awhile.
All of you sitting in the pews today know what your vice is. Some of us only have one, while others will have more. The young man in the story loved his material wealth. Look at this story, it conveys how much he loved what he had. The young man runs to Jesus, kneels before him and calls him Good teacher a sign of utmost respect. Jesus tells him, why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. But the man is not to be dissuaded by Jesus’ admonishment. Still, he replies, Teacher! What is it I lack?” the man was so sure that he didn’t have enough. Right there is the first sign of how the material possessions had taken over his thinking.
But Jesus looked at the man, he saw him and he loved him for who he was. In Matthew, Jesus replies, “If you want to be perfect, go sell all of your possessions give them to the poor and then come, follow me.” In Mark, Jesus says there is one thing you lack, in response to this man’s desire to own. But each version does say that when the man heard this, he was saddened for he had many possessions.
This was the same man who had just run forward, an undignified thing to do back then. If this man was as wealthy and important as the story tells us he is, he never should have been hurrying. Important people always walked as if the world waited for them. So here is a man who is so eager to learn and to follow the way of the Lord that he forgets his dignity. Then even after Jesus admonishes him he is still not dissuaded and continues to question. But as soon as he hears what it is that he must do, he turns away. Someone who had followed all of the commandments his entire life could not follow this one thing Jesus asked of him.
If you asked Jesus what you lack, if you asked him how to be made perfect, what would his response be to you? And would you be able to give up what holds you back from eternal life? There is something we all hold tight and don’t want to let go. For some it is wealth and for others it is something completely different.
If you have your bibles, please turn to Exodus. Exodus is where God calls his people. He calls them out of the land of Egypt and slavery to come and worship Him. Many think that God called them out of Egypt to give them the land of milk and honey, but it says he wanted them to be able to worship. Exodus 3:11-12 it says, But Moses said to God, "Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?"
And God said, "I will be with you. And this will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain."
The Israelites were never able to fully worship the Lord until they had wandered in the desert for 40 years. When they first got to Mount Sinai they were so busy complaining and making a golden calf to worship that they never truly worshiped God. Instead, they spent the next forty years learning how to get rid of their excess baggage so they may do what God had originally intended – entering the Promised Land and worshipping God.
Think about when you start planning a two week vacation. The first thing we want to do is pack a ton of clothing. Then we add the extra stuff that we don’t dare leave without just in case. By the time we are done packing we have twice as much as we really need. But if our trip turned from a two week vacation to 40 years in the desert, it wouldn’t be long before we started to get rid of extras to make our load lighter and our way easier.
We do the same thing in our hearts. We carry around excess baggage that prevents us from getting to the places we should be as quickly as we could. That is why the Holy Spirit is always working on us, helping us to refine and reform our lives. She helps shape us into people that can walk in the desert efficiently, without the vices that would prevent us from entering the Promised Land. Because isn’t that what we all want to eventually do? Enter the Promised Land?
But just as the rich young man could not enter heaven until he gave up his wealth, we cannot enter heaven until we give up that excess baggage we carry around with us. Those things that weigh us down, hardening our hearts to God’s truth, and preventing us from living the life Jesus has called us to. It was the same for the Israelites. They held onto the past and did not want to let go so that they could embrace the future with the Lord.
They complained all the time! I would not have wanted to be Moses because he constantly had to put out fires. They complained about food and water so God provided bread from heaven and quail and dew. Then they complained about not having exotic food. Then, when Moses finally got them to the Mount Sinai and he was gone for only a few days they created a golden calf to worship rather than trust in the Lord.
It was no wonder that the Lord led them in circles in the desert for so long. They needed every bit of that time to learn and to grow. So it took them forty years of wandering to get their hearts in the right place. It took forty long years for them to rid themselves of excess baggage. They needed to learn to depend fully upon God for all things and no longer worry about tomorrow.
How long will it take you?
Jesus tells us in Mark 10: 24 that it is hard to enter the Kingdom of God. We are a sinful people full of pride, envy and other sinful ways. Jesus has called us to be Christians, people that consider the Lord before they act or speak. Jesus has called us to be his people just as the Lord once called the Israelites to be his people. Are we going to take as long as they did to understand the gift of salvation, the gift of deliverance we have been given?
The Lord calls us. He calls us to worship Him. To love others. To give of ourselves. Before we can do any of that, we need to get rid of the sinfulness inside of us. We need to let go of what holds us back from entering the Promised Land. We need to open our hearts to the working of the Holy Spirit so that we may become better people, not perfect or good for that is God alone, but better.
When we worship the Lord, something changes inside of us for we have opened ourselves up. We have made ourselves vulnerable and as hard as that is to do, the blessings we are given by God for doing it, are abundant. But first we must ask ourselves what would Jesus say we must give up, what is it we lack? And then, we must not turn away from Him as the rich young ruler did. We need to be willing to work on our hearts, our minds and bodies. We are called to be the people of Christ. The only way we can be those people is when we give ourselves up to the Lord, so that no longer is it our vice that has taken over our minds and hearts but it is the Lord that has taken us over.
It is the Lord that keeps us going, not some material possession. It is the Lord that is the way, the truth, and the life. It is the Lord that is the bread of life. Let us take into our hearts and minds, all that is our God, Father, son and Spirit. Let the Lord take you over and let go of everything else so you too may enter the Promised Land - the Kingdom of Heaven. Amen.
Monday, April 12, 2010
Proclaiming the Kingdom
We are God’s people. We have been given the gift of salvation because we have heard the Word of God proclaimed to us and we have listened. We have been called to preach and teach the Gospel to the entire world. We are God’s called people.
In this passage of Acts 28:23-31, Luke ends a story that is still not finished today. Perhaps that is the reason we are not told that Paul dies in Rome. Instead, Luke tells us that Paul preached and taught the Kingdom of God and Jesus Christ to all those who would listen. This is important for us to think about because Luke could have ended with Paul’s death and then a persecuted people could have been left with another martyr. But rather, we are being told that death does not stop the preaching of the Word - because as long as the Holy Spirit is active, nothing and no one can silence the Gospel.
In the area I grew up, we had a lot of flooding and so a dam was to be built where a town resided. The town was to be flooded, as part of a large lake for which a dam was being built. In the months before it was to be flooded, all improvements and repairs in the whole town were stopped. What was the use of painting a house if it were to be covered with water in six months? Why repair anything when the whole village was to be wiped out? So, week by week, the whole town became more and more bedraggled, more gone to seed, more woebegone. "Where there is no faith in the future, there is no power in the present."
This world is cynical and without hope. Too often we can let ourselves be dragged down into the same cynicism and hopelessness such as that town that no longer had a future. We, as Christians, are called to be in the world but not of the world. When we feel like outsiders and like nothing will ever go our way, we need to remember the future belongs to Jesus Christ who is The WAY, the TRUTH, and the LIGHT.
When Paul gets to Rome, we read the first thing he did was to go to the Jewish leaders and began to speak to them about the Gospel and Jesus. He spent a whole day talking to them and using the Law of Moses and the Prophets to try to convince them. He was telling them about the faithfulness of God as he deals with a faithless people who have so often rejected the messengers of God. He was telling them that there was still hope if they would allow themselves to listen. Some of them did, but more did not. His last words to them were from Isaiah to explain why some can hear the Word and others cannot.
Paul warned them that their rejection would mean the Good News would be preached to the Gentiles because he knew they would listen. That does not mean Paul was telling the Jewish people they could never be saved. On the contrary, Paul knew that they would always be God’s people but now the Gentiles would be included. Why is Paul so sure that if Jewish people will not listen to the Gospel that the Gentiles will?
The unbelievers or gentiles are not wicked and evil people. They are just like you and me, but have not heard about the grace they may receive through Jesus Christ. This is why they will listen to what Paul has to say. They have no idea the salvation of God is for everyone and when Paul shares this Good News with them it is like when in Luke the rejected host sends out for the maimed, the blind and the lame to sit at his dinner table. These outsiders come because they have nowhere else to go. Unless someone invites them, unless someone shares the Gospel with them, they are without hope. The poor will come, the gentile will listen because they are empty enough to hear and accept the invitation that is being offered to them. They see the gift and they are willing to receive it.
We need to learn to thirst and hunger. We need to want God deep inside of us. When we empty ourselves, we are able to be renewed. We have been blessed by God, for it is God that gives us all we have, but we have stopped responding to his blessings. Why does God bless us? So that we may bless others!
Why is Christianity growing in the poor countries, in the places where people are belittled and hungry and sick? They are empty and someone saw that and began to preach the Kingdom of God to them. Then the sick, the blind, the hungry were filled with hope from the Holy Spirit, they were given the gift of salvation and were made a promise that God will keep even when we break our end of it. The blind were given a vision; the hungry were given food that does not perish. Jesus tells us we cannot live by bread alone. But here in America we sure do try!
D.L Moody, an American evangelist of the 19th century once said, "I believe firmly that the moment our hearts are emptied of pride and selfishness and ambition and everything that is contrary to God's law, the Holy Spirit will fill every corner of our hearts. But if we are full of pride and conceit and ambition and the world, there is no room for the Spirit of God. We must be emptied before we can be filled."
If we could learn to empty ourselves, if we could remember that everything we are given is not by our own efforts but those of Jesus, we would be better for it. Our faith would not be timid and our lives would hold conviction. Luke 24: 48, Jesus tells his disciples that they are witnesses. We are a called people. Jesus has given us the gift of salvation and we have been called to witness to this promise of life everlasting. We witness through blessing others as we have been blessed. We witness by speaking out against injustice and hate. We witness by opening our hearts to those we have closed them to. We witness by loving Jesus and making no excuses for it.
As we witness to those around us, we need to remember Paul did not preach on the subject of an unknown God who is near, but rather he talked about the kingdom of God and the Lord Jesus. He was specific and he was purposeful in his message, even to those he knew would not like what they were hearing. We may not be able to walk into a synagogue or a mosque, but that does not prevent us from reaching out to those of other religions and faiths to make contact. We are all God’s children. We are all called by the Holy Spirit to lead good lives of faith. The only way to do that is by welcoming every person into your heart and extending your hospitality to those who have never had the chance to discuss who Jesus Christ is.
We do not bring people to salvation, but we can help them hear the Gospel by preaching the Kingdom of God and the Lord Jesus Christ. Faith is about listening to the unconditional promise of salvation. Hearing the words and understanding the Truth in them, the truth that is Jesus Christ. Our faith in Jesus comes from the working of the Holy Spirit. That means we cannot get there without the Lord.
But before we can see that and act upon it, we need to be empty enough; we need to be hungry enough to keep seeking Jesus in every moment of every day. If we are not looking for the Lord in all that we say and do – then we are missing the point. The Lord created the world out of nothing which means all things come from Him. Let us thank Him for the blessings he has bestowed upon us by sharing the Gospel, by proclaiming the Kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to all those who would listen.
Amen.
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