With Power

 Isaiah 45: 1-7

1 Thess 1: 1-10

There is a story about three farmers whose fields were adjoined. One was Jewish, one Muslim, and one Christian. Each observed the Sabbath on a different day of the week. One harvest season, bad weather limited the days available for work, and skipping a day for Sabbath observance risked financial ruin. Nevertheless, all three farmers in turn observed their faith, making the choice to stay home on their respective Sabbaths. Upon waking the next day, each farmer found a barn filled with harvest crops. They gave thanks and praise to God, assuming angels had been sent to do the work. In fact, it was the neighbors of differing faiths who did the work in secret.

 Sometimes we are surprised by whom God sends to us when we need help, especially when they are very different from us. This passage from Isaiah speaks of an unexpected savior of the Israelites. They had been exiled for many years now and wanted desperately to go home to Israel. They prayed to God for deliverance, and it came from a foreigner. As a gentile and foreign king Cyrus is perhaps the last person they would have expected to rescue them from the Babylonians. Why not one of their own people, a Hebrew? Why a potential enemy?

It seems like God always has a different agenda and a different way of doing things than we do. Jesus often tells his disciples and anyone who will listen to him that it is not where a person comes from or what religion they practice that matters so very much, it is about what we do with our lives. He gives examples like the Good Samaritan, Nicodemus, the woman with two pence, and many others to show the Jewish people that God is interested in the individual, not the group they are affiliated with. The Lord can save anyone, and often has, throughout history.

 God has a habit of using people to help us whom we would not have anticipated, and we would do well not to make hasty assumptions. A fellow pastor told me a story the other day of shopping at Wal-mart. While he was waiting at the checkout he happened to see a man who was very unkempt. He had long, straggly white hair, blood shot eyes and clothes that had seen better days. As my friend was checking out, the older gentleman said to him, “God bless you, brother”. This kicked off a conversation where my friend learned the older gentleman was a pastor like himself, who does street ministry, working with the homeless and mentally ill. They exchanged well wishes on their individual ministries and my friend walked away. He went to turn around and say one more thing to the man, and he was no longer there.

 Many of us look at people and judge them by their appearances. If any of us would have seen this man at Wal-Mart we probably would have assumed he was a homeless man himself. Or maybe a drunken person with his wild hair and blood shot eyes. Not many of us would have spoken to him, let alone taken a few minutes to find out a bit of his life story. This man is one of God’s workers, but it would be easy to judge him as just another one of those people different from us and too scary to speak to because of his differences.

 But in church, we say that we welcome all people and that anyone who steps through the doors will be warmly received. We tell ourselves that we are friendly to everyone. The world is filled with friendly churches. Friendly churches have room in their pews for new people; willingly welcoming visitors with smiles, warm greetings, and welcome gifts; and they make it a point to host invite-a-friend Sundays with zest and zeal. The world is filled with friendly churches, but what the world needs is open churches.

Churches open to new people are open to their gifts, needs, and wants. Churches that are simply friendly make use of an informal and covert vetting process, a process that moves through a series of questions regarding new person’s past church affiliation, family background, and personal interests. Open churches seek to hear how God might be calling them to widen their circle of discipleship as they embrace the new person. For open churches, two questions work together: How will we share God with others? How is God sharing others with us?

We seek to be friendly here at Trinity, but we also need to be open. There are times when we are entertaining Jesus Christ within these walls and it may be the person we least expect that is representing Jesus. It is people like a man with wild hair and ragged clothes who ministers to the lost people of the streets. It is people like Cyrus who did not know God, and yet saved God’s people from their awful fate. It is people like Paul and Timothy who wrote to the Thessalonians and praised them for turning away from their idols to worship Jesus Christ instead.

 Paul told the Thessalonians that the Lord was with them, present in the power of the Holy Spirit and the good works they were doing in Christ’s name. They had turned away from what was evil and what kept them from God, and turned toward a life filled with grace, love and power. There is so much power for those who are willing to accept Jesus into their hearts. It is not a power that is measurable by any type of equipment; it is not a power that gives us anything we want whenever we want.

 The power we experience is one of unnamable beauty and significance because it takes from us all the burdens, all the worries and all the heartaches this world throws at us daily. It removes the chains of sin and death that drag us deeper into the darkness and instead lifts us up to live life with our Lord and Savior. The power is the presence of Jesus Christ, present through the Spirit of God, who lifts, lightens and enlivens us. We become new people, refreshed and soothed, when we understand the gift of Christ.

 This power comes without a price, but it comes with a condition. We must accept that our ways are not God’s ways. We must start to see the world with different eyes, eyes that are awakened to the idea that just because a person speaks differently, looks differently and believes differently than us, that God could be using that person to fulfill his goals for humanity. We say we do not judge a book by its cover, but when it comes to humanity, we often judge first and then allow ourselves to be surprised later about a person’s character.

 Too often we consider the SUV, three piece suit, and white teeth to be a sign of a good and moral person and the one with dirty clothes, darker skin and unusual demeanor to be bad and immoral. But what might alarm many professed Christians is that Jesus did not look like the first example, he looked the liked the second one. Jesus always seems to be what we least expect. Looks are deceiving.

God delivered Israel through a person that had never heard of YHWH. God delivered all people through someone that was considered a criminal, a common carpenter with a good speaking ability but little else, a person that was stepping above his station. And yet, because of the faith of Jesus Christ, all of us today are saved. Because Jesus was willing to humble himself and become a human, taking on our ills and learning our pain, we will have eternal life. How many of us would have yelled with the crowd, “Crucify him!”?

 It is dangerous to think we would have done things differently than those in the Bible. The reason it is dangerous is because it means we have not learned from the past. The Jews didn’t understand God’s plan and they killed God’s son as a result. They couldn’t look past Jesus’ humble beginnings to his divine nature. When a person walks through these doors, we need to not just be friendly to them, but open to what they have to teach us, rather than what we can teach them. We live by Christ’s example, who did not question those who came to him, but merely accepted them. We need to learn to see every person as an individual who is deserving of our love, compassion, and acceptance.

 Amen.