Welcoming God

Genesis 22: 1-14
Matthew 10: 40-42

Welcoming God

When you picture a welcoming home, there are certain things you expect for it to be considered a comforting and warm place. For some of us, it may be a fireplace in the living room, or a bunch of knick-knacks everywhere, or perhaps you find open spaces welcoming, and for others it is blankets on the chairs and lots of cushy pillows everywhere. When we think of welcoming people, most of us have the same kind of idea about what makes a person welcoming.

Most of us would agree when I say that people we find welcoming are those that smile when they open the door, they ask you to come in and sit down, they seem glad to see you and then you proceed to have a nice conversation. Perhaps they will ask you if you would like something to drink or eat while you talk. They may show you where the bathroom is or they will tell you to make yourself at home. These are all things that are done to make a person feel comfortable in another person’s home.

In the UCC, we have this idea called extravagant welcome. We feel that Jesus did not turn anyone away, and therefore neither do we. We understand that Jesus was all about welcoming people into his fold, there was never a person he refused to help or accept. Even as he hung suspended by his wrists he cried out for God to forgive his tormenters, “for they know not what they do.” 

The UCC believes that those who welcome others into the church, are giving thanks for what God has done for us. God welcomes, and also feeds the hungry, forgives sins, stands with those who are poor and oppressed, comforts the suffering, and becomes a home for those who wander. In gratitude, faithful Christians welcome strangers. A surprise in the Bible is the way you welcome a stranger expresses how you embrace the very presence of God as we see in Matthew 10.

Perhaps you are wondering why there is a story of Abraham offering up his son Isaac paired with this story of welcome in the book of Matthew. The reason is that faith and hospitality go hand in hand. Our faith comes from Jesus and the way we welcome God into our lives and the way we welcome strangers are linked together. Abraham is called the Father of our Faith because this man believed so strongly in God that he was willing to give up his only son because God had told him to. Let’s look back at Abraham’s story.

Abraham and Sarah were a wealthy, older couple living in what we would call a city today. One day, Abraham hears a voice calling to him and when he responds he finds out that it is God talking to him. God tells him to leave his nice home and friends that he has gathered around him in the last seventy years, and goes into the wilderness. God had a great new place – a new home for Abraham and if he listened, he would give him descendents as numerous as the stars in the sky. He tells his wife and they agree to head to this new place God has called them too. God has issued an extravagant invitation, and Abraham and Sarah have accepted this invitation on faith alone. Faith in God helps him welcome God’s call.

But everywhere they went and everything they did, Sarah was still barren. How can they have descendants as numerous as the sand at the shore if she could not have even one child? Sarah is afraid that they will get to this new place and she will not feel welcome at all, she’s going to be miserable and uncomfortable in this new home because she believed God’s promise and now she feels as if she has been duped.

So Sarah comes up with a plan and has her servant Hagar sleep with Abraham and she becomes pregnant. What Sarah did not realize is how hard it would be to watch her husband exclaim over the growth of the baby in Hagar’s belly or how Hagar would now be treated in some ways as well as Sarah despite her being a servant. I’m sure Sarah probably thought she would adopt the baby and call it hers, but that isn’t what happens. Instead, Sarah’s jealousy over the very plan she devised becomes too much for her to ignore so she threatens Hagar who runs away.

Sarah created an unwelcoming home because she lost faith in God’s promise. She tried to create her own happy ending by twisting God’s promise into something it was never supposed to be and made everyone around her suffer as a result. Thirteen years pass by and a couple men come to visit Abraham and Sarah sat in her tent and fumed because it turned out these men were angels sent to give Abraham a message.

The message was the same one they had been hearing for the last 20 years with no fruit to bear and so Sarah finds herself laughing bitterly in the tent when she hears them speaking. But the angels call her on it and she is left to think about where her lack of faith has gotten her. Sarah no longer felt welcome in her own home because of the things she had done due to her lack of faith in God. Her husband had a son by Hagar and Hagar was contemptuous of Sarah for her barrenness. Her husband was frustrated with Sarah’s lack of faith and she herself felt empty inside. Her disbelief in God’s promise created an unwelcome, unloving and inhospitable atmosphere for them all.

When Sarah does become pregnant and gives birth to Isaac, both Abraham and Sarah are very protective of him. After all they had gone through, after all they had given up and experienced, they wanted nothing to hurt or harm this precious boy. So when God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, the amount of faith it took to go so far as to have the knife held over the boy’s heart – it took more faith than most of us have.

But you see, Abraham never lost faith in God like Sarah did. He believed in what God told him and was rewarded. There he was, his hand holding a knife over the heart of his beloved son and he hears God’s voice calling to him and he replies, “Here I am”. As he has always done, Abraham welcomes the voice of God, he welcomes the messages God gives and he believes and has faith in them. Abraham’s faith in God helps him to welcome, listen, and obey God’s hard requests.

Now Matthew 10 tells us that all who welcome us welcomes Jesus and therefore welcomes God. Those who give welcome to the sick, the poor, the hungry and all those in need will never lose their reward in heaven. As we have seen through Abraham and Sarah’s story, faith in God and our willingness to welcome God’s word and God’s people are linked together. There have been times in your life where you felt unwelcome and unloved. You may have felt like a burden upon those around you. But here in this church and in our denomination, we have made a promise to not do that to anyone who needs us because we know intimately the pain of being unwelcome.

It’s a relief to know that no matter what you wear, how you talk or what you do in your personal life, here in this church you will always be accepted as one of God’s children.

Amen.

Covered Ears

Acts 7:55-60
John 14: 1-14

Covered Ears

The two scriptures we read today seem at odds with each other. In one we have a man, a disciple of Jesus being stoned to death because he was doing what Jesus had asked them all to do – go out into the world and witness to the glorious acts of God and Jesus. In the other scripture we have Jesus telling the disciples that if they do as he had told them, anything they ask in his name will be done.

So why, if Stephen was doing as the Lord asked, why has God let Stephen be stoned to death? Didn’t Jesus say that all who believe in him will do wondrous works, greater even than Jesus himself had done? He said, ASK ME ANYTHING, ANYTHING in my name, and I WILL DO IT. Yet poor Stephen, doing as the Lord commanded, finds himself dragged out of the town square into the wilderness so the people could kill him.

If this was you or me, I’m sure we’d be thinking we just got the raw end of the deal. There are a lot of moments in life that mimic this story. There are instances in all of our lives where we can say we were doing exactly what we were supposed to be doing, at exactly the right time and still we got the raw end of the deal.

Think about it, there is always someone who worked really hard, but another person received all the credit. Someone in this room has probably been promised a promotion if only they did these few things and after they did, another person got the position. When you were a child, perhaps your sibling broke a lamp and you got blamed for it. These things seem to happen to the best of us, we are told one thing and we believe it and as soon as we put our faith into that thing, we are let down.

It seems incredibly unfair that Stephen is killed for doing the very thing God wanted him to do. It seems incredibly unjust of a supposedly righteous God to allow a disciple to be hurt for following the plan God had put in place. Reading these two scriptures does not give me a lot of confidence in following the Lord. What about you?

We need to think about this again. It doesn’t seem right that a good and kind Lord would do this. Who can put their faith in a capricious God, one that would place us like pawns on the chessboard to be gobbled up by the enemy? If Stephen, a wonderfully kind man who was a prophet can be killed, then what chance do all of us have? It sounds like we too would be expendable.

This was where I was at the beginning of the week. I had all of these questions floating in my head and I couldn’t figure out what God was trying to tell me. I wanted to force these scriptures to be something they weren’t and as soon as we try to force the scriptures to be something they are not, we have forced God to be something God is not. So finally, I stopped forcing and started listening. That was when God let me in on a little secret I will share with all of you.

Jesus tells us that anything we ask for in His name we shall receive - easy enough to understand. So then if we go back to Stephen’s stoning let’s see what he asked for. “But Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. “Look,” he said, “I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” At this they covered their ears and, yelling at the top of their voices; they all rushed at him, dragged him out of the city and began to stone him. Meanwhile, the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul. While they were stoning him, Stephen prayed, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Then he fell on his knees and cried out, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” When he had said this, he fell asleep”.

Stephen asked for Jesus to receive his spirit and then as he fell to his knees he asked the Lord to not hold this sin against his murderers. Stephen didn’t ask to be saved. Just like Jesus could have asked for a thousand angels to keep him from the cross, Stephen could have asked to be saved, but didn’t. Instead, Stephen understood that the greatest tragedy wasn’t his death because soon he would see his Lord in all God’s glory. No, the greatest tragedy was a group of people who refused to hear a word of truth about God. They refused to such great lengths as to kill another innocent person.

The violence of their reaction really strikes me. They covered their ears like it physically hurt them to hear those words from Stephen’s mouth. It was like a piercing beep inside their brains, they could not stand to listen and so they covered their ears, but it wasn’t enough. These words were pulling apart the very fabric of all they had believed in and so therefore it must be stopped. And so they silenced that piercing voice that spoke the truth.

It makes me wonder how often we do the same thing. It makes me think back to different times in my life where I refused to hear any opinion but my own. I refused to consider a different perspective because that would make my beliefs tumble down like a tsunami crashing against them. It’s scary to be challenged to think differently. It’s scary to think something you have believed your whole life could be wrong. We forget that sometimes our ideas about life hold us captive and that if those ideas change, maybe our captivity will change. Maybe we will be set free.

One thing I have learned in life is that as soon as we think we have our faith figured out, we need to go back to the drawing board. It is very dangerous to ever think we know for sure what God is all about. It’s dangerous to think we have all the answers or that God could not possibly continue to reveal more truth to us about what it means to be a Christian and God’s child. When we begin to think we have seen it all and done it all and know it all, we have become blind and deaf to the Lord’s Holy Spirit. We lose our ability to change and grow, we have lost our ability to become closer to God because we think we have this ‘being a Christian’ thing all figured out.

This is an example of covered ears and we need to ask ourselves where we have become blind to God’s voice. Perhaps there is something you believe about God, about Jesus, that isn’t true. Stubborn belief in something is not the same as having faith. Stubborn belief is just refusing to acknowledge any opinion but your own, not even God’s opinion matters to such a person. Faith is about understanding we know nothing completely, we understand nothing completely, but we believe completely in God’s love for us anyway.

I’m challenging you this week to be open to other opinions but your own. I challenge you to keep your ears uncovered so that you may hear the word of God whispering in your ear. I hope that whatever you have been holding onto so stubbornly will stop holding you back from experiencing the truth of Jesus Christ. Allow your hearts, eyes and ears to be opened by the Holy Spirit and may the Lord bless you in ways you never expected because of it.

Amen.

The Road of Broken Dreams

Acts 2: 14a, 36-41
Luke 24: 13-35

The road of broken dreams, the road to Emmaus is where Jesus finds us and brings back to fullness and light.

Sometimes we are blinded by our pain and loss and confusion, and we wonder if even God knows what comes next for us. In the midst of our pain, do we sometimes limit our viewpoint, and obscure our own vision from seeing the pattern and path that we are to follow?

The road leading away from the holy city these two men are traveling is the road we are taking too. Where have our wounded hearts and downtrodden spirits blinded us to the truth that Jesus walks with us and talks with us? The text today makes us ask ourselves if faith can be found in the garbage of a shattered life and faith? Well, the heart knows more than the head!

As the men are walking along, Jesus shows up on the road and they begin to talk to him. They mention what has happened in Jerusalem this last week when Jesus asks questions about it. Sadly, they tell him they had hoped Jesus would redeem Israel, and now something even more strange has happened in that the women in the group had been told by an angel that Jesus was no longer in the tomb, but had risen from the dead. They had gone to the tomb and it was as the women said, but they did not see the angel or Jesus himself.

Jesus’ response to their pain is to begin a long recitation of the Torah scriptures. Where is the sensitivity of the one they called Messiah? But Jesus shows his connection to the faith tradition of these men’s past when he begins speaking of the Torah to them and making connections between those scriptures and the one they had hoped would redeem Israel. He is forming a bond with them since they have yet to recognize him AS the risen Messiah. He is merely a stranger walking the road to Emmaus with them and who does not seem to know what has taken place these past few days.

These two men walking down the road, know that the women of the group had seen Jesus as well as an angel. They had heard that “Easter” had arrived in the resurrected body of their beloved Messiah, but it has not sunk in yet. They do not feel it in their heart and souls. They are dejected and miserable because of the awful way Jesus died. The humiliation and pain he suffered as well as the horror they felt at the killing of not only Jesus, but their hope in a greater good. Their anguish prevents them from fully believing what Mary and Mary Magdalene had seen that Easter morning.

And so, it is for us sometimes. We go through the 40 days of Lent, and we try to pray more and seek out God’s face and to feel the Holy Spirit more truly in our lives. And then comes Good Friday and we experience the utter loss of hope and then Easter arrives and for whatever reason, the joy is not present. We cannot get past our pain. The anguish in our souls is too heavy and deep to experience true happiness at knowing that the Christian story does not end in death and loss, but in the joy of a resurrected Savior and life eternal for us.

Easter does not always come in three days. Stones are rolled away, but sometimes we stay deep in the tomb. There are a lot of things that prevent us from enjoying Easter the way we are meant to. Sometimes our hearts are burdened with too many cares for us to fully let joy bubble to the surface on Easter morning.

What should we do when we have reached our wit’s end, when what we thought was worth our lives has left us washed up emotionally, financially, physically, and spiritually?

There once was an ant that felt imposed upon, overburdened, and overworked. You see, he was instructed to carry a piece of straw across an expanse of concrete. The straw was so long and heavy that he staggered beneath its weight and felt he would not survive. Finally, as the stress of his burden began to overwhelm him and he began to wonder if life itself was worth it, the ant was brought to a halt by a large crack in his path. There was no way of getting across that deep divide, and it was evident that to go around it would be his final undoing. He stood there discouraged. Then suddenly a thought struck him. Carefully laying the straw across the crack in the concrete, he walked over it and safely reached the other side. His heavy load had become a helpful bridge. The burden was also a blessing.

Sometimes we are so blinded by our burdens that we cannot see how they could possibly become a blessing. But the truth of the matter is that if we stop our grumbling for a moment, if we close our eyes and take a deep breath, if we allow for just a moment our minds to empty of our troubles we are able to see things more clearly. When we stop our busy-ness and our complaints, it gives the Holy Spirit a chance to speak to us. It gives us a chance to open our eyes and see the troubles in our midst hold a purpose and the stranger we encounter on this journey is there to help us.

As the two men walked along the road to Emmaus, Jesus walked with them until the end and then he went to leave them until the men protested and asked him to join them for dinner. Jesus had given them renewed hope as they walked along, and then he offered them a choice. Did they want him to continue to walk with them or will they let him walk away? They ask him to dinner and it is as he takes the bread, blesses and breaks it and gives it to them that they finally see that the wise man on the road walking with them is none other than their risen Lord and Savior, the one they had mourned and missed the last three days.

Jesus always leaves us free to turn our backs on him. We must choose to let him into our hearts. It’s always a choice to see the hope rather than the darkness; to enter the light of the garden rather than stay in the darkened depths of the tomb. I urge you to invite Christ back into your heart today. I urge you to see where God has been working in your life, even in the darkest and most trying moments you have experienced. I urge you to remember that your God is one that does not leave you alone to walk through the desert, but instead he is ahead, behind, and with you at all times.

A little boy was eagerly looking forward to the birthday party of a friend who lived only a few blocks away. When the day finally arrived, a blizzard made the sidewalks and roads nearly impassable. The lad’s father, sensing the danger, hesitated to let his son go. The youngster reacted tearfully. "But Dad," he pleaded, "all the other kids will be there. Their parents are letting them go." The father thought for a moment, and then replied softly, 

"All right, you may go." Surprised but overjoyed, the boy bundled up and plunged into the raging storm. The driving snow made visibility almost impossible, and it took him more than half an hour to trudge the short distance to the party. As he rang the doorbell, he turned briefly to look out into the storm. His eye caught the shadow of a retreating figure. It was his father. He had followed his son’s every step to make sure he arrived safely.

We spend so much of our time wanting life to be a certain way and experiencing a much harsher reality that sometimes the scriptures seem to be unrealistic to our jaded eyes. You have spent enough time experiencing the desert wilderness. Although God has walked with you every step of the way, it is time for you to enter the garden, to find that Promised Land, to experience Easter joy at the idea of your Savior defeating death and sin for your sake.

Let your eyes be opened, feel that burning in your heart, and may your life be changed forever by the knowledge you do NOT have to stay in the darkened tomb! Come out and rejoice for Jesus has set you free!

Amen.