Repent and Live!

Ezekiel 18: 1-4, 25-32

Matthew 21: 23-32
 

There were 3 preachers in a Starbuck’s Coffee shop who were discussing the time when life began. They each gave their opinion of when life begins.

One preacher said "Life begins when the child takes his/her first breath."

The other said "NO," then he finished, "It begins when the child is conceived."

But the last preacher said "You both have the wrong answer! Life begins when the last child leaves home and the dog dies!"

Prayer: Lord, I am glad to say that life begins when we give our sins to Jesus. Thank you Lord that we are able to come to an altar of repentance and say... I need you Lord, I need you! In Jesus’ name, Amen.

 Today we are going to speak of repentance and salvation using the two texts we read earlier. The passage in Ezekiel speaks of repentance in the typical OT way. The Lord tells the Israelites that it used to be that if the mother or father would sin, then the children were punished, if a tribe of Israel sinned the descendents of the tribe were punished as well. But the Lord tells them through Ezekiel that no longer will this be true.

 Instead, a person’s sins are their own and only they would deal with consequences. In the text of Matthew at first it would seem that Jesus is speaking only on authority and obedience. But at the end, he ends with this response: “And even after you saw this, you did not repent and believe him”.  Jesus is also sharing with the Jews how they may be saved and that is through repentance of their past sins just as God had told the Israelites in the book of Ezekiel.

 Since we are speaking of repentance and salvation today, let us take a deeper look at them both. Repentance is another word for contriteness, sorrow, regret, and guilt. However, in the Hebrew language the word for repentance literally meant to turn your back on or turn away from. So when a person repented of their sin they would promise to do the exact opposite of what they regretted doing in the first place.

In a remote portion of Canada, there is a small town called Wabush, which was completely isolated for many years. But as it always seems to happen, eventually civilization reached Wabush and a road was cut through the wilderness to reach it. Wabush now has one road leading into it, and thus, only one road leading out. If someone would travel the unpaved road for six to eight hours to get into Wabush, there is only way he or she could leave---by turning around.

Each of us, by virtue of our human nature, arrives in a town called Sin. As in Wabush, there is only one way out--a road built by Jesus himself. But in order to take that road, one must first turn around. That complete about face is what the Bible calls repentance, and without it, there is no way out of town.

We repent because we are sorry for the awful deeds we have committed. We do not understand the depth of our sinful nature until God has already forgiven us. That may seem strange to think about. We say we are sorry after God has already forgiven us? I can just see some of you thinking, “Isn’t that like closing the barn door after the horse escaped?”

The fact that God forgives us and blesses us when we don’t deserve it and even before we have realized the depth of our sin against God is what makes grace such a risky thing.

Author Philip Yancey, in his book What’s So Amazing About Grace, calls these things loopholes. We all understand loopholes. Webster’s defines a loophole as a means of evading something unpleasant - a hole that provides a means of escape.

Yancey notes that in his book he provides what he calls "a one-sided picture of grace - portraying God as a lovesick father eager to forgive, and grace as a force potent enough to break the chains that bind us. He writes: "depicting grace in such sweeping terms makes people nervous, and I concede that I have skated to the very edge of danger. I have done so because I believe the New Testament does, too."

He then proceeds to tell the story of a friend of his he called Daniel. Daniel was about to leave his wife of 15 years for another woman, someone younger and prettier. He knew the personal and moral consequences of what he was about to do. But he had a larger concern - and he asked his friend "Do you think God can forgive something as awful as I am about to do?"

What a question, huh?

Yancey pondered, "How can I dissuade my friend from committing a terrible mistake if he knows forgiveness lies just around the corner?"

C.S. Lewis once wrote, "God gives where he finds empty hands." Then Lewis noted that a man whose hands are full of parcels can’t receive a gift. Yancey agreed with this because he reflected, "Grace must be received. Lewis explains that what I have termed “grace abuse” stems from a confusion of condoning and forgiving. To condone an evil is simply to ignore it, to treat it as if it were good. But forgiveness needs to be accepted, as well as offered, if it is to be complete…and a person who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness." Ultimately, Yancey told his friend that, yes, of course, God could forgive him. But he also challenged him with these thoughts:

What we have to go through to commit sin distances us from God. We change in the very act of rebellion, and there is no guarantee we will ever come back. He said to his friend, "You ask me about forgiveness now, but will you even want it later, especially if it involves repentance?"

Consider what a tremendous risk God took by announcing forgiveness in advance. Yancey says that the scandal of grace involves a transfer of that risk to us. So yes, we are forgiven before we even admit remorse, and God forgiving us is often what provides the catalyst for our contrition.

 However, we must always be careful to not take it too far. If we assume that we are forgiven even before we have committed an act of sinfulness we have abused God’s grace. We must take on our own sense of responsibility for our actions and our knowledge of God. God tells us in Ezekiel that our sins are our own and we will pay for them. Jesus tells us with the story of the two brothers that our choices hold bigger consequences than our words.

 While one boy said he would go, he did not. The other said he wouldn’t help, but he did. Jesus uses this story to speak to us of not only the chief priests’ actions toward John the Baptist and Jesus, but the way we act toward God.

 We may say that we are Christians and that we love the Lord and our neighbors, but if our actions do not speak just as loudly, then we are like the first son. However, there are many people in this world that say they are not Christians, they say they do not follow God, and yet their actions show that God is with them. We sometimes reject the very people that God has accepted.

This parable in Matthew presupposes the rejection of Jesus by the chief priests and elders and by many of the Jews. As religious leaders they claim to be faithfully obedient to God, but they are blind to the fact that authentic obedience includes responding in faith to the new things God is doing. Do we commit the same sin?

Their refusal to see God at work in John’s ministry is anticipated in their rejection of Jesus. The sinners of Israel such as the tax collectors and prostitutes who had carelessly ignored the demands of their religion, will take a place in the kingdom while Jesus’ adversaries will be shut out.

Sometimes, religious followers become so blinded by their rituals, their ideas about culture and society and even about following the exact demands of God, that they become lost to what God is really up to. It happened two thousand years ago to the Jewish leaders and followers. It makes me wonder if it is happening today.

When I see so many denominations fighting over things like if we should baptize children or adults. Should we give communion by intinction or in the pews? Should we use the trust fund money to rebuild our crumbling church or help feed families who have lost their source of income? Should we allow openly gay members to be leaders of the church or should we not? Should we join two, three churches together to save money or allow all of us to struggle to support our individual buildings? These are the things we fight over. These are the things we allow to divide us.

Christians can also become blind to what God is doing in the world around them. How easily “Church work” degenerates into little more than simply maintaining the institution, with no excitement concerning what God’s active grace is doing and consequently no enthusiasm for evangelism and renewal! We say that we are going to work in the vineyard, but instead of harvesting the grapes we spend our time rearranging the stones along the path!

Repentance is the only way to accept salvation, it is the only way to get back to that Spirit of revival and renewal. We too often condone our bad behavior by focusing on the letter of the law instead of the Spirit of God. The Holy Spirit helps us to follow Jesus the way we are supposed too. Not by just miming what he has told us to do, but by truly changing us, helping us to turn our backs on our past sins and turn toward a future filled with life-eternal life.

Amen.

Grumble, Grumble

Exodus 16:2-15

Matthew 20:1-16

The two scriptures passages we read today are about people who grumble against God because they have lost sight of what God has done for them already and what God will continue to do for them into eternity. These two passages have much to teach us because we often find ourselves grumbling to God about our lives and the unjust ways we are treated.

 The story in Exodus is about a food crisis which leads to a faith crisis for the Israelites.  God responds to this crisis of faith with very little anger. He tells Moses, “I will rain bread on you!”  God gives the Israelites what they need – food for their stomachs and in doing so their faith is restored in God. The story in Matthew is also about God’s generosity told through the story of a generous vineyard owner. In both stories, the people are grumbling about their conditions because they have lost sight of what God is all about. Our God can be found not just in the extraordinary blessings of life, but in the ordinary blessings as well.

 God gives us blessings and life through ordinary means, things that happen to us every day. This is important because if God only blessed us in ways that happen outside the ordinary, we would absent God from our everyday life. No longer would we see God in the laughter of children, or in a moment spent with our families, or in the way a stranger opens a door for us so we may go first. The result of losing God in the ordinary by looking for God in the extraordinary is that we will feel empty and lost in the world. We are searching for God and cannot find God except by miraculous means because we have forgotten that God is everywhere and in everything. Miracles do not occur everyday. If we look for God only in the miraculous, we will spend most of our lives never seeing God. And yet, God is with us everyday of our lives – if we only know where to look.

 God gives the Israelites the food to help their faith crisis as well as their food crisis. He says that in giving them this they shall know that YHWH is their God and that it is God that provides them with all things. God will appear to them to connect the food to God – thereby connecting the ordinary to the extraordinary presence of God. This is one of the reasons why we say a blessing upon our meals before we eat. It reminds us that our food comes not just by our hard work, but by God’s generosity. It reminds us that every meal is a moment to commune with God through accepting that blessing of food and being grateful.

Material and spiritual well-being are closely connected. It is often found that there is strife in households that are hungry or in poor health. The lack of provisions and ability to care for family causes fear which turns to anger, distrust, and often violence. A full belly and a warm bed at night go a long way to alleviate anger and the propensity toward violence. As white middle income Americans, we do not know very much about severe poverty, hunger, and the abuse it often generates. However, that does not mean we cannot appreciate what we have and help others to receive the same blessings of food to eat and a place to sleep. And by helping those people, just as God helped the Israelites, it will bring them back to God.

 As a church, we need to make sure we are not looking for God only in the extraordinary, but also in the everyday dealings of our lives. It makes a difference in how we behave as a church and how we deal with life outside of this church. In finding God in the daily routines we are able to return to the confession that the Israelites were finally able to see once God had provided them with food:  It is you God that gives us what we need. It is you that brings us out of slavery and self-imposed exiles, you are God and you are Lord Almighty.  This confession is one that helps bring us back to God and to find God wherever we look, instead of fruitlessly searching for the miraculous.

 There are times when we resent God’s generosity. We do not resent it when God is being generous with us, but when we think of people we believe are unworthy. There are many times when I have heard someone say, “Why do bad things happen to good people, but the bad people die old, happy, and rich?” We sometimes grumble to God about what other people have received and think that what we have been given is not enough.

 The parable in Matthew is targeting a specific group of people. There were some Jewish Christians that resented being lead by former pagans. They resented that these former pagans had put in less time than them and yet had received leadership positions in the church. Sometimes we feel the same way. We see someone being recognized for their hard work in the church or at work and we think, “What about me?! I’m constantly working long, hard hours and no one pays any attention.” It is easy to grumble to ourselves or to others when some seem to get the recognition and we get nothing. Such resentment can be overcome only by fixing our gaze on the goodness of God who is generous to all.

 The parable in Matthew is often offensive to us, because as Americans many of us believe in a capitalist system which rewards a person based on what they have done. If you do more, you receive more, if you do less you receive less. This is also about a sense of justice; Americans have a highly developed sense of justice, perhaps too highly developed because we have taken over the court systems with petty grievances.

 We empathize then with the grumbling workers in verse 12, we too have known capricious employers who reward lazy workers more generously than faithful, hardworking employees. But this passage begs us to ask, can GOD be so unfair?

 Since the beginning of time, human beings have tried to bargain with their many gods. We make promises, “God if you do this for me, I will do this in return.” In Genesis 28, Jacob tries to bargain with God for protection and sustenance, promising to reward God with a tithing of his income. We will often do the same thing. “I went to church this week, I paid my dues Lord, now you owe ME something!” However, the climax of this parable is what the vineyard owner tells the workers, “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?” The vineyard owner claims the right to pay his workers not on the basis of their merits but on the basis of his own compassion. This is what God does as well.

 Jesus has brought salvation to all people, no matter when or where they come to God in their life. They may be a murderer, a drunk, a hardworking school teacher, a child, an IRS agent or a person of another faith. But if they come to Jesus and profess belief and humility, if they begin to have love in their hearts for God and humanity – Jesus will give them eternal salvation. The same salvation we have been given and yet we come to church every Sunday, we offer up money and time and prayers. We may feel we have done more to earn our salvation, but the vineyard owner tells us that it is not about us, it never has been about what we do.

 It is all about God’s generosity. God gives salvation to us because Jesus Christ died for us. Otherwise we would ALL be condemned to hell. There is nothing you can do to earn salvation. You have not worked harder for it than the atheist who comes to God in the last three minute’s of her life. You have not earned God’s blessings because you tithe more than everyone else on your block. That is not the way God works.

Why should such generosity be condemned as injustice? God is good to all. Jesus reveled in the incredible magnanimity of God. Of course Jesus believed in the God of Justice, but in his vision of God the divine compassion greatly outshone the divine justice. Those who worship such a God must imitate his generosity, not begrudge it.

What it comes down to there is nothing we can do to earn what is freely given out of love. Not to mention the gift being given so completely outshines anything we have done or could do, that in the end – we are all eleventh hour workers. None of us deserves the glorious future that God has prepared.

 These two passages leave us with this truth, a confession we must make often when we forget ourselves and begin to grumble. It is you God that gives us what we need. It is you that brings us out of our self-absorption and self-imposed exiles, it is you, God, that makes us good and holy, you are God and you are Lord Almighty. I confess Lord; I am an eleventh hour worker. It may not seem fair to us that the neighbor who never goes to church will get to go to heaven too, but Lord, I thank you that even though I am a sinner, you are generous and loving to me.

Amen.

Judging Our Brothers and Sisters

Genesis 50: 15-21

Romans 14:1-12

Our human condition often has us treating people with contempt. We ignore our own weaknesses and pick out other people’s to make us feel better. Yet God, who is perfect and good and holy, does not pick on us and does not point out our weaknesses. Instead, God loves us as we are and helps us to become better people through that love.

 As Christian people, we are to be the same as God. We are not to hold people in contempt but instead we are to love them and try to understand them. Paul gives several different examples of the different ways people worship God and how sometimes we use the different ways of worship to hold ourselves apart from other people. We tell ourselves that our way of doing things is better than another denomination and we have nothing to do with them. When someone in our church has an idea to do something differently, sometimes we look down upon them instead of thinking on what they are saying and why they are saying it. We are supposed to be tolerant and loving as well as accepting.

  In the same way, Paul tells us here in the letter to the Romans that some of us are stronger than others, but in their strength they must also be tolerant and accepting. He is addressing the problem in Rome where there are not many Christians and the few that there are have been fighting over whether to eat meat that has been sacrificed to another god. Some of those early Christians saw nothing wrong with eating the meat, they felt that no matter what god it had been sacrificed to, they knew that our one true God would never be threatened by imaginary gods and people’s sacrifices to them. Therefore they saw the meat as safe to eat without blemishing their own belief in Jesus. Yet other early Christians saw this as blasphemous because of the Ten Commandments that said there is only one God and we shall not bow down before other gods. They felt that eating the sacrificed meat was bowing down and worshipping these other people’s gods.

 The point Paul makes is that both are correct. Isn’t that interesting? He tells neither side they are wrong, but instead tells them to co-exist in their rightness. The reason they are both right is because of how passionate they are about their belief. To the second group, to eat the sacrificed meat would be to falter in their faith and they could not do that. So Paul tells the first group to make allowances for the other’s feelings on this matter and to not push their confidence that God would not mind about the meat upon the other. In this way, he said that the first group of Christians was stronger in their faith and could eat the meat without faltering in their faith, but to understand that not everyone is that strong or that sure about their faith.

 This passage is underscored by the first text we read today in Genesis. Joseph’s brothers were weak men. They were jealous and petty and vindictive in their younger years and after their father died, they feared for their very lives because of the way they had treated their brother Joseph. Many of us would have felt the same fear. We have all done selfish things that have hurt other people. Sometimes the person we hurt retaliates quickly, but sometimes that person waits for just the right moment to seek revenge. We fear them and what they will do. We worry about it and think on how they might hurt us back. Instead of coming to the injured party with our metaphorical hat in our hand and an apology on our lips, we plot ways to escape the outcome of our actions.

 This is exactly what Joseph’s brothers did as well. They still had not learned a lot about God and about their brother in the time they had spent with him since he revealed himself to them. So when their father died, they got together and began to plan – the same way they had done when they were young and threw him into that pit. They decided to use their dead father to promote peace and forgiveness through what I’m sure they considered a minor deception.

 But Joseph knew his brothers. Perhaps he knew them better than they knew themselves, certainly better than the brothers knew Joseph. Even though he saw through their little deception, he did not hold it against them. He saw something that his weaker family could not. Joseph saw the hand of God in all that had transpired. Joseph knew that everything that had happened occurred because it needed to. Joseph suffered as a young man so that God could put him in the position to save thousands of people, including his beloved father and his brothers.

 As all of you are aware, today is the tenth year since the 9/11 attacks. There have been many stories being replayed about that time, many personal events recounted and even some untold stories have been shared. One story, about a security guard named Rick Rescorla reminded me of the story of Joseph. Rick worked as the director of security at Morgan Stanley in the South Tower. He was a dedicated man who held fire drills twice a year no matter what and when he heard what happened to the first tower, against orders to stay put, he put his emergency evacuation plan into effect. He saved 2,500 people’s lives that day and gave up his own to do it. The last glimpse anyone had of him, he was on the tenth floor of the South Tower and headed upstairs.

 We are here today because of people like Rick Rescorla and Joseph. These are people that are willing to put others before themselves. They understand that life is not just about taking all you can for yourself, but that sometimes we are meant for better things. We are meant to be God’s workers. I believe that Rick was a man that listened to the voice of God and even though his bosses told him to do nothing, that everything was okay – he instead listened to his heart, listened to the voice inside of him that said, “Get those people out of there. Now.”

 I began this sermon by telling you that we often treat people with contempt to make ourselves feel better. We judge other people as lesser or ourselves as better than them. I also said that God is holy and good and we become better people by experiencing God’s love. A strong person, a strong Christian is one that knows they are not perfect, but we see glimpses of perfection at times. When a person sacrifices their life to save another, when a person gives up their dream job so they can put food on the table, when any one of us gives up our wants to help another person in need – that is God’s perfect love in action. There is no time to be judgmental or hateful. There is no room for it.

9/11 was a terrible, awful experience. And yet, I look at that time as a miraculous one as well. So many people did the right thing that day instead of the easy, selfish thing. Rick’s story is one of thousands. I’m not sure how God does it, but 9/11 was not a victory for the terrorists that attacked the United States. God was the victor that day because even in the midst of all that destruction, God created goodness and mercy and love so that when we look back ten years later, we can see faith and hope even while staring at the awful pictures of pain and death.

That is the Christian legacy. That is God’s love in action. Christ is always victorious. As a church, we should learn from these things. It would be easy to hate all Muslims for the actions of radicals. It is easy to judge harshly, but it is much harder to be forgiving and loving toward everyone. But as Christians we hold in our hearts that God is always the victor because as Paul said to us today in Romans, “For we will all stand before God’s judgment seat. “‘As surely as I live,’ says the Lord, ‘every knee will bow before me; every tongue will acknowledge God.’  So then, each of us will give an account of ourselves to God”.  Let those words steady and strengthen you in your faith so that you may love even those whom others would despise.

Amen.

Different Gifts, One Body

Isaiah 51: 1, 6-8

Romans 12: 1-8

 We often say that the children of this church are our future. Not only do I agree wholeheartedly with this statement, I have also made the same comment a time or two. It is good that we know the children are precious and we need to be there for them. But I cannot help but think about the present when we start thinking about the future.  

Sometimes we put too much emphasis on the future and not enough on the present. While our children are our future, we are the present. If we do not do what is proper and right, there will be no future for our children. In the current political and economic climate, we have a few hard decisions to make which will affect our children’s future for some time to come.

In each generation there is a tipping point, there is a moment that defines the people. For some it was WWII and for others it was the feel-good era of the fifties. For others it was the social movements of the 60s or the free spirited 70’s. Some people think of the Wall Street crash in the 80’s and others think of Desert Storm in the 90’s. This last decade I’m sure many of my generation consider the wars to be one of the biggest things happening in the world and then there are others whose whole life was turned upside down by this Recession.

As a church in the middle of all these defining points in people’s lives, we should be making an impact as well. The scriptures from Isaiah and Romans tell us how we may do that. Isaiah speaks to us about looking to the rock from which you were cast and from the quarry from which you were hewn. Since we are church that was built from stone from a mountain quarry, this image is especially powerful. We come from a group of people who were willing to carry down huge piles of stone after they worked hard to cut them from the mountain to create this beautiful church. We come from people who were once four separate churches that understood God’s call to be one church and one body and so they formed the UCC.

In a more personal way, the rocks we are cut from are our parents and the quarry that we were hewn from is our family. We look to them, our past, to help us stay true to our path in the present. God tells us it is important to pay attention to where you come from and those that came before us. It is important to respect our roots and traditions even as we look to the future for new ideas and new ways to grow.   

It’s easy to be discouraged when we look at the past. Too often all we see is our failures. We see the fights with family members or that time we lost a job or when we hurt someone we loved by being selfish. In Isaiah we are told that we are to lift our eyes to the heavens, to see the wonder and glory of God Almighty. Why? Because even the worst of things will seem like nothing at all when compared to God. Our God who offers us eternal life and Isaiah said that if we accept, salvation will be ours forever, God will never forsake us. 

Isaiah does not leave us with just those words though. He says them again, “Hear me, you who know what is right, you people who have taken my instruction to heart: (That would be us and all Christians) He goes on to say we should not fear what mortals offer us, we should not be terrified by anything they will try to do to us. We should not fear because God is the creator of everything around us and God has complete control of what God created. There is a plan; there is a reason for it all. We may not understand now, but we trust in God for our salvation.          

In Romans, Paul is reiterating what Isaiah has said. What happens in this world is temporary and we are not to be tempted to bend to the dictates of evil because we have been given the gift of a higher power. If we do not conform, if we stay true to God’s path we will be able to see what he has in store for us more clearly, we will be able to understand more, and we will be strengthened even more as a result. Every action has a reaction. Every decision a consequence. Weigh your actions and decisions carefully against the measure of eternity.

Paul then tells us that humility is the only way to make it through this life without messing up too badly. When we are humble we hesitate to do what we want because we are not sure our wants are what are best. Instead, we look to the faith God has given to each of us, the grace he has bestowed upon us to help us figure out if what we are doing is God’s will or our own. We look to each other as a church to help us figure out what God wants us to do, to help us stay true to God’s will.

Paul reminds us that we are many people, but one body in Christ because the weight of every decision a church makes is upon all our shoulders. Therefore, if the church makes a fatal error in judgment, we all carry the burden for it. That means we should never let just one person make the decisions but it should be a collective of voices. And each person here should be given a chance to speak because each person is important to this church, each person will carry the burden of our decisions upon them. It is one of the reasons our committees and Consistory only last for a couple years so everyone may have a chance to lead us, to have a voice in what we accomplish.

We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us. The beautiful part about letting every person have a chance to speak is that we benefit from the different gifts of each person. Some of us are good speakers, but not good conversationalists. Some of us are very comfortable walking into hospital rooms to help the sick, but others of us are much better working with our hands. Some of us are good with money and are able to help us grow the church while others of us have a mind for details and are good at organizing church functions. We need each person here. We need the gifts we all offer because that is how a church grows. 

When we keep in mind that each person has a purpose, each person is important to the future of this church, it helps to keep our own pride in check. It helps us to acknowledge differing opinions and to accept that sometimes we will not win every battle just because are sure we are right and everyone else is wrong. No one person can be right all the time, no one has that ability but Jesus. This is why each voice is important because it is the collective of voices, individual in their own rights but coming together as a whole that make the Christian church as well as the UCC special. We want to hear from all of you. We want each of you to have a place here. You are welcome and you are appreciated and you are loved.

May the Lord bless each of you and may each of you use your gifts to help make the future of this church one that is bright and promising.

Amen.