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.

Few Are Chosen

Exodus 32: 1-14
Matthew 22: 1-14

This story is both alarming and comforting when we read it. Last week we discussed the vineyard owner and his two sons and how our actions and our words need to proclaim the same message. Jesus is now telling another story to the Pharisees and it is not just a look at today, but Jesus is telling them what to expect in the future. Jesus’ story of the wedding banquet is a reminder that some people who think they are invited to the Kingdom will be cast out into the darkness, but it also reassures us that the Lord will look in every corner and crevice of the world for those who do belong in the Kingdom of Heaven.

The King sends out an invitation to his guests and at first they ignore his invite, then when the second one comes, they violently kill the king’s slave which has the king retaliate by burning their village. Then the King sends out a third invitation, asking for the good and the bad alike to come to the wedding. This is what the Kingdom of Heaven is like according to Jesus. The expected guests are absent while the most unlikely ones are present.

Comparing God’s kingdom to that of a great banquet is one which would have been very familiar to the Jewish people. It draws on the practice of ancient kings who gave banquets for their subjects and on the image of God as the king who feeds God’s people. This feast is for the King’s son whom we recognize as Jesus. The king is God and the guests are all of us. The first group may be considered to be the Jewish people who violently killed John the Baptist, God’s first messenger and will then later kill Jesus. But isn’t it interesting that God doesn’t give up inviting people?  Instead, God, as the king in the story begins to invite everyone else both the bad and the good, to the wedding feast – and they all come.

Most human institutions have restrictions and limitations on who may be admitted in. For example, colleges require certain GPAs and scores on SATs as well as a certain amount of money to be paid. There are restaurants that require certain kinds of clothing if you want to eat there, some have even begun refusing children under the age of five to enter their premises. There is no organization or institution where everybody/anybody can freely come whether they are good or bad. Our denomination says proudly that we accept everyone no matter who they are or where they are in their spiritual journey, but I also know that on the congregational level, we don’t always make people feel as welcome as the words on our signs indicate that we should.

The great thing about Jesus is that his number one rule was to accept everyone who showed up to follow him. This is the good news of the gospel: Jesus Christ came to save sinners. Through this parable Jesus tells us that the only thing we need to be invited into the Kingdom of God is to have a transformed life. All of the wedding guests wore wedding clothes but one. That one man was cast out because of his lack of proper attire. To have a transformed life, we need to be clothed with Christ. Our wedding clothing is literally Jesus Christ.

For Jesus, the way of consolation is not around judgment, but through it. Sometimes to be able to live with ourselves, we must allow ourselves to be judged. The unrobed man at the banquet is approached by the King and the king says to him, “How did you get in here without wedding clothes, friend?” God approaches us in the same way and will ask us, “How did you get to these gates without having put on the clothing of Christ?” Our answer needs to be more than speechlessness which is all the man had to offer the king. He was cast out of the wedding and likewise, so will we if we have nothing to say.

Gospel living begins with an invitation. One we have all been given which is why we sit here in these pews today. The invitation requires a response from us. Just as when we are given an invitation to a wedding, we must RSVP and then as all of us women know, we immediately go searching for a wedding outfit. Weddings and celebrations require a response from us. One that the unrobed man did not give. He showed up expecting to be fed and looked after while having done nothing on his own.

Don’t get me wrong, grace is still a gift freely offered by Christ. However, the proper response to a gift is to show appreciation and thanksgiving. Many people are called by God, given the invitation that will set them free from the chains of sin. The ones that will be chosen to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven are the ones who are living in a new way, the ones who have responded to the invitation being offered – they are the ones who have put on the robe of Jesus Christ and are living transformed lives.

They have clothed themselves in compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience, as well as love which will bind all of these traits together in perfect harmony – that is the clothing of Christ. The outward effects of the gospel will be felt and seen on the inner heart.  

Within the Christian community there ones like in the parable whom refuse the invitation from God in one way or another. They want the safe, soft side of discipleship, but they shy away from the more difficult work of outreach and social justice. They want blessings from God but they cannot be found when it is time to share in the work of ministry. They can always be counted on to share in a free dinner at the church, but they are not willing to serve a meal in the hunger centre or hand out a bag of groceries at the food pantry. They want peace on earth, but they do not want to work toward that end. They want to end world hunger, but they do not want to miss a meal themselves or make a contribution to work toward that end.

When the king’s first invited guests refused his invitation, he did what many coaches on sports teams will do; he shifted the lineup that was on the field. When a coach believes his players have lost their energy or focus he will replace them with someone else. God has the authority to bench those who refuse to answer God’s invitation for service. The steady decline in the size and influence of the church in the US and in western Europe should be viewed in relationship to the steady increase in the growth and influence of the Latin American, Asian and African countries. If postmodern Westerners are unwilling to accept God’s invitation, then there are others God can and will invite into divine service. God is not dead, although many western theologians have been insisting so for the last forty years. It is only the zeal and passion in the church that seems to have died off.

The good news is that God is still out searching for wedding guests to invite to the banquet. This is the time where we make the decision on what we want to do. Are we Christians in word and deed who will follow Christ no matter where it leads us and how hard it gets, or are we those first wedding guests who would rather not be bothered by God if it requires hard work from us?

Only you can decide. The invitation is clear and it has been given to each and every one of you. Jesus loves you and has invited you into the Kingdom of God – are you willing to put on the robe of Christ and come inside?

 Amen.