Notes From Jon

Sermon: “It’s Not Fair!”

July 8, 2007 – Pentecost 6 (C)

Luke 15:11-32 and Matthew 20:1 ff

Introduction: A Sad Story

I’m going to tell you a sad true story that happened to me once – final proof for me that life just isn’t fair sometimes. And I want to get a good “AWWWWW…” from you when I’m done. So let’s practice it, OK?

Back when I was younger, 4^th grade I think, Nintendo was the king of the video game world. Remember those NES machines with the little cartridges you put in the slot? Video games have changed a lot since then.

Well I had a friend, who I’d gone to school with for a while, who had a stash of games. He had TONS of them. And one weekend I had a friend coming over who really liked the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, so I asked Todd if I could borrow his.

He said no, and he never said why really. He had stopped playing it a long time ago. I also knew he had just gotten it back from lending it to someone else. I told him these things, and he still said no. He would not give me the game… even just for a couple of days.

So I fumed and fretted, I even cried, then I called back and asked again. All to no avail. So that weekend, all my friend and I could do was to sit around and stare at the walls.

OK, so we found plenty to do. But I never forgot that moment, when I expected to get the video game but didn’t. At the time, it was the most unfair thing I had ever experienced. And it still makes me sad today.

[this is the point at which you say, AWWWW…]

Fairness and Unfairness

CS Lewis, in his book Mere Christianity, states that fairness and unfairness are basic elements of human life. We are all born with a sense of what’s fair and just, and what is not.

No one has to tell my little Kaitlyn, at 15 months, that it’s not fair when Abigail comes up and snatches a toy she was playing with. It’s innate for her, and it is for us as well. We didn’t learn it from a book or a course on morality – we’re born with a sense of basic right and wrong that is universal to most all cultures. Lewis thinks this is proof of an “intelligent design,” though he wouldn’t use those terms today.

Life just isn’t fair sometimes. It stinks. And most often, it’s unfair in my direction! At least that’s the way I want to see it! And we HATE the unfairness of it – it grates at the very core of our being.

And so we spend a good bit of our time in childhood and adolescence trying to figure out how to come to terms with that fact. Somewhere deep inside we have this feeling that life ought to be fair, that all the scales out to balance out somewhere.

And how do we resolve it? Lots of ways:

• Sometimes we say, “they’ll get what’s coming to them eventually” – how many times have I thought this as someone nearly runs me off the road passing me on 360 or on the way to Blackstone? I always look for the State Trooper to catch them around the corner.
• Or maybe we try to put ourselves in the shoes of the other person – this is my favorite tactic lately. “He must really be in trouble to have to go that fast.” But even then, while this is a good and optimistic outlook on other people, it’s just as possible that this guy was just being careless and stupid.
• Finally, if all else fails, we can always pull out the “end-of-time card:”
  • Either, “He’s going to get what’s coming to him when he answers to God for that!”
  • Or, we fall back on this notion of “stars in our crown,” thinking that there are going to be “just rewards” handed out in heaven – a notion that, popular as it is, I have really found little scriptural evidence for.

Unfairness in the Parables

We’ve just read two stories that I remember from growing up in church, and thinking, “that’s not really fair, is it?”

• Luke 15 – This story of the prodigal son and the older brother (which, by the way, modern translations are beginning to call “the Compassionate Father” instead of the “Prodigal Son”)
  • Background: For the story of the brothers, the beginning point was the complaint by the Pharisees that Jesus was eating with all the “sinners” – tax collectors, prostitutes, and town vagrants. If he was so righteous, why would he be hanging out with THOSE kinds of folks?
• Matthew 20 – The parable of the workers who all get paid the same wages at the end of the day .
  • This parable comes after the encounter with the rich young ruler, who turned away when Jesus asked him to give up all he had. Then Peter pipes up and says, “you know, Jesus, WE’VE given up everything and followed you… what will WE get”

Jesus tells these stories in response to two real-life versions of the older brother complaining about someone else getting a reward!

So SURELY, we would think, this is place where Jesus will give us the answer! Finally, an answer to all the unfair things that happen in my life!

We may THINK Jesus is going to fix it. But while these are good parables and well-told stories, Jesus actually doesn’t do a thing to address the unfairness of the situations:

• At the end of the parable of the workers, he basically says, “God can be generous to whom he wants to be generous.”
• At the end of the parable of the compassionate father, he says, “You’re right, you’ve been here and been faithful. But let’s go celebrate this lost brother who has come home.”

Never in one place does Jesus “fix” it for us. He doesn’t come in at the very end and say, “now later, that younger brother got what was coming to him. His Daddy laid into him with the razor strap and grounded him for weeks.” He doesn’t say, “when those workers came back the next day, they got half the wages of everyone else.” He doesn’t even pull the end-of-all-time card – “he’ll pay for that when he comes before the throne of judgment.”

I remember being disappointed when I first sat down and studied these two parables a long time ago. Life just isn’t fair, and when Jesus tells stories like this, we want RESOLUTION. We have this notion that the coming Kingdom of God is going to make everything fair and just.

But Jesus stubbornly refuses to try and answer our question. So this parable Jesus told about the workers is usually ignored. And when we read about the prodigal son (or the compassionate father) we usually end when he’s put the cloak and ring on him and brought him in for the feast. We don’t like to be reminded that this black sheep son, who squandered all the family money and practically slapped his father in the face by asking for his inheritance before he died – this wayward, sinful boy got a feast fit for a king, while the ever-present, responsible, and trustworthy got no special treatment at all!

Getting Into Uncomfortable Sandals

I have a confession, and it’s probably one you could make as well. Like most of us, I secretly put myself in the sandals of the older brother. That also puts me in the place of Peter and the Pharisees. And those are uncomfortable sandals to fill.

And why are we uncomfortable? Let’s face it: we’re not mad at the prodigal son, are we? The brother was only a little mad at the prodigal – he expected as much from him. And the Pharisees expected the prostitutes and tax collectors to act the way they did.

No, Peter, the Pharisees, the older brother – they were mad at GOD. They were mad because God wasn’t making thing right like he was “supposed” to. Isn’t this our normal reaction when something unfair happens?

So we see that someone else was saying “it’s not fair” along with us – but it’s not the crowd we want to be lumped into! Here we are, the older brothers and sisters, arms crossed and feet tapping. We DESERVE an answer to this question! We have to make sense of this or the world may collapse around us. But God doesn’t give us the answer we want.

That’s when we have to remember that there are really only two characters in the story of the prodigal son – the Father, and the wayward child. And the main character of all these stories – the story of the prodigal son, the story of the workers, the story of Peter and the rich ruler, the story of the Pharisees and the sinners… the story of you and I – the main character is not YOU and ME – not the older siblings who were “wronged” in some way and wanted it to be made right.

The real main character is GOD – who was wronged in the most unfair way imaginable… and chose the path of love instead.

While we might like to imagine ourselves in the sandals of the older brother, NONE of us can really claim to be that way. Not one of us. Because every one of us has, at some point, been the prodigal son. I know, some of you might cringe at this, but let’s be honest – most of us have more in common with the prodigal. I know I do – and I can at least speak for myself.

We can’t step into the sandals of the older brother because that’s not where we belong. If Peter had stopped in his tracks and thought for a second before he wagged his finger at the rich young ruler, he would have realized – you know, just a few weeks ago Jesus called me “satan” because I was tempting him.

And if the Pharisees had stopped in their tracks before they wagged their fingers at the prostitutes and tax collectors, they would have come to the realization that would have saved them: We’ve done wrong too, because we love our religion more than we love the God we worship.

Another Kind of Unfairness

So before we get out our step ladder and climb up on our high horse, let’s look at an unspoken element that makes sense of the whole thing – at least to me…

Things DO work out in the end, all the scales ARE balanced in the end. But not in the way we want to think. We think a “whipping” is basically the way that these things work themselves out in the end – whether it’s a belt, or a ticket from a state trooper, or standing before the judgment throne.

But that’s not the point of any of it. In fact, in all our talking so far, we’ve missed the BIG POINT.

And here it is:

The big point is not how unfair it is that God accepts this prodigal son. The point is how unfair it is that God accepts ANY OF US AT ALL.

And it really IS unfair, if you think about it… God created human beings to love him and take care of the earth, and only a few days later they have done something he asked them not to do – they sinned. And it all went downhill from there. Murder, greed, jealousy, lies… and that’s just in the book of Genesis!

God’s people keep running away from God, and yet, God keeps accepting them back. He brings them out of Egypt and they complain in the desert, but he takes them back. They build a golden calf, but he takes them back. They chase after other gods, ignore the poor and helpless, sometimes even curse God to his face. But he STILL takes them back.

And in a final act to show just how much he will accept us, God sends his Son to live among us, to walk the hard and dusty roads with us – to love us and heal us of diseases we didn’t even know about.

And what did we do in return? We killed him. And we continue to be sinful and stubborn even today.

It’s just unfair, the way we treat God sometimes. And he could have chosen the path of revenge – lightning bolts from the sky and fire from heaven. He could have chosen the path of strict justice – wipe out the earth again with a flood or natural disaster.

If anyone can say, “that’s not fair,” it’s God. And if anyone has a right to finally slam the door in our face, it’s God.

But he doesn’t. He brings us back in the door, time and time again. Puts the robe on us for the 100^th time, gives us the ring again. Lays out the feast before us, almost a if we’d never been gone.

When God was treated unfairly, he decided to be “unfair” in return – but not in the way that we think of “unfairness.” He decided to be “unfair” and not hold the sin against us. He decided to forgive, decided to love. Love doesn’t have to play by the rules of fair and unfair – love has its own set of rules.

The Solution: What Can We Do?

So what can we do when life (or someone in our life) just doesn’t seem fair to us? Some people choose to be warriors, fighting back every time something happens. Some people have resigned themselves to being doormats, taking a beating over and over again.

But those aren’t the only ways, not the best ways. We can do something, something more powerful than getting even. We can do what Jesus did, what God does for us over and over again: Choose to love anyway.

Remember what Jesus says about how we react when life’s not fair? When someone hits you, turn the other cheek. If someone takes your cloak, give them your shirt too. If someone makes you walk a mile, walk another mile with them.

It sounds silly. It sounds weak. But look at how POWERFUL we become when we do things the world doesn’t expect when things aren’t fair.

During the Civil Rights movement, people who were opposed to segregation were urged to be calm, quiet and loving. The rest of the world expected them to riot, to shoot, to do awful things. But they didn’t. Instead, they chose a different path, and I personally think that’s the reason things changed. People didn’t know what to think!

And that’s what makes the gospel such a powerful message. No matter how unfairly we may have treated God, he chooses to take us in anyway.

Men, I know this is a hard word for us. It sounds like running from a fight. But it’s not. It’s Jesus’ way of doing something much more powerful than a fist could ever accomplish. Because when we strike back, we play into their hands – we act just like we’re supposed to. It’s when we do something DIFFERENT that people start to notice.

This is love, this is forgiveness – treating someone fairly even when they’ve been unfair to us.

Conclusion

So while I wish I could send you from this place to a world that is fair and just, I can make no such promises. And only God knows how things will work out in the end. But in the meantime, we have a job to do that’s hard, one that makes no sense to us or to anyone else.

But it’s the job that saves us. And it’s an act that will make folks notice.

Sermon

June 3, 2007

Trinity Sunday (C)

Dancing is a beautiful sight, if it’s done right. Recently, our church has developed a ministry for our young girls who want to dance, giving them the opportunity to lead us in worship through their movements. I love to watch good dancers at work practicing their art. “Dancing with the Stars” has brought dancing back into the public eye, and I think we’ll see a lot more young people getting into different kinds of dance because of it. That’s a great thing.

What does this have to do with the Trinity? You’ll find out…

How do we talk about the Trinity? It’s one thing to give little illustrations like the one I used for the children’s sermon, but the fact is that this is an awfully hard concept to understand – and one that no one has completely gotten, even though there have been BOOKS and BOOKS written about it.

And why is it important to, anyway?

It’s not up to us to understand every nuance of the Trinity, but it does help us to understand where the doctrine came from and how it makes a difference to us today.

1. It describes the God we worship.

There is the idea that there’s less of a need for the Trinity today than there used to be, or that it was once more understood than it is today. I don’t think this is true. People have ALWAYS had trouble understanding the Trinity. In the days when Christians sadly killed other Christians who didn’t believe just like them, people were killed over this very doctrine.

There is also the idea that this doctrine was just made up out of the blue, or patched together out of a bunch of separate ideas. This would be easy to believe since, even though there are 120 or more references to the trinity in the Bible, there is no direct teaching on the Trinity to be found in all the scriptures. While it’s true that the doctrine was not fully developed until nearly 400 years after Jesus, this does not mean that it was thrown together on a whim. Far from it – the early Christians debated and argued over who Jesus was and what to make of the Father and Spirit for years and years before an agreement was finally reached.

Not just there for confusion – The Trinity wasn’t just put together because people wanted something confusing about their religion. Who on earth wants a complex, mysterious and baffling religion?! We are no different from the earliest human beings in our desire for a religion that is simple, easy to understand and to practice. No, this complex doctrine of three in one was not something people came up with to make Christianity more attractive – if anything, it has made Christianity less attractive over the centuries!

Doctrine describes experience – No, the Trinity came about, like many other doctrines, because people needed a name for something they had already experienced. The disciples were almost all Jews who believed in God long before they ever met Jesus for the first time. Yet, by the end of their three years with him, they had watched him perform countless miracles, suffer and die, and raise from the dead. By the time they saw their last of Jesus, these men had no other option but to believe that Jesus was, in some way, God himself.

Yet this “God himself” had gone out daily to pray to “God himself,” had even prayed with and for his followers. God praying to God? How could this be?

And this God, praying to God, promised that another Comforter would come and would remind them of all the things Jesus had said and done, would empower them to be his witnesses, would live inside them. And once that Spirit came, once again they had no choice but to understand that in some strange way God had come to live inside them too – not as Jesus, who had gone away, and not as the Father, to whom they still prayed and saw at work in the world. Here was yet a third “version” of God.

So what to do? First they had known God as someone removed and enthroned above. Then they had known God as someone who walked beside them. Then they had known God who lived within them. How to understand God in this way?

So the doctrine of the Trinity was born. Not because someone said, “hey, let’s come up with something really cool to make our religion different!” Not because Jesus had sat them down and given them a lecture about it. But because, like all of us, they struggled to find a way to express the things they had experienced of God.

Following the map – What difference does the Trinity make to us? According to C.S. Lewis, doctrines of theology like the Trinity make the same difference to us that a map makes. We look at maps of the Atlantic Ocean today, and we see a lot of blue with spots and typing on it. But while it seems simple to us, what’s actually represented on that map is something very different than a piece of paper with blue ink on it.

It’s one thing to look at a map of the ocean, and another thing to stand on the beach and look at it. It’s one thing to run your finger across the Atlantic ocean on your desk globe, and another thing to get on a canoe in Virginia Beach and strike out for England. Even though the map may look tame, the ocean is anything but tame. And the map will help us get from one side to the other.

And we have that map because every island dot, every beach, every trade route was tediously explored and mapped by sailors over the course of centuries. Now that we’ve been in space, we can make pictures of the world and make maps of places we’ve never been. But before that time, every map had to be made by someone going there – writing out and drawing their own experiences on paper for those who come behind them.

Relying on the experiences of our forebears – So in something that is so complex, so difficult to grasp, we find something that is absolutely essential. It would be silly (and suicidal) to hop in a canoe and head to England without a map and compass – we have to rely on the experiences and wisdom of those who came before us. It would be just as silly to set out to know a God without the wisdom of those who have experienced him before us. And those who experienced God before us have experienced him as Trinity.

Makes us distinct – The Doctrine of the Trinity makes Christianity distinct. No other religion has a God who is at once enthroned in heaven, walking and suffering alongside us as one of us, and living within us and empowering us to do his will. Whether you realize it or not, you

2. You don’t have to understand it to be able to appreciate it.

The older I get, the more I know that I DON’T know. I understand my limitations. And to me, the mystery of God, the vastness of our amazing God – is both frightening to me AND comforting.

While he was working on the doctrine of the Trinity, St. Augustine had a dream one night in which he saw a little boy on the beach. The by had dug a hole in the sand, and he had a spoon and was trying desperately to spoon the water of the ocean into the hole – which of course swallowed up the water within moments. An angel told Augustine: this is how it is with humans trying to understand God. Our minds simply cannot hold it all.

It’s frightening because, like Augustine, we come to realize that there IS something bigger than us. It’s incomprehensible, impossible to understand. As humans, we want things that are simple and things we can control (just look at modern science and technology). But God is neither. I think that might be why so many modern folks are beginning to reject the notion of God altogether.

But it’s also comforting.

As uncontrollable as we are, we can take comfort in the fact that someone IS in control.

As often as we face uncertainty, we know there IS someone who knows.

As small and inconsequential as we feel sometimes, there IS someone who cares for us.

As little as we can do, there IS someone who can do the impossible.

3. It is the whole reason we exist.

This is where it gets practical.

Think of the relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit as the kind that is developed in a true, loving marriage or a deep friendship. In some way that is indescribable, the two really do become one – they begin to complete one another’s thoughts, to understand the other and know what the other needs. There’s trust and honesty that overcome the normal walls we usually put up between ourselves and other people. The two people are still individuals, and yet they are together making a oneness that is bigger than their individual selves. It’s like we live in a dance – moving together to the same music, moving in the same directions, following and leading, working together and not apart.

Now, if you live in that kind of relationship – if you have that kind of marriage or friendship with someone – you know that it’s not an easy thing. In fact, it’s one of the hardest things we do because it requires us to live outside ourselves. And as wonderful as it is, for some of you it might be all you need – you might be perfectly happy if you could move to a deserted island with that person for the rest of your life!

But as satisfying as that kind of relationship is, and as hard as it would be to share it, imagine what it would be like if you could extend that relationship to include EVERYONE. What kind of place would our world be if we could all relate to each other that way?

Well, that’s exactly what has happened on a divine level. God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit have existed for as long as time has been. They have a perfect relationship of love and care for one another, understanding and knowing each other perfectly as One. And God could have stayed that way forever, never needing anything or anyone else. They have always existed in a beautiful dance.

And yet, God chose to make others. And not just to make others, but to offer those others a chance to join in the dance – those ‘others’ are you and me, in case you didn’t realize it. God made us in his image, and has given all of us the chance to join in that beautiful dance, the relationship of perfect love and care.

And rather than that ruining what was there (“three’s a crowd… or in God’s case, Three’s company and FOUR’s a crowd), the dance becomes even more beautiful because all of creation is joining in. And God’s desire is that ALL of creation might join in the dance at last!

Now you and I have a choice. We can work against the dance – step on toes, trip others up, generally move against the flow – or we can join the dance, and invite others to join as well. You can call it salvation, redemption, whatever you like. But when we accept God’s love, we join into that perfect relationship – and begin to extend that kind of relationship to others.

Closing

So this funny little doctrine of the Trinity turns out to be anything but trivial. It’s the whole root of who God is, and what God intends to do with the world.

Does it sound froofy and mysterious? It is. Does it sound confusing? It is. Does it sound campy and far-fetched? It is. And that’s OK. And despite all that, these are the basic building blocks of our faith – the truth of what others have experienced about God, and what YOU and I can experience about God.

So does the doctrine of the Trinity make a difference to you and to me? Absolutely. All the difference in the world.

“Great Expectations”

May 27, 2007 – Pentecost Sunday

Acts 2:1-12

Introduction: Expectations

Expectations are powerful things.

Not too long after we first got married, Tanya and I learned that we have differing expectations in several areas. One of those areas is vacation…

Expectations are powerful things.

Making expectations is something all of us do. An expectation happens when you think ahead about an event or a conversation and form your own ideas of how you’d like that thing to go. Most of you probably had expectations when you came in to Sunday School this morning. Many of you have expectations for this worship service – maybe you expect to leave as a changed person. Maybe you expected to cry this morning. Maybe you have high expectations of my sermon.

Expectations play a crucial role in almost every kind of relationship we have. We have expectations for our marriages, and as a pastor and a sometimes-counselor, I have seen that expectations play a very large role in how well couples get along and stay together. Most often, young couples these days have unrealistic expectations of marriage that they get from TV, movies and love songs. They think that marriage is going to solve all their problems – they’ll suddenly be happier all the time, less likely to get upset, less likely to get angry at one another. We’ll agree on everything, and we’ll all live happily ever after. My spouse will ALWAYS be understanding, loving, helpful, sensitive, and right at my side when I need him or her. That’s a pretty tall order for ANY human being!

Expectations, the experts say, are an important part of management. If we want the best from those we lead, we have to EXPECT the best. If you’re expecting someone under you to act lazily and turn in poor performance, then it’s likely they’ll meet your expectations. But experts say if you expect the best from someone and treat them that way, then you’ll get the best from them. This generally holds true in all areas of life, I think.

Including parenthood… but parenthood is another matter all together. We have to expect the best from our children – but it has to be a REALISTIC best. We can’t simply expect them to excel at school, football, baseball, math, shop class, community service, gymnastics, music and art. That’s placing UNREALISTIC expectations on them. No human being is capable of the expectations we place on our children sometimes, and they know that. We wonder why they grow up to have low self-esteem and don’t want to do anything – all their lives, they’ve been expected to do too many things they simply can’t do.

But as powerful as expectations are, there’s something that’s even more powerful – UNMET EXPECTATIONS. When we expect a certain outcome, and did not expect anything different, we suddenly find ourselves disappointed. Unmet expectations can make us hurt and vulnerable. Our marriage doesn’t turn out quite as we’d expected – lo and behold, we DO fight, we disagree from time to time, and we’re not 100% happy all day long. Lo and behold, our children aren’t the top of every single activity we enroll them in. Lo and behold, my sermon is not what you might have expected it to be.

And it’s those unmet expectations that can maim our spirits for the rest of our lives. When our expectations are unmet, we can either change our expectations, deal with them, or harbor bitterness and anger over those unmet expectations. And that bitterness is lethal.

If we continue to have unmet expectations in marriage, something will eventually have to give. If we continue to have unmet expectations in our work, then eventually we’ll be dissatisfied and want to move on. If your boss continues to have unmet expectations for you, then it’s likely you’ll be looking for another job soon. If we continue to have broken expectations from our church, then eventually we’ll want to go somewhere else.

Human beings and human institutions will always let us down. Even when we have realistic and achievable expectations of people, they will let us down. And after a while, it makes us cynical, makes us stop trusting people. Or worse, it makes us start expecting the WORST in people and things – and those kinds of expectations are the most dangerous, because they’re the ones that we most often find fulfilled! It’s a cycle that just keeps getting worse and worse…

Expectations of God

What kinds of things do we expect from God? Have you ever been disappointed in God? One book that had a profound influence on me is called Disappointment With God, by the author Philip Yancey. And at first I was afraid to pick it up – after all, who wants to admit they are disappointed with God?

But I have been, many times. When I’ve prayed for someone to be healed and it didn’t happen, when I realized the impact that my parents’ divorce had on me. Like many of you, I struggle with sins and temptations that I would be better off without – but God has not chosen to answer those prayers either. I have found, like Job did, that I’m disappointed with God from time to time.

And that disappointment with God is not about God himself, but about my expectations of him. I have expected God to act in a certain way – to answer this prayer that I pray repeatedly, to reward me for doing something I ought to do, to punish me for doing something I shouldn’t have. And on those instances where I do not find God doing what I wanted him to do, it’s like a little dent is made in my faith. And after a long time, all those dents begin to add up.

And if we let ourselves go further and further down this path, eventually we end up with no faith at all. Sure, we believe in God. But we believe in a God who doesn’t hear our prayers, who doesn’t answer when he hears, who refuses to intervene in situations where only he can do something.

And here’s the thing – It’s OK to come to this place. It’s OK to find yourself there. We all do. Job did, and countless other biblical figures did too – Abraham lost faith when God didn’t give him the son he promised right away. David lost faith when God didn’t win a particular battle for him. Even Jesus cried out on the cross, “My God, My God! Why have you forsaken me?”

It’s OK to find yourself there. But it’s not OK to stay there.

Expectations of God

We have expectations of God, too. We expect God to act a certain way, to do miracles and to answer prayers. We expect him to fix things that are broken. We expect him to always give us a warm happy feeling when we come to him in prayer. Expectations were a big part of our discussion in the book of Job this spring – just what were Job and his friends expecting from God?

We have words in the Christian vocabulary for our expectations of God – faith. Hope. When we pray to God, we have FAITH that he will answer. When we or someone we love is sick, we have HOPE that God will work healing. When God has said he’ll do something, we have FAITH that he will do it – though sometimes we place unrealistic expectations on him to do that thing in a certain way or a certain time.

I’m not going to ask you to raise your hands if you’ve ever found yourself there. You know if you’ve been there sometimes – and it’s OK.

Pentecost

Looking back at the passage, I have to wonder what these disciples, these men and women, expected to happen while they waited. In the past two months, they have seen Jesus willingly march to Jerusalem where his enemies are waiting, preach bold messages right under their noses. They’ve watched as Jesus is arrested, crucified, buried, and raised again. They’ve watched him ascend into heaven with a promise that he’ll be back and that something good is about to happen.

And if we hadn’t heard the story already, what would WE expect, you and I? I think I would have expected something a little different than what happened that day – sound like a wind, a few tongues of flame hovering over people’s heads, some quick language learning… come on. Jesus did stuff lots more exciting than that! What about feeding all of Jerusalem with five loaves of bread and two fish? What about raising someone from the dead? What about all of the people of Israel suddenly being healed of their diseases?

But no. A little noise, a little fire, and a lot of preaching. And when it’s all said and done, we’re left asking the same question as those gathered there to hear Peter’s preaching: “What does this mean?”

But there’s a miracle here that we often overlook. And it’s a miracle that still happens today, over and over again.

There is a REAL and AMAZING miracle that takes place on that day of Pentecost – God changing lives, God changing hearts. The miracle is not the mighty rushing wind or the tongues of fire. The great miracle is not these men speaking in languages they’ve never learned.

The great miracle is this scared and huddled group of believers, locked for weeks behind closed doors, suddenly bursting out of the room and sharing their Good News with the world!

The great miracle is the hardened hearts of the Jews, who just a few weeks before had ordered Jesus to be crucified, suddenly responding in faith to the man they had had a hand in killing.

The great miracle doesn’t happen on the outside. It happens on the inside, where no one can see. But just like Jesus’ analogy of not seeing the wind but seeing its effects, so can we see the mighty effects of the Spirit’s work in their hearts.

Expecting God to Act

Sometimes our expectations for God are unmet. Sometimes he doesn’t answer that prayer, doesn’t send miraculous healing for that person. And then what do we do? We either have to change our ideas about God, or we begin to lose those expectations.

And eventually, we can end up cynical – thinking that God really doesn’t answer our prayers, that he’s not listening. Because of our broken expectations, we might think that God is actually out to get us, to do some harm to us because of something we’ve done. We can stop believing min miracles, stop believing in the power of prayer to change anything. It leaves our faith lifeless and useless. We suddenly believe in an impotent God.

And if we don’t see miracles around us happening every day, then maybe we need to change our expectations of miracles. Ever since Jesus left, those physical miracles – healings, feedings, natural phenomena – have been getting fewer and farther between. It’s not that God has stopped working miracles – it just seems he doesn’t do that kind as often anymore.

But here’s the key to what happened that Pentecost Day – those disciples EXPECTED God to do something. They may have expected him to do something different than he did, but they EXPECTED him to do SOMETHING. And because they were expecting it, they were in the right place and the right time when it happened.

God has the power to make the sun stand still, to part the sea, to shake the earth at its foundations. God has the power to heal the sick, to raise the dead, to feed the multitudes. God has the power to move the planets, to fling the stars into space. God has the power to work salvation on our behalf so that we can live in eternity.

But God also has the power to change the hearts of human beings. But have we forgotten to EXPECT him to do that?

How many times have we said of someone else, “That’s just the way they are, and they aren’t going to change.” We’ve trusted them too many times, and been disappointed too many times. We’ve see that they consistently do the things they are not supposed to. And so we write them off.

And “them” might be anyone – our spouse, our family members, someone who’s made themselves a thorn in our side… it might even be a whole community or a whole race of people. We come to a point when we stop believing it’s possible for them to change. And lo and behold, they DON’T change.

Or the “them” might be ourselves. Have I given up believing that God can change my heart and mind? Have I given up hope that he can cure me of the sinful problems I have? Have I given up hope that I can be any different than I am?

Have we given up hope that God can bring new people to this church? After all, everyone around here is “churched,” right? Are they really, or are we just excusing ourselves from our responsibility?

When we place those kinds of low expectations on someone, when we refuse to believe that God can change them or change us, we put ourselves in the awful position of judge and distant observer. Suddenly, we don’t have a responsibility toward them anymore. There’s no need to expect or hope that they will change. They won’t.

Imagine…

I want to try something with you. Close your eyes and imagine that person you think can never change – that person who you can’t trust anymore

Let’s imagine for a moment that they CAN change. Let’s imagine that no matter how many times they’ve broken our trust, no matter how many times they have hurt us, no matter how many times they have done the things they’re not supposed to do… let’s imagine that they can STILL change, even then. Would we treat them differently? Would we continue to share good news with them?

And let’s imagine for a moment that WE can change. Let’s imagine that we can wake up one morning and be free from that illness, that we could wake up and our bodies would be healed. Let’s imagine that we can walk out the doors of this church

Conclusion

We might be cynical about some of our human relationships, but we should NEVER be cynical about God. Because when we stop expecting God to do something, we miss it when he DOES. It’s not that God is bound up in our expectations of him. But we will miss what he’s doing because we’re not expecting it.

What do you expect God to do?

“David Had a Shepherd”

Psalm 23

April 29, 2007 – Easter 1 (c)

This is a familiar passage, one that has brought comfort to many people. But it probably brought the most comfort to David, who wrote it. David wrote from his experience of God, from his own experience of life. And this is the image that he came up with for God.

Of course, no image for God is perfect – they always fall short. But David’s image endures because it is perhaps the best illustration of God that human beings have yet developed. I tried to come up with a better illustration that matched it, but of course, you can’t beat David!

And here’s the important thing about our view of God: how we see God determines how we TREAT God. David’s image is usually used for comfort, but there are things in here that are not always comforting. Since this is the best image, let’s compare David’s image of God to OURS, and see what we find.

David had a shepherd. What kind of God do we have?

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

Shepherds made sure their sheep had all their NEEDS met… not their wants.

Sometimes, we want to say, “The Lord is my doting grandfather, who gives me everything I desire.”

Sometimes we want to say, “the Lord is my waiter, who is there at my beck and call.”

But that’s not David’s God. David had a shepherd.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth me beside the still waters.

Sheep are generally unintelligent creatures, and shepherds had to lead the sheep toward the grass. But he could not make them eat, and he could not make them drink.

Sometimes we want to say, “the Lord is my mother, who sits me at the table like an infant and spoon-feeds me.”

But that’s not David’s God. David had a shepherd.

He restoreth my soul.

Sheep often relied completely on the shepherd for nourishment, comfort, and guidance. When a sheep was sick, the shepherd cared for it. But then he’d put the sheep back out and let it heal on its own – you can only care for someone so much, you know.

Sometimes we want to say, “The Lord is my mechanic – he fixes me up and sends me off to run myself down again.”

Or maybe, “the Lord is my doctor – I only go to him when I’m sick.”

But that’s not David’s God. David had a shepherd.

He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

The word righteousness here means “right paths.” Horses and other smart animals can find their own way through difficult places. Sheep are not that way. Shepherds had to find a path for their sheep that was safe and kept them from harm. But ultimately, the shepherd could only lead – the sheep had to follow. He led them – he didn’t push.

Sometimes we want to say, “The Lord is my pilot. I’ll let him do all the work.”

But that’s not David’s God. David had a shepherd.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. For thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.

The shepherd did his best to keep the sheep from harm, but sometimes things happened. Sometimes, they had to go through rough places. Even then the shepherd didn’t just whisk them away to another place! He didn’t take them out of the “valley of the shadow of death.” Instead, he reassured them and guided them with his staff.

Sometimes we want to say, ‘”The Lord is my hedge and my protector. He won’t let evil come near me.”

Or maybe, “The Lord is my bubble. If I’m really doing the right things, nothing bad will happen to me.”

But that’s not David’s God. David had a shepherd.

The way we see God will ultimately determine how we treat God, how we live our lives.

David had a shepherd. What kind of God do WE have?

I got a unique opportunity this Easter.  Most years, the choir does a cantata so I don’t get to preach.  This year, the choir had the day off.  So I got in TWO sermons just to make up for the others I’ll miss!  The sermons took place at two separate parts of the service.

Why the Cross Matters

1 Corinthians 1:18-25

A few weeks back, a new documentary came out called The Jesus Tomb.  It was put out by director James Cameron, who directed Titanic and lots of other very successful movies.  Turns out that in 1980, a group of archaeologists discovered a tomb with several ossuaries, boxes containing the bones of the deceased.  Names on those boxes include “Jesus, son of Joseph,” Mary, and even “Mariamene,” a name that was reportedly used to refer to Mary Magdalene.  The implications are serious, they claim:  Jesus was no more than a normal human being, who was married to Mary Magdalene, and who had children.  No cross and resurrection, no ascent into heaven.

And this documentary struck a chord in the media and the secular world.  It’s like they’re just grasping at anything that will come along these days to discredit Christianity.  And there’s a reason.  Paul nailed it on the head.  To them, any religion that’s founded on the fact that its great leader was killed has a problem.  It’s got to have a better foundation than that, doesn’t it?

Which just highlights the questions that secular historians – and even very liberal church scholars – have been asking for the past few decades: Can it really matter anymore that Jesus died?  There are some important events in history, and some very critical times even in Jesus’ life.  We can be friends with Jesus without having to buy into all that crucifixion stuff, can’t we?  It all just seems so violent and sad.

Does it still matter that Jesus died?  I mean, think of all the other people in the world who have died since then, and have had much longer and much worse ends.  Sure the cross was probably bad, but what about the people who have cancer that gets drawn way out?  What about the people with Parkinson’s or Lou Gherig’s Disease who watch their bodies slowly waste away over the course of years?  What about the Christians who were tortured by being burned at the stake, or drawn and quartered, or all those other terrible ways to die?  In the face of all that, can the cross really still matter?

Does it still matter that Jesus died?  Lots of people have died early deaths in history, people who have been more important in worldly terms.  Alexander the Great, Aristotle, Julius Caesar… JFK, Martin Luther King.  All these people had a bigger impact on the world than Jesus did… the only people that really knew him when he was alive were a handful of beggars, thieves, prostitutes and poor people.  Can it really matter anymore that this man died.

Does it still matter that Jesus died?  The cross is a powerful symbol, sure.  But there are symbols that are a lot more potent.  Think of symbols like the swastika, the sickle and hammer.  And there are good symbols, too.  Who doesn’t feel a spark of pride when they see the American flag?  Who doesn’t feel a little comforted when they see the Red Cross symbol?  Can the cross really still matter, with as many other symbols as there are out there today?  And besides, think of all the terrible things that have been done in the name of the cross of Christ. 

Does it still matter that Jesus died?  For a long time, Christianity seemed like the most sane religion in a world full of crazy religions – human sacrifices, unrealistic rules, foolish quests to please gods who may or may not have cared what was being done.  Jesus seemed like a breath of fresh air in a room full of stuffy and violent religions.  But now, there are lots more alternatives.  Buddhism preaches peace and well-being, kindness toward all human beings.  Hinduism teaches that we all have a second chance.  Islam teaches intense devotion to a God who has done everything for us.  There are so many other good alternatives to Christianity – does it really still matter anymore that Jesus died?

And besides, can it really matter that Jesus died?  We’ve all heard the rumors and we know that people are beginning to doubt that he really died, that he really rose from the dead.  If he was buried in the Jesus Tomb like the movie says, he probably died a normal death!  He was a good man, right?  That’s what they say.  And his message was powerful, and it’s done a lot of good.  Let’s put all this crucifixion stuff behind us and focus on the good things that Jesus did.  Surely it doesn’t matter anymore whether Jesus actually died.

—

Does it still matter that Jesus died?  Why don’t you ask a young man in prison, who’s there because he stole and he lied and he murdered someone… all because he was a slave to an addiction he couldn’t control.  For all anyone cared, he was dead to the world – he’d never get out of that place.  And you could tell it just by looking on his face.  He would fight other inmates at the drop of a hat, over things that most everyone else thought was silly.  He made enemies of all the guards, who constantly found excuses to put him in solitary or to have him punished in other ways.  If anyone exemplified sin, it was this man.

One day a chaplain started coming to his cell.  The prisoner said he wanted nothing to do with him, told him to go away.  Sometimes, he even threatened the chaplain… but he kept listening.  And he listened because he found something in that chaplain that he hadn’t seen anywhere else in a long time: FORGIVENESS.  But he didn’t believe it.  He held in all his anger and his hatred for days, just listening to see if he would hear anything different. 

Eventually, the dam burst… he erupted in rage at the startled chaplain.  Shouting for nearly an hour, he told that chaplain every awful thing he had ever done, and then dared the chaplain to show him a God who would forgive all THAT.  The chaplain simply stood and gave him a hug… and the walls came down.  That man’s still in prison, but now he’s leading other people to the cross.  That man found the cross, and he found forgiveness – just try and tell HIM it doesn’t matter that Jesus died.

—

Does it still matter that Jesus died?  Why don’t you ask a young woman who was known in her community for her “indiscretions.”  She was so lonely, she didn’t know what to do but to find young men who would keep her company, if only for a while.  Most everyone who knew her suspected she was sleeping around, but no one could ever prove it.  So for years, she walked the streets with her head and eyes down, fearing to look in anyone’s eyes because she knew what she’d find there – either hatred and scorn, or lust and desire.  She was little more than a prostitute.

One day, she was on the way to meet one of her new “friends,” a nice young man in town who’d been married for only a couple of years.  She met him at his house while his wife had gone to visit some family.  But she was so busy looking down as she walked that she didn’t notice she was being followed.  She entered the house, and no sooner had she gone to the young man’s bedroom than she heard shuffling feet and voices inside the house.  She looked up just in time to see several pairs of hands grab her in the dark and start dragging her outside.

As they dragged her through the street, they tore off her clothes and beat her repeatedly.  She cried with fright as they reached alongside the road for large rocks… that could only mean one thing.  They dragged her to the edge of town, but instead of taking her to the usual place they dragged her into the midst of a little crowd of people that seemed to be gathered and listening to someone.  The rough hands threw her sobbing on the ground at the feet of the man to whom everyone seemed to be listening.  She buried her face in the dirt, ready for the stones to fly.

But what she heard, after the men with rough hands shouted their accusations, was not the voice of anger… but a calm and gentle voice.  And though she was afraid to look up for fear of the hatred she’d find, she lifted her head to look into the eyes of a man… and instead of hatred, instead of the lust and dirty longing that she often saw, she saw… love.

This woman would follow Jesus for years, and was probably one of the few women who were brave enough to stand at the foot of the cross, to take his body to the tomb.  She had gone to the cross, and she found real, unconditional love – just try and tell HER it doesn’t matter that Jesus died.

—

Does it still matter that Jesus died?  Just ask the family of the young girl I knew and ministered to, who was killed in an automobile accident.  Flung from the car while her boyfriend drove.  She would have been sixteen in only a few months, and she was such a responsible and intelligent young lady that I know she would have accomplished great things in the world.  But her life was taken away, and all that her family and her church and her friends could do was to mourn.

Until we began to think through the life of Jesus, and there we found “a man of sorrows, who is acquainted with grief.”  We found a man who had to take time by himself to grieve when he lost his cousin John.  We found a man who wept aloud over the loss of his close friend, even though he knew Lazarus would be raised from the dead.  We found a man who knew the pain of being rejected by the people in his hometown… they’d even tried to stone him.  He had no home, but slept out in the open like a vagabond.  He was misunderstood by his own best friends, asked to leave by several towns, constantly tempted to do things he knew wasn’t right.

And then he was crucified.  There he hung on the cross – God himself, in a human body, nailed to a tree to suffer and to die.  We were used to looking to the example of others who had suffered,, but for some reason we saw in this time more than ever that if anyone could sit with us, like Job’s friends, and mourn for the loss and pain we felt – it was JESUS, God himself.  That family had gone to the cross, and found a God who knows what it’s like to suffer – just try and tell THEM it doesn’t matter that Jesus died.

—-

Does it still matter that Jesus died?  Ask the people who have struggled with sin and pain all their lives, and in the cross have found hope that they can be made right again someday. 

Ask the people who have lost loved ones to hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, murders, diseases… and in the cross have found hope that because of Jesus’ blood the world will one day be purged and cleansed and there will be no more tears. 

Ask the people who are here sitting next to you in the pews, instead of laying on the sofa and watching TV this morning – because they’ve met a savior who has washed them clean to live new lives, who has promised them eternity.

Does it still matter that Jesus died?  You tell ME.

Why the Resurrection Matters MORE

1 Corinthians 15:12-26

“Do you remember playing the ‘my-dad’s-tougher-than-your-dad’ game?  Come on, we’ve all done it in some way – even if it wasn’t about our dad’s.  “My dad is bigger than your dad,” or “my dad can hit a softball farther than your dad,” or “my husband makes more money than yours,” or “my church has more members than yours.”  How about, “my country is bigger and better than yours.”  It’s a sad game.  But it’s a game we still play it in every area of life.

Believe it or not, church theologians play the game too.  Of all the doctrines in Christianity, of all the events that made a difference to the whole world, we have several that could take the trump.  And our various church groups are still calling out for their own to take the top spot.

To Catholics it’s the annunciation and birth of Christ.  To them, the fact that Jesus died is not so important as the fact that he lived – that he was here among us, that he suffered as one of us.  That’s why when you go to a Catholic church and you see a cross, what do you see on that cross?  Jesus hangs there in crucifix.  To Catholics, it’s more important to emphasize the fact that Jesus suffered as one of us than it is to emphasize that he died for us.

To most of us Protestants, if you asked around in our churches folks would probably tell you the cross is most important event.  When you see a cross in our church, it’s empty.  There’s no Jesus on that cross. What’s most important to us is that he died and was buried.  Because to us, in that death, he accomplished the work of salvation.  The atonement, the shed blood of Jesus – that’s surely the most important event of our faith.

But as often as it gets overlooked, I happen to think that the resurrection is the most important event and doctrine of all of them.  Paul has it right, I think (he usually does).  He says that there are a lot of things that might could come or go with our faith, but the resurrection MUST be true.  If not, we’ve only gotten half the story.  If not, we are “to be pitied of all people.”

What do I mean?  Let’s think about what we found – and DIDN’T find – at the cross.

—

We found forgiveness at the cross, that’s true.  But what good is a one-time pardon from sin?  So, we get forgiven for the things we’ve done here on earth… that’s nice.  Eternity is a LONG time, and our little lives are only a part of it.  We live, we die forgiven… I can see how it might be better to just pass on forgiveness and keep living it up while we have time!

But that’s not the end of the story.  Jesus died… but he also ROSE, so that we might rise too.  So suddenly that forgiveness that just lasts a few years is stretched out a LOT longer than just the number of our days here on earth.  The resurrection means we are forgiven – not just for the time being, but FOREVER.

On the cross we found forgiveness, but in the empty tomb we see just how long that forgiveness lasts.

—

We found salvation at the cross, it’s true.  And that’s nice for you and me… it’s like a “Get Out of Jail Free Card” that we just happened to find on the side of the road.  But you know, all on its own, that card is not all it’s cracked up to be.  Remember the movie, The Shawshank Redemption?  In that movie, a man who had been in prison for decades suddenly found himself out on the street, free at last! 

What did he do?  He tried to live a normal life, but he had no family or friends to go to, he had no skills to help him find meaningful work.  In short, this man found that he even though he had left prison, prison had never really left him.  He was free, but for what?  He could find no meaning in life, so this man – who was free at last, who’d gotten a “Get Out of Jail Free” card – ended up swinging from the rafters of his attic.

You and I are like that man in some ways.  The cross freed us from prison.  But what difference does that make if we have nowhere to go when we walk out of the prison gates?  That’s where the empty tomb comes in.  Remember the words Paul gave us, the ones that I use when we baptize someone?  “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”

On the cross, we found an old way of life had ended.  But in the empty tomb, we found out a new way of life has begun!

—

We found meaning in Jesus’ death, it’s true.  We know all the theology – Jesus had to die.  Someone had to die to pay the penalty for all the bad things I’ve done!  And so Jesus was the sacrificial lamb, who died so that I wouldn’t have to die.  We’re all going to die, it’s true.  But we don’t all have to die for our sins.  That’s what Jesus did.

But that’s kind of a morbid end to the story, isn’t it?  Jesus dies, and that’s the all-important answer, the final word?  NO – because Jesus rose from the dead, we see that death might have been the answer to our sin… but that in that death, Jesus defeated DEATH ITSELF forever.  Suddenly, this thing that is the all-consuming end of our existence, this thing that has a hold on us from the minute we die… suddenly, that thing called DEATH doesn’t have its sting anymore.  It’s not the end.  There’s more after that!

On the cross we found that death had to be the answer.  But in the empty tomb we find that death is not the final word!

—

We found a great event at the cross, to be sure.  It was a nice story, made the Old Testament all neat and tidy!  But you know, by itself, the death of Jesus wasn’t much to “write home about.”  So, somebody died.  Didn’t you know there’s a 100% mortality rate among human beings these days?  Everyone dies.  That’s just part of life, right?  What difference does Jesus’ death by itself make to the guy down the street?

Jesus died, and that’s important.  But the important thing happened AFTER Jesus died, when he rose from the dead and passed his mission of reconciliation on to us.  That’s one big torch to carry!  “How can they know if they have not heard?” Paul asks, and that’s the crux of the mission we’ve been given.  Jesus didn’t just die – that’s nothing.  Everyone dies.  But not everyone raises from the dead again.  That’s different.  That’s something we have to tell!

On the cross we learned we were saved.  But in the empty tomb, we find out that we were saved for a REASON – so that others could be saved too.

—

I guess I’m playing it again – “My Dad’s bigger and better.”  And he is.  Our Father is bigger – more powerful, more loving and more purposeful – than to let the final word in his story be the death of some man on a cross.  YES, that cross was important!  YES that cross accomplished the redemption of humanity!  YES, that cross was the revelation of a God who knows what it means to suffer alongside us!

But without the empty tomb on that Easter Sunday morning, that death on the cross accomplished no more than all the sacrifices that had been offered to God throughout history.  What made the difference was not just the death – none of those lambs who had been sacrificed before had ever gotten up and walked again! 

When Jesus rose from the dead, he turned death backwards and suddenly we found a God who was stronger than our greatest enemy! 

When Jesus rose from the dead, our “Get Out of Jail Free” card suddenly got its expiration date canceled! 

When Jesus rose from the dead, he walked out of those grave cloths – just like we are called to walk out of our sinful ways!

When Jesus rose from the dead, he gave us a reason to tell the world that God had done something bigger and better than anyone had ever imagined!

When Jesus rose from the dead, we found out that God could do that wonderful thing inside of US, too!

—

Does the cross still make a difference?  Does the empty tomb still matter?

Then, people of God, let’s LIVE LIKE IT!

Note: The following sermon was preached on March 25,  and was the third in a series about identity – who we are as individuals in God’s kingdom.    It’s in semi-outline form, which means there are probably a few incomplete thoughts…

Introduction

Our last couple of sermons have built upon each other.  First, we learned that God loves us – loves YOU – infinitely more than we can imagine.  God created us in his image, made us unique and special, placed us where we are.  He knows the number of hairs on our heads and the number of our days.  God loves you – how can you not love yourself?

Next we saw that God’s love doesn’t stop at the good things about us.  God even loves the parts of us that are difficult to love.  And he loves us enough that he takes the bad parts of us – sins, weaknesses, failures and all – and uses those things to mold us and fashion us into a different kind of vessel: One that he can use in new and unimaginable ways.

So today’s message continues to build on those ideas.  If God loves you so deeply – even with all your faults – how can you not love yourself?  And if you are to love yourself as God loves you, how can you not care for yourself as God cares for you?

There are all kinds of cute images I could use to help you get this idea across, but the basic thing I want to say is this:  TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF.  It’s not just a thoughtful suggestion.  It’s not just a good idea.  As we’ll see, it’s a scriptural mandate.

I probably don’t need to tell you WHY taking care of yourself is so important.  That’s common sense to most of us.  But here are three very good reasons:

First LIFE IS BETTER WHEN WE DO.

Second, GOD HAS GIVE US A RESOURCE, and we are to take care of it.

Third, GOD HAS WORK FOR US TO DO, and we must be ready to do it.

Life is Better

First, let’s talk about how taking care of ourselves can increase our enjoyment and satisfaction in life. 

Jesus tells us that he has come that we might have life, and might have it more abundantly.  He wasn’t talking about eternal life then – he meant life here and now.  Do we have abundant life?  Jesus took good care of himself – he rested often when he could, and took frequent time away to pray and be with God.  He didn’t have the junk food we have today, and he didn’t have much choice but to walk everywhere he went!

 But it’s the abundant life thing that gets me.  When we take care of ourselves, pace ourselves in life, we certainly enjoy it more.  Our lives are more abundant, more free.

 But this isn’t the only reason to take care of ourselves, and not the most important.

We Have Been Given Resources to Care For

 It’s kind of strange to think of our lives as resources.  We think of money, maybe, or of our talents.  But there are so many biblical reasons to look at life this way. 

 We’ve been told to number our days – to make good use of the time we have.

 We’ve been told that we are temples of the living God.  A temple is a place where God is worshiped, glorified, and put first.  A place where others can come to meet God face to face. 

 Our church building is like a temple.  The church itself is the people, but this building is definitely an asset we have to use.  So we care of it.  We just replaced two heating units that were due to stop working any time now.  We have someone clean the inside, replace light bulbs.  We paint when we need it, change things around to fit the need of what’s going on.

 And think about resources from a common sense point of view.

• A man has a car that is his livelihood – he’s going to take care of it!
• A computer that you need for work – you’re not going to let it get infested with viruses and crash the thing.
• Your house – when the roof leaks, we fix it.  When the siding starts coming down, we put up more.  When the paint is peeling, we scrape, prime and paint again.

 
So if all these things can be replaced, even if we were inclined to let them fall apart, how much more should we take care of ourselves – our body, spirit, mind and heart – that CAN’T be replaced?

 And it’s not just a matter of “if it isn’t broke…”

• It’s practical to take care of these things before they break down instead of waiting for them to fall apart.
  • We don’t wait for our car to start overheating before we change the oil and add water.
  • We don’t wait until our computer makes funny noises and refuses to start before we buy the virus checker.
  • We don’t wait for the entire floor to rot before we finally repair that hole in the roof.
• So why do we treat our bodies and souls this way?

 Once again, it comes down to how we love ourselves.  God loves us.  We know he loves us because he cares for us.  We love our children, or families, or friends.  We love them by caring for them.  Love means taking care.

 So, is it indicative of the love we have for ourselves when we don’t bother to take care of ourselves?!

 
We Have Work to Do – a Race to Run

Paul uses the image of a runner in a race.  This is an area I’m getting more comfortable with, since I’ve been running a good bit more lately.  Up until now, I played some sports in school and did some running.  But nothing serious – nothing like this.  And now that I’m 30, I can’t just go out and run long distances anymore without thinking ahead of time.  What am I going to eat this week to get ready?  What kind of clothes am I going to wear?  How should I schedule my activities this week so I can be ready?

I also have to think carefully when I’m running.  How am I breathing?  If I get out of a breathing rhythm, I’ll pay for it later… my body will begin to hurt and my lungs will burn.  What about my pace?  If I start out too fast, I’ll NEVER finish a long race.  I have to pace myself, make sure I’m running in a way that I can finish.

This is the kind of care we need to give to life.  God willing, most of us will live long and productive lives.  But we can’t just fizzle ourselves out by not taking care of ourselves.  If we stay plugged in, God can use us for eighty years, or for just a few.  Jesus knew he had something to accomplish.  And if he didn’t take care of himself, he might never have been able to do it.

A pastor or doctor, for instance.  There’s a LOT to be done, and we could spend all our waking and sleeping hours attending to that need.  But we’d kill ourselves.

Look at money resources.  There’s a LOT of need in the world, but if we gave away literally every penny, would that really help?  In today’s world, greater good can be done when we are good stewards.  Bill Gates has given billions of dollars to several worthy causes.  If he’d given up every penny he had when he was 30, he would never be where he is today.

Getting Down to Specifics

 So here’s the bottom line:  If you’re waiting for someone to take care of you, you’ll be the guy who shows up at the mechanic’s shop for an oil change after his engine’s already burned up.  God will watch out for you, will provide for your needs.  But that doesn’t mean you can run yourself into the ground in the meantime. 

 Self-care is an important part of life.  It’s not that we should spend all our lives focused on ourselves.  But I think that we cannot reach our full potential unless we do something to take care of ourselves.

 So let’s get to some specifics.  How do we need to take better care of ourselves?  Some of these ways are just common sense.  In fact, I bet I haven’t said and won’t say anything in this sermon that you didn’t already know.  But if you put the REASONS together with the WAYS, maybe God can stir us to make a change for the positive.

 Jesus says we should love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength – our emotions, our spirits, our brains, and our bodies.  Let’s look at the four basic areas of health and see what we can do.

BODY – This is probably the area we think of most.  Do you take good care of your body?

• Now some people go overboard with this – plastic surgery and all that.  I’m not talking about cosmetic.  A few wrinkles aren’t going to kill you.
• But there ARE some things that will kill you:
  • What are you eating?  Are you eating things that are good for you… at least some of the time?
  • Are you exercising?
  • Are you getting enough rest and giving your body time to heal itself?  SABBATH.
  • What kinds of habits do you need to stop?

 
SPIRIT – Our spirits are frail and fragile things, and our spirits spend most of our lives battling against our human nature.  There are so many ways we can boost our spirits.  But most of us, I’m afraid, allow our spirits to get into such awful shape that we can’t even think of the last time we did one of these things.  We have been entrusted with their care.  What kinds of things are we doing to care for our spirits?

• Bible study
• Frequent prayer – Speaking and…
• Listening – Silence and stillness
• Godly friendships and relationships
• “Mission” work – helping those in need, sharing our relationship with God to others.

 
MIND – This seems like such a silly thing, to take care of our minds.  But our minds are so susceptible to all kinds of things in our world that too often we find them full of things that don’t matter.  We may not always be able to control our minds, but we can GUARD them:

• What are you watching on TV and in movies?  What kind of books are you reading?  Are these things REALLY doing you any good?
• Do you allow yourself to dwell on things that aren’t healthy?  That aren’t important?

 
All these things are signs that you need to start guarding and exercising your mind.  Learn something new.  Try something different for a change.  Take a vacation and see if you can’t get a new perspective on things. 

 HEART – Finally, an area that we need to really think about seriously.  Our hearts – our emotions – are the last uncharted and difficult area of the human being.  Science has probed lots of these other areas, but the emotions are probably the most difficult for us to get a grip on.

 And they’re they part that has the most grip on us.  Our emotions can affect all the other parts of us. When you’re up and happy, you can FEEL it in your body.  When you’re down and having a bad day, it drags your mind and spirit in directions they wouldn’t normally go.

 And here’s the misconception that many people have:  Emotions are a bad thing.  And this simply isn’t true.  If any of you ever watched Star Trek, you may remember that the character Spock was supposedly of a race that had no emotions, and that was a result of the time the show was created – when emotions were sometimes seen as bad things.

 But emotions, in themselves, are NOT bad things.  Emotions are God-given parts of who we are, and we should embrace our emotions as gifts from God – both the positive ones AND the negative ones.

 There’s a popular concept among Christians that we should be happy all the time – we should never be worried, or angry, or sad or depressed, that we shouldn’t grieve.  This simply isn’t true.  I have not found a single idea in scripture that supports it, even though people will misread passages to make them say that.

 And this idea has been one of the most damaging in our Christian age. Because when a Christian says we shouldn’t have these emotions, the only thing we can do is to ignore them… and THAT causes serious problems.

 Grief, anger, worry, depression, frustration, jealousy… these are a part of our human condition.  And to pretend we shouldn’t have them is like pretending we don’t have an arm.  It cripples us, because we stop dealing with them and they take control of us.

 If the Bible models anything about emotions, it’s being honest and open with them – before other human beings and before God.  Look at the Psalms – an outpouring of every human emotion, both positive and negative.  And they’re poured out to other people and to God.  Job poured out his emotions to God, as did Moses (“I don’t want to go back to Egypt…”), Abraham (“Why haven’t I had a son yet?”), David (“My soul is downcast…”), Jesus (“Let this cup pass from me…”). 

 In other words:  Every biblical character that had a proper relationship to God expresses his or her joy, sorrow, grief, frustration, separation, and anger.  It’s a part of life, and no part of our life is invisible from God.

 Instead, Paul points out in Ephesians 4:26: “Be angry, but do not sin.  Do not let the sun go down on your anger.”

 
What does this mean?  It means BE ANGRY.  Let yourself experience the emotions.  But don’t let the emotions make you do something you shouldn’t (like beat someone up).  Deal with it, express it and get it out of your heart, so that the “sun doesn’t go down on it.”

 It’s so easy to preach and so hard to do.  But we HAVE to learn to be open with our feelings.  We have to learn to express them to God and to others.

 How can we deal with emotions?  First, try honesty.  Tell what you feel, don’t hide it.

 Second, seek help.  There is such a stigma around counseling and medications these days, but I believe that these are God-given helps to our human condition – the condition that gets more complex and more dangerous with every passing year.  500 years ago, they didn’t have Tylenol and Advil and other pain medications, but there weren’t as many needs for them.  Today’s world – with food additives and all kinds of new ways to hurt ourselves – is a place where pain is much more frequent.

 In the same way, our complex world is a place where emotions are much more difficult to unravel than they used to be…

 
Conclusion

 Finally, remember this:  No one is going to make you take care of yourself.  Don’t tell yourself you don’t have time.  You have to MAKE the time.

 What are you waiting for?  The abundant life Jesus promised is at stake.  God’s kingdom work is at stake.  Start taking care of yourself, and let’s become the people God has intended us to be.

March 11, 2007

Sermon following a parent-child dedication service

We’ve talked a little about what it means to be an example for our children – for each other – as we grow and learn together. But there’s another direction that I try to take during these dedication services that we can’t ignore, and it’s this: That just as we are to be examples for children, so are they to be examples to us. Several times in the Gospels, Jesus says things to this effect: “Allow the children to come to me, because of people like them the Kingdom of Heaven is known.” “I tell you the truth, unless you become like this little child, you will never see the Kingdom of Heaven.”

I’ve talked about both of those passages in dedication sermons before, but this week as I was preparing I “stumbled” upon a new passage that made more sense than ever to me of this idea. And it’s a passage that’s so familiar to us that we are probably used to skipping over it. But it’s one that holds a great deal of information to us if we’ll take it at face value.

I want to read for you John 3:1-17. You’re used to hearing John 3:16 right at the end, so let’s say it together to get it out of the way: “For God so loved…”

Now you know what’s coming. So turn it off, and hear it in the context of what’s happening before it.

(Read John 3:1-17.)

What do you think of when you hear those words, “born again?” We think of babies, perhaps, of little children. But I think mostly we just hear “Christianized language” – words we hear used so often that we often forget to think about the meaning behind them. After all, people describe themselves as being “born again,” or “I’m a born-again Christian” as if it were some kind of category of Christian that’s separate from all the others.

If I asked you right now, “What does it mean to be born again?” some of you would probably say, “It’s simple! First, you recognize that you’re a sinner in need of forgiveness. Then you believe that Jesus Christ came to save you from your sins. Then you confess your sins to God and ask him to forgive you, ask Jesus to come into your heart, and… BOOM! You’re born again!”

We’ve got it down to a process, an outline. And if you ask more than one person, you’ll get a different version of the outline. But the basic idea is still there: “It’s simple! You just do BLANK.”

Now that’s nice and all, but Nicodemus comes and asks Jesus the same question, and gets a TOTALLY different response.

First you have to understand a little about Nicodemus. He is a Pharisee. That means he knows the Mosaic Law backwards and forwards, plus a whole lot more. He could probably quote to you, from memory in Hebrew, the better part of the first five books of our Bible. He is a member of the Sanhedrin, which means he is very respected among the Jewish people. You don’t get to a place like that unless you are VERY intelligent and VERY wise in the ways of the current religious establishment.

Jesus has just come into Jerusalem for the first time, and from the very beginning things are trouble. He comes to the temple, and gets so mad at what he sees there that he makes a whip out of some cord and drives all the merchants and money-traders out. He starts healing and preaching a new kind of message that no one has heard before.

Things are in such an uproar that Nicodemus feels compelled, for some reason, to come to Jesus. He comes at night – whether out of secrecy, or just because that’s the only time they could get together, we don’t know. John uses light-dark contrast very carefully, so John might simply be making a statement about Nicodemus’ spiritual state. But the fact is, he comes. He wants to hear more, wants to see what’s going on.

Now the Pharisees LOVED their outlines. If you went to one and asked, “What does it mean to be righteous?” his face would light up and he’d say, “You’ve come to the right place, my friend! What you do is this, and this, and this, and this…” And they’d go on a LONG time with that list. They loved outlines, because in some way that made righteousness attainable. At the end of that long list was the end – you are righteous at last.

So Nicodemus was hearing something new and different, and he wanted the outline. He wanted Jesus’ notes, so that Nicodemus could squeeze all this new information into his old way of thinking. “Let’s sit down and talk about this, come up with the outline,” he seems to say. “Then maybe we can all understand each other and get along” – in other words, “maybe we can figure out what you’re saying so we know how to fight it.” He comes to Jesus on his own terms, and he thinks that Jesus is going to give him all the answers at last!

But what Jesus gives Nicodemus is not an outline. He doesn’t even say, “Hey Nick, glad you came by. Let’s have some coffee and chat.” He just goes straight into it:

“Unless you are born again (or from above), you cannot see the Kingdom of God.”

And Nicodemus says, “Huh?! Say that again?” And from then on, what we read is so mysterious that most of the time WE want to skip over it. We want to get to the outline part – “God so loved the world” and all that. We can understand all that, but not this “water and spirit” thing. What’s going on here?

Jesus refuses to talk about being “born again” in outline form, and seems to make it sound more like a mystery. And there’s a reason for that – what happens when we are born again is so mysterious that even we don’t understand it.

Any of you who’ve been in a delivery room know what I’m talking about. When Tanya and I had Abigail, we went to parenting classes. We saw all the charts, got the low-down on what happens at birth. We saw pictures and drawings and videos… we were told the step-by-step of what happens from conception to birth. Every power of science can make an outline out of birth, so that you know: “First this happens, then this, then this…”

But you’ve never really experienced birth until you’ve stood there (or sat there, or passed out there) and seen it. Then suddenly all that scientific medical language is useless. You can’t explain what a mystery it is to see a new life brought into the world, to hear those little lungs fill for the first time and let loose in a cry. To see a naked, fragile little body struggle to come to terms with being in a new place. To hold that baby in your arms and watch it sleep more peacefully than you or I can manage any more.

It’s a mystery no outline can explain. And this, Jesus says, is what being re-born is all about.

The key word, to me, to understanding this passage is the word, “See.” Unless you are born again, you cannot SEE the kingdom of God. I think that the beginning of being born again – truly born into God’s kingdom – is not a prayer, but a change in perspective, a different way of seeing. That change of seeing turns into a change of spirit, which turns into a change of action. But it all starts with “seeing.”

Have you ever looked into a mirror in a room you knew so well – maybe your bedroom at home – and suddenly seen a different room? You look at what is familiar, and suddenly you see it in a new and different way? That’s what it’s like to be reborn.

But there’s a much more appropriate example for us to think about today. Any of you who’ve had little ones lately can attest to how HARD it is to baby-proof a house. Every stage makes it harder and harder. It was nice when they laid down on the floor and couldn’t even roll over! Then they crawl, then they walk, then they start opening doors and cabinets, then they start asking questions and sneaking around where they know they’re not supposed to be!

You can read checklists in books and on the internet about baby-proofing your home. But once you’ve finished the checklist, there’s one last step. All of us know the best way to do make sure you’ve done it right…

Yep. Get on the floor and look around. And you don’t just lay there – you look through their eyes. What’s eye-catching? That plug without a cover, that power cord dangling there. That cabinet door with shiny bottles of chemicals inside. That bottle of medicine they can just barely reach. It’s a change in perspective – we have to look through their eyes.

And if you lay there long enough, or if you get down on your hands and knees in other places (where most of us won’t for embarrassment), you start realizing other things.

If you got down on your belly in a crowd – even a small crowd – all you can see is a forest of legs and smelly feet. That’s got to be frightening! And when you look up and see some unfamiliar giant reaching down to scoop you up… it’s enough to scare you to death!

You start to see things differently too. Try laying down on your belly in the yard sometime, or in the flower garden. Things look wonderfully different from a different angle. Try laying down in your home somewhere you’re not used to lying down, and see how different it looks. Lay down on your back and look up at the stars, so that you can see everything from horizon to horizon. Lay down in here and look under the pews and discover a whole new world!

When we get down like that, we start to see things through a child’s eyes. We begin to understand their stranger anxiety a little better when we see that big giant stranger reaching down for us. We understand, once we see the forest of legs, how comforting it might be to hide behind the tree of mommy or daddy. We see the wonder and beauty they must feel when they look at flowers or grass or leaves. It’s a whole new world for us to discover!

THIS, Jesus says, is the mysterious way we are born again. It’s not an outline. Sure, we can say, “these things happen when you’re born again.” But that’s not the true experience. As Jesus describes the wind moving through the trees, we can give all the scientific gobbledygook we want – the change in air pressure causes a movement of air from this place to that, heat rising and cool air rushing in to take its place and all that…

But that’s not what you’re thinking when you sit on your front porch on a summer evening and feel the breeze.

Just so, we can talk about salvation and about John 3:16 and how it explains the Gospel so compactly and directly. But JOHN 3:16 IS NOT THE GOSPEL. It’s only an outline. Notice Jesus doesn’t launch into that first – it only comes at the tail end of the rest of this mysterious talk. John 3:16 may describe the Gospel, but the REAL Good News has to be experienced mysteriously – like laying on the floor, like looking in a mirror, like feeling the breeze.

We have to be born of water, Jesus says. We can talk all day about what it means to be baptized theologically, about the significance of this and that. But at the end of the day, if you remember your baptism, I bet you can’t adequately describe to me what happened.

We have to be born of the Spirit. Once again, we can talk all the theology we want about how God works in our lives – how he transforms us, how he speaks to us, how he makes his presence known. But all that language falls away when we suddenly feel his peaceful presence in a difficult time, when we suddenly realize we’ve done something wrong, when we experience the holiness of God in a cathedral or in the beauty of nature.

Only then, once we’ve experienced being born again, only THEN can we begin to look at the outline again and say, “Oh, THAT’S what Jesus means when he says this…” Suddenly, we realize the wonderful Gospel we’d shoved into an outline and a salvation tract, is bigger and more mysterious than we’d ever thought!

The sad part is, most of us need to be born again all the time. We need to get back on our knees (take that coincidence for what you will), and see the world from that different perspective again. How easily we lose our view of wonder and fear!

But the good news is – we can be reborn time and again… in fact, we HAVE to. And we’re never too old to be born again.

So how about it? Have you been born again? Do you need to be re-born? It’s never too late, and this is the perfect time. May God give us grace and courage to put aside our old eyes, and to see the world anew through the eyes of a child!

“Fearfully and Wonderfully Made”

A Sermon for Lent 1 (C)

February 25, 2007

A brief exercise to prepare for reading: “Write down three things you hate about yourself, and three things you love about yourself.”

Read Psalm 139

We are in the season of Lent. It seems like it was only a week or so ago, when we were celebrating the New Year and the beginning of Epiphany season by baptizing three girls who have made a decision to follow Christ in their lives. Lent always sneaks up on me.

Maybe it’s because Lent can be such a dark season. For centuries, Christians have recognized that it’s not enough just to celebrate a certain event in the year – Christmas, or Easter for example. They have recognized, and still recognize, that we must be prepared to celebrate those events. Just as we saw at Advent (or at least, I hope you saw), the way we prepare to celebrate the birth of Christ can make all the difference in that Christmas Day. If we anticipate Christmas, think about the specialness of that birth, look forward to it, even ache for it as children do sometimes… then we can truly appreciate and enjoy the day that is Christmas – the wonderful birth of our Savior.

But Lent is another matter. Like Advent, it is a preparation. It is a preparation for a holy event – Easter, the resurrection of Jesus. But we all know what resurrection means: It means that death must come first. We can talk about our own resurrection from the dead, our entry into eternal life with God… but most of the time we’re struck, if only silently, by the fact that we must die first in order to get there.

And that’s why Lent is hard for us to observe. If we are preparing to celebrate in Advent, Lent almost seems like preparation for mourning. If we feel the joy of new life at Advent, then at Lent we feel the weight of our own death approaching. That’s why we start Lent with the Service of the Ashes that we celebrated Wednesday night – a reminder of what Lent’s all about.

For as long as Lent has been practiced, it has meant (for many Christians) a time of looking more closely at ourselves – a time to acknowledge our sinfulness and to try to repent. Some people took pilgrimages or retreats during Lent, trying to follow the footsteps of Jesus or some other Saint, hoping the “holiness” might rub off. Others have taken on vows of various kinds: not eating meat, not having desserts, not drinking. In these ways, we hope that in our desire for the things given up, we can find a new desire for God, and to learn – if only in a small way – some of the suffering that Jesus endured on our behalf.

But the uncomfortable part of all that is not the outward rituals. We can handle taking a few days off from television, or not having chocolate. The really hard thing is to look at ourselves, to see ourselves as we truly are. Because, truth be told, most of us don’t like what we see there. We’d rather not look there – not look back at all the failures we feel we’ve made. We’d rather not remember our weaknesses that often get us into trouble.

We’d just rather not look too closely in the mirror, for fear of… what? Despair? Seeing that we haven’t changed much? I’m not sure. It’s different for each of us. But the fact is, most of us don’t like to look at ourselves too closely.

God Loves Human Beings

And this is where scripture steps in and gives us a somewhat different message. It’s true that when we look through the scriptures, we see how sinful we are. We see where God is warning us against unfaithfulness, urging us to live lives of discipline and compassion.

But the overwhelming message of the Bible is LOVE – God’s love for these strange creatures he’s created.

In the beginning, God made all the things we see around us – the deep blue oceans and the sandy beaches; the kind of starry sky you can only see on a cold clear night; the moon, soft and mysterious; brilliant red and orange sunsets; peaceful and quiet sunrises; snow-covered meadows; wildflowers; horses, whales, giraffes, birds.

All the beautiful things we enjoy on the earth, God made before human beings were created. There were peaceful cool evenings before there was ever a person to enjoy them. There were majestic mountains before there was ever a person to climb them. All these beautiful things God made, and said “IT IS GOOD.” But it wasn’t good enough.

Creation was not complete until God had made a man and a woman. He made them in his image, man and woman together in relationship. He made them to care for his world, to love his creatures, to love each other and to make more human beings to do the same. He made them to love and enjoy God himself – to enjoy a relationship with God unlike any other.

Creation was not complete without human beings. We were made for this universe, and the universe for us, in a way. That’s LOVE. God loves us as human beings.

The whole story of the Bible is the story of human beings trying to figure out how best to relate to a God who REALLY loves – who loves us not in a way that just allows us to do whatever we want to do, that leaves us alone. God loves us in a way that desires for us to change – to change so that we can love each other, so that we can love God more perfectly. To change in a way that will set us on a path for eternity.

The Bible is a story of how God loves us enough to make ways for that to happen. Of how God would bring his plan of redemption to completion by coming down himself, by living as one of us, by becoming one of us for a while. He suffered as one of us, learned what it was to be one of us. Then he died on our behalf, so that we would not have to die.

All of this for human beings! It’s no wonder the writer of Psalm 8 would ask:

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,

what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?

You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.

You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet:

all flocks and herds, and the beasts of the field,

the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas.

O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

(NIV)

The Bible is a story of love – a God who made these creatures, made them in his image in some mysterious way, and loves them completely enough to give them freedom to make our own decisions.

God Loves ME and YOU

But the message of love doesn’t end there, and if we let it we’ll miss the most important point:

God loves YOU. Not “all of you.” You, right there. God made you. GOD LOVES ME.

When we can truly see ourselves as we are, brokenness, sinfulness, failures, weaknesses, illnesses, prejudices, hate, anger… when we truly see ourselves this way, we CAN fall prey to despair, to hopelessness.

But the balance, for the Christian, for the one who knows God, is the flip side of this coin: GOD LOVES US ANYWAY. God loves you and I more than we can comprehend. For us, it is this central truth that keeps us anchored.

The psalmist uses beautiful language to describe God’s love and craft. He uses the illustration of a weaver. In ancient times, a weaver who made clothing and other fabric items had to do all th work themselves. They had to gather the wool – there was no Hancock Fabrics to get the materials or pattern! They made the wool into string, then planned their work carefully – there were no patterns, or sewing machines. You had to do it right the first time. Then finally, when everything was ready, the final product planned out – then the weaver could begin to knit.

Now, I don’t consider myself an artist. I dabble in both music and painting. But whatever kind of artwork I’m doing, it takes a long time to get ready. Tanya will tell you that when I’m doing a painting, I can be planning and sketching for a month before I ever put brush to the paper. I draw vague ideas, try out different arrangements, experiment with colors. It usually takes more than a week of evenings for me just to get the sketch done that I will eventually color in.

And then, once I start, I still work carefully, practicing my brush stroke on another piece of paper to get it just right.

Now I have this painting on the wall in my office, that I painted of the church more than a year ago. I love this painting. When I see it, I don’t just see the pretty colors and the arrangement – I think of the sketching I did, the experiments with colors, the places I had to fix when I went overboard with the paints! I think of the hours I spent getting ready, and the new ideas I had even while I was painting.

I’ve done a few paintings like this, and I love them all. I don’t say, “I like this one more than this one,” because to me, even if they’re pretty low-grade work compared to professional works – they’re all different, unique and special. Because I MADE THEM.

If you look closely at my paintings, or listen closely to my songs, you can learn about me. I put myself into those things that I create – lovingly and carefully. So that even though I didn’t paint a picture of myself here – my fingerprints are all over it!

In this same way, God made you and me. God has made you, and you are fearfully and wonderfully made! There’s not some heavenly mass-production plant with an assembly line that cranks out the same person over and over. Each one of us – like that weaver’s cloth, like the painting or the song – is unique, one-of-a-kind. We are planned with careful and loving thought, every attention give to our personality, our circumstances… right down to the hairs on our head.

Loving Ourselves and Loving Others

So as we talk about identity this Lenten season, about what it means to be you and me, we must start with this fundamental fact: God loves us, JUST AS WE ARE. He has made us, has stamped us with his image, and loves us as only a Father, only an artist can.

Why dwell on this? Because I think it is a problem that SO MANY of us struggle with. How easy was it to write down the things you dislike about yourself? How hard was it to write down the stuff you love?

At some point, I think we all struggle with our own self-image, our self-esteem. And I think we come back to it over and over again. And we need to hear this message:

God loves you more than you can imagine. How can you not love yourself?

We try so hard to gain our identity through other things – the place we work. The positions we have at work or in church. The places we’ve been, the things we accomplish. We look at our successes and failures, and then we look at someone else’s – and we compare. We compare two things (ourselves and someone else) that were never meant to be compared.

We’re like apples and oranges, you and I. God has made us unique, each and every one, and he loves us deeply. And this HAS TO BE the foundation of our identity. Otherwise, we’re building a house on sinking sand. We can place our identity on our jobs – we won’t have them one day. We can’t place our identity on money, because all the money in the world will, one day, be useless to us. We can’t place our identity in our successes or failures, because one day they will all be forgotten. We can’t place our identity on other people around us, because you weren’t made to be ME, but to be YOU.

No, God’s love is the only thing worth placing our identity on, because it will NEVER CHANGE.

And if you’ve ever wanted to change the way you are, if you’ve ever been fed up with your own faults and failings, the first step is NOT hatred. As an addict who has been in a recovery group, or a Christian who has been significantly changed. Most often, the path to real change comes NOT through hating ourselves, but through LOVING ourselves.

This truth has other important consequences as well, because when we see how much God loves us, we begin to see how much God loves everyone. It doesn’t matter what they’ve done, and we can’t judge that. It doesn’t matter what color their skin is, what language they speak. God loves that person you despise just as much as he loves you. When we see others in this way, I think it changes how we act toward them.

If God loves him or her just as much as God loves me, how can I not love them too?

Let this truth sink in. You are important and valuable because God created you, and God loves you. Stop allowing other people, stop allowing your past – terrible though it may be – stop allowing these other things to give you your identity. Let GOD give you an identity, and I think we’ll start to see ourselves and other people in a different way.

Moving Forward

In this season of Lent, I’ve committed myself to looking at ME more closely, failings and all. And I’m committing myself to start seeing myself through God’s eyes and not my own. Lent is a time when people make commitments, when we allow God to draw us closer to him. What kind of commitment will you make this Lent?

And one of the best ways we can learn about God and his love for us, is to look at ME more closely. What does it mean that God has made me in his image? How am I unique? How am I the same as others? What things does God desire to change in me – not because he hates me or wants to punish me, but because he loves me and wants me to be more like him?

I’m going to give you some tools this Lent to begin looking at yourself, if you’d like to make use of them. First, this week I’m giving you a copy of a personality test – a little test to help you discover more things about yourself, and why you do things the way you do. Take this little sheet home and fill it out. It’s very basic, just front and back. Next week, I’ll have a sheet that will help you figure out what all these letters mean, and how they can help you learn more about yourself.

And the next few weeks, we’ll continue the journey inward. In the coming weeks, we’ll look at:

Who Am I?

• Part 1: Fearfully, wonderfully and individually made
  • Look at what makes us distinct – personality traits
• Part 2: Broken, but loved anyway! (Jeremiah’s potter, Romans 5:8)
• Part 3: Worth taking care of
  • Get personal and open about health issues – mental, emotional, physical, spiritual
• Part 4: Made to live in community and communion
  • Theology of community… what it means to live as self in trinity: God, self, others.
• Part 5: Gifted for service

After all these months… I’ve finally written a sermon down again!  Actually, I’ve had a good bit of several sermons written down, but this is the first one I’ve had completely written out.  Call it a New Year’s Resolution!

Following the Signs

Sermon: Epiphany 2 (C)

January 14, 2007

John 2:1-11

 The lectionary this week takes us headlong into the season of Epiphany.  Epiphany begins with the celebration of the coming of the Wise Men, but in the church year, Epiphany celebrates the life and ministry of Jesus. 

 We’re used to looking at the bookends of Jesus’ ministry: We’ve celebrated his birth, at lent and Easter we’ll lament his death and celebrate his resurrection.  But here, in Epiphany, we can settle down and look squarely at this man Jesus and what he did in between those bookends… what is, to me, one of the most important things about Jesus coming at all – the fact that he was HERE.

 The Gospels agree on the first act of Jesus’ public ministry.  Although the accounts differ, the writers agree that Jesus’ first public act was his baptism.  We celebrated that last week on Baptism of the Lord Sunday, and celebrated in an appropriate way, by baptizing three young ladies into our church.

 After Jesus’ baptism, however, the Gospel accounts are jumbled.  Jesus goes on to do a lot of different things.  But in John, where the lectionary takes us this year, we see that Jesus ministry is organized around a series of “signs.”

 Now we’re used to signs, aren’t we?  We see signs all over the place, every day.  Signs on the road tell us what’s coming up – a curve in the road, a highway splitting off, a railroad crossing, a traffic light.  Signs in towns and cities tell us what’s inside – a gas station or a library.  We have a sign outside that tells what this building is used for.

 In fact, there are so many signs in our world that we sometimes miss them.  It’s not that we’re ignoring them on purpose… they’ve just become commonplace, and we forget to pay attention.  Like the speed limit signs I told you about a few months back.  They’d become so ordinary that I forgot to pay close attention to them – and there were consequences.

 I had several good passages to choose from this morning, but the one I chose is the passage from John’s Gospel about Jesus turning the water into wine.  It’s not the specialness of this passage that drew me to it, but the ordinariness of it – the fact that there’s so much commonplace about it.

John makes a big deal out of this miracle.  You’d think it was David Copperfield making the Statue of Liberty disappear or something so significant as that.  John uses the word “sign” here, a phrase he uses very carefully.  Other signs include:

• Healing a boy who was about to die
• Feeding five thousand people
• Raising Lazarus from the dead

 So how does this one fit in?  This miracle, in comparison with the others, is surprisingly ordinary.

 First, it is an ordinary event, a wedding banquet.  Weddings, in the ancient world and in Jewish culture, were a big deal.  Jewish weddings are still events that last several days, and are full of traditions and rituals that are central to Jewish society.  When you got an invitation to a wedding, it was almost an insult to turn it down.  And it was almost FOOLISH to turn it down: When you went to a wedding, it was something like going to an all-inclusive resort or spa for a few days.  The host of the party was required to find a place for everyone to stay, made sure everyone was fed for the duration of the event.  Sometimes, the host even provided clothing for the guests to wear during the wedding.  It was a BIG deal, and the reputation of the host and his family rode on how well the guests were taken care of. 

 That’s why it was such a big deal that the wine ran out.  When you had all these guests that you were supposed to take care of, when you fell down on the job, it was almost an insult to THEM.  The host’s job was to make sure everyone had EVERYTHING they wanted, and if the host failed, it would reflect on his family’s reputation for weeks, years… even generations.  And when something ran out, you couldn’t just run down to the supermarket or the ABC store to get some more. 

 Commentators have deduced that because Mary knew about the wine running out, and because she was so concerned about it, that she and Jesus might have been related to the host in some way.  Her concern wasn’t that people have more to drink so they could get drunk.  Wine was to the ancient culture like sweet tea is to modern Southern culture – you just HAVE to have it.  Her concern was not that people are having a good time and getting drunk – her concern was for the reputation of the host and his family.

 But the point is, it was an ordinary event.  Jesus doesn’t come here to do a miracle.  This is not a speaking engagement for him.  For Jesus, this is an everyday event – a time to sit back, chat with friends, laugh with family, have some good food and drink together.  It was a normal, everyday event.

 Second, it was simply and quietly done.  It’s almost done “under the table,” in fact.  There is no dramatic flourish, no dramatic pulling the veil away to uncover something.  Jesus doesn’t stand up and give everyone the best wine, “on the house.”  There isn’t a big deal made at the time, and in fact it seems that hardly anyone knows about it.  The steward and host know something has happened, but don’t know who has done it or how.  Only Jesus, the disciples, the servants and Mary know what has happened.  And yet John records it as a significant “sign.”

 Finally, it was ordinary in that, like the rest of normal life, it was unplanned.  Mary comes to Jesus with the problem, and he says something like, “That’s none of my business.  It’s not time yet.”

 It’s not that Jesus’ time came between the time he said this and the time he did the miracle.  He didn’t say, “My hour has not yet come…” and then, BEEP BEEP, his watch goes off and he says, “Oh!  Now it’s here!”  Jesus didn’t come here to do a miracle.  He didn’t expect to do anything special at all.

 In short, this was an ordinary event that suddenly became extraordinary… but there was no huge deal made out of it.  This first sign came and went as calmly as the steward tasting the new wine and shrugging his shoulders.  But obviously, since it’s recorded here, this “sign” had significance to someone.

 Which leads us to look more closely, perhaps, at the meaning of a sign.  Because I believe that “signs” are not just something that happened a few times in John’s Gospel.  I think God places signs in our lives today.  In fact, I think there are lots of them… so many that we may tend to miss them from time to time.  You may have written down one of those signs just a few minutes ago, and as we talk about signs I want you to think of that sign you wrote down, and the other ones in your life.

 First, a sign is a neat thing, but it’s not the most important thing.

 But signs do serve, especially in pictures, to encapsulate an event for us.  If you go to a National Park, you’ll see a beautifully carved sign at the entrance.  And these signs have become so popular as tourist attractions in themselves that the Park Service has put parking lots by the signs.  There’s something strange about that.  But if you went to the Grand Canyon with some friends, and took a picture together with them in front of the sign, it would be a reminder to you of a greater experience.  You’d put that picture in a frame in your home or on your desk, and when you see it you remember the experience.  You don’t just remember the cool sign – you remember the whole trip, just by looking at that sign.

 Now imagine you’re opening one of Tanya’s scrapbooks, and you open to a page and see one of those pictures of us in front of a sign.  And you turn the page… and there’s nothing more from the trip.  “What about the pictures of the canyon?” you ask.

 “Oh, we didn’t actually GO to the canyon.  We just took a picture at the sign.”

“You didn’t go to the canyon?!”

 “No, we went up to the sign, felt the intricate carvings.  We thought about how talented someone must have been to carve such a sign.  Then we took lots of pictures of it and went home.”

 You’d think we were not quite right.  The sign is not the point.  It’s what the sign points TO that’s important.

 In the same way, the signs Jesus did are not things for us to stare and wonder at.  We don’t have records of the miracles just so we can say, “Wow, Jesus turned water into wine!  How cool is that?”  We look BEYOND those miracles and see what God is saying: 

 “I provide for all your needs, even the little ones that make a big difference.” 

 “I can use anything to do something special.”

 “Despite what you think sometimes, I really am working in your world.”

 And it’s the same way with the signs God places in our lives.  God doesn’t just heal us so we can say, “look, God can make me well again!”  It points us to something else God is telling us, something greater.

 The second thing about signs is that they make something special or significant out of something ordinary.  The signs point out that what looks like just an average highway is really the entrance to a National Park.  What looks like a normal road is really the road we turn on to get to Victoria.  What looks like just another brick building is Kenbridge Baptist Church.  What looks like an average home is really the home where so-and-so was born.  Then suddenly, what was ordinary becomes extraordinary. 

 God uses the ordinary to do something extraordinary.  God places signs in our world and in our lives, but they’re buried in the ordinary.  In fact, sometimes they may even seem hidden, and we’ll miss them if we’re not looking.  Look at some of the ordinary ways God placed signs in people’s lives:

• Burning bush
• Water from a rock
• Water into wine
• Fishes and loaves

 There are so many signs that we probably miss lots of them along the way.  And Jesus did so many signs that we don’t have a record of them all.  John records a few, but then at the end of his Gospel he writes that Jesus did so many other signs that the world could not contain them if we wrote them down.  But what made these signs significant, probably, is that they were significant to John himself – who certainly seems to have been an eyewitness.

 Which leads me to the final thing we can see about signs – they are personal.  They don’t mean the same thing every time, and they likely don’t mean the same thing to every person.  They are personal and individual. 

 When I look at the picture of me and my family standing in front of the Grand Canyon sign, I don’t remember how beautiful that sign was.  In my mind, I look beyond that sign to the beautiful vistas, the gorgeous sunsets over the canyon.  I remember how arid the landscape is.  I remember the first time I’d been looking down with a little surprise, then suddenly caught perspective of how BIG it really is.  That’s what I see when I look at that sign. 

 If you haven’t been to the Grand Canyon, you probably think of pictures you’ve seen.  If you have been, you have your own wealth of experiences and memories.  That sign means something different to every one of us – something significant and special that is ours alone. 

 Notice that John doesn’t say what this sign means.  It means something different to each person who was there.  To Jesus, it may have been confirmation – maybe his hour HAD come.  To the disciples, we see that they came to believe and trust Jesus a little more strongly.  Who knows what it meant to the servants who poured that water?  It was the same sign, but it meant something different to each person.  It didn’t have the same effect on everyone.  In fact, Jesus’ later signs produce dramatically different effects – Jesus’ raising Lazarus from the dead inspired true faith in some, but to the Pharisees it was the nail in the coffin… they begin making plans to kill him.

 In fact, there are many signs that seem to be made just for us – signs God places in our lives that others may not see. 

 So my question for myself this morning, and my question for you as well, is this:  What do we do, what HAVE we done, with the signs God has given to us?

 We can react many different ways to signs we see on the road.  We may see that “curvy road” sign, but do we ignore it, driving straight ahead into the river?

 Or do we commit the opposite error, and stop and stare at the beautiful and perfect sign sitting by the road?

 Or, more dangerously, do we see it, but stop paying attention to it?  Do we turn the extraordinary back into the ordinary – turn the wine back into water, as William Willimon has put it?  Do we stop paying attention to the signs God places in our paths and allow them to become ordinary again, losing the power they have to guide, teach, and inspire us?