Rev. Dewey Johnson: Weekly Sermon Text

HOW TO READ AND WATCH THE NEWS (Feb. 12, 2012 Sermon Text)

2012-02-12T12:42:00.000-08:00

Psalm 12, Mark 13: 1-8, GPC, 2/12/12, D. Johnson

One of the things I sometimes do at the beginning of a funeral or memorial service is set the deceased’s life in the context of the generation to which he or she belonged. To do this, through the years I have relied on two authors, Strauss & Howe, for my understanding of generational differences. They have written a number of books having to do with their research. Namely, they went back to the beginning of our country and listed every generation from then until now, each of which has its own personality. And although a particular person may not always fit the mold, today as we consider how we read and watch the news – hopefully or not - let’s take a look at what characterizes the five plus generations that make up Grace Presbyterian Church.

The G.I. Generation or the Builders were born between 1901 and 1924. And even though this generation fought WWII and endured the Great Depression, theirs has been an incredibly optimistic generation. There has been no problem too big for them to try and solve. As they helped rebuild America after the Great Depression and WWII, they built a big world – big bands, big Hollywood movies, big skyscrapers, and big highway projects. Their positive energy has been symbolized through the years by their most enduring comic strip character, Superman. They had the Supermannish strength to rise to the challenge. Many of this generation have passed away, which is our loss, for we need their hope and optimism.

The Silent Generation is what we call those born between 1925 and 1942. It was historian William Manchester who gave this generation its name when he wrote, “Never had American youth been so…silent.” Why silent? One reason was that they grew up back when teenagers were to be seen and not heard. Back when the worst school discipline problems were cutting in line and chewing gum in class. And for sure, if the GIs manned the booming guns of WWII, there weren’t quite the same sorts of challenges for the younger Silent Generation. Yet, they have had a sturdy social conscience, have believed they could help form a more equitable society. For ex., it is said that every major figure in the modern civil rights movement came from the Silent Generation, which has also been hopeful about the future. Their approach has been let’s work together and build a better world.

The Baby Boomers are those born from 1943-1960, and if you have heard different years attached to this generations, so have I. I often read that the Baby Boomers were born between 1946 and 1964. Depending on the source, different people use different years, but they don’t differ by much. In any event, whereas the generations before them were outwardly focused, Baby Boomers are inwardly focused. Boomers have wanted an ideal world, “but by almost any standard of social pathology, boomers have been a generation of worsening trends.” Throughout their teenage years alone, death rates for every form of accidental death rose sharply. Rates of drunk driving, suicide, illegitimate births, and teen unemployment all doubled or tripled. Crime rates skyrocketed. The world changed with the Boomers and in non-hopeful ways.

The next generation of Americans, born from 1961-81, is called the Baby Busters, so named because there are relatively few of them in comparison to the Boomers. And here’s the problem. If by almost any standard the generation prior to the Busters was one of worsening trends, just how hopeful are the Busters going to be? Not very. “Far more thanother generations, the Baby Busters feel that the world is gearing up to punish them down the road.” The Busters, in reality, were the children of the 60s and 70s. The world that the Baby Boomers thought was so great, was for those born between 1961 and 1981, “a nightmare of self-immersed parents, disintegrating homes, schools with conflicting missions, confused leaders, movie ratings changing from G to R, if not X, and new public-health dangers.” As children, the Baby Busters were the first to be known as latchkeys, throwaways, boomerangs, terms implying that adults would just as soon have them disappear.

The Millenial generation are those born from 1982 through the end of the 90s or early 2000s. And whereas the generation before often suffered neglect, the early 1980s saw a remarkable outpouring of concern for children, an effort to re-establish a more wholesome environment for kids to grow up in. Notable to Millenials is the Cosby Show, which in the late 80s shifted focus. “Mom and dad Huxtable became less pally and more in charge – making punishments stick, and telling little Rudy, ‘you’re too young’ to do this or know about that. It is said that not since the Teddy Roosevelt era have adults made such serious efforts to take danger out of children’s daily life.” The question is, though, just how much danger can one remove in the post 9/11 era?

The newest generation, born in the early 2000s, is called Generation Z or the Digital Natives. How about that for a name, the Digital Natives? They are at home with modern technology; they’ve never known anything else. Not much is said about them yet. They’re not much more than ten years old.

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The reason I bring all this to your attention is to emphasize that it just naturally makes a difference when you were born as to how you respond the news. Some of us were there when victory was snatched from the jaws of defeat and ever since have been rather hopeful about what can be done in the future. Others of us have rarely seen the odds beaten in a significant way, and tend to be pessimistic. Some of us grew up the center of attention. Others of us suffered neglect. We have different experiences, but whatever our generation, as Christians, our news comes to us through the filter of Jesus.

As followers of Jesus, no matter what our age, we have been given the ability to process the news differently from just anyone. We believe that there is more to be hopeful about than what we see and hear. Whatever the breaking story, it’s not the whole story. “Beware says Jesus,” in our NT lesson, “that no one leads you astray.” Read the paper or watch the news with the Bible at hand, for the Biblical story helps us put the news in a more hopeful context, that of a God whose love will endure all challenges and triumph in God’s time. Our era is not different from the biblical story. It is the continuation of the biblical story.

If there was ever a person who wrote a portion of the Bible after reading or listening to the morning news, I suspect it was whoever wrote Psalm 12. I can just see the author sitting there at the breakfast table, reading the paper, sipping coffee, and saying, “Help, O Lord, for there is no longer anyone who is godly; the faithful have disappeared from humankind.” I feel that way at times when I listen to the news. I bet you do too. It seems like there’s just one gruesome murder, robbery, elaborate fraud, ripoff, or armed conflict after another. The Psalmist continues, “They utter lies to each other; with flattering lips and a double heart they speak.” Sounds like he knows we’re going into the 2012 political campaign, doesn’t he? “Beware that no one leads you astray,” says Jesus. But Lord, we respond, who isn’t trying to lead us astray? They all tell lies. The Psalmist gets really upset and says, “May the Lord cut off all flattering lips, the tongue that makes great boasts, those who say, ‘With our tongues we will prevail; our lips are our own – who is our master?’”

And that’s the issue, “Who is our master?” which in our OT lesson is like saying, “There is no God or Master,” or if there is, “God can’t do anything about it.” Is it not the case that so many of the people who make the news that causes us to despair behave as if God can’t stop their lies? God seems to be totally ignored by so many of the people making headlines. Yet, the psalmist knows that God can and will do something about it. “Because the poor are despoiled,” and in the Bible those who are poor do not have the power that the movers and shakers do, “I will now rise up,” says the Lord. “I will place them in the safety for which they long.” I will now rise, God says. And how does a reporter or journalist cover the invisible God doing such a thing? One can’t, and so we don’t ever get the whole story listening to, watching, or reading the news. We’re most often missing the beginning of God’s response.

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In our NT lesson, Jesus also deals with the stuff of the news, namely, how humankind’s story is going to turn out. . The question raised by Peter, James, John, and Andrew has to do with God’s work of transforming life into what God has had in mind all along, what Jesus calls the kingdom of God. And interestingly enough, the one question that the disciples ask and Jesus does not answer is, “When will this be? When will God rise up and fully rule the world rather than just partially?”

There is no shortage of authors in Christian bookstores claiming that the time is near, yet, Jesus gives us no timetable. He does make it plain that those who say they know the time of the end don’t know what they’re talking about. “Beware that no one leads you astray.” Do you remember a book from some time ago called, “The Late, Great Planet Earth.” Hal Lindsey, its author, grabbed the attention of millions of people by telling us how he knew that the end of the world was near. But then what did we read in the newspapers? He invested the money he made off his book in long-term real estate. And how does that work? “The world’s going to end next week. Buy my book so I can invest in long-term real estate!”

What Jesus does say about the arrival of God’s kingdom in its fullness is, “When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come.” And what he means by that is maybe there’s no way God can bring about the new world coming apart from rocking the boat. The work of Jesus Christ is ultimately so earthshaking that there’s no way we can get from here to wherever he’s taking us on smooth seas. There will be opposition from all who oppose God’s will. And Jesus tells us this because whether we’re a member of the GI, the Silent, the Boomer, the Buster, or the Millenial generation, when we hear of tumultuous change, it can shake our hope in God. Don’t let that happen, Jesus says. There’s more going on than you know. Sometime upheaval is proof of God at work.

In the movie “Nobody’s Fool,” Paul Newman plays a fellow about 60 years old, who grows up in a town much like Festus or Crystal City. He’s divorced, works in the construction business when he can find work, has gone through periods in which he drinks too much, and wasn’t a good dad, even though he’s trying to be a better grandfather. He lives in a room in the home of his 8^th grade teacher, played by Jessica Tandy. She looks to be in her eighties, and one day has a stroke, not a big one, just a little one. The Paul Newman character comes to take her home from the hospital and tells her that she’s going to have to let her son know about her stroke so the son can take care of her. The Jessica Tandy character doesn’t agree with her son on much anything, and so she says, “No. I don’t need him to take care of me. He’ll just put me in a home, which will kill me. I already have someone to look after me. You.”

At that, the Paul Newman character says, “No. You don’t want to have to rely on me.” To which she says, “Do you still bet on that horse race of yours?”… He says, “You mean the trifecta. Yeah, the odds are such that one of these days it has to come through.”… She says, “Well, I still feel the same about you. Let’s go home.”

In spite of some rather disheartening days, she hadn’t given up on him yet. How much more, then, should we not give up on God? “Beware that no one leads you astray.” God is in charge and promises, “I will place you in the safety for which you belong.” Amen

RELATIONSHIPS THAT MATTER (Feb. 5, 2012)

2012-02-05T17:06:00.000-08:00

2 Kings 5: 8-14, James 5: 19, 20, GPC, 2/5/12, D. Johnson

Do you remember the movie, “Simon Birch?” It is a story about childhood told by an adult as a flashback. In the opening scene, Joe, who was Simon’s best friend, comes back to town as a grownup and stops at the cemetery. He examines a headstone that says, “Simon Birch, 1952-1964”, and says to those of us watching the movie, “I am doomed to remember a boy. Not because he was the shortest person I have ever known, or because he hit the baseball that killed my mother; but because he is the reason I believe in God. Whatever faith I have, I owe to Simon.”

What a wonderful thing to say about a person, but that’s the difference Jesus can make in our relationships. On Christ’s behalf, on occasion we bring God into our relationships with others, maybe so they can believe also. And there’s need for this. A couple of weeks ago the Pastor’s Column had to do with Dana Tierney, who describes herself as an atheist, but not the sort who is proud of it. She wishes she could believe, she just hasn’t been able to do so. And Dana just assumed that her atheism had rubbed off on her 4-year old son, Luke. For sure she hadn’t done anything herself to bring God into Luke’s life.

But then Dana’s husband was sent to Iraq – this during the time when American casualties were the greatest. While he was gone, one night she and Luke were listening to a news program about the dangers of Iraq. And she just happened to notice out the corner of her eye that Luke was sitting there, eyes closed, head bowed, and fingers steepled. She asked him what he was doing. He said that he was saying a prayer for his dad. She asked him when he first began to believe in God. He said, “I don’t know. I’ve always known he exists,” which sounds like something Simon Birch might have said.

Indeed, doesn’t it seem to you that some people, like Simon and Luke, come to a belief in God easier and more so on their own, whereas the rest of us need help? Help something like Naaman got in our OT lesson. Naaman was the commander of the Syrian Army at a time when Syria was much stronger than Israel. We are told that he had leprosy, although probably not true leprosy, Hansen’s disease. The word “leprosy” in the Bible refers to a variety of skin disease, some less itchy and blotchy than others. But whichever disease Naaman had, it wouldn’t clear up. It persisted week after week. It bothered him so much that he lay awake at night tossing and turning. One morning, then, when Naaman’s wife woke up wishing her husband snored instead of scratched, a young servant girl came to her. The girl was an Israelite who had been taken as a slave during a border raid by Syria. She said, “If only Naaman was with the prophet who is in Samaria (an area of Israel)! He would cure him.”

Naaman is so desperate at this point that his wife doesn’t have to nag for long until he goes to his king, the King of Syria, and gets a letter of introduction. The King of Syria assumes that Elisha, the prophet, is on the King of Israel’s payroll, but he’s not. The King of Israel doesn’t even seem to know about Elisha’s healing power. So when he reads the letter, he has a panic attack. It says, “When this letter reaches you, know that I have sent to you my servant Naaman, that you may cure him of his leprosy.” The King of Israel has no Cabinet Secretary of Skin Diseases to rely on. He thinks that this is the Syrian king setting him up for war. Down the road he’s going to say, “You insulted Naaman and me by not curing him, and so now we’re going to invade your country.”

The King of Israel is so upset about the jam he thinks he’s in that he tears his clothing, which was how one indicated distress in those days. How on earth is he going to avoid war with Syria? Elisha the prophet hears about the king’s dilemma, chuckles, and sends a message saying, “Remember the Superbowl several years ago? Why have you pulled a Janet Jackson type wardrobe malfunction? Let Naaman come to me, that he might learn there’s a prophet in Israel.” And that’s different, isn’t it? Elisha doesn’t say, “Let him come to me so that I might cure his leprosy.” He says, “Let him come so he might learn that there is a prophet in Israel,” a prophet being a person who introduces God into the mix, and who puts people right with God.

Naaman, then, after getting upset with Elisha’s methods, was healed as directed by Elisha in the Jordan River, healed quicker than the duration of a Kim Kardashian marriage, which is pretty quick. Then he worshiped the Lord, saying, “No longer will I offer burnt offerings or sacrifice to any god except the Lord.” What a difference the slave girl speaking to Naaman’s wife made! She helped Naaman come to know the true God.

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Simon Birch’s relationship with Joe also got off to a rocky start regarding God. Simon was an elementary school kid playing Little League baseball, so tiny that the coach only put him in the game so the opposing pitcher would walk him. Pitchers couldn’t throw to someone that short. But wanting to swing rather than walk, Simon disobeys the coach one game and hits the ball. It becomes a long foul ball, going such a distance that it strikes his best friend Joe’s mom in the head and kills her as she is walking by.

Later, as the two friends get back together, Simon says that he’s sorry for killing Joe’s mom, but it was out of his hands. He’s simply God’s instrument, which is a discussion the two have had before. Simon believes that God has put him on earth in such a small form for a special reason, to be a hero. But he can’t figure out how, and he’s running out of time. His little heart hurts, he’s getting sicker and sicker. Won’t live much longer. He wants to know what God wants him to do. In fact, Simon believes that God has a plan for everyone, which is a belief Joe won’t have any of. Joe doesn’t believe in God. He believes his mom died simply because she was hit in the head with a foul ball, and believes Simon is small simply because he was born a sick baby. And so they have an argument, but one that stays with Joe through the years.

Several of us have had similar discussions about God, haven’t we? Let me give you three reasons why we should continue doing so even though these discussions so often seem to be for naught. Number one, Jesus commands us to have such discussions. In Mt. 28 he says go out and make disciples, help others believe. Jesus is concerned about people who do not have faith in God, and one reason is simply this: think how important faith is to you. What would your life be like apart from faith? The knowledge that God seeks nothing less than our wellbeing and that of planet earth? The knowledge that we are loved, that we live in a user-friendly world, that the future belongs to God, no one else? Nothing less than quality of life is at stake in our faith, our enjoying all that God does and makes possible.

Think about the difference that faith made in Simon Birch’s life. Here we have an apparently sickly, undersized, freak of nature. His parents are so offended by his appearance that they have little to do with him. Joe’s grandmother calls him “that creature.” Yet, he knows he is beloved by God, not some unloved freak. He’s God’s instrument, going to be a hero. Simon’s faith in God makes a big difference. Or, again, think about the difference that just enough faith made in Naaman’s life – he was cured of his disease, came to know the true God as opposed to false gods.

The second reason we should be willing to talk to skeptics about God is that we don’t know how it’s eventually going to turn out. Now, it would be good if, like Elisha’s conversation with Naaman, the people in our lives did a quick turnaround, if like Naaman they’d soon give God a chance. But they don’t always, and so we can get discouraged when those we care about don’t buy in to our belief in God and more fully experience of the benefits of Jesus. But such discussions may have to accrue with other evidence over a longer period of time before others are persuaded. And we might be placing too much weight on what we say, as opposed to what we do.

In the movie Simon Birch, a busload of church children, Simon included, goes off the road into the frigid, winter waters of a fast-flowing river. True to what he believes about God and himself, Simon gets the panicky kids off the bus to safety, but in the process loses his life. So, when Joe, his best friend, says many years later as an adult, “Simon Birch is the reason I believe in God,” we have to wonder if Simon’s arguments for God’s existence by themselves would have been enough. Or did it take living out his beliefs to convince Joe?

The third reason we should bring God into our relationships with others is that sometimes we’re not so different from the naysayers. We backslide. We go through periods in which our faith is not as strong as at other times. This is the reality of our NT lesson, “If anyone among you wanders from the truth and is brought back by another, you should know that whoever brings back a sinner from wandering will save the sinner’s soul from death and cover a multitude of sins.” Think about it. At a given point in time we may find ourselves arguing that God exists and that this loved one of ours needs the benefits of Jesus in his or her life. But then a short while later we ourselves have wandered away from the truth of God. We’re mad at God or forget God in the allure of the world or ignore God because we want to do it our way. In neither case is the person in question fully enjoying the benefits of Jesus Christ – in one instance because he or she doesn’t believe, and in the other because we ourselves aren’t right with God. We’ve wandered away.

James means by “a multitude of sins” two. Two sins is the multitude. One is the sin that a Christian has wandered into, and the second is the sin that will result if another Christian doesn’t attempt to bring him or her back. For followers of Jesus it is a sin not to attempt to bring back to God followers who have fallen away from the faith.

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We live in a most skeptical age. And, sure, there are those who wear their atheism on their chests as though it is a medal and the rest of us are dummies. But there are also those like Dana Tierney who wishes she had the faith of her 4-year old son Luke, who are open to some help. Why? Because faith makes an incredibly good difference. She herself has noticed the difference and says, “Over the years I’ve come to feel I’m missing out. My friends and relatives who rely on God have an expansiveness of spirit. When they walk along a stream, they don’t just see water falling over rocks; the sight fills them with ecstasy. They see a realm of hope beyond this world. I just see a babbling brook. I don’t get the message.”

Faith makes a difference. Naaman was healed and discovered the true God. Simon Birch apart from faith might have accepted the world’s verdict that he was no more than a freak and become a sad, self-pitying little kid. Instead, because of his faith, he believed that God had created him for a purpose, saved a busload of kids from drowning, and became the reason that his best friend Joe believes in God. Amen

A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT (January 22, 2012)

2012-01-22T15:33:00.000-08:00

Genesis 3: 8-19, Revelation 22: 1-5, GPC, 1/22/12, D. Johnson

I know a fellow who was reading a magazine recently. It had a test in it that said, “You might want to go on a diet if any of the following is true…” The questions, then, went like this: “Have you ever broken out in a sweat when you realized that you were more than a mile from a Krispy Kreme location?” Or, “Is there a restraining order against you from the Association of All-You-Can-Eat Restaurants?”

Both were true about the man, including several others indicators on the test. At that point he felt that he needed some spiritual support, which was difficult because a week earlier he had become an atheist. Why? He couldn’t believe in a God who would create a world in which people would need to go on a diet. All he could do was phone the Atheist Dial-a-Prayer number. And you know how that goes. That’s where you dial the number and no one answers.

We’ve talked in recent weeks of people who say, “I can’t believe in a God who would allow this or that to happen.” Rarely, though, is it a God who would create a world in which people need to go on a diet. More often we hear that it is hard for people to believe in a God who would allow other forms of suffering. This morning let’s consider another “I can’t believe” statement. Can we say, “I can’t believe in a God who would give up on his original intent for humankind and our universe?” Or can we say, “I can’t believe in a God who eventually gives up and let’s sin and evil win?”

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And what is God’s original intent? We find it stated in the first chapters of the Book of Genesis where God creates a good world in which to live, but we humans sin and it all falls apart. As we have seen in recent weeks, humans are not right with God and God’s world. Much of this is stated clearly in our OT lesson. “When they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden, the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God.” You don’t hide from God if things are right with God.

God called out, “Where are you?” Adam said, “I hid because I was naked.” i.e, I am uncomfortable with myself, which is still the case today. We’re estranged from self for many reasons, physical and psychological, and thus seek out therapists, personal trainers, confession to a priest, self-help books, and the latest diet plan. We are most aware of our many flaws and shortcomings.

“Who told you that you were naked?” God asked. “Have you eaten from the tree of which I told you not to?” And don’t you love Adam’s answer? “The woman made me do it.” He blamed it on Eve, who even though she blamed the snake, probably gave Adam cold shoulder and hot tongue for supper. Human beings are not only estranged from God and self, but also from one another, which is made abundantly clear in chapter 4 when Cain kills Abel.

What the Bible wants us to know about our situation is that we’re a mess, and therein not right with God, not right with self, each other, and with nature, which is oftentimes overlooked. Nature also doesn’t work for us as God intended. God says to the humans, “Because you have disobeyed me… cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you.”

It is sad when you read the first few chapters of Genesis and think about the difference between how God meant life to be on planet earth and the mess we humans have made of it all. Adam and Eve had a good life in the Garden of Eden, trees that provided all they needed to eat, trees watered by the river that flows through Eden. But we lost out on the good life. And God was sad and upset about the damage humans were inflicting on planet earth and each other, but rather than give up on us, as one would expect, God chose to save both nature and us rather than allowing sin and evil win. And so, yes, regarding our earlier questions, as Christians we can’t believe in a God who would give up on his original intent for humankind and our universe. We can’t believe in a God who eventually gives up and let’s sin and evil win.”

Save is the root word of salvation, and salvation means much more than that to which it is limited. And here’s the issue. If God is saving us, what is God saving us from? What else but the mess we’ve made of things. If we’re alienated from God and all God created, doesn’t it make sense that Jesus came to put us right with God, and right with self, others, and Mother Nature? How can we think of salvation apart from the restoration of the good earth, the good life, and the good relationships God has always intended us to enjoy?

Unfortunately, non-biblical notions have crept into the Biblical notion of salvation, such as salvation meaning that God is going to whisk our souls away from all this to some ethereal dwelling place. That this world is no good, this body is no good; it’s all meant for the cosmic trash heap. Salvation, in these non-biblical understandings, consists of escaping this life and all its problems rather than making it all work out for the good. And so, yes, we may sing about our native land on July 4^th, I love thy rocks and rills, thy woods and templed hills, but in many persons’ notions of salvation, the land that has sustained us generation after generation, plenty good enough in spite of the curse, will no longer count. We will have no use for Mother Nature, indeed planet earth, in the long run. But where did we get this?

Certainly not from the song we just sang. Fairest Lord Jesus, Ruler of all nature, O Thou of God to earth come down. Rev. Timothy Keller of Redeemer Presbyterian in Manhattan, NY, gave a Christmas sermon based on 1 John, which has to do with Jesus, the Word of God, becoming flesh. He says, “Greek and Roman readers… would have been astonished when John said he felt the eternal, he saw the eternal. Greeks and Romans and even traditional religious people today believe matter (or nature) is bad; only the divine is good. The divine would not come down in the Greco-Roman world. Traditional religion says that salvation is escaping out of this (natural) world into the kingdom of God, but the gospel of Christmas is that salvation is the kingdom of God coming into this world…The body is important. Matter is important. Nature is important. Jesus took on flesh… The kingdom of God is here to rehabilitate this world, not to save us out into some kind of ethereal paradise… The future of the gospel is a new sky, a new earth.” Ours is not a salvation of escape, but of rehabilitation of what is.

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And how might this rehab or salvation work itself out? Thanks to biblical scholars such as N.T. Wright, who will be the guide in our Tuesday evening DVD course starting Feb. 21, “The New Testament World of Jesus,” we can now put things together about the future that have been confusing. Confusing why? In the NT we have bits and pieces here and there, but no comprehensive picture of salvation laid out in one place. For ex., in Luke’s gospel Jesus says to the revolutionary on the cross by his, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.” Luke says we die and go to Paradise, wherever that is. But then Paul says something else. He speaks of our being resurrected from the dead. In 1 Corinthians 15 he says that at the end of time as we measure it, when Jesus returns, the dead will be made alive in Christ, bodily raised from the dead. Sounds good, but where have we been in the meantime, and where are we when we’re raised? And then to further complicate matters, we have our NT lesson.

God granted John, the author of Revelation, a vision having to do with the end result of Jesus’ salvation. And remember, Revelation is not the weird book many would make it out to be. It is helpful and down-to-earth. It consists of visions, which mean what they mean symbolically rather than literally. And the vision in our NT lesson today follows another vision in chapter 21, one that we’ve looked at several times lately. “Then I saw a new sky and a new earth, for the first sky and the first earth had passed away… And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God… And I heard a loud voice saying, “The home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his people.” John’s vision of our future involves this life and this world made new. It involves God coming to us. It involves our taking care of Mother Nature, because the stuff of Mother Nature is somehow the stuff of our eternal home, albeit transformed.

And Norman Maclean, the Presbyterian preacher’s kid who wrote the book from which the movie was made, A River Runs Through it, understood this. Maclean was a professor of literature at the University of Chicago. And he says in the movie, this as an elderly man fishing a stream in Montana, “All things merge into one.” He does not look at the gorgeous canyon where he’s fishing and say, “All this will be abandoned and thrown into the dumpster.” Nor does he say about the people he loved and who have gone on ahead, “Some of these relationships ended poorly.” No. The story moves from the church, where he and the people he loved worshiped God, to the canyon where they loved to fish, and he says, “All things merge into one, and a river runs through it.” And where did he get that saying?

From out NT lesson, “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city.” i.e. A river runs through it, through the new world coming. “And on either side of the river is the tree of life, with is twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” And where was the last time we encountered the tree of life? In the Garden of Eden. And there was also a river that flowed through Eden to water the Garden. We lost out on life in the Garden because of humankind’s sin. But we will regain life in an even better Garden by God’s grace as God’s salvation is complete.

Again, there are several seemingly disjoint things said in the NT about salvation, but it just seems so. These can confuse us, but scholars such as NT Wright remind us that these things weren’t confusing for the first followers of Jesus. The first followers believed that those of us who die before “the end” of time go to heaven, or Paradise according to Luke, wherever that is. Not much is said in the Bible about this out-of-body existence. Paradise is a place to wait for God’s final act of salvation. Then, at the end of time as we measure it, the vision has it that there will be a judgment, which will include the nature of our relationship to God, self, others, and Mother Nature. And those who pass this judgment, and remember no one is righteous apart from the grace of Jesus, will be resurrected, rejoined with their body made new to live in the new world. This world is not discarded, but rehabbed or saved so that everything is as God originally intended. Eventually all things merge into one and a river runs through it. Amen

WHY ARE WE HERE? January 15, 2012

2012-01-15T10:37:00.001-08:00

Genesis 12: 1-3, Matthew 8: 18-22, GPC, 1/15/12, D. Johnson

One of my cousins moved to Denver a couple of years ago from Kansas City where he had quite a job history. He had been a proofreader for a company that made alphabet soup, a life-guard at a waterbed factory, and a police reporter. Every day for a year he had to report to the police. But in spite of the economy he’s doing all right in Denver now selling cement. I asked him why he decided to go into the cement business. He said he’s always been a good mixer.

I went to visit him at his office once. He has a secretary. I asked him what time she started work of a day. He said about two hours after she got there. She’s scheduled for a pay raise and asked my cousin when her raise would become effective. He said just as soon as she did. Last week she was two hours late coming back from lunch. She had been having her hair cut. My cousin asked her why she cut her hair on company time. She said, well, she grew it on company time. He said she didn’t grow all of it on company time, and she agreed. That’s why she didn’t have all of it cut off.

My cousin, for one, would agree that the workplace lends itself to difficulties. What’s going on with people’s attitudes? Our concern today: what difference does Jesus make on the job – and even more – what difference does he make to anything we do?

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Obviously there are more poor attitudes toward work than I could even mention in one sermon. I don’t have the whole story, but I do know the basic question, which is “Why am I here?” This may be a persistent question with some of us, or one that attacks others of us every now and then like wasps from out of a summer sky. “Why am I here?” Charlie Lents recently gave me a copy of an article from USA Today titled, “God, religion, atheism ‘So What?’ That’s what many say.’” It has to do with the religious climate of our country, one that is changing fast. For ex, 28% of the respondents told LifeWay Research that “It’s not a major priority in my life to find my deeper purpose.” 18% thought it absolutely ridiculous to believe that God has a purpose for everyone. And one fellow said, “God? Purpose? You don’t need an opinion on those things to function.”

Well, I, for one, am not so sure. Obviously some people can stay so busy that it takes them awhile to feel the sting of such a question as “Why am I here?” but they may eventually. And when they try to answer it, they may put the emphasis on the word “I.” I’m here for a life centered around me. I’m here to accumulate whatever contributes to my happiness, security, and feelings of importance. And such an answer is logical. It makes sense. But when you start checking around you find so many self-centered people who are unhappy and unfulfilled. You find studies that say, in spite of Americans now having so much more than we had in the 1950s, we are less happy than then. And when you look back at history you find that many of humankind’s best minds have said that why ever we’re here, it lies outside ourselves. To be happy and fulfilled, we Christians have found that we have to live for more than self, which is the reality found in our OT lesson.

Abraham was born in Ur. Again, you can find Ur on your bulletin insert. Several years ago I would get e-mails from persons I knew who were serving in the Air Force or Army in Iraq. All of them took advantage of a day off to visit the ancient ziggurat near the remains of Ur, a ziggurat that was there when Abraham lived in Ur. The ziggurat is called the Hill of Heaven, and it is dedicated to the moon god, Nanna-Sin. Abraham’s ancestors were most likely moon worshipers. Abraham’s dad’s name, Terah, means “moon.”

For whatever reasons, Terah had moved his family from Ur to Haran, in modern day Turkey, when God’s Word came to Abraham. And listen for how many times the word “I” is stated in this command, but “I” as it applies to God, not Abraham. “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and the one who curses you I will curse; and through you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

And God doesn’t say this just to Abraham. Our faith maintains that God says to each of us, “Go to a place I will show you.” Furthermore, do you see that our lives are a vehicle through which God achieves his purpose for us and others? “I will bless you so that you will be a blessing to others.” As we think about the question, “Why am I here?” Jesus is central to a tradition in which the answer goes like this: our lives are a response to God’s calling, a vehicle through which God achieves his purpose for us and others. Go to a place that I will show you, and that place might be exactly where you are or not. But there I will bless you so that you will be a blessing. We don’t live for just self, but for God and, on Jesus behalf, others.

But let me alert you that there is something going on here too often ignored by our modern world. Namely, not only does Jesus teach us that to find fulfillment we have to live for more than self, but he also teaches that one’s calling is bigger than one’s day job. One’s calling involves the entirety of one’s life, not just the work he or she gets paid for, which may be why so many people feel unfulfilled. They’re trying to find more in their job than is there. No less than our very lives are the vehicles through which God achieves his purpose.

In his book, Rumors of Another World, Philip Yancey reminds us that “The Puritans had a saying, ‘God loveth adverbs,’ meaning that God cares more about the spirit in which we live than the concrete results.” As I recall it, an adverb modifies or changes a verb, adjective, another adverb, or a sentence. As in, “Whatever you do, do it joyfully for the Lord, do it wholeheartedly. Gladly give your entire life, including your career, to God. Let God be powerfully at work in and through you.” Joyfully, wholeheartedly, gladly, and powerfully are adverbs.

Yancey continues, “The Puritans sought to connect all of life to its source in God, sought to bring the sacred and secular together in one world. They accurately understood that pleasing God does not mean that we must busy ourselves with a new set of spiritual activities. No. As the Puritans said, whether cleaning house or preaching sermons or shoeing horses… any human activity may constitute an offering to God.” It depends on the spirit in which it is done, be it on the job or in the home.”

Martin Luther said much the same thing. “Even dirty and unpleasant work… is pure and holy work if it comes from a pure heart.” He urged the people of his day – butchers, milkmaids, and farmers – to do their work as if God was watching. And one thousand years before Luther, Yancey claims, “Saint Benedict had founded the Benedictines to break down the artificial wall between spiritual and secular activities. To pray is to work and to work is to pray, he told followers. While studying theology and producing amazing illuminated manuscripts, Benedictine monks also worked outdoors, draining swamps and cultivating fields.” Even today Benedictines maintain that if they’re not spiritual wherever they are and as they are, they’re not spiritual.

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In our NT lesson, a scribe says to Jesus, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go,” which seems nice, doesn’t it? Jesus, though, replies, “Foxes have holes, and birds have nests; but the Son of Man,” a term Jesus used for himself, “has nowhere to lay his head.” What on earth does Jesus mean by that? “Foxes have holes, and birds have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head?” Kierkegaard thinks that Jesus is saying to the man, “What do you mean ‘follow me’? I have no home address, no studio, no school. You don’t come to where I am to follow me. I come to you and help you follow me in the circumstances of your life.”

And, yes, the Twelve disciples walked the roads with Jesus and learned to carry on his ministry, but we’re not the Twelve. We don’t just tag after Jesus looking for some new set of spiritual activities. Jesus says to us, “I’m not going to give you my address. There’s no sense in it. Rather, I’m coming into your life to help you joyously and wholeheartedly respond to God’s calling – at home, at work, in school, in retirement, in private, public, and at play. Wherever you are and whatever you are doing, I’m with you in the stuff of your life so that God can bless you and others. I’m here to interject adverbs into the stuff of your daily life.”

I don’t know about your Bible, but the editors of mine put a heading on our NT lesson. They titled it, “Would-be Followers of Jesus,” which is certainly the case with this next guy. “Another fellow said to him, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ But Jesus said, ‘Follow me and let the dead bury their own dead,” which seems rather tacky on Jesus’ part, doesn’t it? Again, one of the benefits of our next Tuesday evening course, “The New Testament World of Jesus,” is that it helps us understand some of the sayings of Jesus that would otherwise just zip on by us. The fellow in our NT lesson is an illustration. His dad isn’t dead, he isn’t even sick. He’s simply stating in Middle-Eastern idiom that he’s going to hang around because it’s expected. In fact, just a few years ago a young man refused a scholarship to a Middle-Eastern college. He said much the same words, “I will take it only after I bury my father.” Again, the father was healthy as a camel and still under fifty. The boy was simply allowing societal obligations, and in Jesus’ opinion, unreasonable obligations to interfere with God’s purpose for his life.

If God loveth adverbs, I wonder what God would have thought had Abraham said, “It’s much more important, God, that I help my dad on the ranch here at Haran than go off to Israel.” I don’t think God would have been terribly impressed. And, sure, God doesn’t call everyone to leave where they are and go somewhere else, but God does call all of us to be somewhere. God is always at work in the stuff of our daily lives, and every now and then God tells us it’s time for a change, a new way of offering up our lives to God.

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“Why are we here? Why did God create us? What’s our purpose in life?” There are many people who say that such a question doesn’t concern them. Maybe it will eventually. “Why are we here?” can lay low for a long time and then attack us like a nest of wasps. Thus, we need to know that Jesus makes a difference in how we answer. We’re here to respond to God’s calling, not just on the job, but with our lives as a whole. God’s calling involves everything about us – what we do, how we do it, how we treat others, how we discipline ourselves. God’s calling involves our interests and our disinterests, our skills as well as our lack of skill, our comfort zone as well as our discomfort zone. God calls us to be who we are, not who we aren’t.

And God’s calling involves a few special moments in our lives, such as, “Abraham it’s time to go to a land I will show you.” But it primarily involves a jillion ordinary moments. If we will offer up to God our ordinary moments, God can take our lives and achieve his extraordinary purpose, bless us and others, which is why Jesus says, “Foxes have holes and the birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” He wants an invitation. He wants to add adverbs to what we’re doing, so that whatever we do, we do it joyfully for the Lord, as well as wholeheartedly. We gladly give our lives, including our work week, to God. We let God be powerfully at work in and through us. Amen

WHY IS THIS HAPPENING TO ME? (January 8, 2012)

2012-01-08T16:41:00.000-08:00

Job 42: 1-6, Luke 13: 1-5, GPC, 1/8/12

We live in a world that has a hard time getting a handle on suffering. For example, the other day a man checked-in to a high-rise hotel in Atlanta. He was so distraught that he opened the window in his room, crawled out on the ledge and stood there ready to jump. A crowd gathered below as a police chaplain raced to the man’s room so he could talk to him through the open window.

The chaplain said, “Don’t jump! Think about your family!”… “I don’t have a family,” said the man. “Then think about your friends! For their sake, don’t jump!”… “I don’t have any friends.”… “Then for the honor of the South and Jefferson Davis, don’t jump!” The man asked, “Who’s Jefferson Davis?” to which the chaplain replied; “Who’s Jefferson Davis? Oh, go ahead and jump, Yankee!”

And when we don’t have a tradition to help us deal with suffering, we ask, “Why is this happening to me?” For ex., two men went to the doctor and each was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver. One of them asked, “Why is this happening to me?” but then he realized that he knew the answer. He’d drunk a fifth of hard liquor every day for the past thirty years. He wished he didn’t have liver disease, but it was hardly a surprise. The second man, though, did not drink. He had never had hepatitis. His habits were not those that would contribute to liver problems. And so when he asked, “Why me?” he could find no clear answer.

“Why is this happening to me?” is a question that at times can be helpful. Say, if we’re making the same mistake time after time, it can help us change our ways. “This is why. Stop it.” But at other times “Why me?” may stem from having no sturdy foundation that helps us understand suffering. Jesus never asked, “Why me?” So, our concern today is once again laying claim to the foundation that Jesus gives us when it comes to understanding suffering.

Jesus understood suffering in the context of the biblical story, which goes like this. In the beginning, Genesis 1, God created a good world, but humans then sinned and devastated God’s good world. Adam and Eve disobeyed and took the forbidden fruit, with the consequence that sin snowballed and humankind soon enough became estranged from God, estranged from self, alienated from one another, from nature, and nation alienated from nation.

Within the first few chapters of Genesis we go from living in Paradise to a World of Hurt, which was not what God wanted to happen when God created human beings. But just think how accurate these biblical estrangements now are. People aren’t right with God and suffer a lack of meaning and purpose in their lives. People are alienated from self, suffer the inner turmoil that keep psychiatrists busy. People aren’t right with one another, suffer from violence, abuse, and neglect. Suffer all the pains associated with relationships, especially broken relationships. Nations are alienated from other nations and suffer from various sorts of warfare. And because humankind is estranged from nature, we suffer from such as disease, famine, and death.

Paradise Lost is the beginning of our biblical tradition, but the good news of Jesus Christ is that we’re moving toward Paradise Regained. For even though the Book of Genesis tells us that human beings wrought such disaster that God was sorry he created us, it also tells us that God’s love was so strong that he decided to intervene and begin the process of restoring life to what he had in mind all along. In Genesis 12 God calls Abraham and Sarah to parent a people through whom God would work to put the world right. Their work continued through the centuries until God himself became incarnate in Jesus Christ. And, then, when Jesus had decisively won the war with evil, even though there are battles yet to be fought, Jesus turned this work over to us in the church. We continue the work of Paradise Regained.

There is a beautiful statement of the end result in Revelation 21. It goes like this: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and earth had passed away, and the sea (which is symbolic of the sin and chaos that causes suffering) was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “The home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more; for the first things have passed away.”

That’s the biblical hope or Christian hope, life in a world made new, life in a world in which there is no suffering. And to hope for such a life is never a mistake. It’s never a mistake to hope for what God promises. The mistake is thinking that we shouldn’t have to suffer now, thinking that for some reason this shouldn’t be happening to me, which was what Job thought.

Job accused God of the moral mismanagement of the universe because of his suffering. He didn’t deserve the pain he was going through. It wasn’t fair. A common misperception about Job is that he was patient, accepting whatever happened to him; but where did we ever get that? In reality, Job is irate and demands that God give him an answer as to why this is happening. But by the end of the book, and after a couple of conversations with God, Job changes his mind. He says in our OT lesson, “Now I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted …I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know…” What Job is saying here is that God’s purpose, which is putting a world gone wrong right - and who knows all that God is up against - is beyond Job’s comprehension. Job was wrong to attack God’s integrity with the illusion that he shouldn’t suffer. Thus, Job will repent in dust and ashes because “Why is this happening to me?” doesn’t have an easy, simple answer.

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Having no foundation that helps us understand suffering not only can lead to the question, “Why me?” but also to saying, “I can’t believe in a God who would allow this to happen?” The Christian tradition says that God never intended humans to suffer. But because we’re not robots God gives us the ability to choose, and we too often choose to sin, sin has snowballed into a world of hurt, snowballed into chaos way beyond individual indiscretions, snowballed into what the Apostle Paul called evil powers and principalities, forces that have a destructive life of their own. We see glimpses of this chaos with epidemics of disease, an economy wracked by corporate and political greed, and violence between groups of people that seems to be never-ending. Jesus gives us the hope that God is moving us toward a new day in which there will be no suffering, but we’re not there yet. So why would we expect the impossible? Why would we think that we should magically be exempted from the pains that others suffer? Why would we say, “I haven’t done anything wrong, I don’t deserve it,” which is the reasoning Jesus confronts in our NT lesson.

Two things have happened in our NT lesson. Pontius Pilate has massacred some Galileans while they were attending a religious service; and then a tower made of stone, likely part of Jerusalem’s security defenses, collapsed and killed 18 bystanders. People come to Jesus asking, “Did these people suffer because they were worse sinners than others?” Jesus says, no, not at all. Suffering happens. Paradise has not yet been regained. We’re still living in the between times. And then Jesus makes a point, “By the way; unless you repent, you will all perish as did they.”

And what did Jesus mean by that? Well, to better understand the historical context of many of Jesus’ statements is one of the reasons I hope that you can come to the 6-week course we’re having on Tuesday nights, beginning Feb. 21, “The New Testament World of Jesus: Historical circumstances leading to his death.” Jesus is not speaking in a vacuum in our Luke lesson. He’s speaking to people who hate being under Rome’s thumb, who want to rebel against Rome, and who think they can do so without suffering terrible consequences. Galilee, where Jesus grew up, was a hot-bed of anti-Roman sentiment. They were always ready to fight, and incidents such as Pontius Pilate murdering some of their own at worship could set them off. Jesus knew, though, that if his people rebelled against Rome, they might evict the smaller Roman garrison in Jerusalem, but then Rome would retaliate in might. And just as the Tower of Siloam fell, Jerusalem would fall also. So, first and foremost, Jesus is saying here that unless his people give up their intent for a military rebellion against Rome, they are doomed. No way they can defeat Rome.

But his words also speak to us in the following way. Don’t let your suffering, whatever it is, get the best of you. Don’t let suffering lead you to thoughts about God that aren’t true, say, that a loving God wouldn’t allow “such a thing to happen.” If God gives people free will, and if what humans do snowballs into chaos, affecting self, others, and the whole realm of nature so that it’s all out of whack, “such a thing can happen.” What would you rather be, a robot? If we were all robots, I suppose “such a thing,” whatever the nature of our suffering, wouldn’t happen. God would be in absolute control. But we’re not, nor is God.

Don’t let suffering cause you to walk away from God, be mad at God, want nothing to do with God. Look, God is for us not against us. God didn’t mess this world up; it’s humankind’s fault. If there is any hope of healing - and remember that Jesus is called the Great Physician - God is that hope. And if there is any hope of a better day; God is it, no one else. The good news is that rather than leave us in the situation of Paradise Lost, God through Jesus is transforming life into Paradise Regained. This is the foundation of Christianity, the tradition that helps us deal with suffering, suffering that will one day come to an end, but is with us

OUT WITH THE OLD AND IN WITH THE NEW (Jan. 1, 2012 Sermon Text)

2012-01-01T11:54:00.001-08:00

Amos 5: 21-24, Matthew 1:18-25, GPC, 1/1/12, D. Johnson

I overheard a conversation the other day between a waitress and a fellow who was probably in his seventies. She asked him if his children were going to be home for Christmas. And yes, they were. He has two sons, both coming home. The waitress asked him if his wife was cooking a big dinner. And yes, she was, but she was somewhat puzzled as to the menu. One of his sons is a vegetarian and the other is presently on the Atkins Diet. Did the waitress have any suggestions regarding the Christmas menu? “Sure,” she said, “meat and potatoes. Meat for one, potatoes for the other.”

John Ortberg of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church makes the following suggestion, not to help us understand a Christmas menu, but the Christmas story. Namely, dilemmas arise in this life and we have to respond. Joseph had to make a big decision regarding Mary, and there were complications. Not only had he received word that his fiancée was going to have a baby that he knew was not his, but Joseph was one of the righteous ones, a tsaddiyq in Hebrew. A tsaddiyq was known for his uncompromising obedience to the Law of Moses. What our NT lesson tells us about Joseph in just one word was that he was greatly admired by the people of Nazareth because of his personal righteousness.

I think of the situation in Nazareth somewhat like the situation in the movie, Gilbert Grape. Gilbert Grape’s mentally impaired brother, Arnie, has once again climbed the town water tower. He’s way up there and the townspeople gather to watch. Most are relieved when Arnie gets down safely, although a few kids in the crowd say they would like to see him fall. But that’s not true. Should he fall they’d have nightmares for years and spend lots of their parents’ money on psychiatric help. And there’s a new girl in the crowd who just came to town. She’s riding a bicycle and is impressed by Gilbert’s love for his brother, as well as his willingness to sing little songs to him over the bullhorn, “Match in a gas tank, boom, boom!” That makes Arnie happy enough to climb down. And then there are the two policemen, one of whom doesn’t seem all that upset, but the other is tired of Arnie’s antics. Maybe he ought to put Arnie in jail for awhile to see if the experience would prevent such climbing. Lots of viewpoints about Arnie as he sits atop the town’s water tower.

Lots of viewpoints about Mary also as the townspeople of Nazareth focus her. And remember that the angel hasn’t spoken to them. They only know she’s pregnant, and so what’s to be done with her according to the Law of Moses? Deuteronomy 22 says that if a man’s fiancée is unfaithful during the time of their betrothal, “she shall be brought to the door of her father’s house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death. She has done a disgraceful thing in Israel by being promiscuous… You must purge this evil from among you.” This was the law and not unlike the law today in places in the Middle East and Africa.

Among the townspeople of Nazareth there probably are a number who think that what Mary has done is wrong, yes, but not deserving of capital punishment. I have heard Biblical scholars say that there is evidence that the Law in Deuteronomy 22 about stoning the woman to death was not always enforced in Israel. So maybe the deciding factor in Mary’s fate lies with Joseph, the most aggrieved party. Maybe whatever he says rules. But whatever he says, we can be pretty sure that because he’s a righteous one, his fellow tsaddiyqim are saying to him, “We must purge this evil from our midst! Be obedient to the Torah, Joseph, and stone Mary to death!”

We don’t know how long it took Joseph to make his decision, but at least awhile. Matthew tells us not only that his word eventually held sway, but that Joseph went through two stages in making up his mind, the first stage telling us about his character. Namely, he didn’t think what Mary had done was right, but he wasn’t going to demand capital punishment for her indiscretion. We get this from vs. 19, which, I think, is a poor translation of the original Greek. You know how the Greek of the NT can be translated into English in a variety of ways? We have options with vs. 19, and I think the best translation is this: “Even though her husband Joseph was a righteous man, (i.e., a tsaddiyq who would feel an obligation to stone her,) he was unwilling to expose her to such public disgrace, and chose instead to dismiss her quietly.” Rather than take the verse as it is in your NRSV, add “Even though” to the beginning of vs. 19.

Even though Mary was in the wrong, after much thought and prayer Joseph decided that the death penalty, which the righteous guys demanded, was too severe. He wasn’t going to make a big issue of Mary’s pregnancy. He would simply tell her dad that because of her condition he would not marry her, and that would be that other than having to face his fellow tsaddiyqim. They’d be on his case for not having her stoned, but they’d settle down after awhile.

Things were not that easy, though. It all got much more complicated than Joseph imagined. Before he could talk to Mary’s dad, he had a dream. And in this dream, an angel said, “Joseph, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” Do not be afraid… but afraid of what?

Afraid of destroying his reputation. It was one thing leaving Mary at the altar as opposed to stoning her; it was something else altogether to go through with the marriage. The minute he took her home as his wife, his reputation went down the town drain, just like he knew it would. No longer was he a well-respected person, no longer a tsaddiyq. He was regarded from that time on as a fool. People stopped doing business with him he was held in such little respect. Telling Joseph to take Mary as his wife was the same as the angel telling him to go out and destroy his reputation, and that was a scary thing.

We may have an indication of how little respect the residents of Nazareth had for him over the years in the 6^th chapter of Mark’s gospel. In Mark 6 Jesus has grown up, begun his ministry, and has returned to his hometown. He goes into the synagogue and teaches, and is he impressive! Wow! People are astounded until they stop to remember who he is. And how could he have such wisdom? Jesus is that hometown boy born in the midst of the scandal, remember? And what they said is printed in your bulletin beneath the sermon title. They said, “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.

Two things about the townspeople’s response; one, they referred to Jesus as the son of Mary. Some scholars think that this is most unusual. Sons were always referred to as sons of their father, even if the father was deceased. The only departure from this practice was if the father was held in low esteem. Evidently Joseph’s reputation was trashed beyond all repair in Nazareth. To say that Jesus was the son of Mary was to say terrible things about Joseph. Secondly, the townspeople tell us that Mary and Joseph had other children, four boys and however many girls. This is how we know that not only did Joseph officially adopt Jesus, which was what he did by naming him in our NT lesson, but that he further stated his faith in God by naming the other four boys for Israel’s great patriarchs. This is not clear in Mark 6 because the names are in Greek; but James is Greek for the Hebrew Jacob, Joses Greek for Joseph, Judas Greek for Judah, and Simon Greek for Simeon. It was like Joseph gave his other sons the names of men through whom God had acted in history because he trusted that through his adopted son, Jesus, God was going to act once again to save his people. Be sure that you understand what happened in Nazareth. Joseph gave up his good reputation in order that he live by faith.

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What lessons, then, do we take away from this story into the New Year? One is not that the tsaddiyqim, of whom Joseph had been one, were wrong in their quest to be righteous. Wanting to be right with God, and consequently right with one’s fellow beings and created world, is not wrong. God says in our OT lesson, “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Righteousness is not a bad thing. It’s good. The problem in Nazareth was how the tsaddiyqim were going about it. They thought that they themselves were the source of righteousness because they were perfect people, did not sin or condone those who did, people like Mary and then Joseph. But not so, taught Jesus when he grew up. The source of righteousness is not our behavior, for we are all sinners, but God, who declares us right because we live by faith in Jesus. Big difference. Human beings are right with God because God puts us right through Jesus Christ.

In John 8, Jesus has grown up and comes across a bunch of tsaddiyqim who are about to stone to death a woman caught in the act of adultery. And what does Jesus say to the men in John 8? “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” And what do they say back? Nothing. They know he’s right. They go about their daily lives as if they’re perfect, but they know they’re not. So they walk away in silence as Jesus says to the woman, “Nor do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.” I wonder if this incident made Jesus think about his Mom. “Wow! Mom could have been stoned to death, and where would I be?” Or maybe he thought about Joseph, how Joseph had once belonged to the group of guys ready to stone Mary. Thought about how Joseph had broken ranks with them, and how in order to be truly righteous it had cost him his reputation.

Which gets us to the second lesson for the New Year. Presently there is in our country the notion that it is a smart thing to believe in God. Why? Get God on your side so that God, like any other resource, will help you with your life. And I would certainly have to agree that followers of Jesus enjoy the benefits of a meaningful, purposeful, joyful life. But in what sense did God help Joseph with Joseph’s life? Did God give Joseph an easy life? Not at all. God told Joseph to give up his reputation, no easy thing, and Joseph did.

Rather than God giving us an easy life in the New Year, which is what so many people want God to do, what we get when we believe in Jesus is oftentimes disequilibrium, the life we know turned upside down and inside out. For when the problems, questions, and dilemmas of life confront us – and we truly open ourselves to God’s guidance through prayer and worship and the study of scripture – we may find ourselves coming down where we never thought we’d be. God challenges our long-held opinions and ways of going about things if they’re wrong. God does not exist to help us have an easy life. We exist to help God with his purpose in and through Jesus Christ. And that’s the Christmas story as it pertains to Joseph. Amen

THE PEACE OF GOD (Christmas Day Sermon Text)

2011-12-25T07:38:00.001-08:00

Psalm 4, Philippians 4: 4-9, GPC, 12/25/11, D. Johnson

As Christmas approached, a dad once noticed that his small son was wearing his Halloween costume from the past October. For Halloween the son had been Sir Lancelot, had a costume of shining armor. The dad wondered why the son would be wearing this armor and singing “Jingle Bells”, and so he asked. The son said, “I’m not Sir Lancelot anymore. Now I’m the Knight Before Christmas.”

Sometimes we get our concepts confused. This Christmas morn we’re dealing with the concept of peace, as in “Peace on Earth, Good Will to All.” I recently went through definitions of peace in an English dictionary. I’d say, “Yes, that meaning of peace is in the Bible, and so is that one, but this other one is not always what the Bible means by peace.” And that is, the Bible does not necessarily mean by peace, “freedom from conflict or disagreement among people or groups of people.” Peace in the Bible can be had in the midst of conflict.

For example, in our OT lesson the psalmist is very much in conflict with others. He says, “How long, you people, shall my honor suffer shame? How long will you love vain words, and seek after lies?” These others are on the side of falsehood, the psalmist on the side of truth. These others have attacked the psalmist’s integrity, yet he sleeps in peace. Or in our NT lesson the writer is Paul, who was constantly under attack or involved in conflict. When he says, “the God of peace will be with you,” he means that God will help us deal with conflict in a Christ-like manner, as opposed to free us from conflict. “Do not worry, but ask God for what you need given your situation. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard you hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

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Peace is not the absence of conflict. Peace has to do with handling conflict as would Jesus. And here are some situations to think about. Number one, have you ever had one of those days in which you had more to do than you possibly could? You were under attack from your to-do list, yet, when you went to bed that night you felt really good about what you had accomplished. Now, you still have a mess to sort out and work through tomorrow and the day after and the day after, but you feel really good about how much you got done today. Maybe that feeling is akin to what the Bible calls peace. The psalmist says, “I will both lie down and sleep in peace; for you alone, O Lord, make me lie down in safety.” And safety from what? The feeling that we have to get things all tidied up right now. Life is messy, and so maybe it’s enough to not be intimidated by the mess, but daily do what we can about it. Leave it in God’s hands, sleep at night in peace.

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Or, two, have you ever been doing good things only to suffer a setback? Paul had been proclaiming the gospel that Jesus gave him when he gets thrown in prison for doing so. He is in a Roman prison when he writes our NT lesson, not knowing whether he will be condemned to death or not. Yet he says, “Rejoice in the Lord always.” We are inclined to rejoice only when we experience success, be at peace only when things turn out as we want them to. Paul, though, can say “Rejoice” because he is at peace with doing God’s will regardless of how things turn out. He believes God’s rule is going to ultimately prevail in our world regardless of what happens to him, so “Rejoice!”

There is an ancient Palestinian farmer’s prayer that goes, “Mine is the red, yours is the green,” meaning that all I can do is plow the red soil and plant the seed. The green is God’s domain. If it grows or if it is successful, it is God’s doing, not ours. Some things we have little if any control over, and so peace comes from both doing God’s will and leaving the outcome to God. Mr. Holland, midway in the movie Mr. Holland’s Opus had gotten to the point where he knew that being a music teacher was what he was cut out to be. He could defend his unorthodox methods to the principal. He had learned to take on almost any challenge, but then found out that his infant son was deaf. And that was a setback. This is a man who is turning lives around because he has figured out approaches to music that work for kids. Yet his only son is deaf and cannot experience the music that so excites him. It is hard to be at peace apart from trusting that God is able to bring good out of a situation in which we see only disappointment. Still, “Rejoice”, God can.

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Or, number three, have you ever had one of those days in which you had more voices competing for your attention than you could possibly get around to? And so you had to figure just to whom you were most accountable? You could do this, but not that; make this person happy, but not that one. And even though you wish you could have satisfied everyone, when you went to bed that night you felt good about the choice you made. Amidst the conflict, you did the right thing at the right time for the right reason. Maybe that feeling is also akin to what the Bible calls peace. If we are ultimately accountable to God, we rely on God to help us do the right thing at the right time for the right reason.

In the movie, Mr. Holland had a hard time balancing the demands of his teaching with the demands of family life. And one day when his son was a teenager, the two got into a terrible argument. It was the day that John Lennon was murdered, and the dad was upset when he got home. The deaf son wanted to know who died, but the dad ignored him as not knowing anything about music. This enraged the son who signed that he did know about the Beatles, and that his dad cared more about teaching other people than he did about his own son. The dad asked why the son would have any interest in music, and the son signed “Because music is the joy of my dad’s life!” And that one hurt.

So the dad set a new priority. He went to his son’s school for the deaf and learned all he could about how he might better help the deaf understand music. And then he invited the deaf school to a concert put on by his own students, one in which he hooked up the music to flashing lights and let the deaf students stand close so they could feel the vibrations. Peace is when you struggle with God’s help to do the right thing at the right time for the right reason. And at the end of the concert Mr. Holland sang and signed a song of John Lennon’s for his son. One of the lyrics basically stated the theme of the movie, and that is, “Life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans.”

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If you saw the movie, Mr. Holland’s Opus, you know it has a hokey ending. I’ve heard several people say that as they wiped a tear from their eye. Actually, it’ss the same sort of hokey ending as the movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” in which George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, gets to see the difference his life made. For George, life was also what happened to him as he made other plans. Peace is going along with God as opposed to just any old plans we might have.

As the movie starts out, Mr. Holland takes a job as a teacher because he’s tired of being on the road. He is a musician and a composer and thinks that by working as a teacher he will have plenty of spare time to compose music. That’s his plan. And so as he starts teaching, he puts in his class time, and then sprints out the door when the bell rings to end the school day. He’s off to work on his music. But then there is this girl who really wants to learn how to play the clarinet. She has struggled with it for three years, practices constantly, yet one day is in tears she’s so bad. She tells Mr. Holland that her sister is going to Julliard on a ballet scholarship, her brother to Notre Dame on a football scholarship. Her mom has won the blue ribbon for watercolors at the state fair so many times that they’ve retired the award, and her dad has about the most beautiful singing voice she’s ever heard. She’s the only one in her family who isn’t good at anything.

She comes back the next day to turn in her clarinet so someone else might have it. She’s quitting. Mr. Holland asks her to listen to a song on the radio, “Louie, Louie.” He tells her that the members of the group are terrible singers, and all they do is play three cords, but he likes it and she likes it. Why? Because it’s fun. How about let’s make playing the clarinet fun. How would we do that? Well, when you look in the mirror, what do you like best about yourself? The girl says her hair. Her dad tells her that her red hair reminds him of a beautiful sunset. And so Mr. Holland says, “Then play me a sunset.” And she did, and it was fun, and she became successful at playing the clarinet.

Mr. Holland working with this girl was a turning point both for him and for her. He started finding ways to get most all of his students to love music, and the girl grew up to be the governor who gives the speech at the hokey ending of the movie. She says, “Mr. Holland had a profound influence on my life, on a lot of lives I know. Yet I get the feeling that he feels a great part of his life misspent. Rumor has it he was always working on this symphony of his, and this opus was going to make him rich and famous, probably both. But Mr. Holland isn’t rich and he isn’t famous, at least not outside our little town. So it might be easy for him to think himself a failure, and he would be wrong because I think he has achieved a success far beyond riches and fame. Look around you. There is not a life in this room you have not touched, and each of us is a better person because of you. We are your symphony, Mr. Holland.”. Life’s what happens to us when we’re making other plans, which is one way of thinking about the first Christmas. “A decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered.” Everyone was on the road to whatever town this registration would take place. That was the plan. But what happened?

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One difference between dictionary definitions of peace and the peace of God has to do with conflict. Experiencing the peace of God does not require the absence of conflict, but it does require us to deal with conflict in a Christ-like manner. Peace involves how we deal with our plans versus God’s will, how we deal with the demands made of us by others, how we deal with disappointment vs. success, how we deal with our to-do list given the time we actually have available. We cannot escape conflict, we can only deal with it by prayerfully seeking God’s guidance. As Paul says, “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, set your compass by these things. Do the things you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.” Amen

EXPECTATIONS TURNED UPSIDE DOWN (Christmas Eve Sermon Text)

2011-12-25T07:37:00.001-08:00

Micah 5: 2-5a, Luke 2: 1-7, 3: 7-14, GPC, 12/24/11, D. Johnson

Christmas is about Incarnation, God in the flesh; and about Immanuel, God come to be with us. And we like this kind of togetherness, so much so that just as the shepherds joined Mary, Joseph and Jesus at the manger, we in-the-flesh people tend to get together at Christmastime. It’s traditional. Virtual Christmas celebrations really don’t work; nor do we always like non-traditional celebration.

For example, one Christmas a family gathered at the grandparents’ house only to find out that grandmom and granddad had purchased one of these upside-down, ceiling mounted Christmas trees, which in the parents’ opinion, as well as that of the grandkids, was not traditional. Have you seen these? They’re not unlike the cover of our bulletin this afternoon; Christmas trees that hang from the ceiling, upside-down. They’re expensive if you buy an artificial one, something like $300-$600. Or if you want, you can just nail a real Christmas tree upside down to the ceiling as though it’s a stalactite in your living room. But why would you want an upside-down tree?

Marketing experts say that you can put bigger presents under it. Or if you live in a cramped apartment, a ceiling-mounted tree takes up less floor space. When you decorate it, you can put your prized Christmas ornaments closer to the ceiling so that your pets won’t eat them. But what do you do with the star? And how do you water this sort of tree? I’m not sure it’s going to work out. Years from now maybe we’ll call it the “Edsel Tree”.

Homiletics Magazine says that “for many people their biggest fear is that Christmas won’t happen according to plan, that something will go awry and ruin Christmas.” People want Christmas to work out, period - like the year they got a Red Rider BB gun or Malibu Barbie. They want this Christmas to be like the year the Christmas pageant went off without a hitch; or the year when absolutely everyone in the family got to come home. People remember these Christmases as being “perfect.”

On the other hand, people also remember the year the lights shorted out and turned the Christmas tree into toast; or the Christmas when the oven broke without anyone noticing it until they cut into the turkey; or the year it unexpectedly snowed three feet, stranding 36 relatives with stomach-flu at the house for three days. Even though these imperfect Chrismases really tend to bring out the Christ in our midst, people want a perfect Christmas, one that conforms to expectations. Indeed, what’s the premise of Christmas specials like The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, or Frosty the Snowman, or Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, or Charlie Brown? That someone or something is out to ruin Christmas. It has to be saved.

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People also had traditional expectations back in Micah’s time. One was that the Messiah would come from someplace like New York City rather than Crystal City. But that proved wrong, didn’t it? What does Micah say? “But you, O Bethlehem – Bethlehem not Jerusalem - who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth one who is to rule in Israel.” The Messiah is coming from Main Street not Wall Street. Secondly, people expected God to act soon. After all, they had been good little boys and girls. They expected God to “know when you’ve been sleeping, to know when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for Messiah’s sake.” But again what does Micah say? “Therefore God shall give them up until the time when she who is in labor has brought forth.” The Messiah or Christ will arrive in God’s time, not in response to Israel’s being good, which Israel really hadn’t been.

Thirdly, the people expected a military Messiah to free them from foreign oppression and restore Israel to the glory of Kings David and Solomon. Micah turns that expectation upside down also. He says that the Messiah shall be “the one of peace,” not a Rabbi Rambo action figure. Furthermore, and this is most uncharacteristic of political figures, he “shall feed his flock in the strength of the Lord,” teach them the ways of God. People certainly weren’t expecting that. It was just S.O.P. that whoever was in charge got all the goodies and the people got the crumbs. And the head guy always did whatever he wanted. Sure, he’d say that whatever he did was done the name of the Lord, but it not really.

Micah prophesied some seven-hundred years before Jesus’ birth. He says that the Messiah isn’t going to be the kind that the people expect. Evidently, not many paid attention to Micah because just before Jesus begins his ministry, John the Baptist has to say much the same thing. First of all, he says that with the Messiah their religion, country, ethnicity, and family history doesn’t matter. You think that just because Abraham is your ancestor, which the people did, that the Messiah is going to give you a pat on the back? Wrong. You know better. “Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” The Messiah expects us to be productive in his service, not dead wood.

The people then ask John what they should do. He says minimize your closet and pantry: if you have two coats, share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.” Then John gets really topsy turvy. Tax collectors must collect no more than the amount owed by law. Tax collectors, of course, were Jews. They bid on their job and received a contract from the Romans. With the might of Rome behind them, they got a cut of everything they collected. And the Romans didn’t care if tax collectors observed the law or not. The Romans just wanted more and more taxes. And why be a Jewish tax collector, hated by your own people, if you weren’t going to become wildly wealthy?

Pretty much the same thinking with Roman soldiers. There were Roman soldiers who attached themselves to Jewish synagogues. They were embarrassed by Rome’s gods and wanted to learn the way of Israel’s God, but they didn’t necessarily expect what they learned to interfere with their lifestyle. Typical of the thinking of a Roman soldier was that if you had to be away from your family in Rome stationed in the sticks of Palestine, you might as well make the most of it by shaking down the locals. John thus teaches these soldiers “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation. Be satisfied with your wages.” John not only is describing a different sort of Messiah, but a topsy turvy response to him.

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Every year we Christians gripe about Christmas being too commercial or too secular. We gripe that “They’ve taken the Christ out of Christmas.” We might ask, then, if there was just one thing we could do to put the focus on Christ, what would it be? Obviously there is more than one thing, but based upon our scripture lessons, one thing would be to re-examine our expectations and ask ourselves if we really expect much of Jesus or not. And if we do, allow Jesus to turn our lives and world topsy turvy. Don’t accept the excuse, “Oh, it’s just the way things are.” It may be the way things too often are, but Jesus always challenges the status quo. Isn’t it funny how people gripe about leaving Christ out of Christmas but not about leaving him out of daily life the rest of the year? It is said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, but John’s message is, “Those who cannot imagine a different future are prisoners of their own limited expectations.”

An example of expectations turned topsy turvy. John Dunlop was once a Church of Scotland pastor. He remembered an incident from his life every time he presided over the Sacrament of The Lord’s Supper. Namely, during WWII John was in the British infantry. He was captured and placed in a prisoner of war camp in Poland. It was horrible – cold, wet, filthy, and almost no food. A bowl of thin soup and a scrap of bread once/day. Prisoners lost so much weight they were skin and bones, contracted many diseases, and began to die. The war at that point was not going well for the Allies. There didn’t seem to be much reason for hope. One way that prisoners had learned to end it all was by throwing themselves against the barbed wire fence as if trying to escape and be shot instantly by the guards.

John Dunlop said that one night he was so discouraged, depressed, and hungry that he slipped out of the barracks and walked toward the fence, not quite sure whether he should end it all. He sat down on the bare ground thinking when he sensed movement on the other side of the barbed wire. It was a Polish farmer. He had half a potato in his hand. He thrust the potato through the barbed wire, and as John Dunlop took it the farmer said in heavily accented English, “The body of Christ.” God with us, God in the flesh, coming to turn our expectations topsy turvy. Amen

GROWING OLDER BUT NOT UP (Dec. 11, 2011 Sermon Text)

2011-12-11T16:47:00.000-08:00

Hosea 11: 1-11, Mark 10: 13-16 SPC, 12/11/11, D. Johnson

There are those who feel that the gift of song is a gift of love. There’s even a song written by Mason Williams - I’ve heard it many times in church - “The Gift of Song is a Gift of Love.”And I, for one, have always felt that way. I even love changing the lyrics of songs to something with which I’m more familiar.

For example, there’s a hymn that goes, “We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.” Remember that hymn? We have sung it through the years, especially at Thanksgiving time, whether we have had any experience with a sheaf of grain or not. When I was a kid, the boys in my Sunday school class had never shocked grain, so I’d change the lyrics to, “Bringing in the Sheep,” of which there were many in our part of the country. “We shall come Bo Peeping bringing in the sheep.” And I gave the girls in our Sunday school class a copy of “Bringing in the Sheets”, which is a way of “going green” that you don’t see much anymore, persons going out to the clothesline. “We shall come rejoicing with washday freshness bringing in the sheets.”

With me “a gift of song” has also been a gift of lyrics to make into something more familiar, like with “Jingle Bells” in the Pastor’s Column. Now, I don’t spend much time changing lyrics; it just sort of happens in my head as I drive down the street. But ever since I was a kid I’ve done this, proof that I’m growing older but not up, and hopefully not just me. Our concern today is larger than the gift of song. It has to do with how we receive the gift of the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God means God’s rule over our individual lives as well as God’s rule over our entire world. The kingdom of God is here, inaugurated by Jesus, but not yet fully. It will be here fully with what we call Christ’s second coming. So, how do we accept this gift of quality of life, and what do we do with it?

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In our NT lesson Jesus says to accept this gift as though we were a child. “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” And what is there about a child receiving a gift that Jesus finds so important?

Here’s how I understand it. One day when I first started making up different words to songs, a friend of mine went home from school with a rather expensive toy. I can’t remember just what it was, but I do remember that his parents hadn’t given him one for Christmas because the toy cost too much. They couldn’t afford it. His mother looked at the toy and said, “Who gave that to you?”… He said, “Billy.”… “That’s expensive,” she said. “Why did he give it to you?”… “I don’t know. He just did.”… “Well, no one gives you something unless they owe it to you or they want something in return. Why did Billy give it to you?”… “I don’t know. He just did.”

And therein we have a glimpse of the difference between children and adults that I think so intrigues Jesus. When children receive a gift they simply say “Thank you”, make use of it, enjoy it. When adults receive a gift, we tend to think of it as something we deserve or don’t, as well as something that obligates us to give a gift in return. The wife says to her husband in our cartoon, “The Stevensons sent over a lovely meat basket.” And instead of saying, “Meat, it’s what’s for dinner!”he’ll say, “Oh, no! I haven’t been hunting lately. Agriculture hasn’t been invented yet. What can we give them in return?”

Adults have a hard time separating receiving a gift from what did I do to get it and what can I give in return? My son Curran and his family live in Fredrick, Md., just outside Washington, D.C. He works for Clark Construction Co., which built FedEx Field, where the Washington Redskins play. A few years ago we phoned him to see how things were, and he said, “I’m on my way to the kickoff at the Cowboy-Redskins game.” An acquaintance of his had an extra ticket and had given it to Curran. My immediate and adult way of thinking was that it’s great to get something for free, still, as the saying goes, “There are no free lunches.” Why did this guy give my son a free ticket? Sure enough, it was because Curran had done favors for this acquaintance in the past. The ticket was a payback sort of gift.

So often we adults wonder why we were given a gift, and then worry, as will the couple in our bulletin cartoon, “What can I give in return?” Jesus, though, understands gifts differently. He says, “Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it,” which means accept it with a simple thank you, and use it for the purpose for which it was given - a joyous, hopeful, meaningful life. Again, my friend was given an expensive toy. He told the giver, “Thank you,” and then went home to play with it. His mother, though, kept interfering: “Why did Billy give you that toy?” Finally he said, “I guess he likes me.” Matter settled, at least for him. “I guess he likes me.”

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Sometimes people do give you a gift simply because they like you or love you, and with no motivation other than you need it or it will help you. When Jesus teaches us to pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven,” what he’s telling us by using the word “Father” for God is this: just as children are loved by the world’s best fathers, we are valued and provided for by God. God gives us gifts simply because God finds us worthy of his love and because these gifts will benefit us. Since this is the case, a simple “Thank you” is how we should receive life within God’s rule. Receive it gratefully, strive to be good citizens of God’s kingdom, and enjoy the benefits, of which there are many.

I remember back when I was making up the words to “Bringing in the Sheets” that there was a girl in my Sunday school class whose family was very poor. Her clothes were all hand-me-downs and she didn’t have many toys. She lived two blocks from me. I passed her house on my bike almost everywhere I went, and so I would see her playing in her yard. For Christmas one year her parents gave her a hula-hoop, and she was so proud of it! From then on for months I’d see her in the yard spinning her hula hoop around her waist or her arm or her leg, or rolling it like a hoop, or using it like a jump rope. She’d play with it for hours, becoming quite skilled.

In our OT lesson, the people of Israel were slaves in Egypt. God sent Moses to free them, enable them to become skilled in God’s ways, which is a rather lengthy story, but notice how God sums it up in Hosea. “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.” Again, what was God’s motivation? “I loved Israel.” And because Israel at that time was much like a child, Israel gladly accepted this gift of freedom; at least to get out of Egypt. But then Israel stopped acting like a child, wasn’t so sure it valued this gift, and so God had to spend 40 years, what we call the Wilderness Wanderings, teaching Israel his ways. And why would God do this?

Because God’s ways produce our wellbeing, God seeks nothing less than our wellbeing, and therein God doesn’t give up on us. Ours is to accept life within God’s rule gratefully, become skilled in living by the ways of Jesus, and enjoy the benefits thereof. Unfortunately, as was the case with Israel not obeying God’s commandments, we aren’t always obedient to the ways of Jesus. We sin, which is turning our back on God’s gift for a lesser way of life.

God says in our Hosea lesson, “The more I called (to my people), the more they went from me: they kept sacrificing to the Baals and offering incense to idols.” i.e, even after Israel wandered in the wilderness and then settled in the promised land, the people both intentionally and without even noticing at times abandoned the ways of God for the ways of their neighbors, much like our predicament today. We spend so much time immersed in our secular culture that its values rub off on us, sometimes without our noticing that the values of our world are different from those of Jesus. Read the gospels: it is clear that Jesus does not condone violence, does not go along with casual sex, does not worship wealth, does not endorse policies that rip-off the poor, does not support injustice and unfairness. And Jesus’ opposition to our sin is more than just passive. It’s active.

When we sin and turn our back on the quality of life that God wants us to experience, God does not give up on us. God actively works to correct us. In our Hosea lesson, even though God is so mad at his people he feels like nuking them into a bad memory, his love prevails. He says, “I am God and no mortal…I will not execute my fierce anger.” But God will do something out of his love to correct them, and I like how Barbara Brown Taylor puts it.

She thinks of God’s relationship to us when we persist in sin as that of a jiu-jitsu master to that of a novice. God doesn’t want to hurt us so much as God wants us to feel the full force of rejecting his ways. And so there we are going our merry way, when all of a sudden it’s like some judo master flips us and we’re laying on the mat with a back ache looking up at the ceiling. It’s what God did to Israel. Just as Israel had once been slaves in Egypt, but then were free in the promised land for centuries: God flips their lives so they again experience slavery, this time in Assyria. If we don’t want to live by God’s ways, well, we’ll soon enough see where our ways land us. But even then the story is not over. God is not out to harm us, but to convince us to return to his ways. The appropriate response to having your life flipped or corrected is getting up and getting with God’s agenda.

Back when I was changing the lyrics to “Bringing in the Sheaves”, there was a bully in my school. He made kids’ lives miserable at times. But then one day he picked on a kid he knew nothing about. It turned out that this boy’s dad taught judo, about which the rest of us knew hardly anything at the time, at Walker Air Force Base, and that the dad had taught his son well. Each time the bully tried to grab hold of the smaller boy, he wound up on his back. He spent more time flying through the air that day than Superman did in that week’s television episode. And although the smaller boy could have really hurt the bully, he didn’t. He just taught him enough of a lesson to change the bully’s ways.

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There is a sense in which Jesus tells us to grow older, but never grow up. Why? Because children have abilities that we adults too often lose, especially, knowing how to receive a gift. God has given us a gift, life within his rule. We can think we deserve it, but we don’t. Or we can try to pay God back for his generosity, but we can’t. Grown-up thinking tends to foul-up God’s gift. Rather, let’s simply be thankful, respond by learning and living by Jesus’ ways, and by enjoying the benefits of God’s rule. Amen

AGENTS FOR GOD – REMEMBER WHO YOU REPRESENT

2011-11-27T17:27:00.000-08:00

Psalm 1, Matthew 23: 16-24, GPC, 11/27/11

One way of stating our purpose in life is to say that we’re agents of Christ, people through whom others see God’s love, people who are authorized to represent Jesus’ interests.

Last week we saw how agents of Christ are always on-duty, always ready to respond when opportunities arise. For ex., Debbie Sandborgh, from Idaho, several years ago had a message on her answering machine saying that her son and his army unit would be returning in three days from combat duty in Iraq. They would be arriving at Fort Sill, which is near Lawton, OK. The caller leaving the message said, “We want families to come here, if possible, and welcome these soldiers home. This unit has seen tough duty, and some of them are in pretty bad shape.”

Debby cleared her calendar, got in her car, and drove to Fort Sill, only to find out that her son would not be coming in that day. The welcome-home to which she had been invited took place on Father’s Day. Her son and a few other single guys had given up their places on the plane so that the soldiers who were fathers could be with their families. Debby’s son would be coming in two days later. She was disappointed, of course, as well as proud, and already at Ft. Sill when she got word. She decided to attend the ceremony just to see what it was like.

All the families were waiting in Aircraft Hanger A, when, all of a sudden, the door of Aircraft Hanger B opened. Families could see a platoon of soldiers, about 300 of them, 15 abreast, 20 deep, marching with their shoulders touching, coming toward them. The tramping sound of their boots was loud and impressive. These soldiers looked strong and powerful, but as they got closer the families could see tears running down their faces. Many of them, still teenagers, were so exhausted they could hardly stand.

There was a brief ceremony, and when the platoon commander said, “Company dismissed!” the soldiers ran to their waiting families. Of course, not all of them had a family that could come to Ft. Sill. Many just stood there alone, looking lost, no one to give them a hug, so Debby did! She herself was in tears as she hugged the soldiers, talked with them, and welcomed them home. One of them, an orphan, especially enjoyed the attention. And then, because she still had two days to wait in Lawton for her own son to return, she went to the FPC where she made welcome posters and recruited volunteers to serve on a welcome team for the next batch of returnees. Paul says in last week’s NT lesson, 1 Corinthians 15, “Be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord.” I.e., don’t just wait around for your own, who by the way did a good turn by giving up his seat, but welcome those who have no one waiting for them.

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Agents of Christ are authorized by Jesus to represent his interests, further his influence. We have an amazing amount of freedom in certain tasks, although scripture is always our guide, accompanied by prayer. And we’re always on duty, always open to how we might serve Christ here and now. What we want to look at today is that we take care to truthfully represent Christ. The problem is that we too often misrepresent Jesus, either intentionally or unintentionally, which causes us to break the third of the Ten Commandments, “You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.” That’s how the third commandment reads in your pew bible.

Many of us grew up translating the third commandment, “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain,” which means the same thing. In biblical times it was believed that an inherent power attached to the name of a person, thing, or god. To do something, then, in the name of the person, thing, or god invoked that power, for ex., “In the name of the Lord, let’s share our food with our neighbors!” And God’s spirit will empower us for such a thing – we did it this past Thursday at the meal at First Presbyterian, we’re doing it today by taking a collection for the Rescue Mission. But we don’t always get it right when it comes to what God is doing or not doing. To use the Lord’s name in vain or use it wrongfully is to appeal to God for help that is not in keeping with God’s nature. For example, if one says, “In the name of the Lord God, let’s rip-off our neighbors,” one has used the name of the Lord in vain. The Lord God doesn’t empower anyone to rip off another human being, and to say such a thing is a wrongful use of God’s name. It’s a violation of the third commandment. Agents of Jesus must accurately represent God and Jesus.

Let me give you another example. In a previous life I used to spend time on a walking trail that wound through an area of Gunnison Prairie Dog colonies. Gunnison Prairie Dogs are amazing creatures. They have an elaborate language, they always post a lookout if they’re going to be outside their holes, and their underground homes consist of a storage area, a living space, a bathroom, and a front and back door. As one walks by their colonies, and these were set aside by the city especially for prairie dogs, normally they scamper back into their holes. Very skittish in the presence of human beings, with the exception of this one prairie dog.

Rather than scamper away when I approached him on the trail, he would stand on his back legs and waddle up the trail toward me, a peanut in one paw and an apple slice in another, with this look on his face, “And what did you bring me to eat?” And his approach was working. He was one roly, poly prairie dog. But then in September of that year signs were posted on the trail saying that someone was poisoning the prairie dogs. Report any suspicious behavior. Then someone taped a piece of paper to one of these postings , saying, “Even God hates prairie dogs. Join in Gunnison genocide,” which was a misuse of God’s name. The prairie dog colonies weren’t located in anyone’s lawn. That area was their assigned turf, assigned by the city. In the Book of Genesis, prairie dogs were created on the sixth day, as were we. They are animals over whom God has given us dominion, to preserve, not wantonly destroy.

According to Jesus, just like the birds of the air, prairie dogs are animals who enjoy our heavenly Father’s providence. As agents of Jesus, ours is always to determine where God is at work in the world and join him there. God establishes what is of value and what’s not, and God has established that taking care of creation is important. To give anyone the impression, even by our silence, that it is okay to wantonly trash or destroy God’s creation is to misrepresent Jesus Christ. It’s something an agent of Christ doesn’t do, nor does one do in the name of God.

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One day I was walking along the trail that wound through the prairie dog colonies when a jogger approached with two dogs. She had a leash on one dog, who then had the second dog’s leash in its mouth. The jogger said to me, “He likes to take his dog on runs,” and there they went - the one dog holding the leash to the other dog in its mouth. No telling where it might have led the other dog had the owner not been holding its leash. It reminded me of our NT lesson, in which Jesus calls the scribes and Pharisees “blind guides.” They think that they are capable of leading others when it comes to God’s purpose for our lives, but in reality they’re leading others astray. How? By devaluing things that matter most, and elevating matters of lesser importance.

For ex., Jesus says to them, “Woe to you, blind guides, those who say, in effect, ‘Whoever swears by the sanctuary of Grace Presbyterian Church is bound by nothing, but whoever swears by the money in the collection plates in the sanctuary is bound by the oath.’” Is that a strange way of thinking or what? Maybe, but we do similar sorts of things. Remember how when we were kids, one child would say, “But you promised!” And the other would answer, “But my fingers were crossed behind my back.” Sure I said, “Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye,” but my fingers were crossed. Therefore, it’s okay that I don’t keep my promise. It’s okay to break my word if I swear by the sanctuary but not if I swear by the gold in the sanctuary.

What Jesus is doing here is pointing out the human inclination to both devalue what’s important and then rationalize it. Just because we didn’t sign the contract in triplicate or get caught on You-Tube making a promise, we’re not excused from keeping our word. What’s important is that agents of Christ are honest, that we do what we promise. What’s not important is that we’re smart enough to have figure out a loophole.

Jesus severely criticizes the scribes and Pharisees, “Woe to you!” They have done one thing well, though, and that is they have given a tenth or tithe of all their crops to God’s work, be it wheat, barley, grapes, etc. I don’t think Jesus would criticize such giving if that was the whole story, but it’s not. There are at least two problems. One is that scribes and Pharisees are prideful in the bad sense in that they advertise what great givers they are by tithing everything in their herb gardens – “Look at what I gave that you people forgot to give! A tithe of my mint, cummin and dill. Aren’t I great?” The second is that they also do nothing in regards to God’s work involving justice, mercy, and faith. All around them the poor are being ripped off, and they’re either to blame personally or they won’t protest the actions of others. They just let injustice compound, whereas to serve as Jesus’ agents we can’t ignore the plight of others.

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Followers of Jesus are also agents of Jesus, persons who represent Jesus to others and who are authorized to act on his behalf, persons who show Jesus to the world. We are amazingly free as we serve in this manner. Scripture is always our guide, accompanied by prayer, but how we do some things simply depends on our personality and skills. One person will accomplish the same thing that another will on Christ’s behalf, yet they will do it differently. As Jesus’ agents we’re always on duty, always open to how God can work through us to help others. We’re also obligated to remember who it is we represent. What does Christ require of us? What does God’s name stand for? Amen

AGENTS FOR GOD – ON DUTY (Nov. 20, 2011)

2011-11-21T06:05:00.000-08:00

Jeremiah 32: 6-15, 1 Corinthians 15: 58, GPC, 11/20/11, D. Johnson

A fellow by the name of Robert was sitting at a stoplight on Truman Blvd. The lady in front of him was going through some papers on the seat of her car, so when the light changed to green, she did not move. Robert honked. The woman looked up, intended to go forward, but instead stalled her vehicle. For the rest of the green light she tried to get it started, but with no success.

The light turned red. Robert was so upset about being stuck through the green light that he began cursing and shouting and beating on his steering wheel. No one could hear him with his windows rolled up, but suddenly he was interrupted by a policeman tapping on his window, hand ready at his holster should he need to draw his gun. The policeman cuffed him and put him in the back of the squad car. After two hours of being held at the station, Robert received word that he was free to go. He said, “I told you that you couldn’t arrest me for screaming in my own car. You haven’t heard the last of this.”

The officer said, “I didn’t arrest you for just screaming in your car. I was behind you at the red light. I saw you screaming and beating on your steering wheel; then I noticed the cross hanging from the rearview mirror, the fish painting on the trunk of the car, and the bumper sticker that said, “Jesus is Coming Soon”. You were behaving so badly, what else could I think other than you stole that car from a Christian?”

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Today we continue a sermon series on our being agents of Christ, agents especially in terms of the Parable of the Talents, Mt. 25: 14-30, the situation being this. As Jesus’ life was drawing to a close, he said about his upcoming crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and promised second coming that it’s like a man going on a trip. This man summons his servants and entrusts all he has to them. To one he gives 5 talents of silver, to another 2, and to another 1, a talent being more money than a laborer could make in 15 years. These servants are to advance the man’s interests by engaging in business with these talents or sums of money. What Jesus is really saying is that as he goes away, his concerns and interests are being divvied up. It is the duty of each of us in his church, his servants, to manage and advance Jesus’ mission until he returns and demands an accounting, which in the language of our day makes us what? Not just servants, but agents, persons who represent Jesus to others and who are authorized to act on his behalf.

Because we are agents of Christ, it makes a difference how we endure illness and adversity, how we treat others in daily life, even how we sit through a traffic light. Others are watching. Should we be arrested, we want there to be plenty of evidence, not to convict us of stealing a car, but of being Christian. As agents we have a great degree of freedom in how we go about serving Christ. There is no instruction manual for every situation we find ourselves in. Sometimes whatever we do on Jesus’ behalf is largely dependent on our personality and gifts; still, last week we dealt with a couple of cautions to our freedom, one being that scripture is always our guide.

We cannot simply say that we are Christians and then ignore biblical laws and practice. Let me give you an example. I once read a story in the newspaper about how fatherhood had changed the life of a college basketball player. The player said about his infant son, “I just want to make sure that he knows right from wrong.” Okay, but if this is the case, might not this basketball player consider marrying the baby’s mother, his girlfriend with whom he lives?

Sure, relationships are difficult and we live in a world where commitment has become a dirty word, but here’s what so many don’t understand or agree with regarding marriage nowadays. The marriage vow keeps us as much or more so than we keep the vow. There is a power set loose in our lives when we stand up in public and make a promise having to do with marriage. There is a life-long expectation placed upon us by the vow, namely, hang in there. Others are watching. And, sure, the divorce rate is high. The vow doesn’t always keep us, but the divorce rate is nothing compared to the rate of those who split after staying together awhile apart from the benefit of marriage. Philip Yancey reminds us that the modern West is the only civilization in the history of the world to try and live without a belief in God. And one of the results of leaving God out of our public life is massive public confusion as to meaning, purpose, and morality. It’s a mess out there, still, what do you suppose Jesus would give as advice to the college basketball player? Leave his relationship with the child’s mom to chance, or make a commitment to her and the child in the presence of God?

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Today we want to look at a second aspect of being an agent of Christ, and this is we’re never off duty. And by being on-duty I don’t mean that we’re to ignore the 4^th Commandment, which tells us we’re to observe a day of rest, not wear ourselves out. No, what I mean by never being off-duty is that there are no exemptions when it comes to doing the work of Christ. God created us to be about his business, and thus our NT lesson says, “Be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”

Do you remember a TV program called “Hack,” about an ex-cop played by David Morse who got into trouble and then drove a taxi for a living? One day he’s sitting in his cab reading the newspaper when a man opens the curbside door and jumps in. “Sorry, I’m off-duty,” the cab driver says. But then as the man explains his predicament, the taxi driver sees that because of his police experience, he can be of help to the man. And isn’t being an agent of Christ like that? Even though we have a off-duty sign posted, Jesus may jump into our cab, tell us why a situation needs our involvement, and ask us to represent his interests.

I wonder, though, if Jesus doesn’t get frustrated because being off-duty has become such an established way of life. Off-duty rather than on-duty is the way things so often are any more. For ex., did you hear the story from a couple of years ago, back when temperatures weren’t as mild as they have been this fall, how at 2:00 in the morning a fellow drove up to his girlfriend’s house? He left his 4-year old son unattended in the near-freezing pickup for six hours while he and his girlfriend slept together. He was off-duty as a parent. When the police arrived at 8:00am, the little boy didn’t even have a jacket and was crying because he was so cold, also because he had no idea where his dad was. Such incidents as this offend, even enrage us; yet, who isn’t really good at coming up with an excuse for being off-duty?

There the excuse of, “I’m off duty because that is not my area of expertise.” And, sure, there are many things at which we’re not expert, but the Bible is filled with people called by God to do that for which they have no training – Amos, Moses, David, and the twelve disciples. Sometimes a specialist is not what is called for, just a person who will take the time to get the job done. And then there’s the elderly excuse: “I’m off duty because I don’t have the health and energy I used to.” I like how an acquaintance of mine, Rev. Lloyd Rediger, puts it. “Get in the best shape you can for the shape you’re in, mentally, physically, and spiritually.”Do what you can on behalf of Jesus Christ. God doesn’t expect you to do what you can’t.

There’s also the “I’m too busy with other things” excuse. And, sure, people are busy, which is why we as followers of Jesus have to set priorities. We can’t get around to everything, but we can get around to what God calls us to do as opposed to doesn’t call us to do. Then there’s the youth exemption. “I’m off-duty until I’m an adult,” which if you believe what the media says, a youth isn’t an adult nowadays until he/she is in one’s early 30s, this due to a variety of factors. But I don’t think the Bible agrees. Jesus was only twelve when he told Mary and Joseph, “I must be about my Father’s interests?”

Or sometimes we just get so worn down we hang an off-duty sign around our necks. For ex., do you parents remember how with the first child you spent part of every day gazing at the baby? And then with the second child, how you spent part of every day watching to make sure your older child wasn’t harming the baby? And then with the third child, remember how you spent part of every day hiding from your children? We tend to wear down. We have this recurrent need to renew ourselves through worship, prayer, Bible study, and recreation. Apart from doing so, it’s hard to bounce back.

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There are plenty of examples of people who are off-duty when it comes to being agents, but there are also some great examples of being on-duty. One such person is Jeremiah. In our OT lesson the Babylonians are on their way. Jerusalem will soon fall. Jeremiah and his people will be taken into exile. In such a situation, many folks would become dysfunctional, but not Jeremiah. When God jumps into Jeremiah’s taxi and tells him what needs to be done, he does it. Namely, he buys a field. Why? Doing so is a symbol of hope. “Here, look at what I’m doing! I’m planting a tree. And why am I doing this? Because the coming defeat and exile is not the end of life here. Our people will return to this land and once again buy and sell fields and houses and vineyards. Buy the land on which this tree stands.”

Our God is a God of hope, not of despair. And because of this hope, ours is to be God’s on-duty agents. “Thanks be to God,” says our NT lesson, “who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.” There’s no telling what God can make of us yet or how God can work through us to help others.

So, as we sit in our cabs, let’s not just read the newspaper. Let’s also read something like the prayer of St. Francis, which goes, “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.” Amen

Agents for Christ: Freedom (Sermon Text) Nov. 13, 2011

2011-11-14T20:45:00.000-08:00

2 Kings 22: 11-13, Matthew 25: 14-30, GPC, 11/13/11, D. Johnson

Today we begin a series of sermons having to do with each of us being an agent of Jesus Christ. And why do I say agent? Because the word servant, even though it’s in the NT and Jesus uses it to talk about our serving God, ultimately isn’t as accurate as the word agent, a word that Jesus did not have access to at the time. Had Jesus used the word agent 2,000 years ago, the crowds who followed him would not have understood. Still, look at what we have in our NT Parable of the Talents.

The master of these three servants entrusts to them his property; five talents of silver to one, two to another, and one talent to the third. Then he leaves them with the expectation that they are to increase his net worth, expand his holdings. Such persons as these servants are nowadays called agents, persons who represent another’s interest and who are authorized to act on this other person’s behalf. So often we think of servants as persons who operate in restricted environments where they are told exactly what to do – this or that about everything. They have no freedom to do it their way. That’s not the case with us as followers of Jesus. We have all sorts of freedom when it comes to the Christian faith. We’re free to choose how we volunteer in Christ’s service, this endeavor or that; how we go about our jobs or careers on Christ’s behalf, this way or that; where we attend church, here or there; and we’re always free to use our gifts our way as opposed to mimicking someone else in the congregation.

Just as a sales agent has the freedom to go about his/her job as he/she is gifted, all the while being accountable to the home office, so we also have the freedom to go about our lives as followers of Christ. And therein I have a story. There was once a dangerous church balcony. Dangerous in that if you sat in the front row by the railing there wasn’t much preventing your falling out. A wooden partition came up from the floor about eight inches. And ever so many feet there were brass uprights on which a brass banister rested. If you were standing in the front row, you could rest your hands on the brass banister, which was about 38” high, and stub your toes against the wooden partition that came up to your ankles. But between the partition and the banister were two and one-half feet of air. No parent of a small child dared sit in the front row because the only thing keeping an adventurous toddler from going over was constant vigilance and a firm grip.

One Sunday morning Tank Leonard, who was big enough to be a tackle on the high school football team, was sitting in the front row, his grandmother to his left. There were three vacant seats to his right, and then in the fourth seat sat Joe Don Miller, a 5^th grader, and next to him one of his friends. The two fifth graders sat in the front row of the balcony each week because the open space in front of them made them feel like daredevils. The congregation stood to sing, and then during the prayer that followed, Joe Don heard a strange noise. Looking out the corner of his eye, he saw that Tank, the big teenager, had collapsed onto the banister. What Joe Don didn’t know was that Tank had reacted to codeine based cough syrup, which he had taken earlier that morning, by fainting. What he did know was that Tank’s arms and head were headed straight down to the floor. Tank was balanced precariously, waist resting on the brass banister. And as Joe Don looked, Tank’s legs began rising from the floor, ready to follow the rest of him over the railing.

Joe Don immediately dashed the length of the three seats and jumped, much like Tarzan for a grape vine, to catch Tank’s legs. And then, much like Tarzan when the grape vine is too short, Joe Don found himself hanging over the side of the balcony, having gone through the dangerous 30-inches of air between the ankle-high partition and the brass banister. So there they were: an unconscious teenager, Tank, from the waist above hanging over the brass railing, his legs under the railing, Joe Don holding on to them for dear life until the ushers could come to their rescue.

The reason I bring this story to your attention is that sometimes it is up to us to spring into action. We may need to help a person or stand up for the truth or interject Christ’s guidance into a situation. And just as there was no instruction manual telling Joe Don how to save Tank - he had to do the best he could – neither is there always an instruction manual for us as agents of Christ. We simply have to spring into action as best we can.

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There is a lot of freedom when it comes to serving God, but let me point out a couple of cautions. One comes from a situation in the early church that we mentioned last week in our 1 Corinthians lesson, namely: don’t use your freedom to cause undue confusion about the Christian faith. In ancient Corinth, temples to the various pagan gods were also the main source of meat. When non-Christian farmers or shepherds sacrificed their livestock to the gods of Greece or Rome, they themselves kept a meal-sized portion of the meat to eat, as did the priests performing the sacrifice. God’s portion was thought to be the pleasant smell of the grilled fat wafting upward. But the meat wasn’t cooked to a char. It was taken off the grill when appropriately cooked and the rest of it sold in an attached dining area to help support the temple. Worshipers and priests ate their share in this dining area, to which the public could also come and purchase cooked meat to take home. Such temples were the primary source of meat in Corinth.

If you were a Christian, this pagan source of meat was problematic, both for new converts to the faith and for those who had followed Christ for some time. Paul, who wrote 1 Corinthians, was obviously a mature Christian. He could say, “As to the eating of meat offered to idols, we know that ‘no idol in the world really exists,’ and that ‘there is no God but one.’” With Paul it was a matter of, “Steak. It’s What’s For Dinner.” How can it be dedicated to a god if that god doesn’t really exist?

For example, if there had been a temple dedicated to the OT god Baal, Paul could stop for lunch at the dining room of this temple and pick up some ground beef to go in his tacos for dinner. We might call such a dining room the Taco Baal. But, what if there was a new convert to the Christian faith passing by who saw him doing such a thing. This new convert doesn’t yet have Paul’s understanding of Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit. And so he asks, “How can Paul, who follows Jesus, be eating food dedicated to Baal instead of the Father? He claims that the Holy Spirit is active in him, yet Baal is also in him because he’s eating meat dedicated to Baal. And if that’s the case, I guess I can do anything my pagan neighbors do and still follow Jesus.” That could be the implication to a new believer. But no, one can’t do just anything one’s neighbors do and follow Jesus. And sure, Paul is going to teach Christian converts that there are no other gods, but he doesn’t want to confuse them in the meantime. Building up others in the faith is far more important than his freedom, and so he says, “Lest food become a cause for their falling, I will never eat another T-bone.” As agents of Christ, yes, we have an amazing amount of freedom, but there are things we don’t do lest others become confused about the nature of our faith.

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The second caution regarding our freedom comes from our OT lesson, and that is, don’t ignore the Christian guidance that does exist. Sure, there isn’t an instruction manual for every situation; still, we don’t make it all up as we go along. We’re responsible to certain expectations of the home office no matter where we are or what we’re doing. For ex., King Josiah was devoted to the Lord, whereas many other kings of Judah from that era were not. His intentions were good, but as we know, good intentions alone aren’t enough. While the temple was being renovated, a book was discovered, one that had been lost to his people, one that contained most of what we now find in the Book of Deuteronomy. People write stories and movie scripts about the “Lost Book of the Bible”: well, there really was one, but it was found a long time ago. And in it was guidance that Josiah had been without all his life. “When the king heard the words of the book, he tore his clothes,” which was how people of that day said symbolically, “This is terrible! We’ve been trying to serve as God’s agents without basic guidance from the home office!”

And what Josiah discovered is, in a sense, applicable to our situation. For whereas he didn’t have access to scripture, we don’t always pay attention to what we do have, say, the Beatitudes in Matthew 5. “How beautiful the Beatitudes are!’ some people say, but they say this apart from looking at what the Beatitudes require of us. For ex., N.T. Wright says, “’Blessed are the mourners; they shall be comforted.’ But how will mourners ever believe such a thing if we are not God’s agents in bringing that comfort? Blessed are the meek; they shall inherit the earth. But how will the meek ever believe such a thing if the church does not stand up for their rights against the rich and powerful in the name of the crucified Messiah?” Scripture isn’t just beautiful, it’s applicable, relevant, and inescapable guidance from the home office.

When Josiah discovered the lost scroll, he was overcome with an awareness of how much he needed to change, how much more he needed to do if he was going to be God’s agent. He began what we call Josiah’s Reform, which was applying the guidance of the once-lost-but-then-found Book of the Bible, Deuteronomy, to life in Israel, tearing down the places where idols were being worshiped. Josiah’s Reform. And how about us? When it comes to the guidance of scripture, what have we been leaving out or ignoring? How do we need to change in order that we better serve Christ’s interests?

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Jesus calls his followers servants, God’s servants, which tells us that meaning and purpose in this life are found by serving God’s interests, not self. But Jesus also calls us servants in the fashion of the parable that is our NT lesson today. As his time on earth was drawing to a close, Jesus said about his upcoming crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and promised second coming that it’s like a man going on a trip. This man summons his servants and entrusts all he has to them. To one he gives 5 talents, to another 2, and to another 1, a talent being a tremendous amount for which to be responsible. This owner divvies up his interests, and then it is the duty of each servant to manage and advance the master’s interests until he returns and demands and accounting, which in the language of our day makes us what? Agents? We are amazingly free as we represent Jesus, yet, accountable to the home office for using scripture as our basic guide and not misrepresenting the faith to others. Amen

SECULAR VS. RELIGIOUS (Nov. 6, 2011)

2011-11-06T11:08:00.000-08:00

Genesis 2: 15-17, 1 Corinthians 10:31-11:1, GPC, Nov. 6, 2011, D. Johnson

A letter was sent to Ann Landers. “Dear Ann, I attended a wedding a few weeks ago of a couple who requested cash instead of gifts. While this was not in the best of taste, I realize that some couples might be hard up for money, so I wrote a check.

“The couple recently returned from a three-week honeymoon. All the wedding guests received the following e-mail: ‘Dear Friends, we had a glorious honeymoon cruise and are in the process of writing thank-you notes. Unfortunately, some of the cards became separated from the gifts. Please let us know what you gave us.’

“As if that weren’t enough, we received another e-mail the following day saying, ‘Dear Friends, tomorrow we are meeting with the caterers to dispute the bar tab from our wedding. We were surprised at how large the bill was and are sure there must be a mistake. Please tell us the number of drinks you had and which kind. Since we are meeting the caterers at 9:00a.m. on Tuesday, will you please get this information to us as soon as possible?”

The letter to Ann Landers ends, “My wife and I were stunned by these messages. Have things changed that much? What do you say, Ann? Appalled in Los Angeles.” I don’t know about Ann, but I question this couple’s right to bring children into the world. The question is not, “Can this marriage be saved,” but “Can the world be saved from this marriage?”

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It amazes me at how differently various people look at the world and their lives nowadays, how differently any two people understand things. And the two main differences, of which there are many sub-differences, are secular vs. religious. Many people think that the world and their lives are divided into activities that are secular – including politics, sex, going to school, running a business, holding a job, playing sports, going to the movies, retirement, serving in the military, spending money, etc – and activities that are religious – going to church on Sunday morning, funerals, weddings, Bible study. Two vastly different ways of looking at the world, secular and religious, which is a terrible misunderstanding. Our lives are not divided into secular and religious. All of life belongs to Jesus Christ. When we say that God made Jesus Lord of the world, we mean that everything that exists belongs to Jesus and everything we do is accountable to him. He owns it. He’s in charge. Thus, to say that when you volunteer at church you are doing religious work, but when you’re on the job or in school or voting you’re involved in secular work, is wrong. Whatever the activity, Jesus is in charge and you’re accountable. Paul says in our NT lesson, “Whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God.”

There is no list of secular activities as opposed to a list of religious activities, at least not a valid one. But what is true is that we live in a world in which there is a secular approach to life as opposed to a religious approach. For the last few hundred years people have increasingly left God out as they have examined the world and their lives. Indeed, the only way our culture could have arrived at the opinions that greed is good and sex outside marriage is trivial and gambling should be a means of financing public works is by totally ignoring the biblical God. The secular approach to life ignores God, leaves out faith, and makes human beings the center of the universe.

And I suppose that our OT lesson today could help explain the beginning of secularism. It goes like this. “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to till it and keep it,” i.e., God gave human beings meaning and purpose. Ours is to be tillers or cultivators not only of the soil, but the whole of life – the business world, the world of ideas, the world of relationships, the use of our money. Our job is to work and improve on God’s behalf all that exists to the end that not just we ourselves glorify god, but all that exists glorifies God. This is the religious approach to life. We are to enjoy creation as a gift from God, use it appropriately, and improve it when needs be.

But there is a problem. “The Lord God (then) commanded the man, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat.’” And from the biblical point of view, what do you possess now that you have knowledge of both good and evil, as opposed to just good? You know how to misuse all there is, how to tear down rather than build it all up, how to put things together that don’t fit together, how to behave in ways that God never intended. And we humans liked the idea of being know-it-alls. Adam and Eve ate from the tree, which didn’t work out like they thought. They didn’t become any wiser, just more destructive. Their eyes were opened to a new way of thinking, namely, that they were like gods, life revolved around them. Human beings ever since have tended to be arrogant and to leave God out, which is the secular approach to life. Live as though life is not a gift from God. Live as though God created none of this.

The religious approach to life, on the other hand, integrates our lives as a response to Jesus Christ in church, on the job, at home, at school, in retirement, in public, in the use of our time and money, and in all our relationships. And one way we integrate our lives is by constantly fighting off our secular impulses. It’s so easy to leave God out. We get busy and self-centered and forget all about God. We constantly need to remind ourselves that we engage in no activity in which we are not accountable to Jesus. How we do things is oftentimes more important than what we do, and Paul tells us, “Whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God.”

I one time was helping lead a conference in Atlanta for new church development pastors, this after I had spent many years being a new church pastor myself. The first night at this conference, two Kenyans came up to me and said, “We know you! You’re the guy from the Watermelon Church in Albuquerque.” We then had a big reunion, for they had visited the church I served there, Sandia, which means “watermelon;” watermelon because the late afternoon sun gives the mountains, the Sandia Mountains, a watermelon colored tint. There had been a New Church Development Conference held in Albuquerque the year before, and all the participants came out to Sandia on a Saturday night for our contemporary worship service and then a meal. They got there just as the Sandia mountains were turning watermelon in color.

One of these fellows was named Nehemy. He had just started The Church of Jesus the Nomad in Atlanta. The other was Gitome, the pastor of the Umoja International Swahili Community Church in Washington, D.D. I just love being around Kenyan’s. They are so joyous and grateful. Suddenly, just looking at each other, the two of them broke into laughter. Nehemy said to Gitome, “Remember the little boy? Wasn’t he wonderful!” And then they laughed with delight thinking about an 11-year old boy who had waited on them during the meal they had in Sandia’s Fellowship Hall. His pockets had been filled with food, which sounded gross to me.

Understand that as I’m talking to these guys, even though they’ve learned quite a bit of English in this country, there’s still a language problem. They’re talking about a kid with food in his pockets serving them. The meal that night was barbecue beef, coleslaw, beans, and cobbler. If his pockets were filled with food, his mom must have had the wash-day blues the next morning. She couldn’t begin to “Shout it Out.” So I pressed them for more information.

They said he asked them if they wanted tea to drink. They said yes. He returned with two big glasses of iced tea. They told him they’d never drunk iced tea. Did he have some hot tea? They could tell by the look on his face that he’d never drunk hot tea, but he soon came back with some. Then they asked him for cream and sugar. This was when he left and came back with his pockets filled with what they called food, packets of cream and sugar.

The two Kenyan pastors loved the little boy and gave me a letter to give to him if I could figure out who he was. I did and I gave the letter to a boy whose name was Cassidy Burch. The letter urged Cassidy to go into the ministry because Jesus could use such a person as him. And the church does need young people to go into the pastorate, but life’s bigger and more complex than pastors. Jesus also needs Christian engineers, teachers, coaches, salespersons, musicians, factory workers, IT workers, etc., all of whom have a religious approach to life rather than a secular. The world will never light up with witnesses to Jesus Christ if the church relies only on pastors to set his example. But what a force for good is unleashed when all of Christ’s followers live by faith in their corner of the world, use their God given abilities and interests to maintain and improve all that is. “Whatever you do,” says Paul, “On the job, at school, in home, in public – do everything for the glory of God.”

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At that same conference in Atlanta, there was a fellow there wearing a T-Shirt that said, “An Audience of One.” This was the first time I had seen this saying It was a T-Shirt worn by all the people in the church he served, and what does it mean? “An Audience of One” means that a person should labor to live his/her life for God alone. It refers to the reality that most of us, whether we are aware of it or not, do things with an eye for the approval of some audience. Teens listen to their peers, adults read the latest articles on what it means to be a man or woman of the 21^st century, politicians live by polls. The question is not whether we play to an audience, the question is to which audience do we play.

And when we judge our performance by audiences such as I have mentioned, we are adopting a secular approach to life. Where’s God in these articles, polls, pressures, and focus groups? Sometimes God isn’t there at all. It’s only when we perform for “An Audience of One,” God, that our approach to life is religious. It’s only when we strive to do the things God requires of us, and do them as Jesus teaches, that we escape the secular approach to life, including how we use our money.

I may have mentioned to you how new churches of a variety of denominations, not just Presbyterian, are taking the name Legacy. You may go into a city and find there a Legacy Church. If you do, I am almost sure it has been started within the last fifteen years. And why it’s named Legacy is that people, most often young people, are concerned about their legacy. What will their life amount to? As they spend their money and their time, what are they going to leave behind for others? They could adopt the secular approach to life and spend their money having a good time, center their lives around themselves, leaving nothing to others. No lasting legacy, very little built up for the good. Or they could adopt the religious approach and invest their time and their money in the work of Jesus Christ, which, of course, is the choice that confronts all of us? Secular or Religious? Amen

"What is Sacrifice, Really?" (Sermon Text Oct. 30, 2011)

2011-10-30T15:59:00.000-07:00

2 Samuel 24: 18-25, Ephesians 4: 17-24, GPC, Oct. 30, 2011

There was a Christian school for children of the untouchable caste in India. Prior to WWII, each year this school received a shipment of Christmas presents from England. One year delivery was made by a doctor from a nearby mission hospital. As he distributed the presents, he told the children about a village not too far away, one where the children had never heard of Jesus or Christmas. He suggested that they might like to give one of their old toys or dolls to these other children, and they agreed.

The doctor arrived the next Sunday to receive the used toys. And he was amazed because the boys and girls gave him their new presents rather than the old. He asked a little girl why the children were giving up their new presents, and she said, “Think what Jesus gave for us, and what he has done for us. Could we then give him less than our best?”

This story comes from a Christian school in India prior to 1940. Let’s now think about how it is in America in 2011. George Barna, the researcher, says that in recent times the largest segment of our population to convert to Christianity consists of individuals making good money. And here is what Barna says about this phenomenon, “Many of these individuals are living the good life and upon analyzing salvation, have determined that inviting Christ into their life is a good deal. Faith represents for them an eternal life insurance policy rather than a decision that demands sacrifice and service.”

Do you see the change? Even the children of the Christian untouchables in India knew what sort of a life Jesus calls us to experience, one of sacrifice in joyful service to a cause much larger than ourselves. But many in America don’t get it. We live in a world where people attempt to manipulate Jesus into giving them life in the hereafter without having to engage in his lifestyle in the here and now. Our concern today: just what is sacrifice, really?

Sacrifice is costly. A young couple went for marriage counseling. The woman said to the counselor, “He knows that going camping is very important to me, and before we got married promised that he would go with me on a camping trip once a month. He did say that he didn’t care for camping all that much, yet, because he loved me he agreed to make this sacrifice. Now he’s changed his mind.

“And how have you changed your mind?” the counselor asked the husband…. “I’ve limited the regions where I’m willing to go camping,” he answered…. “And where’s that?”…. “Anywhere there’s a Holiday Inn.”

The first thing we can say about sacrifice is that it has to cost us more than camping out at the Holiday Inn. The second thing we can say is that it is costly because it springs from our desire to worship God, to put God first in our lives. In our OT lesson Araunah would have given David not only the threshing floor where the sacrifice was to take place, but also oxen for the sacrifice. David says no. It’s an act of worship. “I will buy them from you for a price; I will not offer burnt offerings to the Lord my God that cost me nothing.” Then David paid fifty shekels of silver.

Sacrifice is costly because it springs from the human desire to worship God, the God who, says Jesus, is good and seeks nothing but our good. God is not like Steinbauer in our cartoon today. Steinbauer saves Drabble’s life by applying the Heimlich maneuver, for which Drabble is in his debt. But then he asks if he can park his RV in front of Drabble’s house. God’s not like that. God’s not out to disadvantage us. God gives us his best, and deep down we desire to give God our best in return. Douglas Steere says about this human desire, “If we are ever to rise to our full humanity, we must praise and adore that which is the highest we know and freely offer up to it the best that we have. This impulse in us to sacrifice to the deity is primary in our nature (even though we often strive to ignore it.) …This is why the shepherd brings the most perfect lamb of his flock to be sacrificed on a rude heap of stones, why the farmer brings to the priest a cruse of his finest olive oil, why the widow brings her mite…

“There is in us a longing to praise and adore and pour out our best gifts. This is why in Christian history we have great cathedrals, music, and art devoted to God… It is this urge to put ourselves in second place that is our deepest hope. Deny us the right to offer ourselves to God… and we cease to be persons as something of our essence goes dead in us. Furthermore, it is because Jesus spoke to this impulse that we recognize the authenticity of his life and message. It was because Jesus, too, praised and adored and fell down before His Father that we know him to be flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone.”

The impulse to sacrifice is basic in human beings. As I said earlier, we often try to ignore or cover it up, but we do so at the risk of our humanity. As researcher George Barna found, there are people for whom Jesus is no more than an eternal life insurance policy. They have had nothing to do with his lifestyle and have ignored the impulse to give God their best. Yet, who knows what this impulse will bring about tomorrow. God’s not finished with us yet.

On your bulletin cover is a little boy at a candlelight vigil for those who died in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in OK City. Cheri and I just happened to be passing through OK City when this happened. This boy’s family and community were literally drawn to the candlelight worship service by what happened, as are so many others to similar tragedies. Things do happen that cause us to seek out God, and we know this. What we might not be aware of is the longing within us to adore and sacrifice to God. The impulse to put God first will continually try to rise to the surface of our lives, and when we allow it to do so, it will prompt us to give God our best and put ourselves in second place.

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So, one thing we can say about sacrifice is that it’s costly. And the second is that it springs from our desire to worship and love God. The third thing we can say about sacrifice is that it requires self-discipline. Our NT lesson today tells us to not be like people who “have lost all feeling of shame; they give themselves over to vice and do all sorts of indecent things without restraint. That was not what you learned about Christ!... Get rid of your old self, which made you live as you used to – the old self that was being destroyed by its deceitful desires. Your hearts and minds must be made completely new, and you must put on the new self, which is created in God’s likeness and reveals itself in the true life that is upright and holy.”

To put off the old self and put on this new self involves self-discipline. Self-discipline opens us to God’s grace. Self-discipline helps us be conformed to God’s ways rather than falling back into the ways of the world. Self-discipline is how we work with the Holy Spirit to become the generous-hearted people God created us to be. And there is a simple way to tell whether or not we are putting on this new self created in God’s likeness, and this is by how we live.

Paul says in vss. 25 on, no more lying, including to ourselves about our behavior. Are we going to follow Jesus by taking on his lifestyle, or is all that Jesus means to us an eternal life insurance policy? Which, by the way, if it does, isn’t going to work out. An interesting example was given us by Clovis, King of the Franks. In 496a.d. Clovis, who had founded the Frankish monarchy, and who had defeated the Romans, the Alemanni, and the Visigoths, embraced Christianity and was baptized. And not only he himself. He told his army that they were also becoming Christians. Get down to the river and be baptized, which they did. But they were baptized in such a way that they really did not put on the new self created in God’s likeness. Each soldier was immersed, all of him except his sword hand. His sword hand did not go under. That way he could keep swinging his sword for the advancement of Clovis’s ambition as though Jesus Christ had no claim on him.

Commentators love to point out that many of us moderns were baptized in much the same manner. We all of us were immersed in the waters of baptism, but not the hand that holds our wallet. This way Jesus has no claim over our personal finances. Whether or not this is true, there is a lot of confusion when it comes to the self-discipline of stewardship. And so let’s clarify once again briefly the biblical teachings about giving.

First, the stewardship of money is a matter between a person and God. It is not a relationship primarily between a person and a church budget. Stewardship is part and parcel of the new self that a person puts on. Not only does one tell the truth and earn an honest living and use words that are encouraging, but one also returns a portion of what God has entrusted to him or her for Christ’s work. Financial giving is an expression of our love for God.

Secondly, God’s people in OT times understood the amount to be returned to God as10% of one’s income, a tithe. For ex., the prophet Malachi says to people who are trying to get by on the cheap, “Bring the full amount of your tithes to the Temple…” People in the OT were commanded to do this, and people in the NT continued doing the same. Giving a tithe did not change with the arrival of Jesus and the beginnings of his church. But Jesus is graceful and takes us where we are as opposed to where we might want to be. God knows that there are those who sincerely want to tithe to Christ’s work but are presently not able. They may be broke, or if they gave 10% they’d seriously harm their family’s present ability to function. So the responsible thing for them to do is give as much of a percentage as possible, say 6% or 3 or whatever, and then as time passes discipline oneself so this amount can be increased. With Jesus, no one is off the hook, but there is understanding of limited income. One should begin where he/she can, with a sense of love for God and with a sense of discipline that will allow one to grow in generosity.

One’s stewardship commitment is primarily owed to God. It is biblically expressed in terms of a percentage of income, the tithe. The third thing that can be said about financial stewardship is that the local congregation has been authorized by Christ to receive our financial commitment to God. The congregation is not the only organization doing God’s work, but we are certainly the major player. And a congregation has programs, staff, missions, and a building to maintain. A congregation operates by a budget and Intent-to-Give cards.

Intent-to-Give cards have been mailed out. On these, the session would like you to indicate how much you can give in 2012, remembering that if everyone could increase what they gave in 2011 by ten percent, say go from $50/mo to $55, we will better be able to deal with our budget deficit. Over the years these have been called Pledge Cards, but many congregations have changed the name to Intent to Give cards to deal with a variety of concerns. For ex., a person’s income may be variable, say if one is a salesperson. Persons may lose their jobs or have an illness arise that takes more of their income than they planned. And should something like this happen, all you have to do is call Liz at the church office and tell her that you need to change the amount. You intended to give this much, but your situation has changed.

David Hackworth once stated that the U.S. Marine Corps has the most efficient, rigorous

training in America. Why? Drill instructors think of themselves as combating an undisciplined civilian lifestyle. Their job is to take undisciplined persons and transform them into disciplined Marines. And what the Marine Corps calls an undisciplined civilian lifestyle, our Ephesians lesson calls the old self. All sorts of undisciplined impulses make less of us than God wants us to be. Unless we become disciplined we let others do the work, give God the dregs rather than our best, and do not follow Jesus in a sacrificial lifestyle. But with discipline, things can turn around. Amen.

HOW TO RUN GOD OFF (Sermon Text Oct. 16, 2011)

2011-10-16T06:48:00.001-07:00

Hosea 5: 15 – 6:6, Matthew 23: 23-28, GPC, 10/16/11, D. Johnson

When I was a teenager, my grandfather, who was a farmer, couldn’t find enough help, and so I went one summer to live with him and my grandmother. Mostly I chopped cotton, which means I hoed weeds in cotton fields, which is a really good job. You get walk all day long, get a sun tan, and no one bothers you.

The thing about hoeing cotton is that every so often a weed will position itself alongside a cotton stalk so that there is no way you can get it out with a hoe apart from also knocking down the cotton stalk. And so you have to reach down and pull the weed out by hand. Early one morning I was coming to the end of a turn-row. The cotton stalks had been rather sparse in that particular row, but at the end they got really thick. And right in the middle of a thick clump of cotton plants a weed was growing. There was no way I could get it out with my hoe, and so reaching down through the thick leaves to grab it by the root, I felt something cold and weird.

Separating the leaves with my other hand so I could get a look, I saw several diamond shapes on the back of a snake wrapped around that weed. Boy, did I jump! I jumped so high that I made those building-leaping characters in Kung-fu movies look lead-footed. My uncle, who was standing not that far away, got a good laugh out of it and told me that my cousin Curtis had killed the snake earlier that morning. Knowing I’d have to reach down and pull the weed out by hand, he positioned it so I would find it. Boy! Those were fun times, but the reason I bring this story to your attention is that sins in our individual and public life are like weeds in a field. If we don’t remove them, they can take over, choke out the good, and make us miserable, destructive, and unproductive.

Cornelius Plantiga says in his book, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be, that “central to the classic Christian understanding of the world is a concept of the way things are supposed to be - designed and intended by God,” right? They are supposed to include peace, justice, mutual respect, and deliberate attention to the public good. “Of course, things are not that way at all. Human wrongdoing, i.e. sin, or the threat of it, mars every adult’s workday, every child’s school day, every vacationer’s holiday. A moment’s reflection yields a whole catalogue of wrongdoing, some of it so familiar we scarcely think of it any longer as wrong.”

Plantiga continues, “Sin outstrips other human troubles by perverting human excellence. When people devise and defend political fraud… when a drug dealer wants and plans the hooking of a fresh customer, when a teenager reviles his confused grandmother… When we do these things, we exhibit a corruption of thought, emotion, intention, and speech. And by such abuse of our highest powers,” we who are made in God’s image sin and bring blame upon ourselves.

Human beings are to blame for things not being the way they’re supposed to be; yet, we live in an age that refuses to accept blame. For example, the Wall Street meltdown of 2008 is three years old now. Three years ago citizens were incensed that corporate management got rich running companies into the ground by selling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering benefits to the American people, resulted in untold damage to clients, shareholders, employees, and the economy. We were also incensed that no one at the time accepted blame. Three years later as we still deal with the crisis caused by these persons, they still have not been charged with wrongdoing. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers. They continue to benefit from government guarantees. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multi-million dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle class families. It’s not right.

But ours is not the first society to avoid blame and the resultant weeding of sins. We have an example of what we’re becoming in our OT lesson. What is going on here is that people want God to bail them out of the mess their sins have created, but without their acknowledging their guilt or changing their behavior. They have brought destruction upon themselves; yet, they won’t admit it or change their ways. They say, “Come, let us return to the Lord: for it is he who has torn, and he will heal us; he has struck down, and he will bind up” But they never mention that their troubles – their being torn and struck down - are of their own making. They never seek God’s forgiveness for their sins. They turn from their ways to God’s way. And because they don’t, they, in effect, run God off.

God says, “I will return again to my place – I’m going to leave now - until they acknowledge their guilt and seek my face. In their distress they will beg my favor.” Some people would call God’s point of view tough love. If the Israelites think that things are not going well now, just wait and see how bad things get in God’s absence. God is abandoning them; not forever, but until they confess their misdeeds and are ready to weed the sins from their individual and national life. This is God’s wake-up call. And it is the same one generation to the next. If we refuse to admit our sins, which results in nothing being done to get of these sins and the trouble they produce, God will allow us to experience the consequence, “until they acknowledge their guilt and seek my face.”

And what do we call ourselves and call others who won’t acknowledge or accept blame for their sins? Jesus uses the word hypocrites in our NT lesson. “Woe to you hypocrites! For you concern yourselves with trivial pursuits while neglecting the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others. You spend all your time putting up a front, acting respectable. You want your outer life to look all nice and proper, while your inner life is full of greed and self-indulgence and hatred for your fellow man. Woe to you hypocrites!

There is a movie called Chocolat. The mayor in Chocolat considers himself the bastion of Christian morality in his little French town, and in several ways he does a good job. Yet, he’s more concerned with appearances than essence. He interferes in the church, turning the town’s faith into joyless ritual. His wife finds him such a drag that she goes off on vacation and won’t return. And then he walks into the beauty parlor and smears the reputation of the lady at the chocolate shop with gossip. He’s a hypocrite.

There’s another movie called Fury. The picture on your bulletin cover this morning is from it. The question it brings up is this: is gossip a sin? In this case, the hate-filled gossip of the town’s residents results in a mob standing in front of the jail wanting to lynch an innocent man on hearsay evidence. But another concern that this movie brings up is that people oftentimes disagree as to what is sin and what isn’t.

It’s like our world is truly determined to self-destruct by doing nothing about sin. Not only do we refuse to accept blame – my child would never do such a thing! - but we can’t agree in many instances as to what sin is. It’s as though things are supposed to all fouled up and in a mess. If no weeding is done in our individual and public life, our troubles will continue to grow as sin chokes out the common good. No less than the Israelites in our OT lesson ran God off, our age is doing the same. We behave in ways that bring on our own problems, while at the same time expecting God to spare us the consequences.

Pope Gregory the Great, with an assist from Thomas Aquinas and Dante, gave us a list of the Seven Deadly Sins – pride, gluttony, sloth, lust, greed, envy, and anger – sins that lead to things not being like they ought. How many of these are discouraged today? None. In fact, most are encouraged. Pride, in this list, means excessive pride, the sort of pride that maintains I’m better than you simply because I’m me. Sloth, though, may be “the” sin of our time. Sloth doesn’t mean what most people think it does. It’s the sin of “I don’t care.” I don’t care enough to do anything about the mess our world is in or my life is in. Why? I might miss out on TV program or a video game or a ball game if I actually did something helpful. I just don’t care!

The Seven Deadly Sins are now the Seven Great Advertising Strategies. For how else does one promote a product or service nowadays if you don’t appeal to pride in the sense of being better than others, or to gluttony, lust, greed, envy, and anger that you don’t have the newest model? Or how about Mohandas Gandhi’s version of the Seven Deadly Sins? No one takes him seriously either, but Gandhi suggested that the following are truly damaging to our world: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, science without humanity, knowledge without character, politics without principle, commerce without morality, and worship without sacrifice. Of course, worship without sacrifice gets us back to both our OT and NT lessons. We want God to make our lives work out without our having to change our conduct. We want to look good on the exterior with no concern about the quality of our inner life. But what if we break with the world and truly want to weed the sins from our lives and world? What if we want things to be the way God intends? How might we begin? One way includes prayer.

In daily prayer we intentionally enter into the presence of God, or the gaze of the Silent One. Don’t just do a drive-by prayer. Give God a shot. In prayer we encounter God. And the silence on God’s part should have a powerful effect on us. God’s silence alerts us that regardless of what we say, God is going to hold our feet to the fire, for the Silent one knows us better than we know ourselves. Don’t try to con God. In the silence, we reexamine our assumptions. Are we being honest in our assessment of self? Do we have an understanding of our situation that is consistent with the teachings and example of Jesus? Are we capable of doing more good than we think? Maybe we’re selling ourselves short.

The gaze of the Silent One searches us during our daily prayer time, and in God’s presence all our pretensions and hypocrisy are revealed for what they are. And God helps us formulate a plan of action during our prayer time. Sometimes this action has to do with fighting off temptation, or it can involve the actual weeding of sins from our lives.

In the 1970’s, Karl Menninger, Jr., of the Menninger Clinic, lamented our situation in his book, Whatever Happened to Sin? He said that he had a difference with his dad that illustrates what’s going on with sin. The son called certain plants weeds, the dad refused to. The dad called each and every plant by its scientific name, never a weed. I’ll leave it to you what you call whatever plants make an appearance in your garden; but when it comes to our lives, the Biblical truth is this. If we don’t label as sins those words, behaviors, and intentions that are sins, and work to get rid of them, they will take over. And we’re to blame for things not being like they’re supposed to be. Amen

Spotting God in a Leaky Universe (Sermon Text Oct. 9, 2011)

2011-10-10T05:58:00.000-07:00

Psalm 97: 1-9, Hebrews 1:1-4, SPC, 10/9/11, D. Johnson

An information leak can come from an employee who has access to information but who does not have permission to disclose it. For ex., people with secret information that they consider morally wrong may become “whistle blowers” and leak the information in an effort to stop what’s going on. Russell Crowe plays such a person in the movie. The Insider. John Travolta plays a lawyer looking for a whistle blower in the movie, A Civil Action. And Julia Roberts, who plays the title role in Erin Brockovich, meets a mysterious man who helps her uncover an incriminating document in a case of industrial pollution.

Or sometimes people with access to confidential info leak it publically to embarrass political opponents. I heard a rumor that people tried to do this several years ago to Strom Thurmond, one of our only US senators to turn 100. To discredit him they leaked what happened at his wild 100th birthday party, which was, after the guests toasted him with Ensure and sang “Happy Birthday,” a registered nurse popped out of a giant bran muffin. We certainly can’t have our senior senators involved in that sort of thing, can we?

Or people with access to confidential information may leak it for monetary profit. They can become industrial spies leaking secrets to another company or spies leaking secrets to another country. But whatever the reason for the leak, it certainly seems that ever since Wikileaks began releasing details of US diplomatic cables last November, we now live in a leaky universe. Even with regards to God. All around us there are people leaking information as to what God is like and what God is doing. And such activity is not necessarily bad. It’s historical. For ex., the prophets leaked information about the nature of the Messiah. Jesus leaked info about what God had done, and Paul leaked info about what Jesus was bringing about. But just as Paul warned congregations under his care, some of what we hear from others may be misleading. Just because a person is excited about God doesn’t mean the person is right about God. We Christians have to place these leaks alongside God’s ultimate revelation in Jesus Christ to see whether they are right or not.
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In our OT lesson we read that “clouds and darkness surround” God. And that’s the problem, isn’t it, for what our world wants to know is two-fold. One, is there anyone at home behind the clouds and darkness, i.e., does God really exist? And two, if God does exist, what sort of a God are we dealing with. Two things people wonder about, but not necessarily to the same extent at the same time. In the Christian-influenced US of yesteryear, people primarily struggled with the first question, “Does God really exist?” For if God is there behind the clouds and darkness, it was by and large assumed that it’s the God revealed by Jesus Christ. But this is no longer true for many people who believe that God’s there. And here’s what seems to be the case.

In many countries – Latin America, Africa, even parts of Asia – people have long believed that God or gods exists, but in recent times many have abandoned previous understandings in favor of Jesus. The God revealed in Jesus Christ is increasingly the leak of choice in many third world countries. In Europe, people increasingly don’t believe in God, period. Atheism is often the choice. Atheism is also much more vocal in America than it used to be, yet Americans still, by and large, believe that there is a God behind the clouds and darkness. But Americans no longer agree as to what kind of God we’re dealing with. Although Christianity is still the dominant religion of the US, the God revealed by Jesus has all sorts of competition. Different information about God is being leaked by people all over the place, by Wiccans, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, and even by people who are involved in “do it yourself” spirituality.

People in America claim to be catching glimpses of God here, there, and everywhere, and then leaking this knowledge. Americans have become like plane spotters. A few years ago security guards nabbed a white-haired British engineer at the Las Vegas airport when travelers noticed him atop the parking garage studying the runway with binoculars. To say that the fellow caused a stir is an understatement. Turns out he was simply a plane spotter, an aviation lover who jots down aircraft registration numbers.
Plane spotting is a hobby among the British, and to a lesser degree among the people of the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Japan, and the US. Perched atop hotel roofs, observation towers, and parking garages, plane spotters strain through binoculars to read the individual registration numbers printed on the tails of assorted aircraft. They then record the numbers in an attempt to chronicle as many sightings as possible.And just as plane spotters are keeping an eye out for airplanes, Americans keep an eye out for glimpses of God.

People claim that they see God here or there, doing this and that, and so the question is, “How can I tell if what this other person is saying actually has to do with God? Maybe it’s about something else entirely?” People say, for example, that God has blessed them with a luxurious lifestyle. Look at my house, my car, my this, my that. God has blessed me materially, which is interesting because Jesus would never say that about God. Jesus wasn’t everyone to have enough of the material necessities, but he would say that if God has blessed us, God has put us back on the path to being faithful. Blessings are spiritual in nature.

Or there’s that group of people from Westboro Baptist Church who protest at military veteran funerals. They maintain that American soldiers are being killed in Iraq or Afghanistan because America doesn’t what? Get rid of its homosexuals? I’ve seen them at funerals. They carry signs that say, “Thank God for 9/11!” “Thank God for IEDs” and “God hates fags.” And is that right? Does what Westboro Baptist church says about God square with what Jesus says? Or how about those who see God in nature, like in the waterfall on our bulletin cover? It’s one thing to say that God created all there is; it’s entirely another thing to equate God with Mother Nature. To imply that God is the same as Mother Nature puts us among the Baal worshipers in the OT lesson. God is above it all, different, not part of creation. Our OT lesson mentions “worshipers of images… those who make their boast in worthless idols.” So, yes, sometimes what a person may say about God is not God at all. And our NT lesson says that if a person leaks something that actually is about God, it also points to Jesus. “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds.”

Whatever our world leaks about God, if it is reliable, it is also compatible with the God revealed in Jesus Christ. Furthermore, the entire history of ancient Israel leaks Jesus. The Bible is broken into three sections. The Law and the Prophets compose the OT. Jesus composes the New. And both the Law and Prophets are leaks as to the nature of Jesus Christ, who, says our NT lesson, is the exact imprint of God’s very being.
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How, then, does one know that Jesus is none other than God’s fingerprints on planet earth? There are two ways people attempt to know, but one of them is of little help. And that is with one’s mind alone. The Christian faith is not just what we believe about God and Jesus, but a set of practices based upon what we believe. If a person really wants to know Jesus, one has to try on the lifestyle, live as his followers have lived for 2000 years. “Taste and see” that Jesus is the real thing rather than just think about it. And at Grace we have organized much of the “taste and see” experience under the heading of five core commitments.

Number one, if you want to know the God in Jesus Christ, worship regularly. Worship is an expression of our love for and receptivity to God. We express our commitment to God and are shaped by God’s word. We Presbyterians think of worship as having a reforming effect on our lives. Week after week our straying thoughts and actions are reformed, put right as we worship.

Two, if you want to know the God revealed by Jesus, invite others to church, and think about why you’re doing so. Why would Jesus command us to make disciples if he was but one of many truths as opposed to The Truth?

Three, if you want to know the God of Jesus Christ, give sacrificially of your financial means to his work. Apart from giving back to God, there is ultimately no knowledge of the God who gives to us, who gave his son so that all who believe in him might be saved. Sacrifice is the essence of Christianity, and should be the reason why people wear crosses. Jesus said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Sacrifice, shoulder your load.

Four, to know God get involved in a continuing education experience having to do with Jesus and his ways. This could involve books about the faith, devotional materials, Sunday school classes, an Alpha session, daily prayer, or a covenant group that meets for spiritual support and accountability. But for sure it involves learning more about Christ’s way as opposed to not being smarter than a 5th grader when it comes to knowledge of the faith.

Five, to know the God in Jesus Christ, volunteer. Give sacrificially of your time and talent to Jesus who gave his life that we might have abundant life. The knowledge of God and Jesus does not come through the mind alone. It requires a lifestyle of worship, inviting others, sacrifice of time and money, and continuing education in the faith.
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Nowadays we encounter people who for whatever reason leak information about God, but it could be a very different understanding from that of Jesus. So, how are we to relate to these who want to talk about their glimpses of God? With hospitality. Church should be a setting where people can inquire as to what followers of Jesus believe about God and how we come to such belief, a setting where people can compare their understanding of God with that which has been handed down to us by Jesus. Actually, this has always been the nature of the church, although it may have seemed when we were growing up that a person had to believe in Jesus before he/she ever came to church. No. What happens in church should help people believe in Jesus wherever they are in life’s journey. Maybe they will or won’t come to faith, but church challenges people to believe that God not only exists, but that God’s nature is revealed in Jesus.

Again, in our OT lesson we have clouds and darkness. Assume that behind the clouds and the darkness there is a gigantic mass of truth, truth about God, human nature, planet earth, the universe, the future – a gigantic mass of truth. We Presbyterians do not maintain that no one other than Jesus Christ has ever glimpsed some of this truth. What we say is that Jesus was gifted with far more of the truth about God than anyone or anything else, which, by the way, is not unlike the approach of several other religions. For ex., both Jews and Muslims regard Jesus as a prophet, i.e., yes, they would agree that he has some of it right. But for Jews, the Law of Moses is a clearer glimpse of the truth, and for Muslims, the Koran gives a clearer glimpse. Turn both these opinions around, though, and we Christians believe that neither Jews nor Muslims are entirely wrong about God, but Christ is the one we bank on. And where he differs with their understanding of God, so do we. The best glimpse of God is the one we have in Jesus Christ. Amen

WRESTLING FOR A BLESSING (Sermon Text Oct. 2, 2011)

2011-10-03T06:33:00.001-07:00

Genesis 32: 22-32, James 1: 2-4, GPC, 10/2/11, D. Johnson

The circus came to a small town here in MO last summer It featured a strong man who cut a small branch off a tree, fixed it in his hands just so, and squeezed until one or maybe two drops of sap fell into a Mason jar below. He would give a hundred dollars to anyone in the crowd who could do the same. A little lady accepted his challenge. She didn’t weigh half as much as the strong man, maybe not even a third as much, and she was getting on up there in age. People thought she had gone crazy until she grabbed the strongman’s branch and squeezed it so hard that she filled half the Mason jar with sap!

The strongman was amazed, and as he handed her a hundred dollar bill asked, “Lady, how did you do that?”… “I’ve had lots of practice,” she said. “I’m the treasurer over at the Presbyterian Church.”

Our OT lesson today has to do with a wrestling match. And I would think that for some of you women wrestling is not an interest, but I might be wrong. Just like the treasurer who squeezed sap out of the branch, you may routinely hold a strong man down until he cries “Uncle!” or “Aunt!” Whatever the case, though, let me remind you that wrestling is more than a physical phenomenon. It is something we all of us do with our minds and hearts. Wrestling is just another word for struggle, should you prefer it. And the good news today is that by struggling with our faith in the midst of our problems, our disappointments, losses, fears, and concerns - as opposed to doing nothing - God blesses us, gets us back on the right track.

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In our OT story, Jacob used to have a fairly good relationship with his twin brother Esau. And, yes, maybe there was more than the usual competition between the two – Jacob’s very name, “He Grabs By The Heel,” indicates that he is a competitor. He’ll trip you up so he can get ahead – but the two got along until Jacob maneuvered Esau out of his birthright and then cheated him out of their father Isaac’s blessing. Esau was so enraged at being cheated that the twins’ mother, Rebecca, who was complicit herself, urged Jacob to go live with their relatives in Haran, Mesopotamia else Esau would kill him. Maybe with time he’d get over it.

Years pass, then, in which Jacob builds a life for himself in Haran. In our OT lesson he is returning home with his wives, Leah and Rachel, and his concubines, Bilhah and Zilpah, and eleven of his twelve sons, one to be born later. To get home, Jacob’s family needs to pass through the land of Seir which belongs to his brother Esau, and Jacob is more than just a little anxious. Via his servants, Jacob sends an impressive present of livestock to his brother in the hopes of making peace, but he doesn’t know whether or not it will work. He does know from servants going back and forth that Esau and his 400 hired hands, or maybe it’s 400 hired guns, will arrive in the morning. Jacob is so worried that Esau is going to take revenge, that he makes plans to spread out his family in two groups, rather than just one mass, so that if Esau attacks, maybe some can escape.

Jacob doesn’t get much sleep that night. He tosses and turns, which is good because a fellow shows up whose presence implies that “There’s a blessing to be had here, I’ll wrestle you for it.” Being a competitor, Jacob accepts the challenge, and they wrestle all night long – body slams, eye gouges, drop kicks, forearm shivers, and a blow so hard that it knocks Jacob’s hip out of joint. And that blow, the flying hip ripper, changes Jacob’s strategy. From that point on he just holds on to his opponent for dear life, head locks and arm holds and bear hugs rather than using his legs, which he can’t with his hip out of socket. And the strategy works. Why?

The man has to leave before dawn else Jacob will get a good look at him, a look the fellow doesn’t want Jacob to have. So just before daylight the man says, “Let me go.” Jacob agrees, but only if the fellow blesses him, which he does. The blessing is, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed.” So, the short form of Jake’s new name, Israel, means “The one who wrestles with God!” But really, just who was this guy? Had the people in a Lone Ranger movie witnessed this wrestling match they would say to each other as the fellow walked off into the sunrise, “Who was that masked man?” And he might holler, “Hi, ho, Israel,” but it’s not clear just who this man is. It was dark, still, it seems like it might be God or at least an angel, and that it was important that Jacob wrestle with God or God’s agent before he meets up with Esau. Why? Obviously, he was afraid and needed confidence. He didn’t want to answer for what he had done; still, he could avoid Esau no longer. But even more than that, God had told him to return to the land of his father. Jacob had been promised that God would be with him in his new life. Is he going to believe that promise or not? And what do you think? Is God or God’s agent wrestling with Jacob, indeed, blessing Jacob proof or not?

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For years Jacob has carried around the knowledge that he had taken advantage of Esau’s impulsive nature with regard to the birthright, and then he down and out lied to their father Isaac to get his blessing. There is unfinished business between the two, Esau the aggrieved, Jacob in the wrong, which may sound like one’s relationship to a deceased loved one. All Saints is coming up at the end of the month, a time for remembering and honoring our deceased, loved ones who used to be present in our lives. They’re dead and gone now, but at times we still have twinges of unfinished business with them, twinges of pain and regret about things said and unsaid. Maybe we need to be forgiven by God for what we did to them, or maybe we need to forgive them for what they did to us. Whatever the unfinished business, maybe we need to wrestle with our faith, which is what we know of God with us, in the midst of it so we can fully embrace our loved one, even in death.

Years ago I asked a congregation to share an experience of death involving a loved one. They were to write it down and mail it to me. One lady began her reflection like this: “In grief counseling they say that having even two or three days notice of death beforehand is very important, compared to someone keeling over and dying suddenly. So, I am most grateful that my husband and I had three and one-half years after his cancer was diagnosed. Still, after he died there were many more things we should have done and said. I used to beat myself up because of these regrets, but then one day God helped me mature a bit. I now know there are no perfect goodbyes even when you have the time.”
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Like this lady “maturing a bit,” the wrestling match out by the Jabbok was how God helped Jacob mature a bit. The maturity needed for his reunion with Esau is symbolized by the blow to the hip socket. In antiquity men who limp are men who have been through it all, men who have faced what life sends their way, good or bad, and who have become mature human beings. They have the scars or a limp to prove it. Prior to his struggle, Jacob had avoided Esau for years. Maybe he regretted at times how he did Esau dirt, maybe not. In any event he needed to mature by accepting responsibility for what he did. He also needed to mature by believing the promise that God would be with him. We also may need to mature as we deal with unresolved problems, disappointments, losses, fears and concerns. “Know,” says our NT lesson, “that the testing of your faith produces endurance; and let endurance have its full effect,( i.e. hang in there, as did Jacob with God,) so that you may be mature and complete, lacking in nothing.”

There are many tests of our faith, many unresolved problems, disappointments, fears, and concerns that set the stage for grappling with God. So, when we go to God in prayer, maybe God says to us, “There’s a blessing here, and I’ll wrestle you for it,” as you pray, meditate, read scripture and think about it all. And it’s a blessing that God wants us to win. God wants us to get back on the right track via our faith struggles. When I was a boy and wrestled with my dad, he’d let me win on occasion. And when my boys were young and we wrestled, I’d let them win every so often. And isn’t that what God did with Jacob? Jacob couldn’t begin to outwrestle God, but he could hang in there. And so can we. And because he did, he named the place Peniel, meaning, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved,” which then gave him the confidence to face Esau. If you had faced God and come out A-OK, wouldn’t you feel that yo could face anything? Struggling with our faith in the midst of our fears produces courage, courage based on the confidence that God is with us.

Genesis 33 tells us what happens next. “Now Jacob looked up and saw Esau coming, and four hundred men with him. So he divided the children and his wives…and he himself went on ahead of them, bowing himself to the ground seven times, until he came to his brother.” A more mature Jacob was owning up to his theft of the blessing, banking on God’s promise. And, sure enough, instead of beheading Jacob, “Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept.” Jacob wasn’t the only brother who had matured over the years. Esau had forgiven Jacob.

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Another person who wrote me about her experience said about the death of her mom, “I wouldn’t wish my last couple of years on my worst enemy. It has been horrible. Through these awful times, though, I have grown a lot stronger in my faith,” which is the maturity of both our NT lesson and our OT lesson. Struggling with your faith, or just clinging to it when the pain is excruciating and you’re incapacitated, matures you in your faith, enables you to rely upon God’s presence with you as sufficient. Wrestling with your faith enables you to confront what might be hard to face up to now, just as it had been hard for Jacob to face up to Esau. Amen.

CHRISTIAN CONCERN (Sermon Text Sept. 25, 2011)

2011-09-27T06:28:00.000-07:00

Isaiah 42: 5-9, Matthew 7: 24-27, GPC, 9/25/11, D. Johnson

Have you been to a Borders bookstore recently? I suppose the ones closing in St. Louis are still open. The last time I was there, Borders was trying to move inventory at “30% off”. But if they’re still open, they have no employees to help you find anything, just a couple of people running the cash registers. I feel sorry for all the people who have lost their jobs.

I hear that the other day a woman had been waiting in line to buy some books. She finally got to the checkout counter, where she started fumbling through her wallet trying to find her credit card. And as she did, the clerk noticed that there was a remote control in her purse. “Do you always carry your TV remote?” the clerk asked. “No,” the woman said. “My husband wouldn’t come shopping with me, and I just figured this was the most evil thing I could do to him.”

Be careful whenever you go shopping. There may be an evil person standing in line with you, or more likely, a person who finds fault. I sometimes wonder why faultfinders even make a purchase. They’re disappointed that it’s only “30% off” rather than 50. They wanted it in paperback rather than hardback and the large type edition rather than normal. Still, in spite of all their disappointment, they plop it on the sales counter and say, “Well, I’ve lugged it this far. I guess I might as well take it.” I’m pretty sure should chronic faultfinders go to heaven, they won’t like it. They’ll look around and say, “You’d think that God could afford better.”

Our topic today is Christian concern. Are we concerned about, say, the variety of people who wait with us in a checkout line? People are different, often in ways that irritate us. Yet, people are also, in many ways, the same. We have similar hopes and needs. So, when it comes to the concern we have for others on behalf of Jesus Christ, what are we willing to help them with? What would we do for them if they asked? Or, here’s an interesting question on Evangelism Sunday: what should we be concerned about even if they don’t want our help?
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Jonathan Edwards was a famous 18th century theologian, the pastor of the Congregational Church in Northhampton, Mass. from 1727 to 1750, where he delivered warm, fuzzy sermons like, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Columnist Sidney Callahan reminds us how Edwards described the concern of the saved in heaven for the condemned in hell in these sermons. What will the saved do when they look down at the condemned? Edwards said, “When they see the smoke of their torment…and hear their painful shrieks…how they will rejoice!”

And do you agree? Do you think that those who spend eternity with God will look down upon those in hell and say, “Yea, God! Pour it on! Make those sinners sing, ‘Gloom, despair, and agony on me. Deep dark depression, excessive misery. If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all. Gloom, despair, and agony on me.” Which reminds me of a story. A young lady says to her father, “Daddy, I was out on a date with Mike and he proposed to me!”… “That’s good!”… “But I can’t marry him. He’s an atheist and doesn’t believe there is a hell.”… “Well,” said the dad, “marry him anyway. Between you and your mom, you’ll convince him.”

Two hundred-sixty years ago Jonathan Edwards made a statement, of sort, about Christian concern: those who spend eternity with God will rejoice that those in hell are being tormented. Or if they’re like the faultfinders in line with me when I go shopping, they’ll gripe that the sinners’ torture is too lenient. “What kind of hell is that? I’ve seen country clubs that treat their members worse.” I, for one, do not agree with Edwards, but to his credit, he did spend his life trying to keep people out of hell. If he were here today, he’d stress the Great Commission.

There are, of course, three “Greats” in the Bible, three great directives. The first is the Great Commandment, and how does that go? When Jesus was asked which was the most important commandment, he answered, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength; and a second one is like it, love your neighbor as yourself.” The Great Commandment is that we love others as self and as an expression of our love for God. And how do we do that? Imaginatively. Our denomination has started more schools and hospitals around the globe than any other denomination. It is said that to get to some of the hospitals and schools Presbyterians have started that you take a plane, then you take a bus, then a pickup, then an elephant, then a canoe, and then a machete to hack your way through the jungle. We have built all over!

Locally we do several things to fulfill the Great Commandment. PW do so many things I can’t even keep track of it all. The Men’s group has a subgroup that helps in the work of Habitat for Humanity. We have the Shoeman project to help those in Africa who don’t have shoes, and it looks like we’re on track to have donated 1000 pair by the end of the year if we keep up the pace. The Meal-a-month collection that we’re taking today helps the needy through the work of the Jefferson County Rescue Mission. Last week I shared with you how bare their shelves are and how great the need is in this economy, and one of our members gave me a large cash contribution to give immediately to the Rescue Mission, which I did.

The Pastor’s discretionary fund also helps the needy in a variety of ways. Because the fund balance had gone down to almost nothing, an anonymous donor in our church recently made a sizeable contribution. The session of FPC in Festus also donated two-hundred dollars to this fund. Last Sunday sixteen persons turned in applications to Nicole Kellen to be organ donors, with several others taking apps home to maybe turn in later. The Great Commandment.

The second “Great” directive is The Great Charge. We find it in 1 Peter 5, where it says, “I exhort the elders (indeed, all church leaders) among you to tend the flock of God that is in your charge,” i.e., give guidance and support to people in the congregation so they might be faithful to God in the circumstances of their lives. And this we do. We have deacons to visit the homebound and hospitalized. Many of you send Cards of Encouragement. We maintain worship. We pray for each other. We have Sunday school, PW studies, Alpha. The session certainly wishes that more people, certainly younger people, would avail themselves of these opportunities, but we can’t force anyone. They’re there should one be inclined. The Great Charge.

The third “Great” is the Great Commission. This is explicitly stated at the end of in Matthew 28, where Jesus says to all of us in his church, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” We are to have an abiding concern that others outside the church come to know God in and through Jesus Christ. The Great Commission.

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Three components of Christian concern. One, we take care of one another in church to the end that we are all of us striving to be faithful. Two, we assist those who need food, housing, clothing, friends, i.e., people who are disadvantaged. And then three, we help others come to faith in Jesus Christ. And it’s this last one, the Great Commission, that Presbyterians seem least concerned about. And why is this? Why is it that Presbyterians, in general, are concerned that people have food, but not so much that they have the bread of life, Jesus? Why is it that we’re concerned that others have housing, but aren’t that concerned that Jesus be the head of that household? Why is it that we are concerned about the physical, mental, and emotional needs of others, but not so much their spiritual needs? Again, we Presbyterians are builders. We have built more schools and hospitals than any other denomination in the world, quite a few churches also. Why aren’t we more concerned that we help others build a life on the foundation of Jesus?

Evangelism, which is setting the stage so that others can have faith also, is almost a four-letter word among Presbyterians, and in part it may have to do with our distaste for how other Christians go about it. We Presbyterians are the sort, who when a fellow standing on the street corner says as we pass by, “Jesus loves you and I love you too,” say in return, “Half of that is good news.” It’s the other half we have trouble with. And we wonder why every evangelist on TV has a thick head of hair? Just what are they covering up? And we have trouble with the arrogance of some Christians when it comes to evangelism. It’s like, “I’m brilliant and you’re stupid. Pay attention to what I’m going to tell you about Jesus.”

Such approaches to evangelism bother us, but it doesn’t mean we should abstain. We need to find a way that works for us. For example, the definition of evangelism that I like best is one beggar telling another beggar where he/she has found bread. Live in such a way that our reliance on Christ, the Bread of Life, is apparent to others. And when we have an opening, say, “What works for me is Jesus. Want to hear about it?” No arrogance, no arm twisting, no trickery. The very nature of our life is the proof of the pudding.
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Of the Three Great directives Presbyterians do our best when it comes to the Great Commandment. We do feed the hungry, build houses, hospitals, schools, and the list goes on. With the Great Charge it varies from one congregation to another how well we support one another in learning and living the faith. But we for sure need to do better when it comes to the Great Commission, helping make followers of Jesus. In the movie The Apostle, Robert Duval plays a preacher named Sonny who while out on the highway comes up on the scene of a car wreck. The police are there, lights blinking, directing traffic. Sonny stops his car where they can’t see and sneaks down an embankment so he can check the spiritual wellbeing of the two people in the wreck. He asks, “If the Lord is calling you home today, are you ready?” But he’s Pentecostal, not Presbyterian. If he’d been Presbyterian he would have taken them a casserole or asked them to serve on our committee.

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What does Jesus say in our NT lesson? “Everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall because it had been founded on rock.” Jesus Christ is the foundation for life. If a church member finds that his/her life is a bit shaky, maybe he/she needs to learn more from Jesus and build on it. For it is certainly the case that too many Christians claim to follow Jesus, yet they know little about him and his way of life. The problem with many of us is that we don’t go far enough in laying a foundation.

Think, then, about people who have no such foundation at all. Talk to funeral directors. They say that increasingly the people they bury, and the families of those they bury, have no attachment to a church. We know that during WWII 90% of America’s teenagers were associated with a congregation. Ten years ago that number was less than 50%, and I shudder to imagine how much more it has dropped in the last decade. What sort of a foundation do these kids have for their lives? And not just teenagers. Of the people in church in the 1940s and 50s, 2/3 left in the 60s and 70s, and many more in recent years. And whereas our culture used to help out by reflecting Christians values, those days are long gone. Evangelism is important because no matter how life changes, people still need a foundation for their lives, and the foundation that works is Jesus Christ. Amen

FEELING TRAPPED? (Sermon Text Sept. 18, 2011)

2011-09-18T19:34:00.000-07:00

Hosea 11: 1-11, Luke 7: 18-23, GPC, 9/18/11

Feeling trapped in a small life is a recurring theme on Garrison Keillor’s radio program, Prairie Home Companion. Lake Wobegon, his mythical Minnesota hometown, is filled with people who feel trapped in a small town, small job, small life. Cheri and I saw Keillor once when he came to Albuquerque. He kept referring to a segment of the audience as “people who had escaped the small-town life of the frozen Midwest for the sunny climbs of the Southwest.” He pointed out how these Midwest deserters had left behind those small-minded, mean-spirited, butt-into-your-business people who love them and wonder when they’re coming back.

Still, just because one escapes small-town life in the frozen Midwest, it doesn’t mean one won’t feel trapped again. A fellow who lives in my hometown grew up in the Midwest, but then was stationed in the 1960s at Walker Air Force Base. He liked Roswell so much that he stayed there. After a career teaching school, he retired and took a volunteer position at the UFO Museum. But after a few years he began feeling like he ought to be involved in something more. And he got the chance. Roswell is home to more than 90 species of dragonflies. One day this fellow read in the newspaper that a group was interested in an annual Dragonfly Festival. He joined with them and every year now drives a tour bus, telling visitors all about the dragonflies. He even made a significant contribution. There was initially a controversy as to whether or not they should charge festival admission. He won the day with his slogan, “Butterflies are free, but Dragonflies will cost ya.”
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Our concern today is feeling trapped. Whether we live in Lake Wobegon or Roswell or Jefferson County, we can feel locked into a life we don’t want and locked out of a life we’d prefer. And feeling this way doesn’t at all imply that we’re not thankful for what we have. We may be most thankful; still, we feel trapped, which can lead to bad choices. For ex., characters in the movie, Good Girl, not only feel trapped in a small life; but the wife then has an affair as her husband smokes pot and drinks to excess. In various ways people respond to feelings of being trapped, many of which only make things worse, which makes me think of our OT lesson.

And let’s put Hosea in the context of the biblical story. The first 11 chapters of the Bible tell us that God created a wonderfully big world, but that Adam and Eve didn’t appreciate it, sinned, and we all of us became trapped in a small life. Instead of being at one with God, we turned away from God, also became estranged from self, others, and nature. By Genesis 12, humankind and God’s good world have been diminished by sin and it’s only getting worse.

But God calls Abraham and his wife Sarah to parent a special people, special in the sense that God will work through this people to save humankind. Even then, in just a few generations Abraham’s descendants are trapped in Egyptian slavery. This is the situation referred to in Hosea l1:1, “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.” God sends Moses to free the Israelites and lead them to the land of Canaan, where they won’t be trapped in a small life. But what happens? Instead of Israel cooperating in Canaan, vs. 2 says, “The more I called to them, the more they went from me: they kept sacrificing to the baals, and offering incense to idols.” The baals were the fertility gods of the Canaanites, and an idol is anything we lock onto in the hope that it will produce the good life. But idols imprison, and what we have in our OT lesson becomes the biblical pattern. God frees his people, but they get imprisoned again .

In our NT lesson from Luke, John the Baptist is in Machaerus Prison for offending Herod Antipas. Someone asked me what the English translation for Machaerus is and I told them Folsom. John’s in Folsom Prison. I don’t know that for sure, but I do know that prisons in those days didn’t have food service. If you were in prison and you were eating it was because you had enough money to purchase food from the guards or your family brought it in to you. John’s followers are bringing in his food and reporting to him about Jesus, the alleged Messiah, whose activities are confusing. So John sends them to find out, asking, “Are you the one or not?”

Jesus answers, “Go tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” Yes, Jesus is the Messsiah, for in all these acts he is fulfilling the expectations of the prophets, freeing people from too small a life. What we can say about Jesus, a descendant of Abraham, is that he is how God saves us from being trapped or feeling trapped in a small life. But how does he do this?

Well, not like in the song called, “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover.” Remember that? A fellow wanted to leave one woman for another, but it wasn’t happening. So the advice he got went like this: “Just slip out the back, Jack. Make a new plan, Stan. You don’t need to be coy, Roy. Just get yourself free. Hope on the bus, Gus. You don’t need to discuss much. Just drop off the key, Lee, and get yourself free.” But such advice doesn’t come from Jesus. Christians don’t simply run out on our commitments or on those people who depend on us. Sure, sometimes situations and relationships have to come to an end, but never easily or casually.

So, how does Jesus free us from a life that’s too small? Key here is determining whether one’s life actually is too small or just feels that way. As we just saw in our Hosea lesson, sin does entrap us in a life that is too small. It leads to poor choice after poor choice, all of which diminish us. So Jesus frees us with the word “repent,” which means make a U-turn. Turn your life away from sin and back to God. Like the Israelites in our Hosea lesson, God constantly calls us to return.

There’s another way in which life can be too small, and that’s when we don’t attempt enough for God, say, when we don’t learn more and more about Jesus’ way of life. In essence we follow Jesus but know little about his way of life. Or when we rarely do anything on Jesus’ behalf. We’re spectators more than participants. Or when we feel we should do something specific for Christ, but we shrink back because it’s too costly or risky or inconvenient. Life should be every bit as big as the challenges God calls us to undertake. If we don’t undertake them, then our life truly is too small.

Sometimes, though, one’s life really isn’t too small. It just feels that way. Remember the movie, It’s a Wonderful Life? George Bailey wanted to get out of small-town Bedford Falls and experience the bigger world, but he never did. He felt obligated to take over the family’s savings & loan company after his dad died, else unscrupulous Mr. Potter would own Bedford Falls. And even though George made a wonderful difference to the people of his home town, he never realized what a wonderful life he had until an angel named Clarence showed him.

Like George Bailey, why is it that we sometimes feel that our life is too small, when in actuality it might just be the right size? Maybe we may lack desired success. Or we struggle with illness. Or the things we do, good as they are, seem at times like drudgery. Or what we’re doing seems too difficult. And what difference does Jesus make in this situation? The word is “refreshment,” being refreshed with the awareness that God is with us and for us. Remember what Simon Peter said on the Day of Pentecost? “Turn to God…so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord.” We don’t need another life. We just need to be refreshed for this one.

Did you see the bulletin cover? Whereas many kids feel trapped in a small life should they have no access to a swimming pool, the girl on our bulletin cover breaks out of the mold. She even crowns herself queen. She reminds me of lyrics in Cheryle Crowe’s song, Soak Up the Sun. “It’s not having what you want, but wanting what you’ve got.” And God gives none of us a life that’s too small. Amen

THE TASK OF MOURNING (Sermon Text Sept. 11, 2011)

2011-09-12T11:13:00.000-07:00

Ezra 3: 8-13, Romans 8:28, GPC, 9/11/11, D. Johnson

There is a monthly get-together called the St. Louis Ten. Ten people tell ten-minute stories having to do with a specific topic. In late July we got together at a place near Busch Stadium, the topic that night being “First”. All the stories had to do with the “first” time something happened. I told a story that began like this: one of the firsts that we all of us remember is where we were when we first heard earth shaking news. I remember where I was when I first heard that President Kennedy had been shot. I remember where I was when I first heard that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I even remember where I was when I first heard that a UFO had crashed outside Roswell.”

I won’t bore you with the rest of my St. Louis Ten story. You know what I’m talking about in that there are those of you who can remember where you were when you first heard that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. More who can remember where you were when you first heard that President Kennedy had been shot. Far more who can remember where you were ten years ago today when the plane flew into the World Trade Center. I was in my study where I am almost every morning working on a sermon. I’d been working since 5:30, the radio on as I listened to one of my friends, Mike Molony, the morning guy on an oldies radio program. All of a sudden he comes on and says, “We just got word that a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center. You might want to switch over to your televisions to find out more.” I did, and no sooner than the TV came on I saw the second plane crash into the other tower.

Wherever you were and whenever you tuned in to this story, maybe you were like so many people in our country. We literally stayed glued to the TV screen for days, it seems. During that period of time a number of people described their feelings. Some felt outrage, saying, “Let’s find the perpetrators and strike back!” Some were dumbfounded. They said, “If Hollywood had come up with this script, no one would have believed it.” Others felt fear, saying, “If this sort of thing can happen, what’s next.” And then there was the guy, I don’t remember his name, but he was a fairly-well-known personality, and when asked how he felt simply said, “I’m just overcome with a profound sense of sadness.”

Not only did I feel the same way, but I filed away “sad” as the most encompassing word having to do with 9/11. Sure, there are lots of other feelings, but none bigger, I think, than “sad.” Not only were thousands of people murdered and national symbols destroyed or damaged, but once again, and on a gigantic scale, the sense of safety we had known as a nation changed. In fact, on the first anniversary of 9/11, Newsweek wrote, “We wish we could go back to the days when the death of a princess,” referring to the death of Princess Diana in 1997, “seemed the biggest possible news imaginable. What were we thinking?”

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Walter Brueggeman is an OT scholar now retired from Columbia, one of our Presbyterian seminaries. Long before 9/11 I remember hearing him say that given the rate of change in America, we need to spend more time grieving – grieving that the life we used to know is no more, mourning that things are now different. And why would Brueggeman say such a thing? Because no other country in the world has experienced the rate of change we have; not only changes in technology, but changes involving morality, relationships, role models, valued ways of life. And these losses make us sad! Just listen to the following comments from 50-60 years ago. Back in the 1950s a woman actually said, “It won’t be long until couples are sleeping in the same bed in movies. What is this world coming to?” A fellow said, “No one can afford to be sick any more. $35 a day in the hospital is too rich for my blood.” And yet another woman said, “I tell you one thing. If my kid ever talks back to me, he won’t be able to sit down for a week.” Little did these folks know what was coming. None of us did.

Mourning is an ongoing task because so many of the ways-things-were have been or are being taken away from us; not just people we love, but ways of life to which we have grown accustomed. Grieving is the appropriate response to sadness. It’s how we heal, how we get better, how we adjust. And no one has ever recognized any better than our Biblical ancestors.

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The history leading up to our OT lesson is this: Judah had once been its own nation, ruled by kings of the line of David. And even though Judah had to pay tribute to Assyria, the people of Judah owned their land, and the worship of God was still centered around the temple in Jerusalem. But then Judah’s sins led to its downfall. Babylon defeated Assyria, and soon enough also conquered Judah. Babylon reduced Jerusalem and the Temple to rubble, something almost every Israelite thought impossible. They were every bit as stunned to see the Temple, God’s house, in ruins as we were to see the World Trade Center collapse. How could such a thing happen? The Babylonians then took the capable Israelites into exile, making them serve Babylon in other parts of the empire. But five decades later, Cyrus of Persia defeated Babylon and allowed the Israelites to return home.

But there wasn’t much to go home to. Jerusalem had to be rebuilt, and what we have in our OT lesson is a small group of returning exiles whose job it is to begin rebuilding the Temple. The year is 537b.c., and there is great rejoicing with trumpets, cymbals, and singing. But some of the priests and Levites are crying, not rejoicing. Their pain is so acute that vs. 13 says, you “could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the weeping.” And why is this? The people who weep are elderly. They’re of the age of those today who remember where they were when they first heard that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. They were children, maybe even young adults, prior to the Babylonian invasion. They lived in Jerusalem and had seen the glory of Solomon’s Temple!

And yes, they’re glad that their exile in Babylon is over and that rebuilding has begun. But it isn’t the same. They mourn the loss of Solomon’s Temple, which they had known growing up. Solomon’s Temple was magnificent. This new one isn’t going to be much at all in comparison. They don’t have enough money to build much of a Temple. And Jerusalem was glorious, the homes, the walls. But now Jerusalem is rubble. They mourn the loss of a life that is no more, just as we should mourn the loss of an America that is no more. To be sad about how things presently are in this country, not only since 9/11 but over the last half century, is Biblical. To grieve is the proper response.

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September 11 was many things. Some illustrate the truth of our NT lesson, “In all things God works for good.” I.e., there’s nothing can happen to us that God cannot use for our good, for example, all the many acts of heroism ten years ago today. There were many, many brave acts in response to the attacks that day, one by Father Mychal Judge. Do you remember him? He was the Fire Department chaplain killed by falling debris as he administered final rites to dying firefighters. His personal prayer was this: “Lord, take me where you want me to go. Let me meet who you want me to meet. Tell me what you want me to say, and keep me out of your way.”

In addition to the heroism there was a great outpouring of generosity, again an illustration that, “In all things God works for good.” Within the first ten months of the terrorist attack Presbyterians alone donated $5.2 million to a variety of related concerns, including help for low income workers at the trade center who had lost their jobs. And for such heroism and such generosity, God is to be praised. Still, the legacy of 9/11 is a profound sense of sadness that calls for the ongoing response of mourning. And not just a moment of silence, but grieving for however long it takes to heal. And this is hard because we Americans aren’t much into mourning. We want things to go smoothly, and when they don’t , we feel that we have to get past it as quickly as possible and get on with our lives. Minimize the sadness. We seem to think that we can heal without grieving, but we can’t.

A decade ago, Cheryl Strayed wrote about the death of her mom in The Sun magazine. “We are allowed to be deeply into basketball, or Star Trek, or Buddhism, or jazz, but we are not allowed to be deeply sad. Grief is a thing we’re encouraged to “let go of,” to “move on from,” and we’re told specifically how this should be done.” Pop psychologists that we are, we know the five stages of grief that we are supposed to move through as quickly as possible. But sometimes we can’t. Sometimes the sense of loss is so devastating that a profound sense of sadness lingers. And this is okay.

From the Biblical point of view, whenever you are sad, go with it. The only way out is through, regardless of how long it takes. Jesus said, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted,” but he gave no timetable. We may never completely get over that which makes us sad, although the intensity hopefully grows less as time passes. “In all things God works for the good of those who love him,” certainly by helping us heal. There is always hope for tomorrow.

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For many Sundays after 9/11, the NY Times published a page dedicated to persons who died. What struck me was how young most of these people were. Many were in their 30s or younger, newly married or engaged. And so many of these victims, regardless of age, seemed to be caring people. Thy volunteered. They helped others. They were good people, full of hopes and dreams. But bottom line, they were simply human beings, children of God, lives cut short, which is why I think that sadness is the most encompassing word for September 11. Amen

WHO DO YOU TRUST? (Sermon Text Sept. 5, 2011)

2011-09-05T06:08:00.000-07:00

Psalm 9: 7-10, Mark 4: 35-41, GPC, 9/4/11, D. Johnson

I hope you are appreciating the quiet this year, certainly the quiet compared to next year. Next year we will be closing in on the election November 6, 2012, of a President, 11 governors, congress persons both state and national, even a dog catcher or so. And every candidate will claim to be worthy of our trust. They will want us to trust them.

I think I’d vote for television detective Kojak if he was running for office. Kojak constantly asked people, “Who loves ya, baby?” and I think he did. He was a man who could be trusted to share the Tootsie Roll Pops. Composer and singer Isaac Hayes recommended John Shaft as someone we can trust. He even wrote a song about him, “Who’s the cat who won’t cop out when there’s danger all about? Shaft!” Maybe so, but I’d have difficulty voting for any politician named Shaft. Remember the old Jerry Reed song, “She got the gold mine, I got the shaft.”

When it comes to trust, have you heard about a product called Liquid Trust? Vero Labs bottles the human hormone Oxytocin and sells it in a bottle as Liquid Trust. I went to their web page to see how it works. “Apply Liquid Trust in the morning while getting dressed, or before important meetings during the day, or in the evening before going out to socialize. Everyone you encounter will immediately and unconsciously detect the pure human Oxytocin in Liquid Trust that you are wearing. Without realizing why, the people around you have a strong feeling of trust. They can’t explain it, but you know that Liquid Trust is doing its magic!” Scientists working independently at the University of Zurich have supposedly verified that inhaling a nasal spray containing Oxytocin does make humans more trusting. So maybe the storm-tossed disciples in our NT lesson would have been less panic stricken had Jesus been wearing Liquid Trust. But he wasn’t, and had to say to them, “Why are you afraid? Don’t you trust me?”
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In 1986, during a drought, an ancient boat dating from the time of Jesus was discovered in the mud of Lake Galilee. Cheri and I saw it when we visited Israel in 1997. Scholars are rather sure that this boat was the size that Jesus used during his ministry. It was 26 feet long, seven feet in the beam, and four and one half feet high from the bottom of the keel to the top of the rails. It could seat 15 persons, which was sufficient for Jesus and twelve disciples. This boat had a single mast rigged with a yardarm from which hung a square sail. When it was necessary to drop the sail, four crewmen could take to the oars.

The Sea of Galilee is 600 feet below sea level, eight miles wide at its widest, twelve miles long. Completely encircled by hilly land masses, over the years streams have cut deep ravines into these hills. These ravines now act as natural wind funnels. As warm air rises, especially around sunset, cool air rushes in to replace it. The result is that within minutes Lake Galilee is whipped into a white-capped sea of ferocious waves. And how do you plan for such sudden storms? When Jesus said, “Let’s go to the other side,” the waters had to be calm, else they wouldn’t have gone. But soon, “A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped.”

And what do you think? Do the disciples know how to swim or not? I think that maybe a few could dog-paddle, but most couldn’t. Remember that the Israelites were by and large petrified of large bodies of water. They didn’t sail across the Mediterranean. They left sailing to the Phoenicians. Sure, some Israelites fished on the ocean and on Lake Galilee, but water was very scary stuff to them. And so what we have in our NT lesson is this.

The storm on Lake Galilee applies to everyone in that the storms of faith arise quickly. One minute we are trusting, much like the disciples when they leave land, but before you know it, everything is doubt. Much of what we hold dear is being swamped, the gospel writer’s point being this: whatever the storm, Jesus is our hope. We can be, like the disciples, in a craft way too small to withstand the storm. We can be unable to swim should we capsize. We can be incapable of keeping the water out of our boat. We can be in a situation about which we can do nothing. And when this is the case, who do we trust? “Who loves ya, baby?” “Who’s the cat who won’t cop out when there’s danger all about?” Our OT lesson says that it is God, who does not forsake those who seek him. The Gospel of Mark says it’s Jesus, the God-man.

Do you remember the story of Robinson Crusoe, who by the way was a Christian? Robinson Crusoe had been isolated on a small island following a shipwreck. He had come to believe firmly that he was the only human being on the island. But one day on the beach he was startled to find the footprint of a man in the sand. Crusoe concluded that it was the footprint of a savage. In great fear he hurried back to his cabin. There, while lying on his bed, trembling with fear as he thought of savages, he also thought of the words of scripture: "Call on me in the day of trouble and I will deliver you, and you will glorify me." This thought of God’s deliverance was of such comfort that Crusoe rose cheerfully from his bed and returned to his daily life.

Jesus in our NT lesson is far cooler than Robinson Crusoe, Kojak, or Shaft. How could one possibly sleep during such a storm? The disciples are screaming out in fear. The boat is bobbing up and down on the waves. Jesus is soaked from the spray. How could he possibly sleep through it all? I once knew a fellow who said, “There is no sleep like the sleep of faith.” Maybe he had this story in mind. Jesus was sleeping the sleep of faith, but was awakened by disciples who asked, “Can we trust you or not?”

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The disciples’ boat is but one of thousands suddenly in trouble. One of my sons coached a high school mock-trial team for years, and the most interesting case they tried, in my opinion, had to do with the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Some of you have heard about this shipwreck if only by listening to popular music. In 1976 Gordon Lightfoot recorded a song called “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which begins, “The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee. The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead when the skies of November turn gloomy.” And it was on Nov. 9, 1975 when the Edmund Fitzgerald left Superior, Wisconsin en route to the steel mill on Zug Island, near Detroit, carrying 26,000 tons of taconite. Soon she encountered sustained winds of 50 knots and waves as high as 35-feet. Lightfoot sings of the peril: “When supper time came the old cook came on deck, Saying, fellows it’s too rough to feed ya. At 7PM a main hatchway caved in. He said fellas it’s been good to know ya.” Then Lightfoot raises the question, “Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the words turn the minutes to hours?” I.e., can we trust God or not when the storms of life batter our faith?

Good question. If political speechwriters were to write a sermon about our NT lesson, the message would be, “Vote for Jesus. He’ll keep your boat afloat,” which is not entirely true. Yes, the disciples’ faith was saved on Lake Galilee, but the Edmund Fitzgerald is lying on the bottom of Lake Superior, along with a crew of 29 men, some of whom were Jesus’ followers. What’s truer is this: Jesus will keep our faith afloat. He will calm some of our storms. , but not all our storms. Ours is to trust that Jesus knows which storms to calm and trust that his presence with us is sufficient no matter what the storm.

A young fellow was in the seminary when his mother became very sick. He prayed that she would live to see his ordination. He prayed boldly, with a strong faith, wanting her to enjoy the day when he officially became a pastor. To his utter shock, she died while he still had two years to go, undermining his confidence and faith. It wasn't just his grief that he had to deal with. It was what if God really isn't there? What if God won't be there? What if he'd made a tremendous mistake? This agonizing went on for some time, but then it cleared up one day as he was praying. It was as though he heard a voice saying, "Look, your mother was very sick, she was in pain. You wanted me to keep her alive for two more years in that condition? No. It was time. I wanted to bring her home. She'll watch your ordination. Don't worry about that." And thus it became clear to him that God's wisdom was better than his own wisdom. He could trust God even if he doesn’t always understand God.

In our NT lesson, after the wind ceased and the waves had calmed, Jesus said to the disciples, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” The disciples were awestruck and said, “Who is this guy, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” Well, as it turns out, Jesus is the Messiah, and when he was on the Sea of Galilee, his work was still in its initial stages. Maybe the reason Jesus can sleep through the storm is that he trusts that nothing can harm him until he fully presses his claim to his people, “I’m the One,” which he does in Jerusalem sometime later. In fact, what does he say to his disciples in Gethsemane, just outside Jerusalem, the night prior to his crucifixion? In Gethsemane the roles are reversed, aren’t they? Jesus is grieved. He prays, “Father, remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want.” And are the disciples praying also? No, now they’re the ones asleep. He wakes them up, saying, “Enough! The hour has come; the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Get up, let us be going. My betrayer is at hand.”

Jesus calmed the storm on the Sea of Galilee, just as He calms some of our storms. But he did not choose to calm the storm in Jerusalem, just as He will not calm all of our storms. His hour had come, as will ours. So in response to Gordon Lightfoot’s question, “Where does the love of God go?” God’s love is with us no matter what the storm, no matter what the hour, to help us endure or to carry us to our heavenly home. Being in the boat with Jesus makes the best possible difference.

In 155a.d., the Roman Empire had unleashed another round of attacks against Christianity, which was regarded as a politically subversive cult. Polycarp, the 86-year old Bishop of Smyrna was brought before the Roman proconsul, who took pity on the gentle old man. The proconsul asked him to say publicly, “Caesar is Lord!” i.e., the one to whom Polycarp owed ultimate allegiance. If he would do so, he would escape torture and death. Polycarp responded, “Eighty-six years I have served Christ, and he never did me any wrong. How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?” And so he was burned alive at the stake. Eighty-six years Christ never did anything but good for Polycarp, including being with him, consoling him, and giving him strength at the end. If the question is, “Where does the love of God go?” it goes with us always, helping us sail through this life with wings of faith. Amen

FINAL THOUGHT: “THE” FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE (Sermon Text Aug. 28, 2011)

2011-08-29T13:47:00.000-07:00

Amos 8: 11-14, Mark 9: 38-50, GPC, 8/28/11, D. Johnson

In 1939 a coast guard vessel was cruising the Canadian Arctic when the crew came upon a polar bear stranded on an ice floe. The crew began throwing the bear salami, peanut butter, and chocolate bars, doing so until they ran out of dispensable food. The polar bear, though, hadn’t run out of appetite, and so he jumped in the water and boarded the vessel. The men on ship realized that they were in trouble, and so they opened up their fire hoses. The polar bear so loved it that he actually stood up and raised his front paws so they could better squirt his chest and underarms. There is no documentation as to how the crew finally got the bear off their boat and back on his ice floe; but by the time they did, they had learned a lesson about why they shouldn’t feed polar bears.

Our concern today is that we also feed polar bears. What we do is feed our bad attitudes and destructive urges a little at a time until they get on board as full-blown sins. We stop and engage in thoughts, words, and deed that we ought to sail on by, and we do so not thinking about the consequences. As the man said in the old movie Cool Hand Luke, “What we have here is a failure to communicate,” at least the truth about the possible outcome. It’s like thinking we’re out for a leisurely boat ride when we’ve actually boarded the Titanic.
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And what kind of trouble do we take on? All sorts, including a general lack of goodwill toward and cooperation with others. Our NT lesson starts off with the disciples telling Jesus, “Teacher we saw a guy healing people in your name, and we tried to stop him because he was not following us. How dare he!” This reminds me of the church that needed its clapboard building repainted. It was beginning to look weathered. But all the church members were busy at the time, and so the pastor advertised in the newspaper. No local person replied, only a fellow from a neighboring state. The pastor knew nothing about this painter, didn’t want to hire him, and so the pastor decided to save the church some money by doing the job himself. The next morning he started out to paint, only to remember the wasp nest on the east eve of the building. It was way up there, so he fixed a torch on a cane pole to burn the wasp nest off, which was how the pastor burned down the church building. And when you think about it, how much worse a job could the fellow from the neighboring state have done?

The disciples come across a fellow they don’t know. He is curing people in the name of Jesus, casting out demons. Offended, the disciples are on their way to City Hall to get a “Cease and Desist” order when Jesus says, “Hey, don’t stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will soon be able to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us. ” Maybe you heard the story about the farmer working in his field when he sees an evangelist walking toward him from a car on the road. The evangelist asks the farmer to what denomination he belongs. The farmer answers, “Well, when my wheat gets ready for market, I can take it to town by any one of three roads – the river road, the dirt road, or the highway. But when I get my wheat to the buyer at the market, he never asks me which road I took. All he does is look and see if my wheat is any good,” which is the attitude the disciples are to adopt toward the fellow casting out demons.

One of the ways that our common life suffers is by relying on labels to make generalizations rather than communicate about what is really going on. When I was in college, we played a card game in the dorm called spades, the score card for the side keeping score labeled Usins, the other side Urins. It was Usins versus Urins, which was a great education for how life so often plays out, Usins versus Urins as opposed to Ourins, which is not to say that we should accept just any old way of doing things. In what follows in our NT lesson, Jesus makes it clear that not any old way will do. But it is to say that like the buyer judged the farmer’s wheat, and Jesus judged the fellow doing the healing, what we need to do is take a good look at the results.

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Have you noticed that we rarely use the word SINFUL nowadays except to describe a really good dessert? There is really SINFUL stuff being served up after church in Fellowship Hall. But SINFUL applies to much, much more. Sometimes what other people are involved in, truly is SINFUL! Furthermore, Jesus tells us to take a good look at our own lives lest we think that SIN is just the problem of others. Which of our behaviors and attitudes do we feed like the crew fed the polar bear?

We’re all of us sinners, but not everything is tempting to a given person, which leads to our sometimes being judgmental and to Jesus using hand, foot, and eye in our NT lesson. I.e., behavior that leads to greed may be tempting to a certain person, while sins that have to do with sexuality have little appeal. Another person may have a terrible time controlling his temper, but no trouble at all giving ten percent of his income back to God. C.S. Lewis said that gambling had absolutely no appeal to him, but wine was a different matter. What Jesus is asking in our NT lesson is this: what is it that lures us to depart from the example he sets? Forget others for the moment and look at yourself. Like a foot is different from a hand is different from an eye, which temptation gets you in trouble?

Whichever it is, each of us needs to communicate this temptation clearly to our mind and heart. I’m sure that most all of us have seen transformations via time-lapse photography. We’ve seen buds grow into beautiful flowers before our eyes or caterpillars into butterflies, all sorts of beautiful changes. But we can also use time-lapse photography to look at such phenomena as kudzu, the vine that is native to Japan and China, but grows well in the SE United States. It grows so well that if left uncontrolled will eventually grow over any fixed object in its proximity including other vegetation, having the ability to kill trees by blocking the sunlight. What Jesus is saying is that lest certain behaviors and attitudes gradually take over our lives and choke out the good, we need to put an end to these behaviors and attitudes now.

“If your hand causes you to stumble…or if your foot causes you to stumble… or if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out or cut if off.” Or I suppose in this day of surgery, Jesus might also say “cut it out.” If there is a cancer, cut it out. Otherwise the effect will spread and eventually the polar bear will be standing on our deck.

A few years ago a fellow named Aron Ralston was hiking and climbing in Bluejohn Canyon, Utah. He was climbing over a boulder in a three-foot-wide section of the canyon when the boulder shifted and landed on his right hand and forearm. Ralston tried to push the boulder off, but it weighed at least half a ton. He was stuck. A few days later, after no one had come to his rescue and he was out of water, Ralston amputated his arm below the elbow with a flimsy pocketknife, fashioned a tourniquet, and rappelled 75 feet down the remainder of the canyon wall. Then he walked seven miles until he ran into rescuers, who airlifted him to a hospital. Such a “cutting it off” sounds extreme, doesn’t it, but Ralston came to the realization that amputation was the only way to have a life. And for us who are sliding into sin due to a tolerance of certain of our attitudes and behaviors, including the sort of sins that Dante labeled as lust, sloth, greed, gluttony, envy, conceit, and anger, we need to cut it off or out.
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And we’re not the only ones who will suffer if we don’t. What if we went north along Highway 55 and everywhere a highway sign said St. Louis we wrote Memphis. And on 270, everywhere a sign said KC we put Cape Girardeau. We’d send people in the wrong direction, wouldn’t we? William Barclay reminds us that our lives are like signposts. By our attitudes and behaviors, are we sending people down the wrong road or the right road? Obviously, most people would not choose to send people down the wrong road; but so much communication is careless, like the coast guard vessel with the polar bear. It’s like the communicator doesn’t think about what might happen.

Ted Koppel once gave a speech at Duke University on the occasion of his daughter’s graduation. He said, “We have actually convinced ourselves that slogans will save us. ‘Shoot up if you must, but use a clean needle.’ ‘Enjoy sex whenever and with whomever you wish, but wear a condom.’ No! The answer is no. Not because it isn’t cool or smart or because you might end up in jail or dying in an AIDS ward, but because it’s wrong, because we have spent 5,000 years as a race of rational human beings, trying to drag ourselves out of the primeval slime by searching for truth and moral absolutes. In its purest form, truth is not a polite tap on the shoulder. It is a howling reproach. What Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai were not the Ten Suggestions.”

What we so often have anymore is a failure to communicate the truth with self and others. And the truth is that so often we human beings become tolerant of destructive relationships and situations because we don’t cut ourselves off from attitudes and behaviors that are harmful. It’s like, “Oh look at the cute polar bear! Let’s give him some of our popcorn.” And because all people are God’s children and valuable to God, not only does Jesus call us to do the right thing for our own wellbeing, but also as a signpost to others regarding their wellbeing. We’re to say with our lives, “This is the right path to take. That one goes nowhere.”

The movie Cinderella Man is about James Braddock, who in real life was a boxer and a long-shoreman. During the Great Depression, James Braddock had no work and no money. Still, he told his son, who was trying to help out by stealing a salami, “No, we are not people who steal. Never. No matter what happens.” In hard times not only do we have to cut back on our purchases, we still have to cut off those attitudes and behaviors that lead to sin. No excuses.

We live in a world in which the word sinful is primarily used for really good desserts. We live in a world in which truth is thought by many to be relative. There’s your truth and my truth but no longer is there “THE” truth. We live in a world that seems not to care where we’re headed. How different that is from the Biblical world! Our OT lesson from Amos deals with what many in Biblical times feared most – the absence of God’s truth, a famine of God’s Word. What’s really scary is for there to be no guidance from God. Thus, THE failure to communicate of our time involves the Christian belief that there is but one truth, and that truth is to be found in Jesus Christ. This doesn’t at all mean that we take this belief and beat others over the head with it, but it does mean that we behave in ways that make this belief clear to all. Amen

GRACE JUST IN TIME (Sermon Text Aug. 21, 2011)

2011-08-22T11:11:00.000-07:00

Jeremiah 31: 31-34, Matthew 6: 19-21, GPC, 8/21/11, D. Johnson

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth… but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven.” It is interesting to me that even with the tanking stock market tanking, very few of you suspect Jesus of losing what you’ve stored up. W.C. Fields, who lived through a few recessions and depressions himself, once said, “I’m not as interested in the return on my money as the return of my money.”

People can’t imagine Jesus losing what we’ve stored up. We trust that what we need in the life to come will be there. What is much harder for us is trusting that God will provide what we need in this life. And one of the reasons why is that God provides what we need much like Dudley Do-Right used to rescue Nell Fenwick on the Rocky & Bullwinkle Show, i.e., just-in- time. Just before the train can run her over, Dudley Do-Right frees Nell from the tracks, but no sooner.

Of course, we’re not crazy about just-in- time. What we want well-ahead-of- time is a stockpile of everything we could possibly need for the foreseeable future - inventories of faith, love, hope, security, and money. Still, God operates by giving us no more than what we need daily, and, sometimes, just-in-time. “Give us this day our daily bread.” Isn’t that how Jesus teaches us to pray? Daily bread, not rest-of-our-life bread? Give us today what we need today, enough sustenance for mind, body, and soul.

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Jesus urges us to stockpile in heaven, but not on earth. “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal.” And there is a sense in which manufacturers agree. Homiletics magazine reminds us that in times past, to keep production lines running, manufacturers purchased stockpiles of materials and kept restocking as needed. But, as you know, there were problems: huge amounts of money were tied up in inventories. Warehouses were needed to store these materials. Inventories were at risk from fire, flood, theft, moth, rust, and obsolescence. So the J.I.T., or the Just-in-Time method of handling inventory emerged, in which materials were scheduled to arrive just as they were needed.

Henry Ford first described this method in his 1923 book, My Life and Work, but it wasn’t fully implemented until many years later. In the car manufacturing world, Toyota is said to have first made it work, but they modeled their Just-in-Time system not on Ford but on the supermarket chain, Piggly Wiggly, or Hoggly Woggly as many of us called it. Regardless of who had the idea or who made it work first, it is the case that just-in-time, just before it’s needed, is how God has always delivered his grace, the spiritual and material inventory needed to keep up our end of the covenant referred to in our Jeremiah lesson.

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About this covenant, God says, “The days are surely coming when I will make a new covenant…. unlike the covenant I made with their ancestors when I led them out of the land of Egypt.” The old covenant was still in force in Jeremiah’s time. God had established it with Israel at Mt. Sinai: God would be their God and Israel would be God’s instrument in the world. Just as God had delivered Israel from slavery and led them through the Red Sea, God would be their sure defense in times ahead. Israel’s part of the bargain was to live by God’s laws and serve God’s purpose. But as time passed, whereas God was faithful to this agreement, Israel was not. More than once God punished Israel for breaking covenant, and then later forgave them or restored the covenant. So what’s different with the new covenant?

For one thing, “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts,” says God. This is the covenant instituted by Jesus. As we say during communion, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” And God writes it on our hearts, “heart” being a word with a variety of meanings in the English language, largely because of song-writers. Just listen to almost any sort of music. “Your cheating heart will tell on you,” came out recently on the Arnold Schwartzneggar record label. Bernie Madoff sang to his investors, “Trust your heart,” but ever since they’ve had an “achy, breaky heart.” Singers can’t sing for long without using the word “heart” in a variety of ways.

But whatever they mean by “heart” ,biblically it is the ability to both understand and obey what God requires of us. Heart in the Bible consists of mind and willpower – not just knowing what to do but also the “oomph” with which to do it. And therein lies the difference between the old and new covenants. God, in the new covenant instituted by Jesus, not only writes in our mind what is required of us, but then delivers the needed grace that helps give us the “oomph” to obey, sometimes Just-in-Time.
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Paul writes about this knowledge and willpower in Philippians 2, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” By the way, as is the case with the Just-in-Time method of handling inventory, God doesn’t write this covenant on our hearts once and for all. God writes it as we need it for the situation at hand. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “I believe that God will give us all the strength we need... But he never gives it in advance, lest we should rely on ourselves and not on him alone.” The nature of God’s grace is that it’s received daily, not stockpiled.

An ancient rabbi was teaching his students about God feeding the Israelites in the wilderness daily with manna when a student asked, “Why didn’t God just give them enough manna for a whole year?” The rabbi answered with a parable. Once a rich man had a son to whom he promised an annual allowance. Every year on the same day the son showed up to receive this allowance. After a number of years the father realized that the only time he saw his son was on allowance day. And so the father changed his plan: from then on he gave the son only enough for the next day. Thus, the father saw his son every day. As strange as it seems, God wants us to be in touch daily.
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In fact, think about bread. God rained bread or manna in the wilderness, enough for the day, and Jesus teaches us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” enough to keep body and soul together this day, no more. In recent times, it has been discovered how to add preservatives to the bread purchased at Schnucks and Dierborgs. You inject a loaf with botox. Not only is aging delayed, the bread doesn’t show wrinkles. But prior to chemicals, bread had to be made fresh every day else it soon showed its stale, moldy age. C.S. Lewis keyed upon this reality in the fall of 1939 as he delivered a sermon in Oxford, England, the situation being this. England would soon be at war. Not only were there many young men present who did not know whether they would live or die in the months ahead, but there were also those present who did not know if the world as they had known it would survive. Here’s a bit of what Lewis said.

“A more Christian attitude… is that of leaving the future in God’s hands. And we may as well, for God will certainly retain it whether we leave it to him or not. Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the person who takes his/her long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment… It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.”

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Layng Martine is a Nashville songwriter who once wrote an article for the “Modern Love” column of the NY Times. Given that he’s a Nashville songwriter and the column is titled “Modern Love,” I expected a wild story involving pickups of both sorts. I was greatly surprised, though, for the column began with Layng and his wife Linda leaving a medical center in Hershey, PA where she had been convalescing following a car accident. Linda, the love of Layng’s life, had been a mountain hiker, a wave rider, a marathon runner, a dynamo when it came to setting up a household. But as they left the medical center, Linda was now a paraplegic. Her body worked only from the chest up. In the hospital, paraplegic mainly meant to Layng that Linda could no longer walk. Going home is when he found out that it also means she no longer has any control over her bladder or bowels, that she can’t reach her glasses or TV remote when she drops them, that she can no longer do so many of the things they had taken for granted.

One night after returning to their home, while having dinner, she burst into tears. “I don’t know if I can do this for the rest of my life,” she said. All her husband could say was, “We’ll do it together,” which is what God says to us in the new covenant. “We’ll do it together. My grace is sufficient, and Just-in-Time, even when you think you can’t.” God will help us, just as Layng has helped his wife.

He and his sons fashioned a beach chair with inflatable tires so they could move Linda to the edge of the ocean, which she loves. One day, they put a lifejacket on her and carried her out into the water so she could float calmly beyond the crashing breakers. The lifejacket tipped her over, though, and she couldn’t right herself. They took it off, and to their surprise found out that she could bob peacefully with no help.

Early on, Linda couldn’t get up the steps to her favorite old stores in downtown areas, nor up the steps to friends’ homes; but then Layng got stronger. God gave him grace. Whereas originally he could carry her up only two or three steps, now he carries her up six to eight. And now Linda drives a car with hand controls and has rolled in three wheelchair marathons, as well as rolled into pubs in Ireland, coffeehouses in San Francisco, and Red Sox games in Boston. Layng says, “We don’t know what will happen tomorrow, or who will live how long. But we were young together. We struggled to make a life. We raised three great sons. We’ve each been the caregiver and the cared-for. We are two, but we are also one….”
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God, in the new covenant, not only lets us know what to do, but helps us do it. God writes it in our heart situation-after-situation. But we cannot live in the future today. Grace only arrives daily, sometimes J.I.T. Amen

BEING SEEN IS BELIEVING (Sermon Text Aug. 14, 2011)

2011-08-15T05:08:00.000-07:00

1 Samuel 10: 17-24, John 3: 17-21, GPC, 8/14/11, D. Johnson

Let me tell you about a letter to the editor. It’s from a fellow who thinks people should be honest about their age. The problem began when he was a kid. Because he was bigger than other kids his age, the ticket-taker at the local movie theater began hassling him when he was just ten-years old to pay adult admission, the price-break being age twelve. He had no ID as a ten year old, and so the harassment continued for almost two years until he actually turned twelve and legitimately began paying adult admission.

Time passed, but then one night some 42 years later he goes to the movies with his wife. Being in a hurry to get a seat and not counting the ones and fives he got back in change from the box office, it was only the next morning that he reached into his wallet and found five dollars more than he expected. Why? The teenager at the box office had charged the man and his wife senior-citizen prices, which was irritating. Senior-citizen prices were for those 62 and older, he and his wife were only 54.

Shortly after this humiliation, the man discovered one of the biggest scams in America, namely, middle-aged adults passing themselves off as senior citizens to get a lesser admission price. And teenage ticket-sellers don’t have a clue as to who’s what age. The man then did a calculation: saying he was a senior would save $1.50/swim, save him and his wife $5/ movie, and get him free Maalox at Rolling Stones concerts. As he says in his Letter to the Editor: “If I had been playing this angle early on and often, rather than the stock market, I’d be way ahead. But isn’t such a scam how America keeps getting into mess after mess? Companies misrepresenting themselves and ticket takers letting them pass without question?”
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People mislead others about their age, like child predators on the internet, or people under 21 attempting to buy liquor. People cheat in many ways, and so Jesus has an interesting observation in our NT lesson when it comes to cheating. He says that the judgment, or that which separates us into people who cheat or not, is this: light has come into the world, the light of God. Will we then move all our dealings into the spotlight of Jesus so it may be seen that we live by faith, honesty and integrity? Or will we keep some of our deeds in the darkness outside Christ’s spotlight because we don’t want it to be known what kind of deals we’re trying to get or who we’re trying to rip-off?

The light shed by Jesus on all we do and say is how God is saving us and our world, revealing those who love God’s ways and keep God’s laws, or, on the other hand, revealing those who love darkness, those who do not come into the light else their deeds will be exposed.

The title of today’s sermon is “Being Seen is Believing,” which is a variation of “Seeing is Believing.” Being seen is how we cooperate with Jesus in the work of salvation; this in two ways. One, “being seen” helps us work out our own salvation, helps us live what we believe. “No one can serve two masters,” says Jesus. We cannot serve both the Light of the World and the Prince of Darkness. As believers, all is to be done in the open, in Christ’s light, not just a few deeds here and there. We’re to do the right thing consistently, not just pretend we do. And two, being seen by others as we live the faith is how we bear witness to the power of Jesus Christ, how we help others come to know God. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says to us, “You are the light of the world,” meaning people who reflect his light, showing others a better way of life, helping others come to know the God revealed by Jesus.

As I have mentioned before, William Wilberforce who, lived in 18th century England, powerfully bore witness to the nature of God by letting it be known that God does not condone slavery. But as Wilberforce grew in his faith, he had second thoughts about his vocation. Maybe he ought to become a priest instead of a politician. So he goes to see the man who had been his pastor, John Newton, a man who early in his life had been the captain of a slave ship. In fact, John Newton had been so rough and so mean that he was a slave ship captain by age seventeen.

But he changed, writing about his experience the words we know so well, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that changed a wretch like me.” And he told William Wilberforce, “Don’t become an Anglican priest. It would limit the number of people who see you, see how you go about your life as a Christian. God has called you to be in public life so as to advance Christ’s cause, which includes the abolition of slavery.” Wilberforce’s place wasn’t just to be in the light, but in the national spotlight. And he gave it his best shot, eventually abolishing slavery.

How different, then, was Saul in our OT lesson, who didn’t give it his best shot. During the Era of the Conquest and Judges, the tribes of Israel, who did not have a human king, lived next door to Canaanite peoples who had kings. And they couldn’t help noticing how helpful a human king was when it came to things like national defense and trade. The prophet Samuel had been a judge on the Lord’s behalf over the tribes of Israel, settling disputes and granting guidance, but he was getting old and his sons were scoundrels. They didn’t follow in their father’s ways, and the people wanted nothing to do with them. So, even though the Lord was Israel’s king, the people asked Samuel to anoint a human king. Samuel was not happy about this, but the Lord told him to agree. Israel would have a flesh-and-blood king, one who was faithful, hopefully, to God, their true king.

Samuel then begins a search for the person who would become king. And in the stories prior to our OT lesson, God reveals that Saul is the one. Samuel conveys this to Saul, who is very unsure of himself in this role. He says, “Look, I don’t come from privilege. I don’t have a great education or a family fortune. I am but a Benjaminite, the smallest tribe of Israel, my family the humblest of all the families of Benjamin. And believe me, we have much to be humble about. Why me?” This unease with being thrust into the national spotlight continues in our OT lesson when instead of showing up to be chosen by lot as king, Saul actually hides behind the baggage – and I suppose it Samsonite - so Samuel can’t find him.

So often when we think of deeds done in the light as opposed to in the dark, we think of the ethically right thing versus the morally wrong thing. But here’s another slant regarding the light of God’s salvation. Saul doesn’t want to be in the spotlight because he doesn’t think he is up to the job, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Humility may be a virtue, but we can’t be so self-effacing that we fail to fully accept the challenge God gives us and equips us for. Saul eventually turned his back on God’s help and guidance, and so God eventually had to replace him as king with David.

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Ours is to live in the light of Jesus Christ so we might work out our salvation and reveal God the Father of Jesus Christ to others, which is also a concern of The Lord’s Prayer. When we pray TLP we ask God to hallow or make holy God’s name, “Our Father.” To hallow a name is to reveal it as holy, belonging to One who is greater than and different from all other forces and powers. Holy as opposed to common. And one of the reasons we pray for God to hallow his name is so that God’s existence and nature might be known by all. When we hallow God’s name we’re saying that yes, there is a God, and his nature is like that of Our Father. And here’s an example of the need for hallowing.

Do you remember how Moses asked Pharoah to let the Israelite slaves go so they could hold a festival to the Lord? Pharoah said, “Who is the Lord? I do not know the Lord, and I will not let Israel go.” (Ex. 5:2) Pharoah did not know God because God had not revealed or hallowed himself earlier to Pharoah as he had to Moses. And, then, because Pharoah was hard headed – this particular hallowing did not go well - it took Ten Plagues, the Israelites leaving Egypt, and the loss of a portion of the Egyptian army in the Red Sea in order for him to get it.

Today there are also those who do not know the God of Jesus Christ, people who are in the dark regarding Our Father’s existence and nature. We pray for such folks when we pray in TLP, “Hallowed be your name.” Reveal yourself, God, so all might know that you exist and that your nature is Our Father, the One who values each and every human being, Your children, and who provides for our needs, both material and spiritual.” And although faith in God is a work of God’s Holy Spirit, one way people come to know God is by observing how we live. Thus, the importance of our living in Jesus’ light.
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“Seeing is believing,” goes the saying. But being seen is also believing, proof of our belief. Living in the light cast by Jesus, as opposed to in the darkness cast by this world, is how God is saving both us and others. Not only can others see by our behavior the nature of God, but we ourselves are being saved as we actually live our beliefs rather than just say we believe. Amen

A Wise Choice (Sermon Text Aug. 7, 2011)

2011-08-07T18:27:00.000-07:00

Genesis 41: 37-45, Luke 16: 1-13, SPC, 9/23/07, D. Johnson

A newlywed couple is having dinner. The husband looks rather disapprovingly on what his wife sets before him, and so she asks, “What’s the matter?” He says, “Where’s the meat?” She answers, “There is none. There’s a cheese sauce on the pasta, and pecans, cheese, and eggs in the salad. That’s our protein.” From that point on things deteriorate. He says his mom never served a meal without meat. She says her family often had meals without meat. Finally, the husband leaves the table in a huff, saying, “The new rule around here is meat for dinner!”

The next afternoon she phones him and says she’ll be at the restaurant across from his office whenever he gets off from work. About six o’clock he joins her. She tells him that she’s ordered him the biggest steak on the menu. She’s having one of their salads. “Wow!” he says, “but their steaks are really pricey.” … “You bet,” she says, “I don’t know how you’re going to afford it, but it’s your new rule – meet for dinner. We’ll meet here every night or at some other restaurant.”

It is my opinion that we have to have scripture for a sermon. A sermon is an address based upon scripture that presents the good news of Jesus Christ in such a way that the listener is called to live by faith. Sometimes, though, scripture is confusing, like today. Our NT lesson seems to commend this shrewd manager for being dishonest and tells us to go do the same, which sounds more like the gospel of Gordon Gecko in the movie Wall Street than the good news of Jesus Christ.

And we’re not the only ones to have ever noticed this. Julian the Apostate, who ruled the Roman Empire from 361-363a.d. wanted to abolish Christianity as the religion of the empire and return to paganism. He was not successful, but Luke 16, our NT lesson, was the scripture upon which he based his appeal. “We’re Romans,” he said. “We value morality and justice. But what does Christianity teach? Be like this double-dealing manager and act dishonestly! What kind of a religion is that?”

We know that Jesus really isn’t urging us to be dishonest, or at least we hope he’s not. If there is any manager we should be like, it’s Joseph in our OT lesson. Even though he was sold into slavery and falsely accused and forgotten, he always does the job given him. And by God’s grace, he does it well. So well that he comes to the attention of Pharoah who elevates him to Second-in-Charge. When Pharoah chose Joseph, he made a wise choice. And Joseph is our example. Ours is to be hard-working and honest, not lazy and dishonest. So the direction we’re headed today has to do with our understanding one of the most difficult scriptures in the Bible. What is Jesus talking about in our NT lesson?
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Those of you who have been in Bible studies over the years know that there are a variety of approaches when it comes to understanding scripture. The only one that seems helpful, though, with the Parable of the Dishonest Manager is the knowledge of how ancient Palestinian communities functioned. This approach is seldom used, but a Presbyterian Bible scholar named Ken Bailey spent years in the Middle-East learning about village life, which has not changed that much since Jesus lived. The following is how he helps us understand this story.

There was a rich land-owner who rented out several of his fields and orchards. Those who rented land owed him rents payable in produce. I.e., the one who rented a wheat field owed him a hundred bushel baskets of wheat at harvest time, keeping the rest for himself. The one who worked the olive orchard would owe him a fifty jugs of olive oil after the pressing, keeping the rest for himself. This land-owner employed a manager to oversee his land, including collecting the rents. And regarding this manager, “charges were brought to the land-owner that the manager was squandering his property.”

The question is, says Bailey, is just who brought these charges? And the answer is concerned citizens of that community. We don’t know how he was squandering the land-owners holdings, but we can be sure that the land-owner was a respected member of the village. If no one liked him, they wouldn’t tell him that he was getting ripped off. But they valued him as a neighbor and didn’t condone what the manager was doing.

The land-owner then summons the manager and says, “What is this I hear about you?” And the manager says nothing, which is most unusual when it comes to the practice of the day. Ken Bailey interviewed people over the course of forty-years, and no one in the Middle East ever heard of a person being dismissed from a job without putting up a defense. In practice, if this manager was going to be dismissed, it would have taken three days of discussion and negotiation.

He would reply, “People are telling lies! You know me. My father worked for your family and my grandfather before that. How can you think such charges are true?” Or he would say, “There may be some shenanigans going on, but not on my part. You have more fields than Stokeley-Van Camp. I can’t keep an eye on everyone. And the people you give me to work with are very dishonest.” Given the practice of ancient village life, this manager would have given a dozen excuses if he had them to wear down the land-owner and get as much out of this situation as possible. To his credit, he says nothing. He knows that the land-owner has the goods on him and to protest is futile.

This manager’s situation reminds me of another parable told by Jesus. A Pharisee and a tax-collector go to the temple to pray. God has the goods on both of them; yet, the Pharisee acts like God doesn’t. “God, I thank you that I’m not like other people. I’m one of the good guys, not like this sorry tax collector.” The tax-collector, though, knows that God has him pegged. He prays, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” And God was gracious to the tax collector who threw himself upon God’s mercy, but not to the self-righteous Pharisee. Keep this tax collector in mind as we continue with the manager.

The dishonest manager is somewhat admirable in that he owns up to his guilt. The land-owner then tells him to bring in the account books, he’s fired. The manager leaves to get the books, and as he walks along tries to figure out how he’s going to get another job. He’s too weak to dig or work as a laborer, and he’s ashamed to beg. And regarding these account books, no creative accounting will help. The Mishna, an ancient book which details the laws of this period, tells us that from the moment this fellow is fired, nothing he does will stand up in a court of law. It is assumed the books are cooked. He has no legal rights, but he does have a generous master; and so he creates a next job by banking on the master’s generous nature. How so?

At this point, no one else in the community knows he has been terminated. So he summons the renters one-by-one. And they come running to find out what the land-owner, whom the manager represents, wants of them. He asks each one what is owed as rent, a figure he has already written in the account books, and they tell him. Then he says something like, “I told my master how little it has rained this year and about your being sick. Tell you what, given all you’ve been through, my master wants to reduce your rent.” The renter says, “Wow! Your master is really generous! And thank you, Mr. Manager, for calling to his attention my problems!” Then, and this is very important, the manager doesn’t write down the new, lower rent in his handwriting. The tenant writes fifty instead of a hundred. The new, lower rent is entered in the tenant’s handwriting.

The manager then takes the account books to the land-owner who examines them in his presence. He clearly sees that the rents have been reduced; but decides to abide by them. Why? The lesser rents are written in the handwriting of his renters. They have made these changes in response to what they think is the land-owner’s generosity. If he goes back to the original rents, they’re going to think he’s liar, a trickster. The ex-manager had no authority to change the rents; still, the land-owner’s reputation in the community will be damaged if he doesn’t go along. And so he commends the dishonest manager for his shrewdness at finding a new job, someone to welcome him into a home. “Welcoming the manager into one’s home” in this parable means giving him another job as manager. Some of these renters own their own places. They rent out the large land-owners land in addition to their fields. Given that the manager has gotten them all a good deal, one of them will likely hire him in appreciation. Problem solved.

Jesus then says to all of us, “And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth, so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.” This does not mean that Jesus endorses dishonesty. It means that since we all of us are guilty of squandering the life God gives us, and because God has the goods on us; the wise choice is to throw ourselves on God’s mercy in order that we be welcomed into the eternal home. Bank on God’s mercy, not our merit, of which we are lacking.

The parable of the dishonest manager is told in vss.1-9. In verses 10-13, Jesus adds another teaching making it clear that in no way is he endorsing dishonesty. He says, “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much,” which is different from the way we like to think. We like to think that there is a disconnect. Just because I cheat on my income tax, doesn’t mean I’m a dishonest person. Just because I fudge on my expense account, it doesn’t follow that I’m dishonest. They’re such little things. But Jesus disagrees.

“Whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much…If you have not been faithful in your accounting of what you have managed for another, how you’ve treated them, who will give you what is your own?” And what is our own, or what God wants to give us, true riches, is a relationship with God. A relationship with God through Jesus Christ is what matters most. God wants to entrust to us not a bunch of fields, but his presence in our lives. Can we handle this relationship? Not if we deal with God dishonestly. If we are dishonest, even in a small matter, and act as though we’re not; where’s the integrity in our relationship with God? So, fess up, receive God’s forgiveness, and strive again to be faithful.
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We knew that Jesus wasn’t telling us to be dishonest in our NT lesson, but did we also know that God has the goods on us regarding the misconduct of our lives? We’re all in the shoes of the dishonest manager. The wise choice is to accept our guilt, throw ourselves on God’s mercy, and strive again to be faithful. We have a very generous, merciful God. But God is no sap. If we’re going to continue this relationship, God expects us to be honest as we deal with Him and others, even in the smallest of matters. Otherwise, we really don’t have a relationship to God through Jesus Christ. We just act as though we do. We’re doing as we please, and as though God will never know. Amen

A QUIET RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE (Sermon Text July 31, 2011)

2011-08-01T18:54:00.000-07:00

1 Kings 19: 11-18, Acts 9: 1-9, GPC, 7/31/11, D. Johnson

What do you think about religious experiences? Does a religious experience have to involve something like a blinding light and a voice from out of nowhere as with Paul in our NT lesson? Or must a religious experience involve something like a burning bush as was the case with Moses?

It may be difficult getting past thoughts of the spectacular when it comes to a religious experience. Remember the movie, Oh, God! John Denver plays Jerry Landers, a produce manager of a California supermarket. One night Jerry receives a letter that says, “God grants you an interview, 1600 North Hope Street, Los Angeles, Room 2700, tomorrow, 11:00.” Jerry assumes that this is a practical joke being played by his friend Artie Coogan. So he wads up the note, throws it in the wastebasket, and goes to sleep. But the note keeps coming back. So the next morning, after finding it inside a head of romaine lettuce, he decides to go to the interview. And although there are only seventeen floors in the office building, the elevator takes him to the twenty-seventh floor, Room 2700, where he hears a voice allegedly belonging to God. Jerry can’t believe this is happening but then begins to think it is real. God tells him to go back to work. They will chat on the way.

Using the car radio, God tells Jerry that he wants him to deliver a message to people. Namely, God does exist, and God has given people all they need to make their lives and world work. Spread this good news around. People need to hear it. But the first person Jerry tells about his religious experience is his wife, who says, “You know, Jerry, I have some nice fresh chicken soup. Let me fix you a bowl. And then let’s go visit your sister who’s married to that guy, oh what does he do? Oh, I remember. He’s a psychiatrist!”

Whether you are reading the Bible, watching movies or TV, you may get the impression that religious experiences are something extraordinary; and they can be. But they might also include the less spectacular. Maybe you have had several religious experiences that you didn’t recognize. Or maybe you have had one or two you’ve wondered about. So, let’s think today about the essence of a religious experience.

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Luke Timothy Johnson says that the Christian religion is a way of life, that of Jesus Christ. And it is centered around our experiences of and convictions about God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I.e., if we’re going to follow Jesus, we need experiences of God and convictions about God. Where do we get such? Well, some are first hand, based on our own experiences, while others are second hand, handed down to us over the generations, like from the time of Moses. Remember the story of the burning bush? Moses is herding goats on the Sinai Peninsula, a place so hot that it makes this summer seem like fall. Spontaneous combustion in such dry heat is not that uncommon. Plants would get hot and dry out to the point where they just burst into flames. But if they did, they’d burn out just like any fire soon enough burns out.

Moses has likely seen other burning bushes, but this one keeps on burning. It’s like the rabbit with the battery that just keeps going and going. Moses walks over to take a gander, and finds out that he’s been granted an interview with God. He hears a voice, but let’s ask, how does he hear it? If his brother Aaron had been with him, would Aaron have heard it also? Don’t know. Whatever the case, Moses hears “I am the God of your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I have observed the misery of my people in Egyptian slavery. Go tell Pharoah to ‘Let my people go!’” That’s the message.

Moses goes home that night and shares this religious experience with his wife Zipporah, which in Hebrew means “little bird.” And I’ve always wondered does she sing like a little bird or eat like a little bird? Which is it? And then it dawned on me that bird-brain is what she must thinks of her husband. For when Moses tells Zipporah about the burning bush, she maybe says, “Hmm, Moses. I have some nice fresh chicken soup.”
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The Christian religion is a way of life, that of Jesus, and it is centered around experiences of and convictions about God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Some of these experiences are uniquely our own, while others have been handed down to us over the centuries. Again, how did God identify himself to Moses at the burning bush? “I am the God of your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? I.e., This is not an unknown God telling Moses to go to Pharoah, but the God with whom Moses’ people have a history of some 600 plus years, starting with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

In the twelfth chapter of Genesis we read about God calling Abraham to go to a land that God will show him, and to father a people through whom God will work to save humankind. That was Abraham’s first religious experience, and was it something spectacular like Paul’s with the blinding light? I don’t think so. Abraham’s encounter with God doesn’t sound all that spectacular. Maybe it was more like a God-driven inner conviction saying, “Go.” All the Bible says is, “Now the Lord said to Abraham, ‘Go…’” How did the Lord communicate this order? Don’t know for sure, but Abraham went, and as God continued to interact with him over the years, Abraham came to certain convictions about God. God is like this, not like that. Around the campfire at night, Abraham told his son Isaac about his experiences with God. And then because God was also active in Isaac’s life, Isaac could say that he had come to the same convictions. God is like this and not like that. And then Isaac shared the family’s experiences of God with his son, Jacob; who then shared his experiences with his twelve sons.

What I have just described is much the nature of the Bible. The Bible is the written record of a people’s experiences of and convictions about God as God had been involved in their lives over hundreds and hundreds of years. But each generation has had to affirm as their own the experiences and convictions of those who went before or the whole process would fall apart. The Biblical experience of God is not something foreign to our experience, but an account of how God has, is, and will act in our lives also. So, the question is, “Are we paying attention?”

For example, even though most of us would say that we’ve never experienced anything like a blinding light and a voice from out of nowhere, we might say the following: Yes, we have felt God’s presence more so at times than at others. Or we’ve had experiences having to do with certainty. Every now and then we’re just certain that there is a God, more so than at other times. Or these experiences may have to do with an awareness of what kind of a God it is we’re dealing with. We’ve experienced forgiveness or guidance or endurance in such a way that we’re sure it comes from God.

All this the Biblical people also felt at times. So, if we add one more ingredient, we can test to see if it’s a religious experience or not. And that ingredient is our response, taking action that can validate a message as either being from God or not. Such feelings or thinking or convictions as I just mentioned require us or help us do something. We may need to be patient, or we may need to act; we may need to do this and stop doing that; but whatever it is, a response is called for. Again, what was Moses’ experience at the burning bush? Moses has an experience that would lead him to believe that God truly exists, that God’s nature is to work to relieve human misery, and that God has a role for Moses to play in the rescue of the Hebrews. “Go, set my people free!” But unless Moses actually goes and tries to free his people, how will he ever know that it was God speaking to him as opposed to something he imagined? Or what was Paul’s experience in our NT lesson? It seems that he’s been wrong and the Christians he’s been persecuting are right. God is at work through Jesus the Christ, and now God is calling Paul to take the message of Jesus Christ to the world? Whoa! That’s weird! But had Paul not obeyed, what would he have known? Maybe no more than he’d had a weird experience on the road to Damascus. He certainly would not have known what he says in Romans 1, “The gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith.”

What we find with religious experiences in the Bible is that God requires something of the person who has the experience, and the results of doing what God requires validates the experience, proves it really was God communicating or not. And by the way, our OT lesson is proof that you don’t have to have burning bushes or blinding lights to have a religious experience. For how does God communicate with Elijah? Not in the wind that was strong enough to split mountains. That was more like Jezebel’s fury. And not in the earthquake, which was like Jezebel turning the world upside down trying to find Elijah. And not in the fire, which burned as hot as Jezebel’s hatred for Elijah. No. God’s word came to Elijah not in a spectacular way, but in the “sound of sheer silence.” And how Elijah comes to know that it’s God’s voice is by doing what God tells him.

As a pastor, my task is to help you live by faith in Jesus Christ. And the weekly sermon is a large part of this effort. Through the years I have heard from people for whom the scripture lessons and sermon are immediately helpful. They say, “How did you know what I was dealing with?” Well, I didn’t. On any given Sunday, God’s word is immediately applicable to some, but less relevant to others, at least at that particular point in time. What we hope happens is that as we examine these Biblical stories from week to week, little snippets of God’s word get lodged in our brains. We may not need a particular Sunday’s guidance or assurance right then and there, but there’s going to be a time later when we do. And this snippet of good news heard in worship in times past is going to work its way to the forefront of our minds. And it’s going to be of such importance that it’s like it came from God, and to prove it’s from God, we’re going to have to respond in faith. Test and see if it’s God’s guidance and power in your life.

A quiet religious experience is not that uncommon. In whatever way a message from God gets to the forefront of your consciousness, that can be the beginning. If this message has immediate relevance to your life, pay attention. And if this message requires you do something, do it. Responding in faith is how we prove yes or no that we’ve had a religious experience. If it’s from God it sustains or heals or empowers or in some way achieves God’s purpose. For the prophet Isaiah (55: 10,11) records God as saying, “Just as the rain and snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but shall accomplish that which I purpose.” Amen

THE 51/49 PERCENT LAW (Sermon Text July 24, 2011)

2011-08-01T11:52:00.000-07:00

Exodus 1: 15-22, Galatians 5: 13-26, GPC, 7/24/11, D. Johnson

Paul Newman was one of our most popular actors; but when he took on the role of Hud in the movie of the same name, he portrayed one of the most unpopular characters of all times. I was in high school when the movie came out, and even the juvenile delinquents went around saying, “Man, that guy Hud is sorry!”
I didn’t know it at the time, but we Americans have guidelines when it comes to the main characters in our movies. Namely, if a movie is going to work, we have to relate or develop empathy for the main character. And what is interesting about this empathy is that the character endears himself to us through his or her flaws, which have to be substantial, but not overwhelming. Americans relate to the main character in a movie through his/her flaws.

As church goers, we might think that Americans would identify with characters who are strong, moral, almost perfect; but we don’t. This is why movie goers flock to Godzilla vs. King Kong, but not to Mother Teresa vs. Billy Graham. Billy Graham and Mother Teresa are too perfect, at least in popular opinion. We can’t relate; whereas Godzilla and King Kong are basically likeable monsters with terribly destructive temperaments, which we understand all too well. When they’re tearing up Tokyo or batting down airplanes, we can relate to that sort of thing. But, again, only up to a point.

The movie characters that Americans so often love and identify with tend to conform with what is called the “51%/49% Law” , i.e., they’re 51% good, 49% bad. They have just enough good points to outweigh the bad. It they’re 90% good and 10% bad, forget it. We can’t relate. Furthermore, this ratio also has to be close when we’re watching movies with bad guys. If a bad guy is 49% good and 51% bad, even then we can be empathetic. For example, Hannibal Lector in the movies is a cannibalistic, murderous psychopath. But on the other hand, he’s a very charming, intelligent fellow. America likes Hannibal Lector. But Hud is 90% bad and 10% good, a character no one likes.

But let’s not ignore the terrible fix that Hud and his family are in. In the movie, they’re faced with the loss of all they have built up over the years, which is invested in a herd of cattle that appears to have hoof and mouth disease. Faced with financial disaster, Hud wants to sell-off the herd before the lab tests are conclusive and the government steps in to exterminate the herd. He’s willing to risk starting a national epidemic of hoof and mouth disease. He is prepared to do what in our NT lesson is termed “gratify the desires of the flesh,” flesh meaning self-interest, while not caring what happens to his neighbors.

I bring Hud to your attention, because God’s forgiveness incorrectly understood can enable us to act similarly. If we believe that God is going to forgive us, why not keep God busy forgiving? Why not get away with as much as we can? Why struggle to be at least 51% good, 49% not-so-good, when it is so much easier in a particular instance to be 90% bad, 10% good? God forgives. Let’s take advantage of it.
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The Letter to the Galatians can be understood as a spiritual Declaration of Independence. Why? Because Paul says that followers of Jesus have been freed from Jewish legal obligations. It’s not by perfectly obeying the Law of Moses that we are put right with God – we can’t possibly do that anyway – but by our faith in Jesus Christ: faith, which is trusting that God’s way is best and obeying what God requires of us. And when we stumble and aren’t obedient, faith also involves accepting God’s forgiveness and trying once again to do the right thing. That’s the response of faith – trust, obey, and when you blow it, seek God’s forgiveness and once again try to get it right. Paul, though, hardly got these words written down before he was misunderstood.

A group of Christians started behaving in such a way that we call them Antinomian, meaning “against the law.” Their position was that since Christians are not bound by the laws we find in the OT, why obey the Ten Commandments? Why be moral? Why not do as we please? God’s grace is so great that we will be forgiven no matter what we do.

Such thinking may be tempting at times, but such an understanding of freedom couldn’t be further from the truth. What Paul is saying is not that we’ve been freed to do as we please, but freed to do that which is pleasing to God, which sometimes conflicts with the law or is ignored by the law. And what is pleasing to God is that we be Christ-like. Jesus Christ is what a human being would look like were it not for our fall from grace and our sin. Jesus is the person God created humankind to be, but we aren’t. And not in the sense that we live like a first-century Palestinian peasant, or that we own nothing, or that we travel no more than 200 miles from our place of birth. No.

God wants us to be like Jesus along the lines of Philippians 2: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.... Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.” Or what’s pleasing to God is also found in Ephesians 4, “Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us.”

There can be a big difference in how we choose to understand God’s forgiveness. We can understand it rightly as an opportunity to try once again to be Christ-like; or we can understand it wrongly as a license for self-indulgence. But, again, regarding self-indulgence, Paul says in Romans 6, “What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin that grace may abound, meaning go for 90% bad, 10% good in order to keep God busy? Absolutely not!” Jesus himself said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets: I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” It’s not that God’s expectations of human beings were lowered with the arrival of Jesus Christ. It’s that there is now a better way of responding to God’s love, and that’s by faith, which consists of trusting, obeying, being forgiven when needs be, and then trusting and obeying again.

Whereas the law led to many people being blind to their own flaws – I’m 100% good; or led to their being judgmental toward others – You’re 90% bad, 10% good. Or whereas the law leads to people giving up – no way can I do what Billy Graham did or Mother Teresa did - faith leads to the struggle to do the best we can to return God’s love, regardless of who we are. Wherever we’re planted, we are free to blossom with the fruit of the Spirit – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. We’re free to break out of any mold or overcome any obstacle that prevents our being Christ-like.

Of course, we never quite attain perfect likeness on this side of the grave; it’s beyond us. Being Christ-like does not mean “mirror image;” it’s more the likeness we see in the movie Twins” In the movie Twins Danny Devito and Arnold Schwartzneggar play fraternal twins separated at birth, but who then get together later on when Arnold’s character figures out what happened. The Arnold Schwartzneggar character then confronts the Danny Devito character and says, “It’s me, your twin brother.” Danny Devito knows nothing about having a twin brother at that point, and so he says, “Oh, yeah. The likeness is remarkable.” We certainly aren’t the mirror image of Jesus Christ, but hopefully people can tell that we live by faith in him.

We all of us are capable of doing what Jesus would do, and with great result at times. Let’s look at our OT lesson. Given that this story took place some twelve hundred years before Jesus’ birth, Shiphrah and Puah were obviously not followers of Jesus, but they were like followers in that they “feared God.” To fear God in the Bible means to revere God, honor God, to acknowledge God as the ultimate authority in one’s life and to do what God demands of us rather than what others ask of us, even demand of us. Were these midwives Israelites? We’re not for sure. Their names may be Hebrew or Egyptian. To say that they feared God can refer at times in the Bible to non-Israelites who have been attracted to Israel’s God.

In any event, Pharoah’s plan to reduce the number of Israelite slaves was rather simple. These midwives were to kill boy babies but allow female babies to live. The males were targeted for the simple reason that they might grow up to father sons who would rebel against Pharoah. Can’t have that, so Shiphrah and Puah have their instructions, “But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live,” which required courage. It required God-given courage to explain to Pharoah why his plan failed, namely, “Because the Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.” Maybe that story worked because it played on Pharoah’s fears. He feared that something was different because there were so many Israelites. “These women are nothing but baby machines!” he thought. In any event, do you see how taking one’s orders from God, which is what we do when we live by faith, can have amazing results? Two alleged nobodies, Shiphrah and Puah, women who had no power at all in comparison to Pharoah, derailed Pharoah’s murderous plan.

Three weeks ago, as we celebrated our nation’s freedom, my thoughts turned to a movie about freedom, Amazing Grace. Based upon real characters and true events, one character is John Newton, the man who gave us the most popular hymn of all times, “Amazing Grace,” a hymn that expressed his own experience of God: for whereas John Newton had been the captain of a slave ship earlier in his life, he then converted to Christianity and joined forces with William Wilberforce to help free the slaves in England. A man with a simple faith, Newton would say, “The only two things I know: that I am a great sinner and Christ is a great savior.” Who, though, was greater, John Newton the sinner or Christ the Savior?

Obviously, we believe that the good Christ can work in and through us is greater than the bad we’re inclined to do. Still, if we made a movie title out of our NT lesson, Paul might suggest The Holy Spirit vs. Self-Interest. At times this struggle is more of a fight than even Godzilla vs. King Kong. The battle of Holy Spirit vs. Self-Interest rages within, and this battle may be what gives us the 51/49% Law when it comes to relating to movie characters. We know that doing good isn’t always easy. Loving neighbor as self at times can be hard. Still, the good news is that the Spirit of Christ at work in and through us is stronger than the spirit of self-interest. Amen

Authenticity (Sermon Text July 17, 2011)

2011-07-17T13:27:00.000-07:00

1 Samuel 16: 6-13, Luke 7: 1-10, GPC, 7/17/11, D. Johnson

The movie, On the Waterfront, is based on the actual story of a longshoreman who tried to overthrow a corrupt union official. In real life he failed; in the film he succeeds. On the Waterfront is a classic, although it could have been much different. Sam Spiegel, the producer, originally proposed Frank Sinatra for the role of the longshoreman. And Elia Kazan, the director, agreed. After all, the movie was to be filmed on the docks of Hoboken, NJ, and Sinatra spoke perfect Hobokenese. The director had even begun working with Sinatra, when the producer changed his mind. He overruled Sinatra, who graciously bowed out, in favor of Marlon Brando, in what many think was one of the great decisions in film history.

I bring this to your attention because there is somewhat of a parallel between the casting of Marlon Brando for On the Waterfront, and that of David for King of Israel in our OT lesson. If we think of God in the role of producer, which we can because it’s God’s unfolding story, and Samuel in the role of director; the two started this selection process earlier. They originally decided on Saul to be King of Israel, but he didn’t work out. Saul has to be replaced, and so God sends Samuel to Bethlehem to the house of Jesse to choose the new king. And it was a great choice, for in the history of ancient Israel, no king was greater than David.
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But how did God determine that David was the one? By what criterion did he choose David as opposed to one of David’s older, talented brothers? This is a good question, relevant to each of us as we attempt to determine what role God is calling us to play in God’s unfolding story. What career role, volunteer role, family role, church role might we uniquely play in this life? And how do such roles change over time? What is there about us that God looks at when it comes to assigning roles? How might we know what we’re right for and what we’re wrong for?

The tendency is, of course, to want the most important role. We see this with actors all the time. Be they little kids staging their own skit in the living room, or teenagers trying out for the high school drama production, or adults auditioning for a Little Theater play, lots of us, not all but many, tend to want the role of the star. Too often we look at the roles we’d like to have in this life in terms of what they can do for us rather than what we bring to the role, when, in truth, what’s more important is that we’re cut out for the part. So, maybe a mark of maturity is to pray something like this, “God, I don’t know exactly what role you want me to take on at this point in my life, but help me approach this question in terms of what by your grace I bring to the role, how I might serve your purposes, rather than how the role might serve mine.”

I don’t know what was going on in the minds of David’s seven brothers, but this selection process of passing before Samuel reminds me of something like Miss America contestants parading before the judges. As each of the brothers passed before Samuel, likely they had this “Pick me!” mentality. “Because if I’m picked, it means that I am an important person! And it will do great things for my future!” This even though they might not be up to the challenge. Saul wasn’t. David, though, wasn’t there to hope that he would be picked. He was out tending sheep, and when he was finally brought in, he was chosen before he even knew what was going on. “God, I don’t know what role you want me to play, but help me approach it in terms of what I bring to the role. Don’t let me approach it in terms of what the role will do for me?”

Actually, there is a group of actors who approach roles like this, and probably much more so than do Hollywood stars. We call these people character actors. They narrow their search so that they’re looking for roles more in keeping with who they are. William Macy, for example, is a great character actor who has had no illusion about becoming a leading man. Still, he’s been a star in films like Fargo and Wild Hogs. And I like how he puts it. He once said, “I wouldn’t mind getting the girl. But I’ve got to face reality. I’m a character guy. I feel like Tom Cruise, but I look like Howdy Doody.”

William Macy faced reality and has done well, but have we regarding the roles God wants us to play in his unfolding story? Are we being real, and here’s the deal. What God looked for in David, and what God looks for in us, is authenticity. Do we truly mesh with the role God is looking to fill? Is it who we are? And whether or not by God’s grace we fit isn’t necessarily apparent to just anyone. Samuel thought that Eliab was surely the next king. Why? In part because he was the first-born son. Back then the first-born got a double portion of the dad’s inheritance and took over when the dad died. It was never the case in that culture that the youngest son would be favored over the oldest; yet, God’s ways are not always our ways.

Also, Eliab was tall, which has always carried some measure of importance. We are told that even today the average height of male CEOs in Fortune 500 companies is three inches taller than the average man in the U.S. And that there have only been two U.S. Presidents shorter than the average of the population they led at the time. Eliab was also handsome, which is a quality people have always liked in their leaders. As was the second oldest brother, Abinidab. Abinidab was so handsome that he got the lead in the old Brylcreme commercial, remember that one? “Brylcreme, Abinidab’ll do ya. Watch out, the girls’ll all pursues ya.” Brylcreme was so oily that it actually could be used for anointing kings. It’s been around a really long time.

Samuel is ready to anoint Eliab as king when the Lord says, “Do not look upon his appearance or on the height of his stature; because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” The Lord looks upon the heart or one’s character, one’s authenticity, which in this instance does not mean that David was a saint. It means he was a fit. Read about him in the Bible. David was a sinner, as are we all; yet through it all he remained devoted to the Lord. And he achieved the two things demanded of him as king. He centralized worship in Jerusalem, and he did not worship other gods in addition to the Lord.

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“God, I don’t know what role you want me to play, but don’t let me approach it in terms of what the role will do for me. Rather help me approach it in terms of what I bring to the role. Am I right for what you want done?” And we are right if we’re authentic, if our character meshes with what the role requires of us. Again, not everyone recognizes such authenticity. I like how John Wooden, former basketball coach at UCLA put it. He said, “Be more concerned about your character than with your reputation. Your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.” And in the movie, On the Water Front, the brother and the rest of his cronies didn’t recognize the authenticity of the Marlon Brando character. A few years earlier when he was boxing, they’d tell him to take dives so that they could make money on bets. They didn’t care about him, didn’t realize how good he really was. And the tragedy was that he could have been a contender, not a bum. He had the one boxer beaten easily. And had he gone on and won, instead of taking a dive as they wanted him to, he would have had the title shot.

Other people at times can hold us back, cause us to take dives, in some way prevent us from taking on roles God has in mind for us. Like with the Marlon Brando character, if you’re treated often enough like you’re a bum, you begin to believe it. How differently, then, did Jesus treat the people in his life. Jesus never treated anyone as a no one. Look at what’s going on in our NT lesson. We have this Roman centurion, a man who has traveled far and wide. Along the way he has become disillusioned with Rome’s gods, and while stationed in Palestine, finds in the God of the Jews what he’s been searching for.

The Jews of Capernaum welcome him to their synagogue services, although they’re not entirely comfortable with a member of the occupation force. But he’s different. He’s devoted to God, loves the Jewish people rather than treats them like dirt, builds them a synagogue with his own funds; and when his servant becomes ill, close to death, he thinks of Jesus. He has heard that Jesus is an amazing healer; and so he asks Jewish elders if they would plead with Jesus to come heal his servant. And why he has the elders do this instead of himself is his fear that Jesus, like most Jews, will not even talk to a gentile, a non-Jew, on the road. Maybe the elders can plead his case and talk him into it.

It was also against Jewish custom to enter the house of a Roman or pagan, and so the centurion sends friends to Jesus as he approaches, saying, “Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; therefore I did not presume to come to you But only speak the word, and let my servant be healed.” And here’s how he thinks Jesus’ power works. “I also am a man set under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my slave ‘Do this,’ and the slave does it.” I.E., he believes that Jesus has power and authority over the evil spirits of disease. All Jesus needs to do is tell the evil spirit to go, and the servant will be well.

“When Jesus heard this he was amazed at him, and turning to the crowd that followed, he said, ‘I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith,’” and the slave was healed. Jesus recognizes both authenticity and the faith that leads to it. Whereas Samuel would have anointed the wrong king, and whereas the brother of the Marlon Brando character held him back; Jesus gets it right. By our faith, Jesus makes us authentic. And by our authenticity, God knows what role we’re fit for.
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So, what role might God be calling you to fill in your family, among your friends, as a volunteer in church, in public life, or in your career? And are you approaching such a role in terms of what, by God’s grace, you bring to it, rather than what the role might do for you? Are there those who have given you a wrong impression of yourself, not matched your reputation with your true character? Do you need to break away from such limiting expectations, as the Marlon Brando character does? And what can you do to help others find their roles, affirming their authenticity just as Jesus affirmed the faith of the centurion? Amen

PRAYER: WHAT DOES GOD WANT? (Sermon Text July 10, 2011)

2011-07-10T16:47:00.000-07:00

Genesis 28: 10-22, 1 Corinthians 2: 14-16, GPC, 7/10/11, D. Johnson

There is a pastor who likes to write out the prayers he thinks his parishioners pray. He’s not absolutely sure that they always pray like this, but he has suspicions. For ex., the parents of a teenager going off to church camp pray, “Dear Lord, watch over our son and keep him from all harm. Don’t let him be like those kids who get religion at camp and come home all weird expecting their family to go to church every Sunday. Amen.”

On Sunday mornings, prior to the sermon, this pastor invites congregation members to say a silent prayer to the end that they receive God’s word. He’s pretty sure that most of these prayers come out, “Eternal God, be with the pastor so that he not preach any longer than twenty minutes. Amen. ” These are the same parishioners who pray prior to New Year’s Day, “God, I admit that I let you down by breaking all my New Year’s resolutions this past year. So that I not disappoint you in the year to come, guard me against all thoughts of self improvement. Amen.”

A couple of other prayers are, “Lord, you are my Helper, and if you will help me get away with it this time, I promise that I’ll never tell a lie again.”… “Lord, be with us as we bear witness to our faith in Christ this week, but don’t let it be awkward or embarrassing or in front of anyone we know.” On and on these prayers go, and they’re not limited to just the one congregation. Our concern today is with prayers that cooperate with God-at-work in our lives versus prayers that don’t.
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In our NT lesson Paul is dealing with Christians who don’t rely on God’s spirit for guidance, Christians who pray in such an ineffective manner that there is no life-giving interface with God’s spirit. Paul uses the word unspiritual to describe such misguided prayer, unspiritual in the sense that, in reality, we are relying on no more than self. I like the way the Access Bible commentary puts it. It says that when we’re unspiritual we’re like two-dimensional stick-figure people living in a three-dimensional world. We leave out the guidance of God’s spirit, to which we have access. Or put another way, we have access to the mind of Christ, but we don’t go there.

Let me give you an example of an unspiritual person, Jacob in our OT lesson. Later he will change, but at the time he acts as though he is a self-centered two-dimensional stick figure. To say that Jacob cannot see any further than his own interests is an understatement. He has taken his brother Esau’s birthright. He has also deceived his blind father, Isaac, into giving him the blessing meant for Esau, and is now on his way to stay with relatives in Mesopotamia because Esau wants to kill him. Why God doesn’t just drop a ladder on Jacob, instead of using it to come down from heaven in a dream, we really don’t know. Or maybe engage him in a pillow fight.

God must see something in the boy, for he says to him, “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your grandfather and of Isaac your dad; the land on which you sleep I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west, east, north, and south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. Know I am with you and will keep you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”

Jacob is impressed, at least as much as a two-dimensional person can be in a three dimensional life. When he awakes he says, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it!” Such a statement implies that Jacob hasn’t much experienced God’s presence in the past. He’s been pretty sure that the Lord is anywhere but at work in his own life. He also expects less of God than God just promised him. God is talking about giving Jacob a land and offspring as numerous as the dust of the earth, and all Jacob can say is, “If God will be with me, and will keep me safe and give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God.”

Do you hear the personal pronouns in Jacob’s response? Me, me, I, me, I, and then my, my. For Jacob it’s not the “Wow!” of the divine world-shaping influence that God is going to give to him and his descendants, it’s the narrow scope of that which meets Jacob’s needs: “If you give me food, clothing, and safety then we’re tight.” The difference between the unspiritual person and the spiritual person has to do with self and connectedness. The unspiritual person has a hard time seeing beyond self, whereas the spiritual person locates herself within the overall work and purpose of God. The spiritual person knows himself to be connected to God and all others; the natural, unspiritual person has a hard time seeing this connection or dimension.

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How then should we pray? How do we pray in a spiritual way so that we’re connected to God and all others. There’s a movie titled, Yours, Mine, and Ours, which illustrates this in a fun way. In Yours, Mine, and Ours a fellow goes to his class reunion, which is being held on a gigantic yacht, only to face the same problem he always faces. Even though he’s as handsome as a movie star, Dennis Quaid, women run away as soon as they find out that he is a widower with eight children, most adopted. He sees an old flame, and since she is as glamorous as a movie star too, Rene Russo, he’d like to take up with her again. But right off the bat she asks him how many children he has. And what can he do but put his cards on the table? Eight. And if she had two kids, one, or none that might have been the end of their renewed acquaintance; but, lo and behold, not only are they on the same boat, they’re in the same boat – she’s a widow with ten! That’s eighteen between them, two baseball teams, enough to live happily ever after at Busch Stadium! Because they share this information, they know that maybe a future together is possible.

Putting the issue on the table is also how we’re to pray, how we allow God’s spirit to lead us fully rather than partially. By putting our concerns on the table with God, issue after issue, we place our life in the context of God’s will and purpose. Lay it out and get God’s input, let God’s spirit lead you further into a concern or away from a concern. If we don’t know to what projects God says “No”, we’re wasting our time. And if we don’t know to what undertakings God says, “Yes”, we may not be giving it our best. If we don’t bring up our problems, plans, and dreams with God; if we don’t check them out with God but keep them to ourselves, then we’re looking no further than self, the natural person. The guidance of God’s spirit is left out.

In his book The Practice of Private Prayer, Douglas Steere invites us to gather all the concerns and issues about which we want to know, “Is this God’s will for my life? Or is this what God would have from me?” And the list of such concerns and issues is almost unending. People want to know which vocation they should take up, if they should marry this person or not, what they should do about a certain problem. People want to know if they should endure a stressful situation or take a powder, if they should oppose what they don’t feel comfortable with or go along with the crowd, if they should take this branch in the road or that one. We have lots of concerns. Yet, if we affirm that God created all that exists, and that God grants us guidance regarding how to live responsibly within creation; then there is no plan or dream that we cannot take to God in an attempt to see if God will advance it or not; no dilemma or problem or question we cannot take to God in an attempt to find out if what we’re doing is the right thing or not.

And Steele reminds us that laying such issues on the table is not a question of our adding to God’s understanding of our needs, nor is it a question of changing God’s mind by our request. It’s a matter of being in touched by God’s spirit, hearing God’s word. Have you ever noticed what Jesus says in Matthew 6? He says, “When you are praying, do not be long winded like the Gentiles; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father already knows what you need before you ask.” I.e., don’t drone on and on in an attempt to give God info that God doesn’t have, or in an attempt to persuade God that you know best. “Your Father knows what you need before you ask.” Listen don’t gab. God’s knowledge of the issue is not the problem. The problem is that we don’t always know what we need, nor do we know God’s will regarding a matter. Thus prayer is a time to enter the presence of God, a time of being open to God’s purpose, a time of finding and relying on the guidance of God’s spirit, and then emerging with God’s yes or no.

Again, no issue or concern is off the table. What we so often request of God is a desire or an aspiration that has become a part of us. If this desire cannot be, we need to know it before it grows and becomes a wasteful distraction from God’s purpose for our lives. But, on the other hand, we also need to know if this desire is part and parcel of God’s will for our lives. God’s support is a powerful motivator as we pursue a desire. We know that God is working alongside us to this end. The Bible tells us that we are the friends of God. Thus, laying our issues on the table with God is like bringing up our concerns with a friend. What should I do? Is this a good idea or not? Will you help me or not?

The problem then becomes, of course, how do we know when God has spoken and what God has said? How do we know when God’s spirit has touched us? Douglas Steere says about prayer, “I may beg with all my might for some outcome, and after an hour, arise convinced that it is not to be, or that it must be in another form, or that I must wait, or that I must take a costly step in order for it to come about.” How he comes to such certainty, I’m not sure. I know people who say about God’s will, “I knew that I needed to go another way because God put an obstacle in my path.” On the other hand, I know people who say about God’s will, “I knew this was the way to go because the Devil kept putting obstacles in my way that God helped me overcome.” Which is it? I don’t know. Discerning the guidance of God’s spirit is not an exact science; but I do know that by talking it through with God, over and over, eventually we arrive at the guidance of God’s spirit. Jesus even promises success.

In John 15 Jesus says, “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.” Many people tend to ignore this teaching because they asked and did not receive. But did they abide in Jesus? Did they talk it over until they had confidence that they heard God’s answer? Abiding in Jesus means taking our issues and concerns to God in an attempt to find God’s will. Abiding in Jesus is not just hauling off and doing it our way. It’s praying, “Do my plans fit in with your plans? If not, show me what changes I need to make. I want to be guided by Your spirit.” Amen

WITNESSES OR WARRIORS (Sermon Text July 3, 2011)

2011-07-03T19:11:00.000-07:00

Daniel 1:8-21, Acts 1: 6-14, GPC, 7/3/11, D. Johnson

On this 4th of July weekend, let’s think about the task of living by the Christian faith in a country in which we have the freedom to live out many different beliefs. Things have changed over the years, haven’t they? For ex., the main character of the book I wrote in 2005, Summer of Champions is an eleven-year old boy named Joe Don. The year is 1956. The people on his dad’s side are Nazarenes, and on his mom’s side Baptists, among whom there is a sort of family theological truce. But one of his friends is Catholic, a fact he has to conceal from his grandparents. They’ve never known any Catholics, personally, and suspect that nothing but mischief is going on at the Knights of Columbus Hall.

A girl who likes Joe Don and invites him to a dance is Episcopalian. These are the rich Christians who hold bake sales to benefit church members whose vacation homes burn down. When they serve communion they use a wine list. And Joe Don’s best friend is Presbyterian. Unlike Baptists, Presbyterians can drink and dance; they just can’t enjoy either one. They are a rather glum group.

Those of you who have been around for awhile know how things used to be. Back in simpler times, Christians were oftentimes distrustful of each other. And do you think nowadays that things are any better? I think that for many American Christians the barriers that once caused us to be suspicious of other denominations have crumbled a bit. This doesn’t mean that we agree with their beliefs or practices. And it doesn’t mean that we’d join just any denomination. But it does mean that in spite of our differences, over the years we have found that “other Christians” can be really good neighbors. And hopefully, they feel the same way about us.

But we have learned this just in time to deal with newcomers to the block. If kids in the 50s were learning how to relate to other Christians and an occasional Jew, today we’re learning how to relate to people of entirely different religions – Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and people of no religion at all. I was talking with Tom Clifton the other night about how often God is totally left out of public life any more, how secular or even atheistic life is now. We Christians talk about how many non-Christians there are, especially Muslims, but may overlook how many folks profess no religion at all. In any event, fundamental to our learning how to relate to non-Christians is our NT lesson, for it begins with the apostles asking the risen Jesus, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” And what do they mean, “restore the kingdom to Israel”?

The disciples are asking Jesus when is Israel going to be free, out from under Rome’s thumb, independent, self-governing. But there’s more to it than that. The question is also: when is our God going to be recognized as the true God by the people of this world? The disciples look forward to the time described in Isaiah, “In the days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains… all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, ‘Let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and we may walk in his paths.’”
What the disciples are looking for is that time when Jesus’ understanding of God will be recognized by all as the true understanding of God. Jesus answers them, of course, that it is not for us to know when such a widespread understanding will take place. “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you (i.e, the Day of Pentecost), and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Notice that Jesus says witnesses instead of warriors, which is also a word that a person in his position could have used. If one approaches relationships between the world’s religions as a war of ideology, then maybe one would sign on to be a warrior, cram one’s understanding of God down other people’s throats. But that’s not Jesus, the Prince of Peace. Our job as his followers is to bear witness to God’s ways, and let other people make up their minds as to the truth of our message and lifestyle.

And I think that Daniel and his three friends in our OT lesson illustrate well how one serves as a witness. Captive in Babylon following the fall of Jerusalem, for the first time in their lives they live among people who have a different understanding of God. There are many gods and religions in Babylonia, the main god being Marduk. And Daniel and his friends are going to cooperate and be contributing members of Babylon’s pluralistic society – King Nebuchadnezzar gives them this chance - but they’re not going to abandon their faith in the Lord. And foundational to their faith is what they eat and drink. Like other Jews, their faith includes dietary practices different from those of Babylonians.

They tell the palace master, who can be executed for giving them food other than what the king orders, “Test us for ten days. See if our way isn’t better than the king’s,” which is fundamental to witnessing. Test my understanding and see if I’m not right. Test my ways and see if they don’t work. Test the truth of what I’m telling you. He did, and at the end of ten days they looked better than the other young men. And not just regarding their appearance. “In every matter of wisdom and understanding which the king inquired of them, he found them ten times better than all others in his kingdom.”

When Jesus orders us to be his witnesses, he’s telling us to live by his ways, not those of the world, set his example, vote and work for what’s right according to his values, and explain his message when we have the opportunity. Serving as Christ’s witnesses is something that, by God’s grace, we need to do better. For by so doing, others will be able to determine for themselves the truth of the Christian message. The truth is strong enough to take care of itself. It may take awhile, even a long while, but do we or do we not believe that the truth will ultimately prevail?
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Jesus tells us to be his witnesses, which was how Francis of Assissi chose to live. In 1095 a.d., Pope Urban II promised that Christians, who abandoned their wars against other Christians and instead went to fight the Muslims who occupied Jerusalem, would have their sins forgiven. Muslims had conquered half of Christendom at that time and had their sights set on Europe. Urban felt that Christendom was under attack, and he had to do something in response. Thus, the crusades.

Francis of Assisi got caught up in the fervor of the crusades and went to the Holy Land, where he witnessed a terrible defeat of Christian forces at the hands of the Muslims. This blood shedding, along with his disgust at how some of the crusaders behaved, helped him reflect on Jesus’ identity as the Prince of Peace. What was needed was peace, not war; and so Francis went to the Sultan of Egypt. He had no idea how bloodthirsty this guy was going to be, but Francis was willing to be executed in the effort to promote peace. And was Francis surprised! The sultan was gracious, learned, religious, and wanted peace himself. Instead of killing Francis, the sultan allowed him to witness to the message of Jesus Christ by preaching to him. Now, the sultan didn’t buy in to the gospel, but he did get to know about the real Jesus Christ through Francis’ witness.

Several years ago at a NCD conference I was sitting at a lunch table when a fellow sat down across from me who looked like he had been through the wringer. He was able to speak enough English for me to understand that he had recently been the pastor of a church in Egypt. Being Christian had gotten him in conflict with the government, and he had to flee. Had they caught him he would have been imprisoned. His story plus other stories I have heard make me feel fortunate that I’m not a Christian trying to live my faith in certain Muslim governed countries. But that’s not the issue before us today.

The issue on this July 4th weekend is how we live out our Christian faith in this country. Things in the U.S. have changed incredibly over the past decades, and lots of people are fighting mad about it. And anger is understandable. We have lost a way of life we loved and who knows how things are going to turn out. But one foundational thing has not changed. Jesus teaches us that our job is to be his witnesses in this place and at this time. How we live our faith is no less important than how Daniel lived his, for it is through our words and behavior that the truth of Jesus Christ becomes evident to others, no matter how things have changed.

We now live in a country that has more than 2100 religious groups, each of which thinks that what they believe is true. Furthermore, we belong to a denomination that has just changed the standards as to who can be an elder, deacon, and pastor – and both sides, those for this change and those against it, think that their side is right. Whatever one does in this contentious day and age, one should constantly take the opportunity to bear witness to what one thinks is the truth of Jesus Christ.

Last week I wrote an article in the Pastor’s Column having to do with “ethical wills.” Ethical wills have been around at least since the 1970s, but they began to gain traction after 9-11. And what is an ethical will? It is a statement of experiences and values that one hands down to the next generation or generations. It’s a summary of how you are allegedly living your life now. It is how one witnesses to what one thinks is important, the beneficiary of these insights being one’s family and friends. And this ethical will can be as important as passing on property and wealth.

For ex., a hospice patient felt he had nothing to pass on to his family because he had lost all his money, but a chaplain helped him write an ethical will. Suddenly he saw that his life and legacy had meaning. Why? Many people, as they approach death, regardless of finances, see lifestyles and attitudes nowadays that are much different from their own. New controversies and new situations have arisen. And it’s not like they want to dictate from the grave, but they do want to make their witness to what they think is right, which is oftentimes hard to do in the course of daily life because people are so busy.
Some of this material people
will already know, hopefully, but in an ethical will you bear witness to what is important about your family history, including your family’s involvement in the Christian faith. You can explain the Christian principles that you have employed in living your life. You can list the ways of the world that you find offensive. You can ask for forgiveness or give forgiveness if needs be. You can explain certain decisions about your estate, such as it being important to you to donate a portion to the church or to some cause. You can state how you have specifically applied Christ’s example to education, workplace, marriage, parenting, voting, etc.

Witnessing on behalf of Jesus Christ is important. So let’s start living now in such a way that whether we write an ethical will or not, people know what we stand for. Amen

THE CREDENTIAL OF THE FAITH (Sermon Text June 26, 2011)

2011-06-26T15:50:00.000-07:00

Judges 6: 36-40, Romans 6: 1-12, GPC, 6/26/11, D. Johnson

A lady was telling me about her granddaughter. Her granddaughter was four years old, and when she began pre-school would not talk to anyone. For months she was shy, afraid, kept to herself; but then one day came out of her shell. Now she talks to people, so much so they wish she’d shut up, and situations that used to cause her to cry she takes in stride.

At the other end of the age spectrum, I once knew a lady whose husband of 55 years died. We were all worried about Emily because she was so dependent on him. Roy had been like so many men of his generation. He had taken care of the car, yard, and the bills. He held a job, Emily never had one. Several of us were worried that she wouldn’t be able to function on her own. And were we wrong! Emily turned out to be a truly capable person. There wasn’t much anything she couldn’t learn to do on her own. She blossomed at about age 75.

And how about these people we call teenagers? Whereas it took the granddaughter several months in pre-school to come out of her shell, and whereas Emily blossomed at age 75: teenagers can turn on a dime. One day they’re moping around, eyes on their shoes, can’t find anything to be excited about, can’t figure out how they fit in; but then all of a sudden the light bulb comes on and their life begins to make sense. They begin to feel good about themselves, see some possibilities for their lives.

Our concern today is that no matter what our age or situation, no matter what is holding us back, we have a credential, baptism, that says we can blossom. Instead of retreating into our shell, our baptism reminds us that by God’s grace we can overcome self-limiting ways of thinking.

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God is at work in our OT lesson to help Gideon blossom. And if Gideon can come out of his shell, anyone can. He lives in Israel’s bread basket, the Jezreel Valley. Take away the Jezreel Valley and Israel’s agriculture productivity is severely damaged. In Gideon’s day, harvest time was something to look forward to, but Midianites, a nomadic tribe that seems to have moved all over the place in the Bible, started coming in and taking the produce for themselves. They couldn’t be stopped. Why? The Midianites were the beneficiary of the latest wave of technology in the Middle East, and that was the camel. The Midianites were the first we know to domesticate the camel and use camels in warfare – a camel caravan - which made them hard to defeat. Judges 6 says, “Neither they nor their camels could be counted; so they wasted the land as they came in. Israel was greatly impoverished because of Midian; and the Israelites cried out to the Lord for help.”

God hears the Israelites. God answers by sending an angel to Gideon. The angel says, “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior…Go in this might of yours and deliver Israel from the hand of Midian: I hereby commission you.” God commissions Gideon to save his people, and Gideon, mighty warrior that he is, valiantly responds, “Oh no, not me! My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I’m the wimpiest of my family. No one even chose me for their team at recess. You’ve got it all wrong. You need someone else.”

Have you ever been in a similar situation? Felt that God might be calling you to do something important, but can’t see how you possibly can? You’re just a four-year old. You can’t play with these other kids in pre-school. Or you’re elderly, set in your ways. No way you can change and make a new life. Or you’re Patricia Raybon, who wrote the book, My First White Friend.

Patricia Raybon was a good student. As a teenager she loved her school, a mostly black school. But then her dad moved them to the suburbs, and she had to go to a 99.9% white school. And there were racial incidents on the bus and in the cafeteria and in the counselor’s office that would bother any of us were we in her shoes. But I read her book, My First White Friend. By her own admission, Patricia dealt with racism less graciously than did others. She was very sensitive, sometimes blew things way out of proportion, and got to the point where she just hated white people. And she knew that she needed to do something about it because the hatred was eating her up, but what?

Patricia thought about all she’d been through and started writing a book. She thought she was writing it to make peace with white people, but no, that wasn’t it. She was writing a book to make peace with Patricia and re-create Patricia’s relationship to God, to which Paul in our NT lesson says, “Amen!” Re-creating our relationship to Jesus Christ, especially after we’ve allowed this relationship to deteriorate, is how we are able to come out of our shell when we’ve retreated, how the light bulb comes on in the midst of our confusion, and how we’re able to blossom rather than wither on the vine. Re-creating a neglected relationship to Jesus Christ is how we’re able to do what we think we can’t, but what our baptism says we can.

Listen to what Paul says. “How can we who died to sin go on living in it?” i.e., How can we who have died to sin go around with the attitude that we can’t love others, can’t stand up for what’s fair, can’t make the right choice, can’t do the moral thing, can’t overcome harmful habits, can’t get out of our rut, can’t rise to the occasion, can’t turn things around, can’t endure discomfort, can’t take a risk, can’t get up when we fall down, can’t make a sacrifice, can’t, can’t, can’t, can’t, can’t? “Do you not know,” Paul says, “that all of us who have been baptized in Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” The word “can’t” as it applies to the life Jesus makes possible, was nailed to the cross. The word “can’t” was in the tomb for three days, and then it rose as the word “can”. “We have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”

We need to examine ourselves every so often and determine if we’re actually living this new life. And if we’ve allowed our life to turn into no life worthy of our baptism, it’s time to re-create or put back together our relationship with Jesus.

If you were baptized as an adult, you had to make a profession of your faith at the time. Or if you were baptized as an infant, you had to make a profession of your faith when you grew up, say, at the time of a confirmation class. And that profession of faith goes something like this. “I believe in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior,” Lord being the one to whom you owe ultimate allegiance, Savior being the one who will save you from all the afflictions of the human spirit, including the tendency to say “I can’t” rather than “I can.” Furthermore, “I intend to be Jesus’ disciple, to obey his word, and to show his love. I will be a faithful member of this congregation, giving of myself in every way, and will seek the fellowship of the church wherever I may be.”

In baptism we profess our life-long intent, and then we’re marked by water, the invisible sign of the invisible God, as belonging to Jesus. And wherever you go, this invisible mark or credential stays with you, reminding you of who you are, unlike certain other credentials. And we do have other credentials. Years ago I worked for American National Life Insurance Co., at their home office in Galveston, TX. This was a really long time ago. Nothing much at American National was computerized back then, but the company wanted to automate all company transactions, and so I was assigned with a number of other computer programmers to work with IBM on this special automation project. In fact, the IBM team who programmed the first moon shot was hired to launch life insurance policies.

Every day we had to drive from Galveston to Webster, TX, to the IBM building on NASA Blvd. 1. And we soon realized that IBM employees lived in a different world than did we. For one thing, they knew how to show an ID badge to get in the building. We had no experience with ID badges, and many of us could not adapt to this procedure. Maybe two out of five days I’d remember my badge, but no more than that. And the guys I car-pooled with were even worse. The most responsible guy in the car was a fellow named Sluggo. We didn’t ask each other when we left Galveston if we had our badges, we just got in the car and went to sleep, hopefully not if we were driving that day. It was only when we walked into the lobby of the IBM building and the guard glared at us that we realized we had forgotten our credentials. And so he’d have to call a supervisor to come identify us. The guards did not like us. If IBM stood for “I’ve Been Moved”, which IBM personnel constantly were back in those days; they called us IAMs, “I’m A Mess,” can’t remember my credentials.

Working at the IBM building on NASA Blvd. 1 was the last job I had before going to seminary. I came to the realization that wearing that particular ID badge was not who I was. More important for me, in essence, was my baptism and where that credential was leading me, what that credential demanded of me. Every so often all of us need to think about our baptism and what it requires of us. It says, “I believe in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior,” Lord being the one to whom we owe ultimate allegiance, Savior being the one who will save us from all the afflictions of the human spirit, including the tendency to say “I can’t” rather than “I can.” Furthermore, “I intend to be Jesus’ disciple, to obey his word, and to show his love. I will be a faithful member of this congregation, giving of myself in every way, and will seek the fellowship of the church wherever I may be.” This is who I am.
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Many of us have known the OT story of Gideon’s fleece ever since we were children, but maybe did not place it in the proper context. There’s nothing admirable about the fleece. The fleece is Gideon not believing what the angel told him. The fleece is Gideon hanging on to the words, “I can’t possibly do that.” Gideon saying to God, “Prove it to me once again that I’m the one. Last time it was wet, this time let it be dry. Time after next, half wet, half dry.”

Of course, we don’t get a fleece when we think we can’t. What we have is our baptism, a mark on us that was once wet, now dry. It is our fundamental credential, the badge that IDs us as people who, by the grace of Jesus Christ, can. We can love others rather than ignore them; hope for God’s goodness rather than hang our heads in despair; stand up for what’s fair rather than walk away; make the right choice as opposed to the easy choice; do the moral thing as opposed to immoral; overcome harmful habits; get out of our ruts; rise to the occasion; turn things around; endure discomfort; take a risk; make a sacrifice; get up when we fall down. We can do all things through Jesus Christ who strengthens us. “Do you not know,” says Paul, “that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life,” a newness that involves the word “can” rather than “can’t.” Amen

WHEN JESUS CALLS US TO CLIMB HIGHER (Sermon Text June 19, 2011)

2011-06-19T18:28:00.001-07:00

2 Kings 5: 8-14, Luke 10: 1-12, GPC, 6/19/11, D. Johnson

On the back of your bulletin is an ad that in the 1950s and 60s would appear on the back cover of comic books. “Throw Your Voice” was often advertised, along with ads for spud guns, sea monkeys, and tiny dogs that fit in a coffee cup. A bunch of us kids, all cousins, one afternoon were gathered at Grandmother Johnson’s house. We had a comic book with this ad on the back, and one of us older cousins said, “Wouldn’t it be fun to be able to throw your voice like that kid and pull jokes on adults like the man carrying the trunk.” And it was the wrong thing to say.

One of our younger cousins had to correct us by pointing out that the device this ad was selling, a swazzle, did not work for ventriloquism. It was merely a whistle you could hide in your mouth and do things like drive teachers nuts in class. And then, secondly, he told us that a ventriloquist cannot throw his/her voice past another person’s ear. There’s no way the boy can throw his voice past the man’s ear into the trunk. But the man could be pulling a joke on the boy by throwing his voice into the trunk. We older cousins normally would not have paid any attention to a younger cousin, but this was Jay and he knew about such things. He was already a pretty good ventriloquist. And then to show us what he meant, he threw his voice so that it came from behind him. It was an amazing thing! In school, he could also throw his voice out in the hall and say to the teacher, “Mrs. Burton, would you please come out here.” But no one could throw his/her voice behind the teacher’s ear.

At an early age my cousin Jay Johnson knew what God had created him to do. He was an entertainer, primarily a ventriloquist, which has always seemed like a lot of fun to me. But here’s the deal: no less than God bestowed gifts on my cousin, our concern today is that God has gifted each of us and expects us to use these diverse gifts as we follow Jesus. And sure, from the human point of view, ventriloquists, contortionists, chess masters, major league baseball players, movie directors, and race car drivers do fun things that most of us can only dream about. But from God’s point of view, we also have interesting gifts, gifts that make this world and our live work. God doesn’t give boring gifts. And if we take seriously God’s gifts and God’s expectations, we have the basis for a meaningful, purposeful life. Whereas if we ignore God’s gifts and expectations, we become like so many others for whom life has become meaningless.
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Our goal at GPC is to be the best followers of Jesus that we can, and in our NT lesson we come across a group of Jesus’ followers about which little is known. Jesus, of course, had three groups of followers. One we talk about all the time, the Twelve disciples. The Twelve were with him day and night for three years. They witnessed what he did and were the original beneficiaries of all he taught. On the other hand, there was a second group the Bible calls “the crowd,” people who by and large didn’t get it. At times Jesus was besieged by crowds of people, hundreds even thousands of people, as was the case along the shore of Lake Galilee when Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount. But many of these people came out to see miracles or hear only what they wanted to hear. They had their own agendas. Jesus eventually disappointed many of them and they left, which is still the case today. If Jesus doesn’t do what some people expect him to do, they quit.

The third group of disciples were men and women and children who could not be with Jesus all the time as were the Twelve. From Jesus’ point of view, there simply wasn’t room around the campfire. Twelve were as many as he could live with at such an intimate level. And from the view of this third bunch of disciples, they couldn’t leave their families and work and be with Jesus constantly. Still, they didn’t fall away. They were drawn to him and his message, and so at times they would gather to hear his teachings and witness his healings and be of whatever service to him they could.

And it’s this third bunch that Jesus sends off on a mission trip, some 70 of them. Our NT lesson says, “After this the Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go.” And where Jesus intends to go eventually is Jerusalem. From Luke 9:51 on, Jesus is ascending. Jerusalem is hilly, elevation 3200 feet. Jesus will take the road to Jerusalem from Jericho, which is 900 ft. below sea level. So Jesus is ascending 4100 feet to Jerusalem, where he ascends to the cross, then ascends from the tomb, and then ascends into the heavens.

What we have in our NT lesson is a group of disciples called to ascend, ascend to a higher level of using the gifts God has given them. Such a climb requires willpower and stamina. Indeed, if we’re going to give Jesus our best, rock climbers say we have to climb to fallure not failure. There’s a big difference. And some of our teenagers may know what fallure means because they’ve been to a climbing gym. Rock climbers most often are attached to a safety rope, either on the climbing wall of a gym or on the face of a rock cliff. And so the distinction between fallure and failure is this. As you struggle to keep going upward, you have to use every single mental, physical, and spiritual resource you have. It’s tough. With failure you reach a point of giving up and letting go. You think to yourself, “I can’t do this any longer,” and quit. But with fallure, you fall while taking the next step up. You slip or your strength gives out, but you don’t quit. In either case the safety rope saves you from harm.

Jesus expects us to climb to fallure of effort, not failure of nerve. He says so, in effect, in our Luke lesson: “Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, great. Eat what is set before you, cure the sick, and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near.’ But whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome you, (well, don’t just quit and go home. And don’t just walk away.) Say, ‘Even the dust of your street, we wipe off our feet in protest against you. Yet know this: the kingdom of God has come near.’”

Jesus is clear. Not everyone will welcome The Seventy. So be it, but give each town the chance to say yea or nay. Don’t just assume a town will reject you. Don’t give up because they reject you. And if they reject you, make sure they know who they’ve rejected. The difference between fallure and failure is a matter of willpower. It’s a matter of trying or not trying. It’s the determination to do as much as one can. The singer Bono put it well a few years back while receiving an honorary degree from U Penn. He spoke about several concerns, including the famines and epidemics taking a toll on Africa. And about our response to the 7,000 Africans dying every day of preventable diseases caused by poverty, he said, “We have the know how. We have the cash. We have the life-saving drugs. But do we have the will?” The will to try to save them as opposed to not try.

How about Naaman in our OT lesson? He has traveled all the way from Syria to see the prophet, Elisha, who allegedly has great healing powers. And he’s waiting in the examining room for Dr. Elisha to come in, psyching himself up for an MRI, surgery, radiation, and chemo; when in walks a nurse who simply tells him to go jump in the lake. Well, if this is how Elisha does things, Naaman is going home! Fortunately his servants talk him into taking that last step upward to healing, and what a waste had he not, but his will to do so was shaky. Left to his own he would have failed. We can’t be like that. If we’re going to become the people God created us to be, use our gifts fully, we have to serve Jesus to fallure of effort not failure of nerve.

The second thing that rock climbers have to teach us about becoming the best we can be in Jesus’ service has to do with those imes when they’re not hooked up to a safety rope. And this is to separate the consequence from the probability, i.e., separate the consequences of a fall, which can be deadly, from the probability of falling, which can be quite low for a skilled climber. For ex., a young climber named David Breashears once set out to climb an unclimbed sheet of rock that rose vertically for about five stories, and then angled backward. And don’t you have it when rock does that? He had no safety rope on this climb, so about 50 feet up he had a horrifying thought. The climb ahead, angling backward, would be more difficult than the initial ascent. If he fell, he would plummet 60 feet down into a pile of boulders and surely be killed.

Such would not be an acceptable risk for most of us, but for David Breashears this was not that risky a situation. Yes, the consequence of a fall was certain death, but the probability of a fall for him was next to zero. He was such a gifted climber that making it to the top was simply a challenge, a matter of solving a puzzle. And he did so.

The 70 followers of Jesus also face danger as they embark on their mission trip. Jesus says, “I am sending you out like lambs in the midst of wolves.” And yes, I suppose there is a chance they might be killed by opposition on their mission, but it’s rather small. Not enough to deter one from going. The more likely consequence is rejection, including being roughed up, which is certainly discouraging, but not deadly.

To serve God to the best of the abilities God has given us we have to separate consequence from probability and keep climbing. The great opera singer Pavarotti believed that the worst thing that could have ever been said about him was, “What a wonderful voice he had! Too bad he didn’t do anything with it.”
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Re. the picture on our bulletin cover, back in the 1940s some Bedouin boys were standing at the base of that mountain by the Dead Sea throwing rocks. And do you see the dark cave entrance that is just to the left of the very middle of the picture? They were trying to throw a rock into that cave, and one of them did. But instead of the rock landing without a sound, they heard the unmistakable sound of pottery breaking. With that they ran home, told their parents, and the word got around that there’s something stored inside a cave by the Dead Sea.

An adventurer heard this story and came to investigate. No way, though, could he climb up to the cave or climb down to the cave. And so he said to the boy he had hired to show him which cave it was, “Here, let’s tie this rope around your waist, and I’ll drop you down the cliff. You swing into the cave and tell me what’s there.” The boy refused. It was too dangerous, but after the man upped the money, the boy said, “I’ll do it if my father can hold the rope.” And, thus, the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered.

Most rock climbing is done with a safety rope. If we’re going to climb to fallure just as rock climbers climb to fallure, and make the most of God’s gifts, remember that God’s holding the rope. Amen

BEING IN THE PRESENT TENSE (Sermon Text June 12, 2011)

2011-06-12T17:50:00.000-07:00

Exodus 16: 1-7, Matthew 6: 34, SPC, 5/15/05, D. Johnson

A fellow by the name of Mortland was arrested awhile back for a string of eight robberies in Minnesota. No one will remember his actual name, though, because he received such a great nickname during his crime spree. They called him “The Rolaids Robber.” It seems that while he was robbing store clerks he would ask them to hand him a pack of antacid tablets. They would ask him why, and he’d say that the stress of the robbery was getting to him.

I’m sure that we can think of at least one way in which this fellow is not much of a role model, namely, what he’s doing is illegal; but let me point out one way in which he is. The fellow lived in the present tense. When he was committing a robbery, he was into it. His stomach told him so. The present moment commanded his complete attention, unlike how we so often approach the moment.

Listen to how we avoid the present tense by saying the words “If only.” This comes from Rev. Craig Barnes, pastor of Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh. He says, “I’m amazed at how often as a pastor you hear the same statements being made by people of all different generations. It starts out when you listen to the youth group. They’re saying things like, ‘If only I could get out of this house, go to college, everything would be great.’” But then you listen to college students. “‘If only I could get out of college, get a job, a dream job.’ Then they get those dream jobs, and they turn into nightmares. Next is, ‘If only I could find someone special and get married, then everything would be all right…If only we would have children, then everything would be great.’…Then before long it’s, ‘If only the kids would leave home, go away. Everything would be okay.’…Then, ‘If only they would come back and visit and bring the grandkids…If only we could retire.’ And then after retirement, ‘If only I had something important to do that wouldn’t take up a lot of time…’”

We think “if only right up to the nursing home, where (we) think, If only I’d done it differently. Some people are preoccupied with the future; others with the past, saying things like, ‘If only I had married someone else…If only I had made different career decision.’” Barnes says, “Sometimes pastors do that too. You get stuck around the midpoint of life, and pastors start saying, ‘If only I’d gone to law school instead.’” I find it interesting that the pastor of the “Shadyside” church would say, “If only I’d gone to law school instead.” Still, he’s right that if only is a problem. Anytime we’re in the if only mode, we’re either in the past or the future. We’re not in the present, which is the only moment in which manna or grace is found.

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In our OT lesson the Israelites are living in the past. “If only we’d stayed in Egypt, we’d have enough to eat. We had bread. We could fish in the Nile. But no, Moses! You brought us out into this barren moonscape where there are no fruit and berries to pick, no wildlife to hunt. We’re going to starve!” Two things are not true about this charge. First of all, it’s not Moses who has led them into the wilderness. Moses is but God’s instrument. God freed the people from slavery and is leading them to a land that he promised their ancestors. So when we start playing the if only game, let’s get it right. Is this the present tense that God has placed us in or not placed us in? Is this the schooling God has led us to, or the career God has prepared us for, or the place where God has led us to retire? Now, our answer may be yes or no. We all have the ability to choose, and sometimes we choose without listening for God’s guidance. If the situation you’re in is not one to which God has led you - and you’re sure of that as opposed to just not wanting to live up to your responsibilities or endure difficulty or solve problems or make things work out - well then, where does God want you to be? Go there.

But if the situation you’re in is where you’re supposed to be, as is the case with the Israelites in the Wilderness, the second thing they have wrong is that they think they’re going to starve, not going to make it. God says to Moses, “I’m going to rain bread (or manna) from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day.” They’re not going to starve, and let’s notice several things about how God gets them through the present moment.

First of all, if we were to translate the Hebrew word for bread or manna into English it would come out, “What is it?” We know all about “What is it?” don’t we? How many times have we sat down to a meal, looked at our plate, and said, “What is it?” But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad or won’t get the job done. My son Curran has a friend, Scot. A few years ago Scot changed careers. He decided he wanted to become a chef, and so he was constantly trying recipes both on the job and at his home. One night Cheri was on the phone with Curran who was on his way to a cookout at Scot’s house. And he knew the food was going to be really good, but he also knew that when he sat down at the table he’d have to ask, “What is it?” because he’d never had it before.

So often, “What is it?” is our problem with receiving God’s grace. We were expecting something else, something more familiar. We were expecting God to make our problem go away, or God to do something material to improve our situation, say rain money from heaven. So “What is it?” then that God has done. God has given us the spiritual strength to endure our situation, the spiritual strength to be faithful, make it through to a better day, which is the grace we’re enacting today in The Lord’s Supper. “What is it?” It’s Jesus table. He invites us to bring him our difficulties, worries, and pains, as well as our opportunities and joys. And when we partake of the elements of his presence with us, the cup and the bread, “What is it?” It’s the spiritual nurture to go on, Jesus with us, supporting us, guiding us, inspiring us, doing those things in our lives and world that keep us going. At times God does act in our lives to materially make things better. But daily what we can count on for sure is the strength to handle whatever comes our way.

And how much strength does God give us? Enough for the day, but not enough to last until tomorrow, next week, month, or year. The Lord said to Moses, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day.” The only exception to this was the day prior to the Sabbath. Because they were to do no work or gathering on the Sabbath, the day before they had to gather enough for two days; but during the rest of the week only enough for the present tense. Did they follow this instruction? No. Some of them gathered more than they needed, tried to hoard it for the future tense. But rather than meet their needs in the future it turned wormy, unfit for human consumption.

God provides what we need on a day-by-day basis. He does not give us strength for tomorrow today. He gives us tomorrow what we will need for tomorrow, just as Jesus says in our NT lesson. If Jesus says, “Do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today;” it’s because God provides manna day by day. God will provide the spiritual strength to deal with today’s troubles, but not the manna enough today for tomorrow also. When we worry now about what we’re going to be up against tomorrow or in the future tense, we’re doing so without strength yet to be delivered.

An English immigrant named Fred Harvey, who later established Harvey Houses throughout the Midwest and West, became an America citizen in 1858 and took over the Merchants’ Dining Saloon & Restaurant at 10 Chestnut Street, a location today directly beneath the St. Louis Gateway Arch. Fred ran the restaurant and had a partner, William Doyle, who ran the saloon. The Merchants’ was a 3-story building, one-half block from the docks. There were rooms upstairs that Fred rented to travelers, one of whom stayed there when he came off the river, a young fellow named Samuel Clemens.

Fred’s business prospered but effectively ended like much of normal life in St. Louis on May 10, 1861, the day of the St. Louis Massacre. Union leaders then took control of chaotic St. Louis as pro-secessionist Governor Jackson fled. Fred and his partner, William Doyle, got into a terrible argument – Fred, anti-slavery, Doyle pro-slavery. A day or so later Doyle disappeared taking every cent the two of them had amassed, $1300 ($32, 774) to join the secessionist army.

Come summer 1861, Fred Harvey had been in the land of opportunity for eight years. What did he have to show for it? He was a penniless 26 year-old with a wife and baby to support. We don’t know much about Fred’s devotional or prayer life. We don’t know how much he worried one day to the next, but we do know that Fred was Episcopalian, a man of the Christian faith. He had his faith to fall back on. We also know that one of the favorite regulars at his St. Louis restaurant, Capt. Rufus Ford, soon enough sat down with the unemployed Fred Harvey and told him about his newest venture. A railroad had been completed, connecting Hannibal on the eastern border of MO to St. Joseph on the western border. The Hannibal & St. Joseph RR, H&SJ, more often called the Horrible & Slow Jolting, had hired Capt. Ford to run packet boats on the untamed Missouri River, allowing people, goods, and mail to cross the river from St. Joseph into Kansas or continue upriver to Omaha. Capt. Ford needed Fred’s help keeping his packet boats, which had large dining rooms, running on time. And so Fred and his family moved to St. Jo.

God provides. God not only provided an unemployed Fred Harvey a job, but also the grace to keep going through a period of unemployment. But this grace was a day by day thing. God didn’t give Fred on May 10, the day of the St. Louis Massacre the strength to make it to September or whenever it was that Capt. Ford offered him a job. In order that he not worry himself sick or despise his life or find nothing in his life enjoyable, Fred would have had to accept this strength day by day, and with this strength, make it through the day.

I like our bulletin cover today. I think it is much better at times than the old saying, “Take time to smell the roses.” Nothing against roses – they can certainly enhance the day - but sometimes what I need more so than the pleasant smell of a rose is the strength to make it through the day. Thus, “Open wide for God’s manna,” is a better reminder at that point. And when we do open wide for God’s manna or grace, we’ll find that God helps us take the day’s troubles in stride. We sense God’s presence and make the most of the life God has given us. Amen