Encouragement

A sermon for Sunday, September 27, 2020, based on Psalm 78 and Philippians 2.

Would you pray with me? God who loves us more than we can ever know, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. By your spirit, make your presence known here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

Do you remember those WWJD bracelets that people used to have? Or maybe not the bracelets, maybe that wasn't the fad here, but do you remember the bumper stickers and bookmarks and posters? WWJD was a big thing in my formative years as a Christian. We were always told to ask ourselves, whenever we weren't sure what to do, what would Jesus do?

Because, as you all know, no matter how many Sundays we spend in church or how many bible studies we go to or how often we pray, there will always be something in this world that confuses us. There will always be some situation where we're not sure what to do or how to respond. We can be sure about many things as Christians: the unending love of God for us, the need we all have for forgiveness, the importance of the Bible, and the importance of loving our neighbors. But even though we know these things for sure, we're always being faced with new situations. Like those word problems in math class, we're always having to figure out how to apply what we know to be true.

Which is why I love our two passages this morning and I love the fact that the lectionary pairs them together. The psalmist asks God to listen to them and to witness how they are continuing to teach God's words and love to the generations. Paul, in Philippians, does much the same, but centered around Christ. The psalmist brings answers to old riddles. Paul brings Christ's example to answer the questions that the Philippians are living with. Across the centuries, we see God shedding light on our questions.

So what light does God have to shed on our lives today and how might we carry that knowledge with us into our weeks? Well, let's start by looking at the psalm.

I'm fascinated by the phrase, “riddles from days long gone” in the CEB translation of the psalm. It’s “dark sayings” in other translations, and when I put those two phrases together, I know exactly what it means, but I have such difficulty putting words to it. I think, though, that the rest of the psalm gives us the clue that we need to understand it. The psalmist is telling the story of all the things that God did for Israel when Israel came out of the land of Egypt and wandered in the wilderness before coming into the promised Land. I can imagine how mysterious God’s wonders must have seemed to those who came out of Egypt. Mysterious and powerful. Too much for us to fathom, too much for us to understand, in the same way that the night sky is full of riddles, dark and mysterious and wonderful and powerful. We will tell the generation how awesome God is, the psalmist is saying, awesome in that deep and powerful way that God is awesome.

And here's where the light comes in. Here's where the love comes in. This awesome God, who could choose to burn up the whole world in that fiery pillar, instead chooses to give freedom and abundant Life to all. God, this awesome God, who does not need to listen to the cries of the Israelites in Egypt or in the wilderness, instead chooses to hear them and lead them into freedom and provide for them abundant streams of flowing water. This awesome God, who could choose to start all over again on some other planets somewhere far away, chooses to hear us when we complain and when we grumble, because God knows that our complaints and our grumbling come out of needs deep within our hearts and souls. God knows us inside and out and God loves us completely and so God chooses to be generous with us, no matter what our situation, but especially in times of need.

This is the first answer to our questions that we can carry with us throughout this week. We are loved by an awesome God and so, no matter what the week ahead brings, we know that we will be provided for abundantly.

That's actually key to understanding what Paul tells us in Philippians. I think that this passage from Philippians, what's known as the Philippians hymn, could be another one of those riddles or dark sayings, if it weren't for the love and light of God. Let's turn to Philippians let's see what we have to learn here.

Paul asks us to have the same mind that Jesus had, which in itself seems to be a very mysterious saying, but Paul goes on to explain. The mind that Jesus had was a mind that put service first. Jesus, being with God and God from the beginning, could have, like God in the fiery pillar, chosen to come to Earth in the form of an emperor or a king, forcing us to do exactly as he says. But that's not what he does. In fact, Jesus does not want to do that. he does not consider equality with God something to be coveted. Jesus, who could have summoned all of the power in the universe to bend it to his own will, chose instead to become a servant. Not only a servant, but a servant who expects nothing in return for his work.

It is this selflessness, this selflessness that didn't fight back even on the cross, that makes Jesus worthy of elevating above all. Jesus was able to give everything he had, keeping nothing back, and through that giving, we have all been saved and set free. This is what Jesus did. This is what Jesus does. This is what God's love will always do.

Jesus's selflessness is possible only because of who we know God to be, who the psalmist attests that God is. We know that God has the ability and the willingness to give us whatever we need, to provide for us no matter what we're going through. We never have to worry that we will be abandoned. We never have to worry that we will be alone. We never have to worry that we won't have enough. If God can provide streams of flowing water in the desert, God can provide what we need. And when we trust that God will always be with us and will always give us what we need, then we can give without holding back. Then we can have the mind of Christ, who served others until the very end.

That's the other answer that will shed light on our lives this week. Because we are loved with the everlasting love of an awesome God, we can offer ourselves as servants of others without losing anything at all. Anytime the spirit moves us to say a kind word to someone else, to have a difficult conversation in order to repair a relationship, to offer an act of kindness to someone, to be there for someone going through their own time of difficulty and darkness, to reach out and listen to someone who has a story that needs to be told, or just to smile with our eyes above our masks as we go about our days, we know that we can do all of these things and more because we are held in the love of God who will never let us go. We can serve others in this world boldly, without fear, and without holding anything back. We can see the world as Jesus sees it: beautiful and precious and worth saving.

That's how we have the mind of Christ. That's what Paul means when he says for us to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. Paul means for us to ask ourselves, in every situation, what would Jesus do? How can I serve others in this situation, the way Jesus would?

The beautiful thing for each of you is that you already know the answers to those questions. You have spent your lives wrapped up in the love of God. You know how to trust God with all that you have and all that you are. And you know how to serve.

So be encouraged, friends. No matter what the world throws at you, no matter what the situation is, you know what Jesus would do and you know how to do it. You just got to keep on doing it.

Amen.

Manna

A sermon for Sunday, September 20th, based on Exodus 16:2-15 and Philippians 1:21-30.

Would you pray with me?

God, we are tired. God, we are worn. God, we are ready for your kingdom to be here and now. Be with us in this time and this place. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

After a long spring and an even longer summer, fall is almost here, and I couldn’t be more thankful. I’m so ready for this little bit of normal, this promised and faithful change in the weather, to come into this world that has been so abnormal for these past six months. COVID has tired me out and I’m ready for a break.

Our passage this morning is a gift from the lectionary, a break from our time with the teachings of Jesus. We’re taking this break because we need it, because even though Jesus does tell us to come unto him, for his burden is easy and his yoke is light, I, in my infinite wisdom, did not put that particular passage into this sermon series, and I feel that we need a brief spot of comfort today.

So this morning, we join the Israelites in the wilderness. They have come out of Egypt, through the freeing work of the Lord, crossed the Red Sea, and now they find themselves hungry and wandering, unsure of where to go next, two and a half months after leaving Egypt. They, too, are tired, exhausted, even, living in an uncertain present with an even more uncertain future. The people are at their breaking point, and so they say to Moses, in verse 3, “ If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”

“Sure,” the Israelites say, “Sure, we were enslaved in Egypt, and Pharaoh murdered our sons and kept us in captivity, but at least there was bread! At least there was soup with meat in it! What good is freedom if we’re just going to starve? Freedom doesn’t feed us.”

Now, we might look at them with pity, and maybe a little bit of sass. These are the people who God led out of Egypt! These are the people who saw the plagues, who lived through the first Passover, who walked through the Red Sea on dry land, who have been led by a pillar of cloud and fire. These people have seen God’s wonders, have experienced God’s saving grace firsthand, and only two and a half months later, they’re complaining because they don’t have enough meat in their diet? Have they forgotten who God is?

But let me tell you something. When you’ve spent every day of your life struggling to keep it, you don’t exactly have the space to notice when your hunger is clouding your judgement. When every moment is spent in survival mode, quiet moments of self-analysis are hard to come by. When you have spent generations longing for freedom, there is a necessary period of adjustment, because if the world around you was built on your oppression, it isn’t going to welcome your freedom. Freedom is the first, but not the only step, on the way to abundant life, and freedom does not feed us.

Praise be to God, though, that God hears our cries, even when our leaders, just as tired as we ourselves are, treat our complaints with contempt. Manna, a pure gift from God, bread enough for the Israelites to eat their fill, falls from the sky. They fled from Egypt without waiting for their bread to rise, doing what they had to do to escape into freedom, and as soon as they ask for it, the bread of the wilderness is given to them for their sojourn. And quail as well, a gracious gift of protein for bodies long overworked and under-cared for.

Friends, our bodies are overworked and they need care and my guess is that our spirits are much the same. We have lived in the struggle that the Apostle Paul speaks about. We have been striving to live our lives in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ, striving to live into our best understanding of the good news of our Lord Jesus. I can’t speak to the condition of your spirit, because that is something only you and God truly know, but speaking for myself, I find I am caught in the same conundrum as Paul. I am hard pressed between the two: my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better; but there is so much left to do here, in this place, that to remain is more necessary. How I long for the coming reign of God, when the good harvest is done and the rest can begin! How I long for the fullness of peace, the presence of justice and grace, to be here and now! How I long for the day when Jesus makes all things right!

And yet, I know, there is manna in the wilderness. Though we are weary, God will give us strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow. Though we are burdened, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Though there is still a long road ahead of us before we finally arrive in the promised land, a road that will require strength and dedication and creativity, we do not walk it alone. God hears us. God hears us. And God is always more ready to hear than we are to pray, more ready to give than we are prepared to receive. God is always with us, even in this season of tiredness, and more than that, God is ready and waiting to revive us. All we have to do is ask.

We’re tired, yes. Living is hard right now, yes, and for many, it’s been hard for a long, long time. But thanks be to God for the promise of a better life for all, for rest for our weary selves. Take the time to rest, because you need it. Always be ready to rest, because God calls us to it. Take the time to ask God to give you what you need for the days ahead, because God is ready to give it. But more than anything else, do all that you can to prepare yourselves for the road ahead. We’ve still got a ways to go.

Amen.

New Wineskins

A sermon for Sunday, September 13, 2020, based on Matthew 9:9-17.

Would you pray with me?

God our Healer, who is making all things new, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. By your Spirit, make your presence known here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

Have y’all ever picked out life verses, those verses of scripture that speak to you and have been with you all your life? It was a big thing when I was in high school and in college. I remember memorizing verses, writing them on index cards and taping them to my mirror, making collages out of them. And these verses, they were always something like Jeremiah 29:11: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future” or Philippians 4:13: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,” or Psalm 46:10: “Be still and know that I am God,” or Romans 12:2: “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.”

And you know, Jesus has something like life verses in the gospel of Matthew. I mean, we see him quoting from the Jewish scriptures during his temptation and during the Sermon on the Mount, but there’s only a few times that he quotes scripture as is, without offering a reinterpretation, without out saying, “You have heard it said, …but I say to you…” One of these few scriptures that Jesus quotes with full approval, one of his life verses, if you will, is the one we hear him quote in our passage this morning, Hosea 6:6: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” He actually quotes it twice in Matthew, both here and in Matthew 12. “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” is clearly important to Jesus.

Now, I know it’s not a competition, but oof. Jesus’ life verse really blows mine out of the water. I mean, Jeremiah 29:11 is nice and all, but it’s plucked out of the context of Jeremiah, a brief moment of light in the middle of the misery that Jeremiah and his people are going through, and it’s meant to apply to a nation, not to a person. Hosea 6:6, on the other hand, is a key verse in Hosea, a core part of the prophet’s teachings. Hosea, like most prophets, is preaching to Israel, asking them to turn back to God before destruction comes, because Israel has been putting its trust in foreign leaders and in going through the motions of faith, which has led to destruction and hurt felt most often by the vulnerable people in Israel. Hosea 6:6 gives us a vision of what the prophet and God long for. The full verse is, “For I desire steadfast love (which can also be translated as mercy) and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”

I mean, this is powerful stuff. This is world-changing stuff. Even though these are the words of a prophet who was centuries dead by the time of Jesus, these words are words of newness, of renewal and new life. People who have been trapped by the corruption of others, by the violence of others, can be set free, if only the people turned to true worship of God: mercy, steadfast love, and knowledge of God.

This verse is important to Jesus and he makes it a part of how he lives his life. Jesus’ life verse shaped him more than any of mine have shaped me. And maybe that’s because all the verses I memorized, and most of the Christianity I was taught growing up, were about me. The verses I was taught to hold up as important, the ones that I wrote over and over again, were about God’s plans for me, all the things that I can do, my actions, and my mind. I’ve spent so much of my life as a Christian engaging in some magical thinking, assuming that if I learned the right verses and was patient enough, God would give me the things I wanted, would open the perfect door for me to walk through on my way to my dream career, relationship, family, home. Honestly and truly, the verses that I held closest to my heart taught me things about my heart, but not much about anything else.

But not Jesus. No, Jesus’ life verse is something that opens his ministry up wide, something that transforms him, his followers, and his world. Remember, last week, we had seen Jesus travelling to the Decapolis and learning something new about the people around him: it doesn’t matter that he’s casting out demons and healing people. If he’s disrupting the status quo, he’s got to go. So he goes back to his home, and continues healing, but I think that verse from Hosea had been bouncing around in his head for a while, because instead of going to the Pharisees, going to the people in charge of maintaining the status quo, he calls Matthew. He asks a tax collector, someone who makes money off of charging people more than their fair share, to be his follower.

And Jesus keeps at it. He eats with tax collectors and sinners. He doesn’t follow the religious rules of the day. He causes a commotion by who he decides to associate with. Now, my friends, Jesus would cause a commotion in our world today too, because Jesus would not be here with us in this place. He would not be talking with upstanding citizens and people who we all look up to. He would be with the meth heads, with people living on welfare, with the unmarried mothers who have children by five different fathers, with the person who’s been sleeping in their car or a tent out in the woods. If Jesus were here in the flesh among us today, he’d have the same words for us that he has for the Pharisees, because remember, the Pharisees were good, religious people of Jesus’ day. And friends, when we lean on the verses that I learned to lean on in my youth, we will always be the good religious people that Jesus won’t have much to do with.

Because Jesus isn’t focused on the things we are so often focused on. Jesus’ life verse isn’t “plans to prosper you,” it’s “mercy, not sacrifice.” It’s not, “I can do all things,” it’s “love God with all you are and love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus is constantly focused on what is out there, because that’s who Jesus came to this world for: the rejected, the sinners, and not the included and the righteous. Jesus can see that what has been going on already, the people who have already been reached, the ones who are already comfortable, they don’t need his attention in the immediate way that others do.

And in that, Jesus is doing something new, and is calling us to something new as well, just as the prophet Hosea called his people to new action. And new is frightening, I know, and new is uncertain and new might not succeed the first time around. We have a whole Bible full of stories of the perpetual struggle God’s people have with newness. But Jesus knows that too, and so he reminds us: don’t put new wine into old wineskins, because that will burst the wineskin and spill the wine. Make a new wineskin for the new wine.

So what does that look like for us? How do we make new wineskins in the middle of a pandemic, in the middle of such a divided time in our country, in the middle of so much difficulty? Well, through Christ who strengthens us, of course, but I think that maybe y’all and me have something in common. We have taken to heart parts of the Bible that have kept us focused on ourselves. And so before we go about making a new ministry or finding new ways to reach out or training ourselves to do new things, maybe we need to rethink the verses that we hold close to our hearts.

What was it Jesus said at the end of the Sermon on the Mount? Something about building on the solid ground his teachings and acting on them? Jesus offers us solid ground to stand on right now, when so much in the world seems like shifting sand. We just need to learn to see the world as he sees it, “orphaned and broken and staggeringly beautiful, a thing to be held and put back right.” We can do that. I’m sure that we can. We just have to find the right verses, the ones that lead to new life.

Amen.