Travails of the Faith Pilgrimage
Hebrews 12:18-29; Jeremiah 1:4-10; Luke 13:10-17
Lanny Peters, a Baptist pastor from Georgia, tells the story about a class of youth exploring believer’s baptism. The class is similar to what Presbyterians and others do for confirmation. The class members were asked at the informal initial meeting to share their reasons for seeking to be baptized. Each of the members shared in their own way their desire to know God better, to be a disciple of Christ, and to be a member of the church.
One class member, Tim, said that he was looking forward to the experience because he had lots of questions. The first one, he said, was, “Why does God in the Bible act as if God had a split personality?” Sometimes God is really kind and loving and forgiving, but then God gets angry and wants to punish and even hurt people.(1)
Sometimes we get that impression of God when the scriptures are interpreted. The passage from Hebrews today is a case in point. The author talks about two very different mountain experiences with God: Mount Sinai and Mount Zion. The Israelites in Exodus were told not to touch the mountain, even to stone any animal that stepped on it. God was terrifying, someone you wouldn’t want to run into in broad daylight, let alone in a dark alley. Even Moses trembled in fear.
Then the Hebrews’ writer contrasts the fearsome encounter of Mount Sinai with a “party-hearty” festival on Mount Zion. There are all the heirs of the kingdom, the firstborn, the registry of all the folks whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life, to borrow an image from John of Patmos. All these folks have been made perfect. It’s like going to an Academy Awards after-party. God is there and so is Jesus, whose shed blood is a whole lot more beneficial than that of Abel, the first human being who died.
The Hebrews’ writer hasn’t gone all Wolfgang Puck. Just when we are ready to nosh, the tone changes. If you thought the God of Sinai was terrifying, pay attention to the God of Zion, because if you don’t, heaven as well as earth will be shook for all they’re worth. Worship God rightly, for God is a consuming fire.
We’ve heard “hellfire and brimstone” sermons and rants from preachers across the Christian spectrum. Fire means punishment. That’s what we want it mean or that’s what we have been told that it means. But is that what it means? When Moses encountered God the first time at Sinai, the bush was not burned up. More often than not, on both sides of the Testamental divide, fire means refining. Metals are refined. The impure ore is heated up to such a temperature that impurities burn off or separate from the pure metal and are skimmed off the top or allowed to settle to the bottom. The smelter melts the gold or silver ore until it is liquid and then skims off the dross until he can see his own face reflected in the molten metal.(2) What a wonderful and appropriate image that is. When God refines us, God wants to see God’s own image reflected in us. When John of Patmos reports that the devil was thrown into the lake of fire (Revelation 20:10) it was refining and not punishment going on. Perhaps the lake of fire was like an autoclave sterilizing the devil so that the devil wouldn’t pollute the earth.
What is that pollution? What could it be other than sin? Grey Temple asks, “How can God’s fire purify anyone from sin without frying them to a crisp?”(3) Think of some of the behaviors which we normally call sin: drunkenness, embezzling, lying, cheating, adultery. Think of the some of the human attitudes that are really offensive: greed, arrogance, uncontrolled anger, lack of compassion. How would God’s fire make the person different who did those things or presented herself or himself in one of those ways? As Temple says that you would simply be the same old rascal with third degree burns.
To be an image that carries meaning, the fire of God must consume something in each of us that goes deeper than our sins. Temple says that God’s fire must purge away the “false self” which is the fertile ground for our worst sins. The self that God created can emerge only as the self that each of us constructs to retail to others is consumed.
That’s an interesting concept. By building up an unreal self to present to the world, we are polluting the image of God that was imprinted on us at our birth. We take fig leaves and hide our natural self, the self that God gave us, the self that is supposed to reflect God when God looks at us.
Perhaps that was what God was getting at when Jeremiah tried to beg off from doing the ministry God was calling him to. “I don’t know how to speak because I’m only a child.” Isn’t that the unreal self that Jeremiah is trying to present. We might accept that from him, but God knows better. “Don’t say, ‘I’m only a child.’ ... Before I created you in the womb I knew you; before you were born I set you apart.” Or how about Moses and his first meeting with God. He had a litany of excuses and fears — lack of confidence, limited skill, insecurities about personal identity, and fear of rejection (Exodus 3–4). Isaiah’s excuse was a profound sense of personal sin (Isaiah 6).
We all have excuses. We all rationalize why we don’t do things or do things we know we shouldn’t. We all create fictions about ourselves, sometimes intentionally, and sometimes by default. For a long time my internal image of myself was somewhere in my thirties. I haven’t been thirty something in a long time, and there is no way that I can live up to that self-image. I’m moving it forward slowly, and maybe someday it will be close to my chronological age.
It’s a self-deception. We do it all the time. Physically it is Botox, nips and tucks, “Just for Men Touch of Gray,” and erectile dysfunction medicine. Mentally it is believing we are someone other than who we are, believing that we are self-made, that it doesn’t matter who we really are, just who we get the world to believe that we are.
Sometimes religiousness is part of the false front we present the world. People conform to a particular religious group – its dress, vocabulary, belief, even political opinions . They don’t ask questions about why certain things are the way they are, they accept them, and as a result they become objects of loyalty, gods in the place of God.
It’s a DIY – Do It Yourself – world, except when it comes to salvation. God’s purifying fire will consume all the false, fictitious, pretentious, puffed up impurities that we hide behind and that we allow to pollute, dilute, and destroy the God-given person we are.
All that falsehood increases rather than decreases the burden we carry around during our lives. Like the woman with the 18 year affliction that Jesus encountered, we are stooped over and cannot stand up straight. And the religious leaders were more concerned with the sanctity of the Sabbath than they were with the sanctity of the holy image of God that was supposed to be in that woman. Jesus said, “[I]sn’t it necessary that this woman, a daughter of Abraham, bound by Satan for eighteen long years, be set free from her bondage on the Sabbath day?”
That was a precursor to a very special Sabbath not all that far in the future from the encounter with the woman. It was the Sabbath that Jesus inaugurated by his resurrection from the dead. He threw off the falsehood of death and its fear, terror, and penalties. “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).
We come through the travails of pilgrimage to faith, not be smacked down, but to be refined, purified, made glowing so that God can see God’s own self in us.
May your life be a reflection of God.
(1) Lanny Peters, “Hebrews 12:18-29, Pastoral Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 376, 378.
(2) Grey Temple, “Hebrews 12:18-29, Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 378.
(3) Ibid.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Sunday, August 25, 2013
Sunday, August 18, 2013
By Faith . . .
By Faith . . .
Hebrews 11:29-12:2;
Isaiah 5:1-7; Luke 12:14-56
“By faith....” That’s the watchword that the writer of the Hebrews letter has been stressing since the beginning of chapter 11. The writer’s understanding of faith is different from what most of us think on first hearing.
How many times have we heard someone say to us, “If you only had enough faith”? Perhaps we have said that ourselves. Faith is a gift from God. It is not something that we ourselves create. It is not something that can be added to by our own effort. It is not like a store brand reward card that guarantees us so many cents off a gallon of gas or $10 off our next purchase for every $100 we buy today. That understanding of faith is all about us. It backs God into a corner if we don’t get what we think we should be getting.
Faith is more like the air we breathe, it can’t be quantified. It just is. The writer of the letter has taken pains to introduce the idea that faith has to do with the courage to endure. This letter was written to a band of Christians struggling with hostility, ridicule, and shame laid heavily on them by the surrounding society. Yes, the community is thinking about themselves, but the writer suggests that they need to step back and see the larger picture. Faith can be understood only in terms of the larger story of promise that stretches all the way back to Abraham and Sarah — and more importantly, forever into the future.
One of the themes of the tradition is that God’s people have always been immigrants, aliens, strangers, pilgrims. The Israelites spent forty years in the wilderness struggling with trust or distrust of God. Even in the promised land the struggle went on. When things were going well, there still a gnawing doubt that God might not keep God’s end of the bargain, that God might not keep faith with the beloved community, that God might not be trustworthy.
The Hebrews writer is not naive about faith. But he is not going to be nailed down to a narrow definition. What he has outlined might be seen as very broad. Or it might be perceived as ambiguous. Some of the names listed are well-known. And some are not. If your Bible has the center column of scripture references, you are going to have to follow them back to the books of Joshua and Judges to refresh your memory about them. Some of the examples which are included led to amazing results. Some did not. These point simply to courageous endurance, even to the point of torture, persecution, and death. If we were to read the stories of the early church in the preserved writings from just beyond the time frame the New Testament, we would find that faith often led believers to martyrdom instead of earthly success.
Faith is not what happens. Faith is the act of perceiving the activity of God, whether it is in miraculous escape as the Israelites crossing through the Red Sea or whether it is in the courageous witness and endurance of martyrs. Faith is an against all odds kind of relationship with God, a no matter what attitude, such as Joshua asserted at the end of his ministry, “My family and I will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15); such as Jesus’ own comment, “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be loyal to the one and have contempt for the other. You cannot serve God and wealth” (Matthew 6:24). We can’t serve faith and unfaith, trust and distrust, at the same time. Faith is the relationship with God when things seem to be totally messed up as well as when everything seems to be going well.
Remember that even though Sarah laughed at the thought of having a child in her old age, it was credited to Abraham and her as faith that they waited for the promise to be fulfilled. John Shelley writes that
Today’s problems are not from a success of thinking but rather from a failure of imagination. Think about some of the people in the Hebrews’ roll call of the saints. They were able to imagine God’s activity in the world. They could imagine and believe that God kept the promises that God had made over the course of divine history.
Lack of imagination leads to all kinds of things. People resort to violence because they cannot imagine a better way of dealing with conflict or with addressing issues of power or justice. People resort to greed because they cannot imagine that there is enough to go around to benefit everyone. They are ready to throw everyone off the island in favor of keeping themselves going. People resort to arrogance because they cannot imagine that knowledge is something to be shared for everyone’s good.
The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’ call to be imaginative. “You have heard that it was said..., but I say to you....” Believers are called to imagine the reality of the kingdom of heaven and live it even though they may never see its reality in their earthly life. Courageous endurance is the product of faith, probably more so than miraculous, catastrophic interventions by God in the lives of believers.
This “by faith” power of imagination is what will set family member against family member. Those who are stuck in the present moment and cannot see, dream, imagine beyond this moment in time will be divided off from those who can. These are the not divisions between red state and blue state, between progressives and conservatives, between visionaries and historians. The division is between those who truly and thoroughly believe that God can do anything that God desires, even if people are unfamiliar with it, and those who cannot imagine doing anything different from what they have previously experienced. No matter how many times God says that God will do a new thing, they will decry the possibility, dispute the need for anything new, and even actively block it — all out of ignorance, fear, arrogance, sinfulness.
Sin: that’s a significant part of it according to the Hebrews’ writer. “Let us throw off any extra baggage, get rid of the sin that trips us up, and fix our eyes on Jesus, faith’s pioneer and perfecter.” We don’t like that word “sin” in the singular. We much prefer it as a plural. We can make up a list and add and subtract items from it. This is a sin, and this isn’t. Sin – singular – is a basic orientation of the self. It deals with presumption, pride, greed. All these are wrapped with an egoism that cannot allow other individuals to have the same status, value, and uniqueness that “I” do. That is active sin.
But sin can be passive, as well. It could be seen in despair, apathy, or a tendency to become mired in dealing with symptoms of injustice rather than working to remove the root causes. Passive sin could be the refusal to accept individual responsibility to neighbor, to God, or to God’s future.
Which was the bigger, more problematic sin for the readers of the Hebrews letter? Had they become lured away from the faith by worldliness and the sinful activities that so often go along with it? Or had they given up on God? Had they decided not to care any more? Perhaps. That kind of attitude was tempting. John of Patmos, perhaps a contemporary of the Hebrews writer, was dealing with fear and apathy as well as with hope and faith among the believers he knew. Had the readers of the Hebrews’ letter given up on ever seeing some big activity of God? Were they edging away from faithful and courageous endurance?
Often scripture uses growing images. Scattered seed, grain and weeds, and careful pruning. For grapes to be produced in abundance, the vines have to be carefully pruned each winter to encourage new growth which will bring the clusters of rich fruit. To the person who is unfamiliar with viticulture, the seasonal pruning looks severe and fatal. Yet a new growing season’s bounty will be great. God loves the vineyard. Pruning is God’s way of saying that by perseverance, by imagination, by faith the kingdom and all God’s plans for it will happen.
The cloud of witnesses are beneficiaries of all that has gone on and their witness benefits us so that we may dare to break out of the present and imagine with Spirit-filled fervor the future God will absolutely create. Ron McCreary puts it this way: “The church is not a walled fortress against change. The church is a launching pad into God’s future.”(2) At this table, the countdown begins. Bread and blood, loaves and life, grapes and grace.
Thanks be to God!
(1) John C. Shelley, “Hebrews 11:29-12:2, Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010) Year C, Volume 3, 354.
(2) Ron McCreary, http://tinyurl.com/kcr73w3, Monday, August 12, 2013
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com
Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Hebrews 11:29-12:2;
Isaiah 5:1-7; Luke 12:14-56
“By faith....” That’s the watchword that the writer of the Hebrews letter has been stressing since the beginning of chapter 11. The writer’s understanding of faith is different from what most of us think on first hearing.
How many times have we heard someone say to us, “If you only had enough faith”? Perhaps we have said that ourselves. Faith is a gift from God. It is not something that we ourselves create. It is not something that can be added to by our own effort. It is not like a store brand reward card that guarantees us so many cents off a gallon of gas or $10 off our next purchase for every $100 we buy today. That understanding of faith is all about us. It backs God into a corner if we don’t get what we think we should be getting.
Faith is more like the air we breathe, it can’t be quantified. It just is. The writer of the letter has taken pains to introduce the idea that faith has to do with the courage to endure. This letter was written to a band of Christians struggling with hostility, ridicule, and shame laid heavily on them by the surrounding society. Yes, the community is thinking about themselves, but the writer suggests that they need to step back and see the larger picture. Faith can be understood only in terms of the larger story of promise that stretches all the way back to Abraham and Sarah — and more importantly, forever into the future.
One of the themes of the tradition is that God’s people have always been immigrants, aliens, strangers, pilgrims. The Israelites spent forty years in the wilderness struggling with trust or distrust of God. Even in the promised land the struggle went on. When things were going well, there still a gnawing doubt that God might not keep God’s end of the bargain, that God might not keep faith with the beloved community, that God might not be trustworthy.
The Hebrews writer is not naive about faith. But he is not going to be nailed down to a narrow definition. What he has outlined might be seen as very broad. Or it might be perceived as ambiguous. Some of the names listed are well-known. And some are not. If your Bible has the center column of scripture references, you are going to have to follow them back to the books of Joshua and Judges to refresh your memory about them. Some of the examples which are included led to amazing results. Some did not. These point simply to courageous endurance, even to the point of torture, persecution, and death. If we were to read the stories of the early church in the preserved writings from just beyond the time frame the New Testament, we would find that faith often led believers to martyrdom instead of earthly success.
Faith is not what happens. Faith is the act of perceiving the activity of God, whether it is in miraculous escape as the Israelites crossing through the Red Sea or whether it is in the courageous witness and endurance of martyrs. Faith is an against all odds kind of relationship with God, a no matter what attitude, such as Joshua asserted at the end of his ministry, “My family and I will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15); such as Jesus’ own comment, “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be loyal to the one and have contempt for the other. You cannot serve God and wealth” (Matthew 6:24). We can’t serve faith and unfaith, trust and distrust, at the same time. Faith is the relationship with God when things seem to be totally messed up as well as when everything seems to be going well.
Remember that even though Sarah laughed at the thought of having a child in her old age, it was credited to Abraham and her as faith that they waited for the promise to be fulfilled. John Shelley writes that
“the promise is not simply an extension of the present, based on what seems possible at the moment. It is a new creation that invades our present reality and makes the impossible possible.”(1)By faith...the impossible is possible. Shelley goes on to say that the problems in our lives of faith today are not because of a deficit of good will and good intentions. We are all well-meaning people. We were raised that way. But we were also raised to use our heads, our rational minds. We are children of the age of science, the age of the scientific proof which will conclusively determine what is and what will be.
Today’s problems are not from a success of thinking but rather from a failure of imagination. Think about some of the people in the Hebrews’ roll call of the saints. They were able to imagine God’s activity in the world. They could imagine and believe that God kept the promises that God had made over the course of divine history.
Lack of imagination leads to all kinds of things. People resort to violence because they cannot imagine a better way of dealing with conflict or with addressing issues of power or justice. People resort to greed because they cannot imagine that there is enough to go around to benefit everyone. They are ready to throw everyone off the island in favor of keeping themselves going. People resort to arrogance because they cannot imagine that knowledge is something to be shared for everyone’s good.
The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’ call to be imaginative. “You have heard that it was said..., but I say to you....” Believers are called to imagine the reality of the kingdom of heaven and live it even though they may never see its reality in their earthly life. Courageous endurance is the product of faith, probably more so than miraculous, catastrophic interventions by God in the lives of believers.
This “by faith” power of imagination is what will set family member against family member. Those who are stuck in the present moment and cannot see, dream, imagine beyond this moment in time will be divided off from those who can. These are the not divisions between red state and blue state, between progressives and conservatives, between visionaries and historians. The division is between those who truly and thoroughly believe that God can do anything that God desires, even if people are unfamiliar with it, and those who cannot imagine doing anything different from what they have previously experienced. No matter how many times God says that God will do a new thing, they will decry the possibility, dispute the need for anything new, and even actively block it — all out of ignorance, fear, arrogance, sinfulness.
Sin: that’s a significant part of it according to the Hebrews’ writer. “Let us throw off any extra baggage, get rid of the sin that trips us up, and fix our eyes on Jesus, faith’s pioneer and perfecter.” We don’t like that word “sin” in the singular. We much prefer it as a plural. We can make up a list and add and subtract items from it. This is a sin, and this isn’t. Sin – singular – is a basic orientation of the self. It deals with presumption, pride, greed. All these are wrapped with an egoism that cannot allow other individuals to have the same status, value, and uniqueness that “I” do. That is active sin.
But sin can be passive, as well. It could be seen in despair, apathy, or a tendency to become mired in dealing with symptoms of injustice rather than working to remove the root causes. Passive sin could be the refusal to accept individual responsibility to neighbor, to God, or to God’s future.
Which was the bigger, more problematic sin for the readers of the Hebrews letter? Had they become lured away from the faith by worldliness and the sinful activities that so often go along with it? Or had they given up on God? Had they decided not to care any more? Perhaps. That kind of attitude was tempting. John of Patmos, perhaps a contemporary of the Hebrews writer, was dealing with fear and apathy as well as with hope and faith among the believers he knew. Had the readers of the Hebrews’ letter given up on ever seeing some big activity of God? Were they edging away from faithful and courageous endurance?
Often scripture uses growing images. Scattered seed, grain and weeds, and careful pruning. For grapes to be produced in abundance, the vines have to be carefully pruned each winter to encourage new growth which will bring the clusters of rich fruit. To the person who is unfamiliar with viticulture, the seasonal pruning looks severe and fatal. Yet a new growing season’s bounty will be great. God loves the vineyard. Pruning is God’s way of saying that by perseverance, by imagination, by faith the kingdom and all God’s plans for it will happen.
The cloud of witnesses are beneficiaries of all that has gone on and their witness benefits us so that we may dare to break out of the present and imagine with Spirit-filled fervor the future God will absolutely create. Ron McCreary puts it this way: “The church is not a walled fortress against change. The church is a launching pad into God’s future.”(2) At this table, the countdown begins. Bread and blood, loaves and life, grapes and grace.
Thanks be to God!
(1) John C. Shelley, “Hebrews 11:29-12:2, Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010) Year C, Volume 3, 354.
(2) Ron McCreary, http://tinyurl.com/kcr73w3, Monday, August 12, 2013
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com
Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Sunday, August 11, 2013
Cultivating Surprise
Cultivating Surprise
Luke 12:32-40
Isaiah 1:1, 10-20; Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
Just when you think you know what the Bible is saying, it trips you up. We don’t get tripped up by some enemy that gives us something better than God’s word. God’s word gets us. No wonder the writer of Hebrews says that God’s word is sharper than any two-edged sword. I would suggest that working with scripture is like working with a roll of barbed wire without benefit of gloves.
If you take on its own the passage from Luke I just read, each of us would have to be constantly at the ready, day and night, week in and week out, for the Human One, the Son of Man, Jesus Christ, to come knocking at our door. Can you count how many sermons you have heard in your lifetime that preached that point? I know, I’ve waited for that same repairman, too.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t need that kind of stress in my life. In fact, Jesus doesn’t think I – or you – need that kind of stress either. In the passage that Luke placed immediately before the one I read earlier, Jesus says so. We usually encounter it in Matthew as part of the “Sermon on the Mount”:
“Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Therefore, I say to you, don’t worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. There is more to life than food and more to the body than clothing’ ” (Luke 12:22-23). Jesus said that in response to the request of someone who asked Jesus to tell that person’s brother to divide the family inheritance with him. In case you’re having a senior moment, that was the passage that Pastor Bob preached on last week. I didn’t hear his message, but he called it, “Reliable Investment.” And what was the gist of that passage? The problem of being rich – storing up treasure – for one’s self and not being rich toward God. Storing up riches for me and not storing up riches for God says that I don’t trust God and that God needs all the help that God can get.
That my friends, is not where Jesus starts in today’s passage. He says, “Don’t be afraid, little flock, because your Father delights in giving you the kingdom.” God doesn’t want us down and out, God doesn’t want us standing at the intersection holding up a sign begging for food. God doesn’t want us living under a bridge. God doesn’t want us to be ignorant about grace, forgiveness, or eternal fellowship. Just the opposite. When “he arrives, he will dress himself to serve, seat them at the table as honored guests, and wait on them.” That is as delightful for us as it is for God.
So we have these three passages, back to back: Do not worry; lay up kingdom treasure instead of worldly treasure; and wait for the Lord.
Don’t worry. (There’s that admonition again.) I am not going to turn this into a sermon about selling everything you have and putting it into the offering plate. Being rich toward God doesn’t mean that. In fact, Luke records further on in the Gospel Jesus saying that he’d rather have the widow’s two cents than the rich person’s spare change (Luke 21:1-3). (A word of warning: If you don’t like God meddling with your money, don’t read Luke’s gospel. In fact, the Bible says a whole lot more about money than it does about war and peace, etiquette, or sexuality.)
Making moth-proof wallets and rust-resistant purses is a far better business plan than building bigger barns, bigger closets, or more diversified 401K accounts. What Jesus wants you and me to do is to realize that the gift of life is whole lot more than monthly retirement checks, deeds to developer-sought-after land, commissions on sales, or royalties on mineral rights. All of life is a generous gift from God. God desires to lavish life upon us. We are so trained to expect strangers to cheat us and deprive us of what is rightfully ours, that we treat God the same way. It’s like one person’s stewardship plan: “I’ll throw everything up in the air, God, and anything you can catch you can keep.” Like that’s going to happen, and we know it.
On the human side of the equation, none of us can receive or give with clenched fists. On the God side of the equation, Jesus asks us – commands us – to be so oriented to life that we see it, know it, understand it through and through as an abundant gift from a generous God. And that means that having received it, we can give it away with gleeful abandon.
Being “rich toward God” involves a “generosity of spirit” that makes our minds and hearts more sensitive toward the ways in which God’s generosity manifests itself. Those ways are always present, but are often at the edges of our awareness, blurs at the periphery of our spiritual vision. And because we are busy trying to focus our sight on hoped-for large-scale God activities, we miss, overlook, or ignore the seemingly insignificant, small-scale God activities that are going on constantly around us.
What this means is that we have to cultivate the art of being surprised. That doesn’t mean being on a state of high alert nor its opposite which is being zonked out of it. We don’t have to be fixated or fuzzy. There is a difference, as David Schlafer says(1), between being the “lookout” and being “on the lookout.” We have been long conditioned to looking out. We have had it drummed into us until suspicion is the natural filter through which we sense everything. Remember the Sunday school song: “Be careful little eye what you see, be careful little ear what you hear,” and so on. We are to “position ourselves to be surprised.”(2) The surprise in the imagery that Jesus uses isn’t that the master comes at an odd hour. It is that when he comes and finds the servants, he prepares himself, sits them down, and serves them.
When humanity least expected it Jesus came, “matured in wisdom and years and in favor with God and with people” (Luke 2:52). Before that, Simeon and Anna had oriented their lives in such a way that when Mary and Joseph brought the infant Jesus into the temple area, they were immediately surprised – pleasantly – by the Lord’s Christ. He came to serve those who served him. “Desire God’s kingdom” (Luke 12:31) is what Jesus told people. That’s the perspective that will enable disciples to be surprised at all that God has done, is doing, and will yet do. The kingdom for which we are instructed to strive is presented to us just like the feast for the master’s servants. It is not compensation. It is not reward. It is a gift.
I challenge you to be surprised by God’s gifts this week. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if God might surprise you with a gift before you leave the building today. No you won’t find God’s gifts wrapped in colorful paper with neatly tied bows. The gift of God that might surprise you could be a smile, or the beautiful curve of a flower blossom. God’s surprise might be a steadying arm or a breath of peace interrupting anxiousness. God might surprise you with a phone call from a friend or pleasant aroma of fresh brewed herbal tea. Don’t spend the week looking for these things and thinking that you deserved them if they came. Don’t say, “It’s about time.” But rather let your responses be filled with “Oohs” and “Aahs” and “Wows.”
We are disciples of an awesome God who loves to surprise us with grace and love, with mercy and with blessings, with joy and with peace. How surprising is that?
Cultivate surprise and God will surprise you right into the kingdom. Wow!
(1) David J. Schlafer, “Luke 12:32-40, Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010) Year C, Volume 3, 339.
(2) Eugene L. Lowry, The Sermon: Dancing the Edge of Mystery (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997), 95-100.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com
Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Luke 12:32-40
Isaiah 1:1, 10-20; Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
Just when you think you know what the Bible is saying, it trips you up. We don’t get tripped up by some enemy that gives us something better than God’s word. God’s word gets us. No wonder the writer of Hebrews says that God’s word is sharper than any two-edged sword. I would suggest that working with scripture is like working with a roll of barbed wire without benefit of gloves.
If you take on its own the passage from Luke I just read, each of us would have to be constantly at the ready, day and night, week in and week out, for the Human One, the Son of Man, Jesus Christ, to come knocking at our door. Can you count how many sermons you have heard in your lifetime that preached that point? I know, I’ve waited for that same repairman, too.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t need that kind of stress in my life. In fact, Jesus doesn’t think I – or you – need that kind of stress either. In the passage that Luke placed immediately before the one I read earlier, Jesus says so. We usually encounter it in Matthew as part of the “Sermon on the Mount”:
“Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Therefore, I say to you, don’t worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. There is more to life than food and more to the body than clothing’ ” (Luke 12:22-23). Jesus said that in response to the request of someone who asked Jesus to tell that person’s brother to divide the family inheritance with him. In case you’re having a senior moment, that was the passage that Pastor Bob preached on last week. I didn’t hear his message, but he called it, “Reliable Investment.” And what was the gist of that passage? The problem of being rich – storing up treasure – for one’s self and not being rich toward God. Storing up riches for me and not storing up riches for God says that I don’t trust God and that God needs all the help that God can get.
That my friends, is not where Jesus starts in today’s passage. He says, “Don’t be afraid, little flock, because your Father delights in giving you the kingdom.” God doesn’t want us down and out, God doesn’t want us standing at the intersection holding up a sign begging for food. God doesn’t want us living under a bridge. God doesn’t want us to be ignorant about grace, forgiveness, or eternal fellowship. Just the opposite. When “he arrives, he will dress himself to serve, seat them at the table as honored guests, and wait on them.” That is as delightful for us as it is for God.
So we have these three passages, back to back: Do not worry; lay up kingdom treasure instead of worldly treasure; and wait for the Lord.
Don’t worry. (There’s that admonition again.) I am not going to turn this into a sermon about selling everything you have and putting it into the offering plate. Being rich toward God doesn’t mean that. In fact, Luke records further on in the Gospel Jesus saying that he’d rather have the widow’s two cents than the rich person’s spare change (Luke 21:1-3). (A word of warning: If you don’t like God meddling with your money, don’t read Luke’s gospel. In fact, the Bible says a whole lot more about money than it does about war and peace, etiquette, or sexuality.)
Making moth-proof wallets and rust-resistant purses is a far better business plan than building bigger barns, bigger closets, or more diversified 401K accounts. What Jesus wants you and me to do is to realize that the gift of life is whole lot more than monthly retirement checks, deeds to developer-sought-after land, commissions on sales, or royalties on mineral rights. All of life is a generous gift from God. God desires to lavish life upon us. We are so trained to expect strangers to cheat us and deprive us of what is rightfully ours, that we treat God the same way. It’s like one person’s stewardship plan: “I’ll throw everything up in the air, God, and anything you can catch you can keep.” Like that’s going to happen, and we know it.
On the human side of the equation, none of us can receive or give with clenched fists. On the God side of the equation, Jesus asks us – commands us – to be so oriented to life that we see it, know it, understand it through and through as an abundant gift from a generous God. And that means that having received it, we can give it away with gleeful abandon.
Being “rich toward God” involves a “generosity of spirit” that makes our minds and hearts more sensitive toward the ways in which God’s generosity manifests itself. Those ways are always present, but are often at the edges of our awareness, blurs at the periphery of our spiritual vision. And because we are busy trying to focus our sight on hoped-for large-scale God activities, we miss, overlook, or ignore the seemingly insignificant, small-scale God activities that are going on constantly around us.
What this means is that we have to cultivate the art of being surprised. That doesn’t mean being on a state of high alert nor its opposite which is being zonked out of it. We don’t have to be fixated or fuzzy. There is a difference, as David Schlafer says(1), between being the “lookout” and being “on the lookout.” We have been long conditioned to looking out. We have had it drummed into us until suspicion is the natural filter through which we sense everything. Remember the Sunday school song: “Be careful little eye what you see, be careful little ear what you hear,” and so on. We are to “position ourselves to be surprised.”(2) The surprise in the imagery that Jesus uses isn’t that the master comes at an odd hour. It is that when he comes and finds the servants, he prepares himself, sits them down, and serves them.
When humanity least expected it Jesus came, “matured in wisdom and years and in favor with God and with people” (Luke 2:52). Before that, Simeon and Anna had oriented their lives in such a way that when Mary and Joseph brought the infant Jesus into the temple area, they were immediately surprised – pleasantly – by the Lord’s Christ. He came to serve those who served him. “Desire God’s kingdom” (Luke 12:31) is what Jesus told people. That’s the perspective that will enable disciples to be surprised at all that God has done, is doing, and will yet do. The kingdom for which we are instructed to strive is presented to us just like the feast for the master’s servants. It is not compensation. It is not reward. It is a gift.
I challenge you to be surprised by God’s gifts this week. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if God might surprise you with a gift before you leave the building today. No you won’t find God’s gifts wrapped in colorful paper with neatly tied bows. The gift of God that might surprise you could be a smile, or the beautiful curve of a flower blossom. God’s surprise might be a steadying arm or a breath of peace interrupting anxiousness. God might surprise you with a phone call from a friend or pleasant aroma of fresh brewed herbal tea. Don’t spend the week looking for these things and thinking that you deserved them if they came. Don’t say, “It’s about time.” But rather let your responses be filled with “Oohs” and “Aahs” and “Wows.”
We are disciples of an awesome God who loves to surprise us with grace and love, with mercy and with blessings, with joy and with peace. How surprising is that?
Cultivate surprise and God will surprise you right into the kingdom. Wow!
(1) David J. Schlafer, “Luke 12:32-40, Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010) Year C, Volume 3, 339.
(2) Eugene L. Lowry, The Sermon: Dancing the Edge of Mystery (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997), 95-100.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com
Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
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