Romans 8:12-25; Isaiah 44:6-8; Psalm 86:11-17
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In the sentence before our reading begins, Paul has told the Roman believers that
“If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, the one who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your human bodies also, through his Spirit that lives in you.” (Romans 8:11)
If we parse what Paul has said here in his usual dense style, we will realize that this is an affirmation of the Trinity. It speaks of the Spirit, the one who raise Jesus, and Christ. All three are connected, intertwined, and responsible to each other in the greater work of fulfilling God’s purpose.
So then, Paul begins his next thought: “So then, brothers and sisters, we have an obligation.” “We are debtors.” That’s not exactly something we want to hear. Our monthly credit card bills, car or house payments all too enthusiastically remind us of that. We dislike having that frequent reminder. It lowers our self-estimation, and that’s a real downer. Worse than that, being told we are debtors when all our IOUs are cleared and the bill collector has no reason to pound on our door is a real drag. We would resent that implication. After all, we tend to agree with Polonius in Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, when he counseled his son Laertes, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” This concept is a good ideal, but it’s not practical.
Having told his readers that they are debtors, Paul then goes on to explain. As Eugene Peterson paraphrases the apostle, “We don’t owe this old do-it-yourself life one red cent.” That is, we are not debtors to our flesh, we don’t owe anything to our selfish ways of living.
There is not a thing we could have done saving ourselves. God has done everything we needed to be done. Therefore, we have an obligation to respond, not to ourselves, not to our human nature wracked with sin, but to God. That’s something more than our mother whispering in our ear, “Say ‘Thank you,’ Rick.” Because of all that Christ has done and is going to do for us, we are obligated to live in the power and control of the Holy Spirit.
The way that Paul puts this is that we are to refuse the drives and desires of our still attractive but crucified sinful nature. We are to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions. Paul says that redeemed life in Christ is a call to live “sensible, ethical, and godly lives right now” (Titus 2:12). The old, sinful nature may present its demands, based upon the past but we have no obligation to cooperate. It is like having fraud protection on our credit cards. We aren’t required to pay for something fraudulently charged to our account. Jesus has cancelled the debt to sin.
I suppose that we could look at this as refinancing our debt. We no longer owe a debt of death to sin. The debt we now owe is a debt of life and it is owed to God. Why is that? Because “all who are led by God’s Spirit are God’s sons and daughters....[Y]ou received a Spirit that shows you are adopted as his children.”
The true children of God are everyone who are led by the Spirit of God. The Spirit-led life stands out. It can’t be hid. Believers not only have the Spirit, they are also led by the Spirit.
Paul uses adoption to illustrate the believer’s new relationship with God and his or her privileges as part of God’s family. In Roman culture familiar to both Paul and his readers, the adopted person lost all the rights which came from the old family and gained all the rights of a legitimate child in the new family. The adoptee became a full heir to all the rights, privileges, responsibilities, and assets and debts of the new family.
That’s why Paul uses the image about becoming a Christian. When a person comes to Christ, he or she gets everything that goes with being a child in God’s family. One of the outstanding privileges of family of God membership is being led by the Spirit. What a gift the new family relationship provides!
Former American poet laureate Billy Collins wrote a poem about a boy making a lanyard at summer camp. With the help of his counselor he wove the plastic strands into a lanyard which he gave to his mother. Collins writes:
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,
set cold face-cloths on my forehead
then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied.
Collins concludes the poem,
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift – not the worn truth,
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-toned lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.(1)
We are like that boy giving the lanyard to his mother. There is nothing that we can give to God that is equivalent to all that God has done for us in Christ. There is no way to place a human value on the inheritance we receive with Christ through the Spirit.
Paul’s Jewish co-religionists understood themselves to heirs of God in terms of being the possessors of the “Promised Land.” They had lost it completely once, and gotten it back (by dint of God’s activity). Now it was overrun by foreign overlords. Paul told Jews and Gentiles about a different inheritance that God had prepared in Christ, not geographical land but God’s spiritual kingdom, the realm of God’s rule. Too often that gets interpreted as something in the future. But Paul’s emphasis about the Spirit being in believers suggests that the realm of God’s rule is a present reality when the Spirit is fully dwelling in the hearts of believers.
Many Christians are conditioned to think of atonement as Christ’s cross paying the debt owed to the law, or the devil, or even to God. That would mean that sinners have a debt defined by the law. But Christians are debt free, due to Christ's payment in the crucifixion. This would mean that at one time each of us was in debt to the law; but now, with Christ, we don’t owe the law a thing.
Just as we are about to breathe a sigh of relief, Paul makes the astounding claim that we are still debtors. But for Paul everything depends upon to whom the debt is owed. He says that the debt we owe is owed to the Spirit. As he said, the now-cancelled debt to sin gave death. The debt we now owe gives life. What a strange debt this is!
If you talk to your accountant, you know that debt is a liability. When your CPA puts your balance sheet together, liabilities – debts – are subtracted from assets to determine net worth. That’s the accounting law. Debt reduces assets. However, the Spirit doesn’t do accounting according to human principles. Debt owed to the Spirit increases your net spiritual worth; it doesn’t take away from it. Spirit debt is not what must be repaid, but what is paid to you. Christ said it this way: “Everyone who has will be given more” (Luke 19:26). In other words, whoever has the Spirit of Christ will receive more as the person grows and matures in Christ-like faith.
Debt is not our basic problem; it is to whom we owe the debt that matters. The more we seek to have the Spirit power our faith, the more we try to live the kind of life Christ modeled for us, the more we hand over our lives to God, the more we add to our debt to the Spirit. The more we owe the Spirit, the greater our total worth is as an heir with Christ to the glory of God’s holy rule. That’s a debt everyone of us needs to take on. That’s the debt we owe, and we owe it to the Spirit.
(1) Billy Collins, Lanyard, 2007.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2017 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Isaiah 55:10-13; Psalm 65:9-13; Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
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Major League Baseball has started the second half of the season. Last Tuesday’s All Star Game was the 88th. It took 10 innings, but the American League continued their recent dominance of All Star Games. For those of us more supportive of the National League, the last two decades have been dismal.
I grew up listening to baseball on the radio. It was always exciting. I don’t know if the games went faster then, but the announcer’s chatter between pitches and hits provided the color that watching the game live without announcing doesn’t have. And it seemed like there were fewer commercials then. You know how memory works, so that probably isn’t so.
One thing about baseball is that the home team always has the last chance to bat. If they are ahead they won’t need it. If they are behind, they have a chance to win, or at least tie and take the game into extra innings.
There is a play on words which attributes the creation of baseball not to Abner Doubleday but to God. If a person misreads the first verse of Genesis, it could say, “In the big inning....” Be that as it may, if God were to be involved with baseball, God would always be the home team, God would always bat last. That’s the gist of the verses we have before us today from the prophet Isaiah. God has the last word. It goes out and doesn’t return to go empty. God wins.
All of Isaiah 55 is memorable. The opening verses are used on a Lenten Sunday in one of the lectionary years.
All of you who are thirsty, come to the water! Whoever has no money, come, buy food and eat! Without money, at no cost, buy wine and milk! Why spend money for what isn’t food, and your earnings for what doesn’t satisfy?
The first five verses will be the Old Testament lesson in three weeks and are coupled with the story from Matthew of the feeding of the 5,000.
Isaiah 55 opens as an invitation to a banquet. The reading comes at the end of the section often referred to as Second Isaiah and the writer is looking to the day of Israel’s return to Jerusalem and Judea, the rebuilding of the Temple, the reestablishment of lineage of the Davidic kings, and birth of the New Jerusalem symbolizing the dawn of God’s universal reign of righteous compassion. That will indeed be something worth celebrating.
Whenever with think about celebrations and festivals in the biblical context, we can’t help but think of the parable which Jesus told about the wedding feast (Matthew 22:1–10). When the announcement was delivered that the feast was ready, all the invited guests had more important business to attend to. So the invitation list was revised: “Go to the roads on the edge of town and invite everyone you find to the wedding party.”
There it is, stated plainly and simply: The most precious gift of all — the gift of life in God’s presence — is free. The only thing that can invalidate the gift is your insistence that there are places you would rather be and things you would rather do. Why anyone would ever opt for their choice over God’s is impossible to fathom. What are the possibilities? You want to determine the menu. You aren’t an afternoon person. You want to be in control of the company you keep. After all, someone you can’t stand might be there. But God will be there. Yeah, didn’t the host say that anyone could attend? But Jesus may join the wedding feast! Wouldn’t it be better to be in God’s presence, sitting with Jesus, that worrying about who else might be there?
The morale of Israel in exile was pretty bleak. After the defeat of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, God’s approval rating plummeted to an all-time low. How could God allow God’s people to be defeated? How could God lose? The prophet Jeremiah dealt with the same issues. He took a British approach with the exiles in Babylon. “Keep a stiff upper lip. Keep calm and carry on. Dig into the local community and improve it. Don’t just survive, thrive. Look at me, I bought property in suburban Anathoth.”
Isaiah uses the image of the feast to seal the promise of God’s activity. Second Isaiah had started out in chapter 40 with two questions: Was God able to save Israel? And was God willing to save Israel? Isaiah saw that the problem wasn’t with God but with the people. He tells the people,
“Seek the Lord when he can still be found; call him while he is yet near. Let the wicked abandon their ways and the sinful their schemes. Return to the Lord so that he may have mercy on them, to our God, because he is generous with forgiveness.”
We live our spiritual lives no differently than we do our personal lives. We are loathe to admit that any fault lies on our side of the relationship. It is a habitual comfort to blame the other person, to blame someone else, to blame God. So we rationalize with fake logic. That’s what the Israelites did: If God possessed sufficient power and concern, Jerusalem would not have been destroyed by pagans and we would not be exiles in a foreign land.
You can hear Second Isaiah audibly sigh. He patiently but firmly lays out his argument about God’s wrath being a necessary response to the persistence of sin and God’s judgment being ultimately overruled by God’s mercy. He has said it before but it always seems to be lost on the people still straining to maintain their pride.
It is at that point that the prophet refocuses the people’s thinking:
“My plans aren’t your plans, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.”
The human foible is that we are always trying to tell God what to do. To bring back the baseball image, it’s as if we believe that we are the field manager and God is the ace reliever in the bullpen, waiting to be called up to close a nasty inning. In reality, we are the opponents and God is the home team. God always bats last. And God always wins.
Second Isaiah wants to leave that message with the Israelites as he closes out his prophetic work.
“[M]y word that comes from my mouth; it does not return to me empty. Instead, it does what I want, and accomplishes what I intend.”
The prophet’s image teems with quiet confidence in the triumph of God’s righteousness and the trustworthiness of God’s promises. He echoes the statement that he made as wrestled with God’s call to him in chapter 40: “The grass dries up; the flower withers, but our God’s word will exist forever.”
This Isaiah earnestly believes that only God’s word was the sure and certain basis for the reconstruction of their spiritual, personal, and corporate lives. “It does what I want, and accomplishes what I intend.”
The prophet concludes his final thought by announcing that there will be a festive procession of the freed exiles when they return to their home in joy and in peace. What a conclusion! What an affirmation of faith! Salvation is God’s ultimate accomplishment. The only things which human beings need to bring to the celebration are open hearts effervescing with joy and voices bubbling in song. Creation is seen as being whole again, for in the festive celebration, humanity is joined by nature. Everything in creation will be brought to wholeness by the Redeemer. The transformation into glory of all that the Lord has created provides the proper ballpark for the abiding presence of the God of glory. God always bats last, and God always wins.
Where is the despair in your life that needs Isaiah’s confident word? What is the exile that you are suffering through? Where are you contending against God by trying to run your own life? These are the places where you can receive the prophet’s word of assurance: God’s word doesn’t return empty. God’s word accomplishes what it sets out to do. God always bats last. God always wins.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2017 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Romans 7:15-25a; Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
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A number of years ago the eclectic trivia website, Mental Floss, compiled a list of “25 most important questions in the history of the universe.” You know the kinds of questions that appeared on the list, the ones that you couldn’t answer when your children asked them.
• Why is the sky blue?
• Why do snooze buttons only give you nine more minutes of sleep?
• Why can’t you tickle yourself?
• Those big clocks in the parlor — why do we call them “grandfather clocks?” (That one makes you want to ask, ‘Are there grandchildren clocks?’)
These questions and more — like “Why does Hawaii have Interstate highways?” — are adult versions of the riddles we used to ask as kids. You remember the ones you laughed at as a kid and groaned at as an adult:
• What did the sock say to the foot? You’re putting me on.
• What did the tie say to the hat? You go on ahead, I’ll hang around.
• What do whales like to chew? Blubber gum.
The television game show, “To Tell the Truth” has come back. The premise is that three people pose as a person with a particular skill, story, or experience. The panel asks questions in an attempt to guess which if the three is really who they claim to be.
We all know people who are full of questions. Whether we voice them or not, we often have questions or at least wonderings about something that happens. They don’t have to be grade school questions. Sometimes adults ask really deep, gnawing questions which don’t have easy answers, questions that are conundrums and paradoxes.
That’s where Paul is. He seems to be having a stream of consciousness conversation as he talks out his faith in the letter addressed to the Roman believers. “I don’t know what I’m doing, because I don’t do what I want to do. Instead, I do the thing that I hate.” It really bothers him. He says it again. “The desire to do good is inside of me, but I can’t do it. I don’t do the good that I want to do, but I do the evil that I don’t want to do.”
Most of us are neither as verbose or as articulate as Paul is. Nevertheless, we have asked ourselves that same question, maybe even posed it to a trusted confidant or pastor.
So how do we get to the answer? We have to start with that theological four-letter word, “sin.” We avoid saying it like other naughty words.
For all of Paul’s Pharisee training to tick off the boxes of dos and don’ts, Paul knows that sin is something much larger. It’s a power, a principle, a propensity, a proclivity, a penchant that pervades his inner self and dwells deep within him. It’s as if he is programmed to be that way. Fifth century St. Augustine called it “original sin” and 16th century Reformer John Calvin and others called it “total depravity.” Theological terms aside, sin is a problem that corrupts every relationship with God and neighbor, whether it’s in Paul or you or me.
We can certainly relate to Paul’s inner struggle. I know we don’t want to think about it, but let’s look at the things that we sometimes do unthinkingly that are sin as well as the things we do know better about. Sin is what causes us to gossip with our friends when we know we shouldn’t. Sin is wasting time on the job when we don’t want to work. Sin is jumping to conclusions without sufficient evidence. Sin is deliberately ignoring facts. Sin is abusing drugs and alcohol or eating foods we know are harmful to us. Sin is snapping at friends and loved ones. Sin is coveting wealth and material possessions. Sin is turning a blind eye to the needs of others or the wrongs done by others. The vast majority of the time we know full well what course of action we should take — but don’t.
Paul shares three lessons that he learned in trying to deal with his old sinful desires. (1) Knowledge is not the answer; Paul felt fine as long as he did not understand what the law demanded. When he learned the truth, he knew he was doomed. (2) Self-determination, that is, struggling in one’s own strength, doesn’t succeed; Paul found himself sinning in ways that weren’t even attractive to him. (3) Becoming a Christian does not stamp out all sin and temptation from a person’s life.
Sin. It’s all over. That doesn’t mean that everything we do is completely sinful, but that every dimension of our life — personal, community, national, global — is tainted by Sin.
Psychiatrist and author M. Scott Peck put it this way in an interview with Christianity Today (February 2005):
“I think we’ve got things wrong. The predominant view in our culture is that this is a naturally good world that has somehow been contaminated by evil. It’s much more likely, I think, that this is a naturally evil world that has mysteriously been contaminated by goodness. And that the good bugs are growing and that indeed Satan is being defeated.”
We aren’t in a position to judge whether Satan is being defeated, but we are to take it on faith.
We are left with the question which probably didn’t make the Mental Floss list: “What — or who — will get us out of this mess?” Paul put it this way: “Who will deliver me from this dead corpse?” Then he supplies the answer: “Thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” The only antidote to total depravity is total grace, a grace that comes to us through our faith in Jesus Christ.
Being born again, born from above, born of the Spirit, starts in a moment of faith, but becoming like Christ takes a lifetime. In other of his letters Paul compared Christian growth to a strenuous race or fight. Paul emphasized since the beginning of his letter to the Roman believers that no one in the world is innocent. Further, no one deserves to be saved—neither the pagan who doesn’t know God’s laws nor the Christian or Jew who knows them and tries to keep them. All of us must depend totally on the work of Christ for our salvation. We cannot earn it by our good behavior.
In spite of Paul’s great knowledge of the Jewish faith traditions, and in spite of the often strained construction of his thoughts, Paul is very human. He is baring his soul before his Roman readers. He speaks from personal experience. We know a good bit about Paul, but there is a great deal more that we don’t know about him. Whatever that may be, we can only guess at.
What we do know from Paul is this: Those who are really under grace take sin seriously. Sin is no longer their master, but it is still a powerful adversary. If you and I don’t take sin seriously, we fall into it. And if we don’t take victory seriously, we fail to utilize the Holy Spirit’s help. The depth of Paul’s honesty highlights the magnificent message with which he follows up today’s reading at the beginning of his intensely powerful chapter 8: “So now there isn’t any condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
Jesus Christ rescues us, saves us. It was costly for him, because he died in the “rescue” process. That’s what our salvation is about, that’s what makes it grace. Salvation, rescue, is not in the future. It has already taken place through the work of Jesus Christ as he lived, died, and was raised.
Our business, our vocation, our calling is to live in the truth of our new life. There’s no point waiting to be rescued, thinking that someone will come and save us with only seconds to go before our lives blow up. We are not the fair damsel tied to a railroad track by the dastardly villain of some silent movie melodrama. We have already been saved. There’s no point clinging to old resentments of being slighted, overlooked, cheated. There’s no point refusing to forgive, no point in cheating, lusting, fighting, carping, harping, stealing, lying — any of these things. It’s not who we are!
Who are we? Are we perfect? No way. This is what we are: We are forgiven, not flawless. And Paul knows that there always will be a war going on between the flesh and the spirit.
When I remember who I am, when you remember who you are, then each of us will know what it means to be “saved” and to live the way God wants us to. We are forgiven, not flawless.
Thanks be to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
General Resources:
Homiletics, July 3, 2005,
Life Application Bible Commentary, “Romans.”
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2017 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Jeremiah 20:7-13; Psalm 69:7-18; Matthew 10:24-39
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An extraordinary and compelling crucifix hangs on the wall of the Cathedral College Chapel at the Washington National Cathedral. The observer can’t help but be drawn to this curious piece of art. The crucifix, sculpted from bronze on wood by Gurdon Brewster, depicts an additional figure on that Celtic cross with Jesus. They hang together, facing one another, their arms lovingly wrapped around each other.(1)
It evokes a number of biblical images. There is the father embracing the wayward, penniless, repentant, younger son on his return home. There is Mary desiring to cling to the risen Christ. There is Thomas, with his fingers in the risen Jesus’ wounds, declaring, “My Lord and my God!”
Farther afield biblically there is Ruth clinging to Naomi declaring that she will go with Naomi to Naomi’s homeland and that Naomi’s God will be Ruth’s God. There is the embrace between the estranged brothers Jacob and Esau when they meet after years of separation following Jacob’s youthful deceit. There is Elisha desiring two measures of Elijah’s spirit as the older prophet is whisked away to heaven in the fiery chariot.
Who is the second person clinging to Jesus on the crucifix? It is you, me, anyone, everyone in need of that embrace. Each of us is there on that cross, timelessly wrapped in the arms of the crucified Christ. The title of this crucifix is “Welcome Home.” Good, solid preaching, at its best, always urges every hearer of the word, beginning with the preacher, to allow the embracing arms and heart of God to enfold them. Pastoral preaching is always about “Welcome Home.”
The 20th century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr gave powerful voice to a 1902 aphorism by a Chicago journalist, Finley Peter Dunne, who described the work of newspapers as “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.” Niebuhr used the words about the work of preaching. Sermons need to have two purposes: the first is to comfort those who driven to the margins of society by their own sin as well as societal sin; the second is to afflict with a view to bring them to repentance those who are so insensitive to the working of God’s grace in their own lives that they cause others to spin out of control in their own and society’s sin.
The word that afflicts is prophetic preaching. At its best, prophetic preaching exhorts every participant (again, preacher first) to “Leave Home,” to be driven by the Spirit into the wilderness of today’s world, to wrestle with and defiantly to speak God’s counter-cultural word to the monumental injustices that afflict so many of God’s people and which other of God’s people cannot or will not see.
Thus preaching must be pastoral and prophetic. For all of us are sinners in need to be called out for our sinning against God “in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone,” as Archbishop Thomas Cranmer penned so eloquently in the general confession for the original 16th century Book of Common Prayer, words still used today. Yet even in his prayer, Cranmer concluded with pastoral grace: “In your mercy forgive what we have been, amend what we are, and direct what we shall be, so that we may delight in your will and walk in your ways.”
The prophet is always caught on the prongs of this dual nature of the word. Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh because he knew that God would likely change the divine mind about destroying the people. Oh, how Jonah wanted to revel in that outcome. And when he finally did God’s work, forgiveness was exactly what God provided the sack-clothed and ash-wearing Ninevites. And Jonah was angry.
Jeremiah was as vituperative a prophet as any, yet he too was caught between pastoral grace and prophetic witness. Like Jonah, Jeremiah was angry at God. He prophesied as God commanded and nothing happened. The people didn’t change nor did God smite them. Instead, all his preaching made him a laughingstock, the butt of everyone’s jokes and derision.
Jeremiah had the misfortune of living in a time of great social upheaval. I suspect he would really identify with the events of today’s world. God had given him the unpleasant task of warning the people of Jerusalem that their city will be destroyed. Leading up to today’s reading, Jeremiah has expressed his grief and anger at his task. He doesn’t hold anything back. In very strong language, the prophet accuses God of having conned him into being a prophet. Some translators from the Hebrew temper Jeremiah’s language by using a milder term such as “persuaded” or “enticed.” Either way, the implication here is that Jeremiah found himself helpless before God’s powers of persuasion (or simply God’s power) and he is now suffering the consequences.
Jeremiah is in a no-win situation. He is compelled to speak against Jerusalem and all he gets is abuse. But when he decides to stop speaking, the word of God burns inside of him, and he has no peace then either. To make matters worse, God seems absent, both when Jeremiah speaks and when he remains silent.
The prophet seems so confused that he can’t see straight. In these seven verses he starts with an invocation (which is really a “calling out” of God), follows that with a description of his predicament, a confession of confidence, a petition, and finally a command to praise God. Jeremiah can do this because he has an intimate, personal relationship with God. He also represents the people of God who, whether they realize it or not, are just as confused about how to deal with God.
We can often identify with the prophet. We can’t understand what God is doing. We wonder why God isn’t doing something more. We wonder when God is going to act. We think that God should be doing something different than what we perceive God is doing. We don’t see honest and sincere prayers being answered. God doesn’t seem to be explaining very well what God is doing. God has deceived us with both talk of punishment and talk of grace. We are frustrated to say the least, and upset bordering on anger.
We can’t write Jeremiah off as being a nut case. He is very human. We can’t psychoanalyze him into a nice padded pew in an out of the way chapel. He is front and center at the chancel. He is as earnest as he can get. His lament, his outcry, his harsh words leveled at God, is really an expression of faith! He is being spiritual to the deepest recesses of his soul.
Lament, and even anger at God, is not the opposite of faith in God. Doubt and struggle in the face of vocation do not negate his vocation. The prophet mightily struggles with the realities of his life of faith, but his railing, his questioning, his crying out is not blasphemy. There must be room for that struggle in the life of faith. True faith seethes at times, runs smack up against knotty issues, gets perplexed at the seeming incongruities of faith. A placid, unruffled, unquestioning, unchallenged faith is suspect.
The life of faith is not always serene. It is not quiet submission to the will of God. A faithful life struggles with God and God’s will, as surely as Jacob wrestled with God at Bethel and as Elijah fled in lonely fear following the defeat of Jezebel’s prophets of Baal at Mt. Carmel. It is only through the struggle that we get reassurance that God’s grace is, when all is said and done, truly all sufficient. When Jeremiah is uttering his lament, God does not come to him in a thundercloud, a burning bush, or the rich silence of a morning meditation. God does not seem to respond to Jeremiah at all. Nevertheless, Jeremiah’s lament turns to praise. Even in the midst of his despair and anger, Jeremiah knows that the God who has overpowered him is the sovereign God whose grace is sufficient.
Sing to the Lord,
praise the Lord,
for he has rescued the needy
from the clutches of evildoers.
The trials of faith can be like the hound of heaven thundering down on us, chasing us for all that grace is worth. If we aren’t being chased by questions, doubts, pain, raucous lament, then our faith may be beyond resuscitation. 20th century theologian Paul Tillich, a contemporary of Niebuhr, wrote that grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness, when we walk though the “dark valley of a meaningless and empty life,” when despair destroys all joy and courage.(2)
Jeremiah's prophetic task takes him to the edge of despair. He experiences the silence of God and the derision of his fellow countrymen, even to the point of feeling violated by that same prophetic calling. But when he expresses his pain, he does so in the faith language of his people. His response to pain reminds us that there is room for lament in faith, and indeed for public expression of pain in worship, for the grace of God is sufficient. Welcome home!
General resource: Rachel Sophia Baard, “Proper 7: Jeremiah 20:7-13: Theological Perspective” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), Year A, vol. 3, 146-150.
(1) Cited by Douglass M. Bailey, “Proper 7: Jeremiah 20:7-13: Homiletical Perspective” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), Year A, vol. 3, 147.
(2) Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons 1948) 153ff.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2017 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Matthew 9:35-10:23; Genesis 19:2-8a; Psalm 100
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Years ago a board game was introduced which was call “Oregon Trail.” Players drew cards which gave them events and situations which happened along the 2,170 mile trail during the decades from 1840 to 1870: broken wheels and axles, flooded rivers, extreme temperatures, drought, ambushes, cholera and scurvy, drowning, being run- over, being mauled by wild animals, other accidents, loss of horses, excess weight, loss of food and water.
The people didn’t know what they were getting into. They only knew that they had to do it, that going into the unknown was likely better than remaining in the known. Of the some 400,000 persons that traveled west, an estimated six percent never made it. They were buried in unmarked graves along or under the wagon track.
We have never done anything like that, but each of us embarked on radically new paths of living during our lifetimes: going away to college, getting the first job, getting married, changing employers or careers, finding a retirement location. None of them were as threatening or intense as the Oregon Trail experience, even though the changes may have felt that way. But we went ahead and we survived to tell the tales.
Last December America saluted John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth, the oldest American to go in to space, and the last living original Project Mercury astronaut. Those seven were tapped to go where no human being had ever gone, to break the bonds of earth’s atmosphere. They had close calls, but they made it. The ultimate dangers were fully realized during Gemini, Apollo, and Space Shuttle missions.
A new class of astronauts was announced recently. They will go to the International Space Station and maybe farther. In the 2015 movie, The Martian, Matt Damon plays a scientist who gets stranded on Mars during the first manned mission to the red planet. He uses his training, his wits, and a lot of perseverance to survive while his friends work to bring him back to Earth.
Imagine, however, if the mission had been to go to Mars with no intention of ever coming back. Imagine leaving behind everything and everyone you’ve ever known, much as the Oregon Trail pioneers did 175 years ago, to go to a planet where you’ll spend the rest of your life (and surely death) in a hostile environment with nothing but red rocks and dust to look at.
That idea has been proposed by a Dutch nonprofit organization called Mars One. The idea is to put four people on Mars as an initial colony in the year 2030, followed by new crews every two years. Mars will be their permanent home where they’ll live, work, and study the planet.
You would think it would be tough to get people to sign up for such a one-way mission, but when the search for astronauts began in 2013, more than 200,000 applicants expressed their desire to go where no one has gone and from where no one will return.
Mars One has culled the applicants down to 100 people, split evenly between male and female, and they range from doctors to unemployed people in their 20s. The most important qualification for candidates is their perceived ability to handle living on a big planet with just a few other people and their acceptance of the fact that they will never return to Earth. Mars One can teach them skills like engineering, farming and medicine, but it can’t teach determination, perseverance, and the ability to risk. As one the lucky 100 says, “I would probably die on Earth if I stayed here, too.” I doubt if any of us would sign up for Mars One, even in our reckless, carefree, younger days.
We should be careful saying, “No way.” Jesus offers us a very similar sort of one-way mission, not to leave this world behind, but rather to venture into it for the purpose of colonizing it as citizens of the kingdom of God. We don’t leave inner space, but infiltrate it fully. But like a one-way ticket to Mars, it’s also an extremely dangerous mission from which there may be no return. It’s a mission that could cost us everything.
Like SpaceX’s Elon Musk, Jesus is the visionary for this mission and demonstrates to his potential crew how it would work. Matthew reported that “Jesus traveled among all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, announcing the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every sickness.” The crowds who came to Jesus were living in an unsustainable environment, “troubled and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” Israel's rulers, both kings and religious leaders, had failed them, leaving them longing for a new spiritual home.
Jesus pointed to this new future home — a home that was breaking into the present even as he spoke his teaching on the kingdom of God. He called this home the rule of God on the earth. God would “harvest” the faithful and enroll them within the realm of God’s Rule. But while the “harvest” was plentiful and the people ripe for this new world to break in, the number of initial crew members available for the journey would be small. Jesus put out a call to “plead with the Lord of the harvest to send out workers for his harvest.” It was, and is, a prayer and a call that can lead to receiving a one-way ticket.
Matthew lists the “Kingdom Twelve,” a ragtag group including simple fishermen, a tax collector, a revolutionary, a loudmouth, and a shifty betrayer. Matthew uses the word “apostles” for them, meaning that they are sent, dispatched, commissioned, charged with the responsibility to share the same news Jesus has been spreading: God’s rule is near now!
Yes, they will need further training, and they will get it. Who of us ever knew everything we needed to know for job we were tasked to do. On-the-job training is the rule, not the exception. They are not free-lancers. They have a specific target: “the lost sheep, the people of Israel,” not Gentiles or Samaritans. Others will see to them later. And they have a specific mission: announce that “the kingdom of heaven has come near.” They were to do that not only through words, but also through the specific actions that Jesus himself had demonstrated and given them authority to do themselves: curing the sick and casting out demons.
NASA plans, plans, and plans again for the sustainability of every mission they do. Jesus told the apostles up front that they will live off of whatever is provided for them. Unlike the Oregon Trail folks who took too much, they are to take nothing but the clothes on their backs. Being completely dependent on strangers is Jesus’ way of saying that they will be fully dependent on God to supply their needs. They will enter both welcoming and hostile environments and need to deal with both.
The sent ones will also need a realistic picture of their future: their mission will be dangerous. Accompanying Jesus will give them a taste of that danger. They will go as “sheep among wolves.” They will face hostility from both religious and civil authorities, alienation and separation from their families, and presumed guilt by being associated with Jesus. But they are not to fear because God will be with them.
You and I also have been called into this one-way mission. That’s what being the church of Jesus Christ is all about. Unfortunately it is too easy for us to see the church as a safe and secure place from which to see the world and its darkness from a distance. Jesus has given us the church as a training ground and launching pad for his mission in the world. We have to wrestle with the same questions as the first apostles did.
Who is our target? Who are the specific people in our community to whom Jesus is sending us? What are we willing to risk in order to reach them?
What is our goal? Are we proclaiming the good news of God’s kingdom, both present and future, through both our words and our actions? Where are we working to confront evil in our community? How are we participating in the healing of the bodies and souls of our neighbors?
What is our sustainability plan? Are we hoarding resources as a means of sustaining the church as an institution, or are we depending on God for our daily bread while sharing our resources with others in need? Are we offering peace to our neighbors and to the strangers we encounter, or are we offering condemnation and fear?
What are we willing to risk? Are we willing to be at odds with the culture around us because of our faith in Christ? Are we willing to risk ridicule and persecution because we proclaim Christ and minister in ways that reflect his kingdom? Are we willing to stand for what is right, what is just, and what is true when the world seeks to conform us to its evil ways?
Accepting the Jesus mission is a one-way ticket. Jesus only promised his disciples a cross, which was and is the one-way journey from which the only return is resurrection. As Jesus put it, “Those who don’t pick up their crosses and follow me aren’t worthy of me. Those who find their lives will lose them, and those who lose their lives because of me will find them” (Matthew 10:38-39).
There is no risk more worth it than the mission of the kingdom! Will you accept the one-way ticket Jesus offers? Will you come and follow him?
General Resource: Homiletics, June 18, 2017
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2017 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Numbers 11:24-29; John 7:37-39; Acts 2:1-21
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Many believers think of the Spirit as a late arrival, an afterthought, or perhaps, to use a movie metaphor, a sequel to the original story. It’s easy enough to do. The Spirit doesn’t arrive until chapter two of Acts, after all the goings and comings, dyings and risings of the gospels. Jesus mentions the Spirit, usually with a code-worded alias: comforter, advocate, companion, counselor. But there were no real guarantees that the Spirit would actually show up.
In John’s great gospel prologue, it’s a two-person show. Word and God. There is no mention of a Spirit. Light is a significant image, but that is synonymous with Word. Word is Light. Still no report of the Spirit.
In the opening verses of Genesis, we have a mention of the Spirit. The Spirit of God – or “wind of God,” as our sanctuary Bibles and the New Revised Standard Version translate it – is right there with God in the beginning, seeming to be the same kind of co-agent of creation as John describes the Word. But in Genesis it is again a two-person operation. There is no mention of the Son of God, the Son of Man, the Human One, Christ, Messiah, or Anointed One.
This could be the lead-in to a sermon on the Holy Trinity, but that’s the topic for next week. Today – the Holy Spirit’s day – is focused on the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not a Johnny or Janie come lately. The Spirit is as old as scripture, as old as creation. And if we didn’t have John’s attestation about the Word and creation, we could think of Jesus as the newbie in God’s group. Just so you don’t get that impression, remember that Jesus was born of flesh and Spirit in the fullness of time, God’s time. When the need was the greatest, then God sent the Son, as John says, “not to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17).
The Spirit lurks through much of the Hebrew scriptures. One of the places where its presence is more evident is the episode I just read from the Book of Numbers.
The movement of all the Hebrews out of Egypt must have been a logistical nightmare. If the numbers which scripture gives are accurate and not just story-telling methods of saying there were a “lot of people,” moving that many people over long distances would have made the D-Day invasion of France look simple, which it wasn’t. Moving people and herds would have been akin to rush hour in Los Angeles or Chicago or Washington DC. You know how traffic moves when there is a tie up. You move a car length or two for no apparent reason other than the space opens up. It is a chain of movings. Everyone doesn’t move at the same time. First one, then the next all down the line. It’s like the rippling of waves.
So it would have been with the Hebrews leaving the edge of the Reed Sea and moving through the years of wandering in Sinai. When the front of the line got to a stopping place, the back may not have started yet.
No wonder the people were cranky and cantankerous. And that didn’t put Moses in the best of humor when he was dealing with God. Just before the account I read earlier, Moses tells God,
“The people I’m with are six hundred thousand on foot and you’re saying, ‘I will give them meat, and they will eat for a month.’ Can flocks and herds be found and slaughtered for them? Or can all the fish in the sea be found and caught for them?” The Lord said to Moses, “Is the Lord’s power too weak? Now you will see whether my word will come true for you or not.” (Numbers 11:21-23)
At God’s direction Moses assembles a cadre of seventy men to encircle the Tent of Meeting which contained the Ark or Covenant Chest. The Lord descended in the cloud distributed to the seventy some of the Spirit which he had previously placed on Moses. And they all prophesied at once for one time only.
But were there were seventy men surrounding the Meeting Tent? The text is not absolutely clear. At first it suggests that all seventy were there, but then it goes on to say that two had stayed home, Eldad and Medad. Assuming that they were numbered in the seventy, we don’t know why they weren’t there. Had they not gotten the memo? Did they not know they were short-listed for this particular activity? Or did they know about it and didn’t care about it or wanted no part of it? Were they hiding? Were they trying to avoid the Spirit?
It didn’t work. The Spirit found them and they went to prophesying inside the camp rather than beyond it at the Meeting Tent. And not only did the Spirit catch and start them prophesying, they didn’t stop, like the others did. They kept it up.
We wouldn’t know about this episode if someone hadn’t been so taken aback by the activity of the two. They ran and told Moses. Joshua, Moses’ assistant, was so upset at the report that he wanted Moses to stop Eldad and Medad. He may have thought that the two were stealing Moses’ power, that they had caught the Spirit without authorization. After all, they hadn’t been to the gathering at the Meeting Tent.
For someone who would later blow trumpets to bring down a walled fortress at Jericho, it seems like this younger Joshua was trying to build a wall to keep God’s Spirit from getting into too many people without an orderly process. After all the gift of the Spirit on the men encircling the Meeting Tent was of limited duration for a set number of people. If Eldad and Medad were supposed to be there and weren’t, then it was their loss. The Spirit shouldn’t have gone and found them.
If all seventy men were standing around the Meeting Tent, then the Spirit got to seventy plus two. Can God’s Spirit do that? Does the Spirit only come in limited quantities? I think we know the answer to that. “The Lord said to Moses, ‘Is the Lord’s power too weak? Now you will see whether my word will come true for you or not.’”
A lot of us battle with the same queasiness that inflicted Joshua when he thought about the Lord giving out more Spirit than has been promised, particularly when that Spirit is given to cantankerous, unpredictable, and often ungrateful people. How can we control such gifts if we cannot count and register them or, at least, their recipients? And while the sixty-eight or seventy got the prescribed 15 minutes of Spirit time, Eldad and Medad got more. It’s unfair. Whoever put this story down in ink or edited it is worried about an oversupply of the Spirit.
I think that Moses would be upset if he thought that people were thinking that the Spirit should be given in limited amounts to elite groups of people. He said as much to Joshua, “If only all the Lord’s people were prophets with the Lord placing his spirit on them!”
There are lots of threads in this story.
1. We can’t tell God to whom to give or not give the Spirit.
2. We can’t tell God how long the Spirit should rest on anyone who receives it.
3. We can’t tell God where or when to give the Spirit.
4. God has more than enough Spirit to go around.
5. We can run from the Spirit, but we can’t hide.
While all these take-aways are valuable, I think that last one is the most practical for us. Yes, we wrestle with the tendency to tell God what to do and how to do it. That’s part of our humanness handed down from the first parents once they took on God’s word and doubted it.
Not being able to hide from the Spirit is what really messes us up. Except when life is going sour, we would really rather have God stay away from us. We are afraid of being found. Being found limits us, we think. We want freedom but no responsibility. We want God’s largess, but we don’t want to be obligated. We don’t want to hear God’s clarion call to serve in ways that challenge life-long behaviors and thinking, We don’t want to have to leave our zones of comfort – physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual. We want Christ’s salvation, but we don’t want the purpose for which we were saved, that is to share it with others and to give it away to others who respond to different pictures, words, music, ideas than we do.
So we try to dodge the Spirit, perhaps like Eldad and Medad may have, They didn’t get a little bit of Spirit, they got a lot. And a lot is what we are afraid of. God can have all the Spirit God wants and give it out anyway God wants. Just don’t give us too much. Pentecost is about God giving us more Spirit than we either want or know what to do with. That’s God’s pleasure.
This table tells us of God’s lavish gift of grace. Jesus didn’t die a little for us, a breadcrumb’s worth and thimbleful’s amount. He died all the way. He rose all the way. He reigns all the way. He pours out the Spirit all the way. So don’t dodge the Spirit.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2017 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
1 Peter 3:13-22; Acts 17:15-31; Psalm 66:8-20; John 14:15-21
Who of us hasn’t used ketchup? There’s hardly a restaurant of modest presentation that doesn’t already have ketchup on the table or offers it with the meal. We use it on eggs and fries, burgers and wieners. My mother had a friend who put it on watermelon. The thicker the ketchup the better. As one ketchup jingle years ago sang, “Anticipation.”
Ketchup has a history, the early part of which is not nice. Some coal tar was added to make it redder. Sanitary conditions around its preparation and preservation often made it all the more toxic. As late at the turn of the 20th century 90 percent of commercial ketchup was found to have ingredients which were injurious to health. That’s makes today’s Big Macs positively healthy.
Almost a century and a half ago Henry J. Heinz was committed to bottling pure unsullied ketchup. He pioneered sanitary conditions for making ketchup and led the way for training his employees in health and wellness. His efforts resulted in a perfect environment for making a ketchup that would not kill you. It was so good that it became a staple on American dinner tables.
Heinz was so focused on purity and transparency that he refused to bottle his ketchup in the opaque brown bottles that were common at the time. He used clear glass bottles as a way of demonstrating the product’s purity to the public. Heinz even opened his factory to 30,000 visitors a year so they could see that the company had nothing to hide. “It’s always safe to buy the products of an establishment that keeps its doors open,” he once wrote. By 1906, Heinz was selling five million bottles of preservative-free ketchup every year.
Henry Heinz built a lasting legacy based on transparency, earning the trust of consumers because he focused on purity and quality and hid nothing from them. That clear, quality bottle of ketchup, whether it’s the traditional glass design or the squeeze bottle, is still something that people trust well enough to take for granted, even in the red plastic bottles now sold. The transparent character of H. J. Heinz is still reflected in every one of his products since after his death in 1919.
Heinz made better ketchup and he wanted to make the world a better place. Are we as “zealous for good,” as Peter puts it in this week's reading? Are we living lives that are equally transparent, “because of righteousness,” no matter what it might cost us? Are we clear spiritual bottles which allow everyone who sees us to know exactly what’s inside us?
Distress and persecution for their faith were the order of the day for the people who received the Peter letters. They lived in a world where greed and fear and lust for power produced all manner of hidden and open agendas and schemes to beat down social and political threats. The righteousness and good works of Christians were perceived as a threat to the extractive system of the economy and rule which enriched the already rich and empowered at the expense of the already poor and disenfranchised.
Rather than retaliate or go into hiding, Peter encouraged the believers to live lives of purity in the midst of suffering, “maintaining a good conscience ... so that those who malign your good lifestyle in Christ may be ashamed when they slander you.” Peter urged, “Happy are you even if you suffer because of righteousness.” For Peter, the real test of the Christian life was the ability to stay pure and transparent, even when others were trying to demean your spirit and pollute your witness. Suffering is inevitable in the Christian life. Peter might go so far as to say that if we aren’t suffering because of our faith in Christ, we have given into or been absorbed by the culture around us. We are opaque bottles of toxic lives. What matters is how we react to the suffering that the world around us creates.
When the world pounds us, what comes out? Paul wrote the Roman believers (5:3), that “trouble produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” Jesus said that we should rejoice when we suffer, because it means that we are representing him and we are coming closer to the kingdom (Matthew 5:10-11). Somehow, in a counter-intuitive way, suffering can wind up producing the best in us.
We only need to look at a ketchup bottle to be reminded of this. We like thick ketchup, but then we get frustrated having to wait for it to make up its mind to come out of the bottle. The classic glass Heinz bottle doesn’t make it easy to pour out the ketchup. The thick tomato mixture is strengthened with xanthan gum, which makes it a “non-Newtonian fluid,” that is, one which changes its viscosity or flow rate under stress. That’s why you have to whack a bottle of ketchup repeatedly to get it to come out. The trick is to do it the right way. Pounding on the bottom of the bottle only causes the viscosity of the ketchup at the mouth of the bottle to get thicker. Instead of releasing the pent-up ketchup, we block it in. Instead, as every Pittsburgher knows, the way you get the ketchup to transform into free flowing liquid is to tap on the top of the bottle or, even more ideally, to tap two fingers on the raised “57” numbers on the bottle's neck. That’s the force that produces the good stuff.
The pounding of persecution and suffering can produce the same effect in us. It can either cause us to stiffen, or it can trigger a flow of the fruit of the Spirit in us that can season the world. Just as the spice and herb rack offer all kinds of possibilities, so do Spirit’s fruit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22).
Peter says that this is exactly what happened with Jesus, who suffered for our sins on the cross and yet produced the effect of bringing people to God. When we “regard Christ as holy” in our hearts and respond to the imposition of trouble in our lives by giving an account of this hope in Christ that is within us with “respectful humility,” we produce the kind of fruit that is transparently clear in conscience, and pure in heart, life and motive, the kind that will bring shame upon those who persecute us.
Jesus extended his own fruitfulness to the “spirits in prison,” those people who were disobedient in the days of Noah. Scholars debate what Peter actually meant here, but the main thrust of these verses is about baptism, which is the ultimate mark of purity, transparency and cleanliness for the Christian. As God saved Noah and his family “through water” during the days of the flood, so God saves us through baptism into the death and resurrection of Christ.
It’s a cleansing that goes much deeper than the removal of the dirt and crud that defiles the body and makes even things like ketchup to be lethal. Instead, it’s a cleansing that sterilizes and protects us from the long-term effects of death. Baptism reminds us that we are people who belong to Jesus and that we are to witness transparently to him in our conduct, our character, and even in our suffering.
Baptism is a sign and seal of salvation, But it is also a solemn oath made before God. The flood came as a judgment upon evil people, but for Noah it brought deliverance from their mockery and sin, ushering him into a new life. In baptism, believers identify with Jesus Christ, who separates us from the lost and gives us new life. Baptism is a sign of the new covenant, identifying the person baptized with the people of God and the community of Christ. Neither the ceremony, the water, or the removal of dirt from the body – the spiritual cleansing – saves us.
The water of baptism does not “wash away sin” literally. Baptism is the outward symbol of the inner transformation that happens in the hearts of those who believe. So the pouring of the water into the font as part of our words of confession and forgiveness is a visual reminder of what Christ has done for us.
What kind of suffering has been pounding at you these days? How can you allow Jesus to help you make it fruitful? In what ways are you living out your baptism, being a transparent witness for Christ in the world? As Jesus said, the true people of God will be known by their fruit, by what they produce. Are we presenting ourselves to the world as an opaque bottle of a vile and potentially lethal potion concocted of hatred, sin, and revenge?
Or, are we pure, inviting, and transparent? Does our living invite the world to see the vision of the one who loves us, cares for us and employs us?
The next time you pick up a bottle of Heinz ketchup and start to become impatient with the time it takes to receive its goodness, and prepare to pound the red delight out of it, remember where it came from. And remember where you came from, that Christ has made you a pure, transparent bottle of Spirit-filled joy to humbly strike fear and shame into the world that would declare you toxic.
General Resources:
“Consider the Ketchup Bottle,” Homiletics, May 25, 2014.
Life Application Bible Commentary, 1 Peter 3:13-22.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2017 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
