There's Still More (John 20:1-18)

Sermon as preached at Lambs and Evington UMC on 4/20/14

Image Courtesy of Vanderbilt Divinity Library

Has anyone seen a crucifix before A crucifix, , is simply a cross that still has the image of Jesus hanging on the cross.  For Christians it is a reminder of the gruesome way in which Jesus Christ was killed, and at the same time it is a reminder of the great love that God has for us, that Christ was willing to die on behalf of our sins. The crucifix also has a lot of  deep theological significance to it as well. It reminds us that God came to Earth as human for our sins. It also reminds us just as we have been talking about throughout Lent, that we as humans are sinful. That we have rebelled against God’s love, and that our nature is one that is now self-serving rather than God serving. Most of all the crucifix reminds us of what we as Christians honor as Good Fríday, the day in which Jesus Christ died on a cross, died for our guilt of sin, and died so that through grace we may be reconciled with God. There is in fact good news in Good Friday. As we have said we are able to celebrate the forgiveness of sins, we are able to marvel at the amazing love of Christ, that our God would die for us.  And yet far too often in Christianity the story seems to end there, we tend to leave Christ up on the cross, or at least let him rest in his grave. While the crucifix may be more common in Catholic churches, the emphasis of Jesus on the cross is quite common in many Protestant churches. Just look at some of the hymns that we love to sing.  “On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross the emblem of suffering and shame; and I love that old cross where the dearest and best for a world of lost sinners was slain.” or               “Christ our Redeemer died on the cross, Died for the sinner, paid all his due; All who receive Him need never fear, Yes, He will pass, will pass over you.When I see the blood, when I see the blood, When I see the blood, I will pass, I will pass over you.”     Or even   Jesus paid it all, All to Him I owe; Sin had left a crimson stain, He washed. it white as snow.”    

            While the crucifixion of Christ is certainly important to us as Christians, far too often we focus so much on Jesus’s death that we act as though the story ends there. We become like the disciples and friends of Jesus on that Holy Saturday; Appreciating what Jesus has done for us, but heartbroken at his death. We rejoice at the forgiveness of our sins,  but begin to ask ourselves what now?  This is how we find the disciples and Mary Magdalene in our scripture for today. It is now the third day and Mary is going to the tomb of Jesus.  When she gets there she realizes that the boulder in front of the tomb has been rolled away and so she runs back to the disciples in a panic and exclaims, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him."   Peter and the beloved disciple respond to Mary and the three dash off back to the tomb. The beloved disciple gets there first he looks into the tomb and sees nothing but the linen wrapping lying there.  Peter then arrives and in typical Peter fashion he boldly enters into the tomb. As he enters he see thes linen just like the other disciple had noticed, but he also found the cloth that had been on Jesus’s head rolled up in a place by itself. At that moment the beloved disciple got it. Scripture tells us, Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed.”  He started to piece things together in his mind.  At first they had suspected that grave robbers had taken the body, but grave robbers wouldn’t have taken the cloth and linens off of the body and rolled it all up nice and neat, no they would have just taken the body.  You can imagine at that moment in the mind of the beloved disciple things were falling into place like at the end of a good mystery book where all of the clues finally seem to make sense. I imagine the words of Jesus’s farewell flashed in his head, “Very truly, I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice; you will have pain, but your pain will turn into joy. ²¹ When a woman is in labor, she has pain, because her hour has come. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world. ²² So you have pain now; but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”  This is what Jesus was talking about, we have experienced the pain of his death, we have lost Jesus but he says we will see him again. The body is gone, he wasn’t being figurative, Jesus is risen, Jesus is Alive! Though the beloved disciple figures it out, for some reason he doesn’t tell it to the others. All we have in our scripture is that he and Peter return home while Mary remains and weeps.

            We are then left alone in our story with Mary as she weeps at the tomb.  She looks into the tomb for herself and Lo and behold she sees two angels sitting at where the head and feet of Jesus had been. The angels ask her, “Woman, why are you weeping?  Once again Mary answers with her words of heartache and desperation, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.”  Once again Mary sees the empty tomb not as a sign of hope but as a sign of loss, not as a victory over death,  but as some cruel and harsh action done by someone else to further rub in the pain of losing someone she so deeply loved. Even angels cannot shift Mary’s focus away from the cross and towards the good news of the tomb.

             In fact, even Jesus himself is not recognized by Mary.  We are told in our scripture that Jesus approaches Mary as she is looking into the tomb, Mary turns around and does not recognize him, she thinks he is just the gardener. For a second there actually seems to be a little bit of hope in Mary’s voice,  Mary starts to think maybe this guy saw who took him, or better yet maybe he is the one who took the body. She says, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Mary so desperately wants closure,  she understandably wants to put an end to this drama and heartache of the past few days. She just wants to find the body so that she can return the body to the tomb, so that she can move on in peace, so that it will finally all be over. But the Easter story is not about finality, it is not about embracing  Jesus’s death,  Easter is a celebration that Jesus Christ is risen!  On Easter we do not cling to the cross, we rejoice at the empty tomb. 

The power of this truth was finally realized in our scripture through the power of just one word, “Mary.” Mary, Jesus calls Mary by name, finally Mary recognizes who it is that is standing before her, finally she realizes that the empty tomb is not bad news at all, but rather a reason to reason to rejoice. Finally she recognizes that Jesus Christ is alive, and so she cries outs, “Rabbouni!”  Everything changes for Mary with that one word from Jesus, “Mary,” her name.  Being called by name is something special,  it speaks to a recognition of who you are, but much deeper than that it speaks to a relationship that you have.  For Mary, it brings back all of those feelings and memories that she thought she had lost forever, it was a sound that probably sounded much like an echo in her memory of the times she spent with Jesus, the time she thought she lost, and yet here it is loud and clear, that Jesus is still with her, that Jesus had conquered sin and death; that the Lord has risen.

            And so it is for this reason, at least for Protestants, that simply the cross, not the crucifix has become such a powerful statement for our faith.  This does not diminish the significance of the crucifix, of Jesus hanging on the cross. None of this could have happened without his death on a cross.  Our guilt of sin was forgiven on that cross, our hearts were ransomed from the clutches of evil, and yet that’s not the end of the story, as we know there’s still more. We depict a cross without the crucified Lord because we recognize that Jesus no longer hangs on that cross, Jesus no longer lays in his tomb, we depict a cross without the crucified Lord because Jesus is not dead, he has risen!  We celebrate because Jesus has conquered sin and death. Just when it looks as though evil had won, just when it looks as though God incarnate would fall victim to the same fate that awaits all humans, Jesus defies death. It’s not that Jesus couldn’t die, Jesus who was fully human died just like anyone else, but Jesus proved that death had no hold over him, that death wasn’t the end, that through God even in death there is new life.  Easter morning brings us the good news that death is not the end, just as sin was conquered on the cross, death was conquered in the resurrection, and we loved ones of Christ, we as a people called by name at our baptism, have the hope of being freed from the bondage of sin and death. This is good news on Easter morning,    and yet there is still more.

            After  Mary finally realizes who it is that she is talking to, after her cries of joy had died down Jesus shocks Mary once again. He says, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, 'I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'"  Do not hold on to me, this probably has to be the hardest words for Mary to hear. She thought she had lost her Lord,  now finally she just felt the joy of seeing him again, knowing that he is risen, and now he is telling Mary not to hold on to him. It just doesn’t seem fair for her, that he should once again leave, but as Jesus tells her, I am ascending to my father and your Father, to my God and your God.  This too is crucial in faith as Christians.   Jesus Christ died on the cross, he rose again from the grave, but Christ will not die again. No Christ will ascend into heaven to be at the right hand of God the Father.  While for Mary this may sound like horrible news, the truth is for the world it is great news, in fact it is the greatest news of Easter. That Christ is risen, that Christ has not and will not die. That means that Christ is alive, yes Christ is alive even today.  That Jesus truly is Lord, and reigns in heaven and on Earth. The good news for us as Christians when we proclaim on Easter that Christ is Risen, is the fact that he is still risen today. That we are able to be in relationship with him, he is able to guide us, watch us, love us, even today.

            But still as we sit here gathered on Easter morning, we may be wondering why is this celebration of Easter so important?  We know we are supposed to gather here with our family of and friends, we know that this is one of the most important if not the most important Christian holiday, but we may be wondering what does an empty tomb, what does the Resurrection have anything to do with my life? The answer is everything.  In a world full of pain and heartbreak, in this dog eat dog world where it seems as though the bottom line is more important than the poverty line, in a world where the politicians, families, and even the church can be so easily divided, in a world in which we mourn the loss of loved ones that seem to leave us far too soon, in a world like this it is easy to lose hope. It is easy to look around at the world and think that evil has won, that the world is destined for destruction, and that our lives here on Earth have no real meaning, But the good news of Easter is that Christ has won. 

            Christ died, but rose again conquering sin and death, not just for himself but for all of creation. That means for us death is not the end, death is just a continuance into the eternal life that Christ offers us through his resurrection.  Christ victory of death also means that Christ is not dead Christ is risen! When Christ tells Mary not to hold on to him, it means that there is still more in store for this world.  That some two thousand years later Christ is still alive and offering us through the power of the Holy Spirit the same love, the same grace he offered the world centuries before. And it means that long after we have passed and we rest in peace with the Lord, Jesus will still be with humanity, still loving, still extending his grace.  What it means is that Jesus Christ truly is Lord, he is king. That through his life death and resurrection and ascension, Jesus established his Kingdom on Earth and will work with us here on Earth until that Kingdom is fully arrived.  This means our lives do have purpose, we are kingdom builders, we are servants of the Lord. We are helping Christ to change the world and fully establish the kingdom of God.  You see the resurrection gives us hope. It first gives us hope that we too shall not die. That though our bodies will eventually fail us, that we have eternal life through the one who conquered death. But the resurrection also gives us hope that this world that can so often get us down, will one day be made new through a Christ that lives and reigns with God the Father, and the we, as insignificant as we me sometimes feel, have a part in that transformation.  The good news of Easter is that Jesus did not just die for our sins, that he is not someone who we memorialize as being gone forever, but that Jesus Christ is Risen, Alleluia, Jesus Christ is Risen, Alleluia, Jesus Christ  is Risen Alleluia!

           

           

Saying it Right, Getting it Wrong (Matthew 21:1-11)

Sermon as preached at Lambs UMC on 4/13/14

Image courtesy of Vanderbilt Library

God be with you. This is a simple yet powerful phrase that we as Christians often use as we depart from or as we leave worship. There is even a great hymn of dismissal that many of you probably know that is based around this phrase. “God be with you till we meet again;
By His counsels guide, uphold you, With His sheep securely fold you; God be with you till we meet again.”  The phrase just speaks to our hearts and to our souls, that God will be with us, watching us, guiding us, loving us until we meet again. Over time this phrase has lost much of its power, it has lost much of its meaning, so much so that most of us probably use this phrase on a daily basis without knowing it.  Not me, you may say, If I were to say God be with you I would surely know I was saying it, I wouldn’t just throw that phrase around for nothing.  But I ask you, when is that time you said goodbye to someone? It probably wasn’t that long ago was it? Well the last time you said goodbye,  you were in fact saying God be with you, and you probably didn’t even know it. This phrase God be with you used to be such a common phrase for departing that over time it morphed from saying God be with, into a brand new word, goodbye. Now that word is used so often that for most of us there is no religious connotation to it; it has simply become a meaningless word.  We even shorten the word to bye, which we all know what it means, but when we say bye we are in essence saying “be with you;”  which seems to make no sense at all.  Just as the phrase “God be with you” had become so commonplace that it morphed into a word that lost its meaning altogether; So too was the meaning of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem lost on most of the crowd gathered there. They said all the right things, they did all the right things, but we know the story, and we know that this triumphal entry into Jerusalem continues on to Christ’s death, we know that Palm Sunday leads us right into Good Friday.  How could a crowd that seemed to get it so right, get it so wrong?  What was it that the people of Jerusalem were missing?

            As we begin to look at our story for today it is obvious that the importance of this entry is not lost Jesus, and is not lost on Matthew as he records what happened.  Jesus is on the outskirts of Jerusalem, the holy city, about to enter in, but Jesus recognizes that this moment is special. For so long the people of Israel have been waiting for their Messiah, for so long they have been waiting for their new King;  one who would protect them from their enemies, one that would restore justice to the land, one that would bring peace to the land. In many of the prophets in the old testament prophesy about the day in which this Messiah would.  For example we find in Zechariah chapter 9, “Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion! Shout, Daughter Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. I will take away the chariots from Ephraim, and the warhorses from Jerusalem, and the battle bow will be broken. He will proclaim peace to the nations. His rule will extend from sea to sea and from the River to the ends of the earth.”  And now here is the Messiah, God incarnate, about to enter into the holy city, just as was prophesied by the prophets of old, and so Jesus understanding the significance of this moment gives the people a sign of who he truly is.

            He sends two of his disciples before him and tells them that they will find a donkey and a colt tied up. He tells them to take it and bring it back, and that if anyone asks what they are doing, that they should tell them that the Lord needs it.  The disciples do just that,  they bring the donkey and colt back, and Jesus enters into Jerusalem riding on them.  Jesus fulfills the prophecy that we just heard from Zechariah, and in doing so Jesus is proclaiming to the world that he is the Messiah. He is proclaiming that he has come to bring peace to the world, that he comes on a  donkey and not a war horse because the Lord reigns with humility not with an iron fist. The Messiah has arrived.

            All signs point to the fact that the people of Jerusalem get it, that they understand the importance of this amazing event that is happening before their eyes. The crowd gives Jesus the royal treatment as he enters into the city. The gather in the road, they lay their coats down road as he comes by, and they wave palm branches and lay them down in the road as well. As all of this is going on they celebrate Jesus,  saying, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!" As the crowd grows others from the city come out and when asked who is this? They respond, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.”  It seems as though if the people of Jerusalem ever got it right it was here on this triumphal entry. They are praising Jesus and shouting Hosanna, Hosanna, and yet not even a week later these shouts of Hosanna have turned into the cries, “Crucify him.” What happened, what went wrong, when everything seemed to be right?

            Do I have the absolute answer to how the people could go from singing Hosanna one day to yelling crucify him less than a week later?  No, none of us can really know what was happening in the minds of those inhabitants of Jerusalem, but I can imagine some of what may have been the cause. As we know, this moment comes at the end of Jesus’s ministry. That means that word of those miracles that he has performed, the teachings of love and justice, his confrontations with some of those in power has probably spread around the city.  Now here comes this man,  this legend, riding into the city for all to see.  As he approaches on a donkey I’m sure that there are some that realize the significance of this moment and so that start to praise him. Others see the commotion, and having heard the stories of Jesus, join in, maybe hoping to see some miracle performed in front of their own eyes. The crowd continues to grow and grow, people of the city start asking,  “ Who is this?”  And those present answer, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.” You know, the one we’ve all been hearing about. Suddenly you can imagine that this moment of praise has become much more like The Beatles invasion, with all of the screaming girls , and less like worship. What about their praises of Hosanna you may ask, doesn’t that show their worshipful manner?  But what does Hosanna really mean? Just like us, this word Hosanna is one that the Jewish people have heard over and over again. It comes from Psalm 118 and literally means, “Save us, we beseech thee O Lord.”  Save us, we beseech, or in other words we urgently ask O’ Lord that you save us. These are words of desperation, words of great turmoil and fear. These are words  that recognize our own sin, recognize our need for a savior, they are words appropriate for the Messiah, and yet as Jesus rides in the words are said with joy and jubilation, not with urgency and desperation. You see by the time of Jesus the word Hosanna had lost its meaning, much like our word goodbye, and Hosanna simply became nothing more than a “religious hurrah”[1] like an Amen or and Alleluia to something that we like.

            What is so painful about this Palm Sunday story is that the people of Jerusalem are so close to getting it right, but still get it so wrong.  They celebrate the arrival of the Messiah into the holy city, the praise him with palm branches and by laying their coats on the road before him. They even cry Hosanna, Save us, O Lord we beseech thee.  Words as we have said that are so fitting for the Messiah, the one who is to come to restore Israel to its glory, the one who has come to bring peace and justice to the land,  the one who has come to bring good news to the poor, set the prisoners free, to restore sight to the blind, and to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the  year of the Lord’s favor. This is the very person we should be crying out to, save us, save us, and yet while the people Jerusalem say it all right, they get it all wrong. Their words are correct but hollow. Some praise the Lord out of habbit, some praise the Lord for the thrill of that exciting day, and so it is no wonder then how these same people later that week can once again get exciting about a commotion in town. That this man Jesus has been declared a heretic and a leader of an insurrection and so once again caught up in the moment those shouts of Hosanna turn to shouts of crucify him.

            Let us not be quick to judge the people of Jerusalem, thinking that we are so much better than them. We too often say the right things while getting it all wrong.  Each week we proclaim, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and Earth. And in Jesus Christ his only son our Lord” but how often have we stopped to think about what we mean when we call Jesus Lord?  I mean we say it all the time, Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, but do we really know what we are saying? Do we really live out what we are saying. A Lord is a master. It is the person in which we work for, who owns everything. That means we own nothing, everything we have is the Lord’s. It means we are not our own bosses, but live by the Lord’s commands. Do we really live this way?  If we do why do we view our money as my paycheck, my income, my money, my house, my land, when in fact it all belongs to God?  Why do we so often put what we want over the needs of others, if all of us are made in the image of God?  Just like the people of Jerusalem,  we often proclaim one thing and live another. We say it right, but it get it wrong.  Hosanna, Save us, we beseech thee O Lord.

            Even as this pivotal event of Easter approaches, the event that is at the very heart of our beliefs, how often do we say what it is all about, and yet not live it.  We say that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, and yet act as though we have no sins for Jesus to save us from. We act as though Jesus is saving all the other “bad” people in the world. We act as though we are not broken, as though we have already reached Christian perfection, as if our hearts are already attuned with the Lord’s. We act as though we don’t need saving.  Hosanna, Save us, we beseech thee O Lord.

On that Easter morning, when we hear of the boulder being rolled away and the body missing, we cry out in joy, “he is risen, He is risen indeed”  and yet so often we act as though Christ is still dead.  We act as though Jesus was something in the past, that he’s not here, not present with us today, we ignore the power of the Holy Spirit, but the phrase is Jesus is risen, not Jesus rose. Jesus still lives, still guides our every step, still loves us, and still hears our prayers.  Yet how often do we act as though we are honoring a fallen hero rather than serving a risen Lord? As though we are living in a world from which we are trying to escape, rather than a world in which Christ is Lord, and who is daily working to make all things new.  Hosanna, Save us O Lord we beseech thee.

            You see, we are not that different than those people of Jerusalem some two thousand years before us. We too recognize a glimpse of something special happening and yet so often offer up hollow words of praise.  Too often we ask for Christ to save us, and yet live as though we need no saving. We proclaim that Christ is Lord, and yet live as though we are our own masters, that all that we have belongs to us.  And yes we proclaim that Jesus is risen, and live as though he is not with us today.  You see this morning we too are in need of a Messiah. We too approach the Last Supper with shock and confusion. We too approach Good Friday and Jesus’s death on the cross with sadness and hopelessness. We too are in disbelief of the missing body on Easter morning. We too celebrate this Palm Sunday’s with shouts of Hosanna in highest,  but we too also cry crucify him.   As we enter into this Holy week, let it not be for us just another holiday. Let us not offer up our shallow praises, but rather prayers of true confession, true wrestling, true submission, and yes true thanksgiving. Let us gather as a people who truly acknowledge our faults, who truly realize our need for the Messiah, and who truly anticipate the good news of Easter morning.  Hosanna, Save us, we beseech thee O Lord.

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[1] New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary pg. 403

Hearing Loss (John 11:1-45)

Sermon as preached at Lambs and Evington UMC on 4/6/14

I have a good friend that I met back in college that I have a special relationship with. I say this because one of the things that most people try to avoid, we do quite regularly, that is we argue. It doesn’t matter what it is about it can be who we think will win the World Series, our stance on the Affordable Care Act, denominational differences, or even whether something is truly bar-b-q if it is not pulled pork. In all honesty, it doesn’t take very much to get us arguing. Funny thing is even though we enjoy arguing with one another, these arguments can get quite heated. I’ll get so frustrated and say I don’t think you are listening to what I say. I get frustrated and sometimes quit, because he’s not listening to me, to only later on realize it was I that wasn’t listening. It is very easy to feel as though someone’s not listening simply because the response you get back is not the one you wanted to hear.

            In our scripture for today, we find the sisters Martha and Mary trapped in this very snare. Their brother Lazarus has become quite sick and so they sent word to Jesus asking for him to come and heal their brother,  but Jesus does not come right away.  Instead Jesus waits two days and then heads out on his journey, knowing that Lazarus has already died.  As he approaches the house Martha runs out to meet Jesus. Angry at Jesus yet still trusting in him she cries out, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  In other words Martha is upset because Jesus did not respond immediately as she had asked for and now her brother is dead.  Jesus however tells Martha that her brother will rise again, and yet Martha doesn’t really hear it.  In her mind her brother is dead, and so Jesus is just telling her that Lazarus will rise again on the day of resurrection.  But Jesus clarifies himself, he says, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?  Jesus says, I am that resurrection, as who believe in me will. Jesus even asks Martha, do you believe this and Martha still gets it wrong. “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world."  Martha just doesn’t get it, she professes Jesus as Lord, but she sees things as she wants to see them, and fails to recognize the good news that Jesus is really telling her.

            To be fair it’s not just Martha who fails to listen. As Jesus comes to the house Mary accompanied by some of the Jews who were mourning with her came out and blamed Jesus just as her sister Martha had done before. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  Once again  angry that Jesus didn’t respond the way she wanted him, thinking that Jesus wasn’t listening or didn’t care, she accuses him of failing the family.   We are told that Jesus was greatly disturbed and wept. So often we over sentimentalize this verse, where in reality Jesus’ being disturbed is translated much closer to anger than to sympathy. Jesus is upset that these people he’s loves are berating him, he weeps because after all he has done for them they think he doesn’t care.

            Finally we to the end of the story and Mary, Martha, Jesus, and some of the Jews are there at the gravesite, having been led there at Jesus’s request.  When they got there it had already been four days since Lazarus was dead,  and a large boulder had been put in front of the grave.  Seeing this Jesus commands some of the men there to remove the stone, but Martha objects.   At that time the Jewish people did not embalm the dead, but rather simply wrapped them in cloth and in perfume. Martha knows that the perfume had worn off and that the stench of the body would be strong. It becomes clear that Martha did not listen when Jesus told her that Lazarus would be raised, Jesus even exclaims out of frustration,  “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?  The men roll away the stone, Jesus says a prayer to God the Father and then command Lazarus to come out. Lo and behold out came Lazarus just as Jesus had told  them.

Throughout this whole story Martha and Mary had felt as though Jesus had not listened to them. Faith was not an issue for the sisters, they knew that Jesus could heal Lazarus. The issue was that Jesus did not come when they asked, Jesus seemingly had ignored them and now their brother was dead.  Jesus didn’t ignore them. Sure he waited 2 days after he got word that Lazarus was sick, but he heard their cries, he knew their fears, but he waited. He waited, and that is the real crux of it, he did not respond like the sisters wanted, even though as he told his disciples he would use this situation for the glory of God, it was too late. The sisters had made up their mind, and even when Jesus tells them that Lazarus would rise again, they did not listen.

            There are many times in our lives where we are going through something so difficult, or we feel such a void in our hearts that it seems as though there is a gaping chasm between ourselves and the Lord. That we cry out to God for help but God isn’t listening.  What we fail to see, is that it is we that aren’t listening. All throughout the Bible from the Israelites in captivity in Egypt to Martha and Mary weeping for their dying brother, God has listened. It is we who have failed to listen. We have in our hearts the way we want things to go, the way that we think things should go, and when things go according to our plan then all honor and glory to God, but when things don’t then God has failed us, God has forgotten us.  That just not how it works. We don’t tell God what to do, we listen. And sometimes if we just stop to listen, instead of being blinded by our desires, instead of getting caught up in the heat of the moment like we often do when we argue, if we just stopped and listened, we would realize that God has not abandoned us, that God has not forgotten us, that God listens.  Now, this doesn’t mean everything will be as we want, death and pain will still be a part of our day to day lives, but when we stop and listen we know that God is there. That Christ weeps for us and with us. That we may find ways even in the midst of our darkest hours in which God’s glory is being revealed. As we conclude our sermon series, we acknowledge that we acknowledge that we are broken and live in a nature of sin. We acknowledge how quickly we seems to forget God’s goodness or how easily we miss the work of God performed right in front of us. As we prepare for that feast of Easter that is ever so close, today we simply listen, listen for how God’s glory is being revealed for us today.

Spiritual Blindness (John 9:1-41)

Sermon as preached at Lambs and Evington UMC 3/30/14

As a psychology major at Randolph-Macon, I remember studying many fascinating experiments  that have been done in the field of psychology. One of these experiments that I really enjoyed was an experiment in selective attention. Now the results of this experiment are so baffling that I probably wouldn’t have believed that they were true except for the fact that my professor first tested the experiment on us before explaining the results. The experiment goes like this: we were shown a video of people passing a basketball, some of them were wearing white shirts, others were wearing black shirts. Our objective was to count how many times only the people wearing the white shirts passed the ball. We sat and we watched focused on those people wearing white shirts, and when the video was over we were asked how many times the people in white shirts passed the ball, and most of us were happy because we had the right answer. But then the professor asked us a strange question, “Did you see the gorilla?” Did we see the gorilla? What kind of question is that?  So the professor played the video again for us and told us just to watch and not to count this time. At first things were just as we remembered it, but midway through the video sure enough someone dressed in a gorilla suit walks out in the middle of the people passing the ball. Not only does the gorilla walk out, but he actually stops in the middle of them, pounds his chest, and the continues off the set. The gorilla had probably been on the screen for 10 seconds in clear sight, and yet the majority of us watching the video had no idea. This is called selective attention.  It is when we become so caught up in looking for one thing that we completely miss what is going on around us, even something that is so obvious, like a man in a gorilla suit. As the old adage goes, “we can’t see the woods for the tree.”  Jesus in our scripture lesson for this morning might have called this selective attention blindness; not blindness in the physical sense, but instead a spiritual blindness.

            Our story from the John this morning starts out with Jesus and his disciples as they are traveling the come across a blind beggar.  The disciples’ response to the situation indicates where the dilemma in this story is going to be. First, the disciples ask Jesus, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"  In those times illness and disability was seen as being something that was caused by sin. The question the disciples are really asking is really whether or not this man has committed some sin that has caused him to be blind, or whether his blindness is a punishment against his parent’s for their sin. Jesus responds by saying, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him.”  This man has not sinned, but instead God’s works are able to be revealed in him. This isn’t that challenging of a statement for many of us today, but for the disciples this was mind-blowing. Jesus is telling them that something they had always viewed as being a result of sin is actually is actually a means by which God’s works may be revealed.

            In our scripture we don’t get the disciples reaction to this statement, whether they agreed or were upset; instead the story quickly goes into the disciples questioning Jesus once again. They told Jesus to hurry up and heal the man for daylight was almost gone and the Sabbath was almost upon them. Once again we must recognize the practices and beliefs of that time. For Jews of that time, and still some today, the Sabbath, this began at sundown on Friday to sundown Saturday.  There were  many strict laws about working on the Sabbath, this list was in fact long of things that could not be done including the making of clay.  We see that Jesus ignores the disciples protests, spits on the ground and makes mud or clay, and  tells the man to go wash in the pool of Siloam and sight would be given to him.  After just telling the disciples that the man’s blindness was not the cause of anyone’s sin, Jesus shocks the disciples again by committing what many believed to be a sin, working on the Sabbath.  These two elements of Jesus works in this story, the rejection of an idea of the man’s blindness being caused by sin, and Jesus’s working on the Sabbath are crucial to hold onto, as they will become the focus later on in the story. 

            Interestingly enough, the story changes, and now instead of focusing on Jesus and his disciples, John focuses on the once blind man. People around town notice that this man has sight and they begin to say to each other, “Wait isn’t that the beggar that used to sit on the road?” I  thought he was blind? Maybe it is just someone who looks like him. And they began asking what happened? How were your eyes open to which the man replied, “The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, 'Go to Siloam and wash.' Then I went and washed and received my sight.” All of this was very odd and so they took the man before the Pharisees to be questioned.

            As we see the man who had been blind from birth being questioned by the Pharisees we once again see those two stumbling blocks that we mentioned earlier at play. The evangelist John sets up the scenario for us he  says, “Now it was a sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes.”  As the blind man tells the Pharisees about how Jesus had healed him, we see that the fact that the miracle was performed on the Sabbath creates a divide amongst some of the Pharisees. Some argued that this man was a sinner because he had done this work on the Sabbath day, while others argued, “How could a sinner perform such signs.” In order to help the debate the Pharisees turn to the man and ask him what he thinks about this man Jesus. This may seem like a harmless question asked in order to find out the truth but that is probably not the case. At that time it was a mandate forbidding Jews from following any heretical movements, so it is likely those Pharisees against Jesus asked the man this question assuming he’d be afraid and reject Jesus, but that’s not what happened. The man replies, “He is a prophet.”  These are brave and powerful words from this once blind man.

            Not satisfied with this answer the dismiss the man and call for the man’s parents. If they can’t prove that Jesus is a sinner, maybe they can dismiss the case by proving that the man who had been a sinner. Remember that blindness was seen as being a punishment for sin; those who committed a sin may become blind during their lifetime, but someone born blind would not be a sinner but rather the result of their parent’s sin.  The Pharisees desperately wanted to prove that this man was a sinner and therefore his testimony about Jesus would be tainted. When the parents arrive they ask the parents if this man was blind from birth, and the parents respond with the truth, yes.  When asked how he was healed however the parents backed down in fear, they said, He is of age to answer that, ask him.”

            So after finding out that the man was in fact blind from birth, spoiling their plans of discrediting the man’s testimony to Jesus, the Pharisees decide to once again question the man. This time they ask the man straight up, Was this man Jesus who healed you a sinner?  The man’s response is poetically honest, “I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see." You can almost feel the frustration of the Pharisees they want to discredit this man’s testimony so bad, but yet have been able to do such, so once again that ask to hear his testimony.  Fed up the man replies, “I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?" Well this angers the Pharisees, but also gives them the leverage they think they need. They reply, “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.”  In other words, We do not follow this random man off of the streets, we follow the law handed down to us from Moses.  It seems like a valid argument, it seems as if the Pharisees finally have the upper hand until the man once again chimes in. It’s funny that you know nothing about him and yet he opened my eyes. Never have we heard of a man born blind being healed, and that very law you follow teaches us that God does not listen to sinner but to the righteous. If Jesus was not from God, how could he perform this miracle? Flabbergasted and angry the Pharisees label the man and dismiss him.

            Later the man once again runs into Jesus and Jesus asks do you believe in the Son of Man?” The man responds show me him so that I may believe. Jesus responds it is I, and immediately the man responds, “Lord, I believe.” Jesus concludes by saying, “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” You see this whole story is about blindness and sight, but what Jesus reveals is that the story is just as much about spiritual blindness as it is about the physical. This blind man was healed, his eyes were opened, but he did not just begin to only see the world around him, he began to the Lord as well. Just look at the progression of how he describes this man Jesus. When first asked by the random townspeople asking how he sees, he simply refers to Jesus as, “the man named Jesus.” As he is being questioned by the Pharisees and asked who does he say that Jesus is, the man goes one step further and claims, “He is a prophet.” Finally after all the questioning and when Jesus meets with the man again, the man cries out, “Lord I believe.”  The man’s eyes were opened both physically and spiritually and now this man is able to go from recognizing Jesus simply as a man, then as a prophet, and finally as Lord. “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.”

            This seems like it should be the end of the story, except some Pharisees overhear this last comment from Jesus.  He has just told the blind man that he came to give sight to those who do not see, and to blind those who see. They ask Jesus, “Surely we are not blind, are we?"  Jesus responds, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, 'We see,' your sin remains.” But what does that mean?  Jesus tells the Pharisees, because you claim to see you are in fact blind. Because you think you have it all figured out, you have nothing figured out. I healed a man who was blind by birth and instead of recognizing the miracle that it was, you criticized me for working on the Sabbath and attacked the man I healed for being blind in the first place. You put so much trust in the Law of Moses that you failed to notice God working in the midst of you. Like the experimenters who failed to see a man in a gorilla suit walk in clear sight, because the Pharisees were so involved in finding the sin in someone else, they failed to see the glory of God in their midst they had become spiritually blind.

            We too in Christian culture often fall into this sin. We hold up the law of Moses as we should, but instead of using to work on our own holiness we use them to label others as sinners. Or like the Pharisees we follow the law of Moses believing that if we follow correctly we will earn our way into heaven, but Paul tells us that is not the purpose of the law. In Romans 7 Paul says, “What then should we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet, if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin.” In other words,  the law does not save you, instead it helps us to see our own sin and recognize that we need saving. Being a good person, following all of the checklists does not get you into heaven, only by faith are we saved. And so instead of using the law as some checklist to follow or even worse as some tool for differentiating ourselves and discrediting others, let us use the law as a means to build our faith.  Let us use it to help us recognize that which separates us from God.  The fatal flaw of the Pharisees is that they were focused on the law and not how the law leads to Christ. They put their trust in the law, not in God. Sadly sometimes as Christians it is our very attempts to get it right that lead us astray. We can forget what we worship is a Holy and living God, not a set of rules. Let us  not be like the Pharisees who in their claims of wisdom found only blindness, instead let us use this Holy gift (hold the Bible) not as a way to prop ourselves up,  but as a way to humble ourselves, as a way of opening our eyes to our own sin.  So that we may not be blind but see, that what we need most is not our own righteousness, but rather the grace of God drawing us ever closer a love like Christ’s.

Selective Amnesia (Exodus 17:1-7)

Sermon as preached at Lambs and Evington on 3/23/14

 So there is an interesting phenomenon that I  and a bet many of you have; this phenomenon is known as selective amnesia. Whereas amnesia is the loss of memory or even identity often caused by some sort of physical or psychological trauma, selective amnesia is an intentional loss of memory that usually benefits the person forgetting.  It is quite a helpful little phenomenon to have.  It helps around the house when laundry starts to pile up, and I was asked to do a load, but for some reason I can’t remember ever being asked.  In school, I conveniently forgot that homework had been assigned. When an email is sent asking for volunteers for this or that, I seem to forget about it until it is too late. Especially when it comes to my sport teams this selective amnesia helps me to cope with difficult realities. For example I remember that Duke played last weekend, but for some reason I don’t remember anything about the game.  ( Take time to “try to remember”) Well anyways, this phenomenon of selective amnesia is quite interesting since I can remember so much other random information. I remember my telephone number from my house growing up, I remember every super bowl winner that I’ve watched, and I remember that the Battle of Hastings happened in 1066, and yet I can’t remember to do my homework or to wash my clothes.  All kidding aside, while selective amnesia seems like a good and fun thing to have, the consequences can be quite damaging.  Not doing my homework affected my grades; not doing laundry leaves me with dirty clothes, and probably an angry wife, and not remembering who won last weekend, well that’s still ok.   You see in life, we sometimes hold on to the memories we should ignore and forget things we should cherish.  We can become angry at a loved one for something so minor while forgetting  everything they have done for us. We can allow ourselves to lose hope in something just because of a minor setback.

            This is the case  with the Israelites in the desert; the Israelites had selective amnesia. Our scripture for today starts looks at the Israelites in the midst of their travels in the wilderness, however the story for the Israelites starts long before that. The Israelites were a people who had been enslaved in Egypt, forced to work long days for the Pharaoh. As a people, this was rock bottom. They cried out to the Lord for help, and as we see God hears the cry of his people.  God calls Moses, an Israelite himself, though now living amongst the Pharaoh, to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. We see many encounters between the Pharaoh and Moses, miracles performed by God through Moses, and of course the plagues as a punishment for Pharaoh’s failure to listen. Finally we see the Israelites lead out of Egypt by the power of God, through fire and storm and through the parting of the Red Sea. God had lead the Israelites out of captivity, had closed off the Red sea to ensure their freedom, and on top of it all had promised them a land full of milk and honey. The Israelite’s history is one of God providing for them, God delivering them from evil,  God abiding with them.

            With this history in mind our scripture for this morning seems a little odd. Today we find the Israelites wandering in the desert, and quite honestly wandering in misery. It has been quite some time since they had left Egypt, and they are still not at the promised land of milk and honey.  Not only is there no milk or honey, there is hardly any food or water at all. Our scripture tells us, “They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink.” The Isrealites had become fed up with the journey, fed up with their seemingly aimless wandering, fed up with Moses, and yes even fed up with the Lord.  The Israelites had come to the end of their ropes and so they cried out, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?  The once joyous moment of freedom from Egypt, the crossing of the Red sea, now seemed like a cruel twist of fate.  The freedom they had always longed for now seemed to be leading to their demise.  The people began to question whether or not it was worth it to flee, they even began to look back upon slavery and think about how good those times were; they thought this about slavery! In their minds Moses had led them astray, God had disserted them, and that anything would be better than what they were going through now.

            This is the danger of selective amnesia.  The pain and uncertainty that they were enduring now caused the people to forget how bad they really had it. They forgot about the beatings, the labor, their lack of power or of voice, and now all they remembered is that they we fed. At the current moment that seemed like a good deal. What is worse however is not that they forgot about how bad their situation had been, but they forgot about how faithful God had been.  They forgot that their leader Moses had thrown away all the comfort and wealth he had when he killed the unjust slave driver. They forgot about the plagues that Egypt endured and how they were protected from them. They forgot about the meal they shared at Passover, marking their doors with lambs blood so that in the morning they could hold their firstborn in their arms, and they forgot the agony of the Pharaoh and the other Egyptians who were not as fortunate. They  forgot the Lord parted a sea for them  to cross and then closed it so that no one could follow. They had forgotten all of this, and now cried out to a God they believed had forgotten them. They cried, “Is the Lord among us or not?”  After all that God had done for them they still ask whether the Lord is with them are not.

            It’s amazing how quickly things can turn from looking up to looking down, and it’s amazing how quickly faith and praise can turn into doubt and anger.  But even as the Israelites questioned and threated Moses, Moses continued to have faith in the Lord.  Now as I say that let us be clear in what I mean. There is a common misconception that in order for us to have faith we are not allowed to doubt at all, that if we have faith we should never be afraid or angry, but this is not that case. Moses kept his faith, but you better believe his was scared, and you better believe he was questioning whether what he had done was the right thing. In our scripture he says, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” Moses is scared for his life, Moses has no idea what to do, but what makes it true that Moses had faith; Moses goes to the Lord with his problem.  Moses does not forget the ways in which the Lord had provided for him, Moses does not forget about God’s promise of a land full of milk and honey. Moses has no idea what is going to happen, he has no delusion that things will be simple or easy, but Moses trusts that if he follows the Lord all will be right, whatever right may be.

            And from there on we see that Moses was right. The Lord tells Moses to take some elders and go ahead in the journey to the rock of Horeb and with the same rod he used to part the Red sea, strike the rock and water will flow.  This moment is priceless, it is not just some coincidence that the same rod used for freeing the slaves is now used to quench their thirst, in fact God goes out of the way to make that point. It’s almost sarcastic how God uses the same instrument that freed them from slavery in order to quiet their doubts and provide them with water. As the Israelites cry out is God among us, God cries back, I never left.  Do you not remember this rod, this rod that I used in order to set you free. This rod will now once again save you. It is almost as if God is crying out to the Israelites, Moses has in his hands a sign, a symbol of my faithfulness to you, you see this sign every day, how could you forget?  And yet the Israelites history is one of selective amnesia, of forgetting God’s faithfulness and then abandoning the Lord, getting brought back and starting the circle all over again. In fact this is not just the Israelites history, but it is also our own.  How many times have we experienced the grace and power of God at work in our lives, and later felt as though God was nowhere to be found, or that God had abandoned us. How often do we traverse from a mountain top experience with Christ into a barren spiritual desert?  Like the Israelites who we tired, thirsty and hungry, sometimes we have some legitimate reasons to doubt. The loss of a job, the loss of a loved one, some goal we just can’t achieve, or some debt or addiction that we just can’t get out from under. In these wilderness times it can make sense for us to have some doubts. It makes sense for us to thirst for some spiritual water. It makes sense for us to have selective amnesia, but we cannot let ourselves fall into the same trap as the Israelites. When we thirst we cannot run away from God, we must not forget God’s steadfast love for us.

            Instead, when we thirst, we should be more like Moses, whose initial reaction is not to run away from God, but instead is to run towards God. Yes he was scared, yes he too was tired, and probably a little angry, but in his times of trouble and doubt, he sought out the Lord.

            Many of us today are going through our own spiritual wilderness.  Some of us are facing external dilemmas such as the ones mentioned earlier. Others of us feel guilty because our spiritual fervor has waned even though there seems to be no reason for it.  We become spiritually thirsty, and we begin to forget what ever nourished us in the first place. This however is not necessarily a sign of your faith diminishing, in fact it can even be a sign of your own spiritual growth.  Just like I showed the children for the children’s message,  as the glasses get larger, it takes more water to fill them up.  Likewise, as we grow spiritually we become capable and open to letting more of God’s grace into our lives, and so when we fail to fill the void we can sometimes feel thirsty or empty.  This means that what filled us up when we first became Christians probably doesn’t fill us up the same way anymore. I know that for me personally, My formative time was during my teenage years. Retreats with the same vibe as pep rally used to fill me up, and while I still enjoy these type of experiences they don’t quite quench my thirst anymore. As a kid all I needed was worship, as I got older throw in a bible study and I was good, but as I kept getting older and older I needed more and more to quench my thirst.  I still feel it now when I have served in outreach or mission in a while. When I fail to read, or be in prayer as often as I should I feel it. I can tell when I am not being spiritually fed and do you know how I know? I know because my selective amnesia comes back. I begin to forget all that the Lord has done for me, the ways God has carried me through difficult times in my lives, the people who have touched my life through the power of the Holy Spirit, all of this seems to fade from memory and all that is left is an aching, longing feeling. This Lent as we prepare for Easter, let us not miss all the signs around us reminding us of God’s faithfulness to us.  Let us not be like the Israelites who daily fixed their eyes upon the very rod that freed them and yet remembered nothing about it. As we focus on that which separates us from God, as we recognize our own sin, we also recognize that it is we that separate ourselves from God. That God’s love is steadfast, and yet so often we fail to see. That sometimes in our spiritual growth we become discouraged because what used to fill us, doesn’t produce the same results anymore.  So whether this morning we face some difficult situation that makes God seem so distance or if we simply have seemed to lost the spark in our hearts that once burned, the solution is simple, seek the Lord.  Seeking the Lord doesn’t mean everything will be better, it doesn’t mean that we will automatically be once again alive for Christ, but is means that we will have comfort that no matter what, God is with us. It means that we will be filling ourselves with God’s grace, it means we will never forget God faithfulness. 

The Fall (Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7)

Sermon as preached 3/16/14 at Lambs and Evington UMC

This week we begin a new sermon series that is called “Separation Anxiety” As most of you know we have entered into a season of the church that we call Lent. While in today’s culture most people associate Lent with giving up some minor guilty pleasure in our lives like chocolate, or coffee, even caffeine all together. The true purpose of the season of Lent however is a time that prepares us for the great feast of Easter. Lent is not too dissimilar to the more familiar season of advent that prepares us for the for the arrival of the Son of God at Christmas. The major difference between the two is that in Advent we are preparing for Jesus’s arrival and therefore there is an emphasis on expectation and waiting, whereas for in Lent we are not preparing for our Lord’s birth but rather, for his death and resurrection. And so how do you prepare for Jesus’ death and resurrection; for this even that is the basis for our whole belief system, the essence of our salvation? How do you prepare to celebrate Christ’s atonement for our sins and the promise of eternal life that it provides. We prepare by reflecting upon why it is important in the first place. When we start this type of reflection it become apparent quite quickly that we need it because we are such broken and sinful people. No matter how hard we try we seem to keep falling short of the glory of God, we get corrupted by evil, we turn our desires towards ourselves rather than upon God and on others. We realize that we cannot save ourselves and we desperately need God’s grace to save us. And as we reflect upon our need for God’s grace we begin to truly realize the distance between us and God. Not because of anything God has done , for God’s grace is always extended to us, but because we have separated ourselves from God, we have put up our own barriers. And so during Lent we give up these things that devour our time and our energy, these things that distract us from God, and at the same time we take on spiritual disciplines that realign our hearts with the heart of Christ. This is the beauty of Lent, this is why over the next for weeks we will look at ways in which we separate ourselves from God, because to truly appreciate Easter, we need to appreciate why we need it so badly.

            We look at the world today and we see violence and wars, we see animosity in the political spheres, we see homelessness, poverty and starvation around the world and in our own community. We even find ourselves occupied and worried about so many different things  that “have to” get done. We get so used to this type of world that we live in that we begin to think that this is the norm, that this may even be what God wanted. But if we read from Genesis and look at the creation story, we start to find a world quite different than ours, we notice that this isn’t how it has always been. In Genesis 2 we find Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, and we find that they are living in paradise, in the garden of Eden. The two of them were together with the birds and the beasts, and the creatures of the sea. There did not have to worry about starvation because food was abundant, in fact its seems as though they did not have to worry about death at all. They were naked and not ashamed of it, for what guilt or what shame should they feel, they were as God created them. All of this was freely given to them with the one stipulation that they must not eat of the tree of knowledge of good or evil.  The Lord warned them that if they it from it, if they even touch it they will die.

            Things were great in paradise, that is until sin crept into the world through the power of curiosity and through the serpent.  The serpent persuades Eve to take of the fruit from the tree of good and evil, Eve persuades Adam to eat from the fruit, and from there on the course of history, of human nature had been changed.  Sin had entered into the world. Now there are certainly many questions that arise from this story, many are good questions that we just aren’t able to cover today.  Did God create the serpent, and if so did God create the serpent evil? Did God create evil? Why was there even a potential of sin in the first place. As I’ve said these are great and difficult questions, questions that pastors, laity, theologians, and philosophers alike have been trying to answer for centuries. It is not as important to focus on the why sin entered into the world as it is to recognized that we as humans have been changed because of it. Instead of asking why is there sin, we should be asking what is sin.

            What is the sin that occurred during what we call the fall of humanity?  We see that the action that led to the fall was the eating of the forbidden fruit, but was it simply the act of disobeying God that led us to the state we are in now? Not entirely, yes disobeying God was bad, but it was what happened before that which to that original sin. The serpent tells Eve that if they eat from the fruit “You will not die;  for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God,^[a] knowing good and evil.” You see Adam and Eve ate from the fruit, ate from the tree of good and evil because they were tempted to make themselves like God. They wanted to be able to determine good and evil, the quality best reserved for a ruler. They wanted to have more power than that which God had already given them. They wanted to be like God. And so when they ate of that fruit their eyes were opened, and yet somehow as their eyes were open they lost focus. They became focused on themselves, they noticed that they were naked, something that had always been, but now they were ashamed of it. They recognized that it made them no different than the animals around them, and that just could not be. Those people of honor and glory hide their intimate parts, they were no longer like the animals after all, they were now like gods.  You see the original sin of Adam and Eve was that in that moment they changed their very natures from living as creatures in union with God’s vision of creation, and became creatures who rejected God’s vision, and saw themselves as something greater than they already were. They had turned their vision and their focus away from God and put it squarely on themselves. So when God questions what had happened, the damage was already done. The humans tremble in fear and feel an emotion they have never felt before, guilt. As promised the humans now face the fate of death, the face a world of toil and pain, they face a life of sin. There is a separation from the garden,  in our scripture it seems as some sort of punishment but for what purpose I’m not sure. Scripture tells us that God says, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever.”  What does this mean I’m not sure, maybe God is preventing humans from a greater hell of living an eternal life while  focused on ourselves, or maybe God’s banishment from the garden in God’s first act in trying to restore our nature to what it once was. Whatever the case may be the story ends with humans banished from Eden with a twisted, perverse nature that seeks our own pleasure and power over that of any one else.

            This is the essence of sin, that our focus has been shifted from God and shifted toward ourselves. As we continue in this season of Lent before we do anything else we must try to get a grasp upon what sin really means. In our culture we like to talk about sin as an action that we have done. Murder, lying, cheating, stealing; for us these things are sins, and indeed they are. And yet if we live our lives simply trying to avoid committing these sins, then we are doomed for failure, we are looking at sin all wrong.  Instead we should think of sin more like a disease, like a genetic disorder, like an illness. An example of a disease is more fitting than that of an illness, but out of respect for so many who have faced diseases, let us use the example of a flu to explain what I mean by sin being like a disease.  So say you wake up one morning shivering, and coughing. You start to feel nauseous, your body aches and so you take your temperature and find out that you have a fever. How do you react? Do you look at each thing separately and take medicine for each ailment, or do you realize that they are all symptoms of a greater illness, the flu, and realize you need to go see a doctor.  You see those daily sins that we commit they are much like symptoms of a disease.  We lie because we want to protect ourselves our make ourselves look better. We gossip because we enjoy the thrill of knowledge and the feeling of being superior to someone else.  We could try to treat eat symptom, we can try to stop gossiping, we can try to stop lying, and we should, but that doesn’t solve our overall condition of sin.

            So are you, how am I affected by sin? What does Adam and Eve’s mistake have anything to do with us?  Well if we viewed sin and simply committing evil acts, then the answer would be that it doesn’t affect us. That we are separate entities making our own separate mistakes; that the only way that they affect us is that we learn their bad habits.  It is because so many of us have this understanding of sin that we find the concept of original sin so disgusting. We ask how can a baby be sinful if they haven’t even done anything wrong? But do you see how that’s the wrong question to ask? A baby isn’t sinful because they have committed some wrong, the baby is sinful because we as humans are all sinful. We are all affected with this disease, this nature of sin.  It is quite amazing how our modern technology can actually help us to understand this point. Over the past few decades amazing research has been done in human genetics. In fact the human genome project has mapped our DNA.  Researchers are slowly now able to find abnormalities or predictors in a person’s genes that show the passing of genetic diseases from parents to children. Now I’m not saying that sin is a genetic disorder or that we can find sin somewhere in our DNA, but what I am saying is like genetic disorders are passed from parent to child, so too has sin been passed onto all of us. In the fall human nature was changed from a perfect state to a sinful state, so that all the offspring of humanity were no longer able to reap the benefit of the perfect nature originally created for us, but rather we have inherited that distorted nature of sin.  This morning as we begin to start out talking about what it is that separates us from God, we must first start by admitting we are in fact separated. That this life that we live, this world that we live in is not as it was intended to be. That we have inherited the sinful nature of sin, the disease of sin, so that now our inclination is to treasure ourselves over anything else, that serving God, loving God more than we love ourselves is a struggle. In fact so much of a struggle that so often even our faith is primarily focused on the hope of our own personal salvation and assurance of heaven, rather than the will and  desire that God has for all creation.

            And so as we begin this sermon series, as we recognize and admit that we live with this disease of sin, we can now start the process of having our health restored. Just like with a disease, the first step is recognizing the symptoms and getting diagnosed. So this morning we come recognizing our own symptoms of sin, that we daily fail to be obedient to God’s will, that we fail to serve our neighbors, and even failed to love God with our whole hearts. It is why we say prayers of confession because it allows us to recognize the fact that things aren’t the way they should be. We aren’t the way we should be.  The diagnosis is simple we have sin; sin is part of our nature. And yet the good news is that there is a cure. That Christ has come to Earth, taking on our sin upon the cross and conquering it and death with his resurrection. As is the case with most cures though the treatment is long.  We must strive each day to be drawn closer to Christ.  Each day will bring challenges are we get sidetracked by our own desires, as we feed our own ego, but today we take the first step, we recognize that we are sick and that we need help.  The good news is that even when we fail in our journey, and we do constantly, that God’s grace is there to pick us back up. Our sin is never terminal for even when our love fails and we turn away, Gods love remains steadfast, because grace is greater than sin.

Containing God (Matthew 17:1-9)

Sermon as preached at Lambs and Evington UMC on 3/2/14

Image courtesy of Vanderbilt Divinity School

This Sunday is a special Sunday in the life of the church that we call Transfiguration Sunday. It is the Sunday in which we celebrate the special revelation to a few of the disciples of Christ where they saw Jesus transformed in white light and accompanied on the mountain by Elijah and Moses. This story fascinates many of us, while at the same time this story confuses many of us. There is just so much going on, what are we to focus on?  We could focus on what it means for Jesus to be transfigured by glowing light. We could focus on why Moses and Elijah are there with Jesus. We could ask why only a few disciples a privy to this revelation, and we can ask why Jesus tells them not to tell anyone until he is raised from the dead.  We could and we will talk a little about Peter’s request to build dwelling places. There are almost too many things going on to cover in the span of a sermon, and any of the things listed above warrant their own time and energy, but today we will talk about something that maybe is one of the lesser talked about parts of this story, and that is the cloud.

            Verse 5 tells us, “While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, "This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!"  Here we see the presence of a bright cloud on top of the mountain, but what does this cloud signify?  As Christians the first thing that jumps out to us is that the words from the cloud here on the mountain are the same as the words from God during the baptism of Jesus.  These words tell us the significance of Jesus Christ as the Son of God as well as the command for him to be listened to, to be followed.  These words continue into the theme of revelation happening during the Transfiguration; that Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of the law and the prophets. These words tell us something else about the voice heard from the cloud, and that is that the voice we hear is none other than that of God the Father. 

            For Christians today as well as Gentiles of that time, we may need this clue to understand the significance of the cloud; however for those from the Jewish tradition, like the disciples of Jesus already knew exactly what this cloud signified.  This is not the first appearance of a cloud like this in the Bible, in fact this cloud was present often through the history of the Israelites.  In Exodus 14 as the Israelites are escaping Egypt we see, “The angel of God who was going before the Israelite army moved and went behind them; and the pillar of cloud moved from in front of them and took its place behind them. ²⁰ It came between the army of Egypt and the army of Israel. And so the cloud was there with the darkness, and it lit up the night; one did not come near the other all night.”  Likewise later when the Israelites were constructing the Tabernacle we read, “Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. ³⁵ Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting because the cloud settled upon it, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.³⁶ Whenever the cloud was taken up from the tabernacle, the Israelites would set out on each stage of their journey;³⁷ but if the cloud was not taken up, then they did not set out until the day that it was taken up. ³⁸ For the cloud of the Lord was on the tabernacle by day, and fire was in the cloud^[f] by night, before the eyes of all the house of Israel at each stage of their journey.  This cloud signifies the presence of God with the Israelites. First it is God with them as the escaped from Egypt, and later it was God with them in the Holy Tabernacle.  In fact it was Jewish belief at that time that where the cloud resided was where the Lord was, and the cloud as we read resided at the tabernacle. Those who were able to enter the tabernacle, we able to dwell in the presence of the Lord.

            When we understand this important aspect of the cloud, then it becomes clear why Peter reacts the way he does. Here he see Moses, Elijah and Jesus transfigured by bright light in the presence of this cloud, this cloud signifying that they God is dwelling with them on this mountain. And so Peter simply reacts the only way he knows how; let’s make three dwelling so that what is happening may last, so that this cloud, this presence of God may continue to last for others to come and see. Peter tries so hard to get it right, but poor Peter gets it all wrong. Peter doesn’t understand that God will not be contained, that there doesn’t need to be a special dwelling place for God. Peter misses the whole message of this transfiguration, that God is already dwelling amongst them as a human, as Jesus Christ. God is no longer contained to a special dwelling place, God is with us, everywhere.

            How often do we make Peter’s mistake? It is right and good for us to gather hear together in this sanctuary for worship. It is wonderful to gather here for Bible studies, and UMW, for special benefits, and for the planning and ordering of events of the church. But how often when we refer to church do we mean this building rather than those who are gathered in it?  How often do we view church as something that we go to rather than something that we are always a part of?  How often do we honestly strive to serve and reach out to others in our community but stay here in this building expecting others to come to us rather than we go out to others?  When we do these things, when we think like this we are making the same mistake as Peter did on that Mount of Transfiguration. Too often the church building becomes for us a false tabernacle where we expect God to dwell.  And God does dwell here, but far too often we try to contain God. That God happens here for an hour on Sunday mornings and then I can leave that behind. But the Transfiguration reminds us that God is always with us. That God lived among us as human, and as Jesus Christ ascended he gave the Holy Spirit to be with us always. God cannot be contained, the presence of the Lord is always with us. Let us not set us dwelling places to contain the Lord, instead let us reveal the presence of the Lord for all to see.  Let us always dwell in the presence of the Lord.