Celebration Sunday

01/29/12 Celebration Sunday Grace UMC

As you all know, the topic of celebration has been in the forefront of some of our conversations in the church over the last month or so. One of the things I have noticed in the time that I have been a Christian is that we, as people of faith, tend to develop a specialized vocabulary that we use when we talk about things. As we get more and more involved in our community of faith, as we spend time reflecting on what we believe in the company of other believers, we begin to assimilate this vocabulary into our lives and begin to use it for ourselves. What we don't always realize is that there are times when we use words and we don't necessarily notice that we are using them in a way that is not quite how the rest of the world uses them. As we have talked about in the theology class, the English word for love has a huge range of meanings but when we talk about God's love, we don't mean the same thing as if we were to say, "I love pizza" or, "I love this movie." But if someone didn't know that Christians mean something very specific when they say "love," there might be quite a bit of confusion.

I wonder if the same might be true, at least sometimes, with our word "celebration." After all, there aren't all that many churches that make a point of making celebration a regular part of their life together. In fact, if you look throughout history, you will find that celebration has not tended to play a major role in our Protestant heritage. How can this be, especially since we find celebrations and festivals all throughout the Bible, especially the Old Testament? Do we think that, somehow, God used to be excited about celebration with the people of Israel but, now that Jesus has come, isn't so interested in it anymore? I think it is far more likely that God has never stopped being interested in our celebration but we have pushed it to the side for one reason or another.

Why would we have done this? This trend started so long ago that we might not even be able to understand how it started. I wonder if this might be at least a partial explanation. It doesn't take much for most of us to notice that there are some ways that people in our world celebrate which, when compared with what we are taught in the Bible, are not exactly completely compatible with the gospel. For example, there are those in our world who cannot comprehend the idea that one could have a good time, or that one could celebrate, without consuming their weight in alcohol. I met people like that when I was in college and you may have also. For all I know, you may have been one of those people once upon a time; that isn't my point. My point is that if we take that kind of view of celebration and use it as the way we understand the whole idea of celebration, we might feel that we have to reject celebration altogether as Christians. It hasn't been all that long since many churches included statements in their constitutions that outlawed their members from drinking of any kind, dancing of any kind, or even card games of any kind.

But there seems to be a sense in which we may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Just because there are some people in the world who do not feel they can celebrate without simultaneously engaging in sinful behavior, that doesn't mean that it has to be that way. The Bible teaches a lot about joy and celebration. The Psalms are absolutely full of whole songs dedicated to calling the people of God to celebrate and to rejoice in their God. In fact, the New Testament, far from reducing the importance of celebration, actually increases it. Paul writes to the Christians in Philippi, "Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice." He is saying, "It is so important that you rejoice in the Lord that I am going to repeat it. I don't want there to be any chance that you could possibly miss this." The joy that the apostles wrote about wasn't like standing around with a smile, real or otherwise, pasted to our faces. It was a joy that was not stoppable, a joy that endured, even in the midst of tragedy. It is a joy that abides in your heart, even while you are weeping, a joy that enables you to celebrate in the midst of grief. Paul rejoiced in the prisons, Stephen rejoiced even while he was being executed. This is in no way a lesser understanding of celebration but one that is so strong that nothing in all of creation can overcome it.

I want to draw your attention to a book that has gotten something of a bad name among Christians, the book of Leviticus. Leviticus is the book that people talk about when they want to talk about how the Bible can get boring, though usually people say that, even if they have never read it for themselves. In chapter twenty-three of Leviticus, we have all the festivals that God had instituted for his people listed together to remind them to celebrate what God has done. We have the Sabbath, a day of celebration and rest that happens every single week, we have the Passover, the festival of Unleavened Bread, which takes place in the Spring, the same week as Easter, where the people rejoice that God had delivered them from slavery in Egypt. We have the offering of the first fruits, which takes place at the very beginning of the harvest season, where the people were commanded to rejoice that they had another crop that year.

We also read about what is called the Festival of Weeks, which was also known as Shauv'ot, which corresponds to our Christian celebration of Pentecost. Seven weeks after the Israelites celebrate their exodus from Egypt, they celebrate the fact that God did not just deliver them and then leave them to their own devices, but gave them a law to live by, a law that set them apart from the other nations as the people set apart by God. We read about the festival of trumpets, a joyful and musical celebration. We read about the Day of Atonement, which isn't a celebration in the sense of a day of dancing and partying, but it is the day where the people remembered, in a very concrete way, that God did not simply leave them in their sins, but provided a way to atone, both for the sins they knew they committed and also those they were unaware of.

The last festival we read about in this chapter in Leviticus is the festival of Booths, called Sukkot, which was a time to celebrate the years the Israelites spent in the wilderness. Everyone constructs and lives in temporary shelters outside where the rain can get to them, all to remember that God has given them shelter and safety when their ancestors did not have it. It is a time for feasting and hospitality and a wonderful time of celebration. In subsequent history, Israel has added even more celebrations, perhaps the most well-known of which is Hannukah, which celebrates God's deliverance of his people from the rule of the Greeks.

The point is that there is major festival after major festival in the Jewish calendar and they aren't just holidays that human beings just decided were going to be special, like so many of ours in America are, but they are meant to reflect what God has actually done in the life of his people. Every time God moves decisively, every time God, in his interaction with his people, does something that shapes the very identity of those people, he institutes a celebration, a festival through which to remember who God is and what God has done.

What I think is amazing is the way in which celebration forms not only a key part of the Israelites' life together but that they are commanded to celebrate. God doesn't say, "Here is a holiday, take it or leave it; its up to you, but don't complain to me if you don't take advantage of it." Rather he says, "Here is a celebration, a festival; keep it." In some cases, failure to keep the festivals was to result in expulsion from the community. Clearly God took the celebration of his people incredibly seriously.

Sometimes we in America like to think that there is a big split through the middle of the human person, dividing body from soul or spirit. We like to think that our bodies don't have all that much to do with our spirits and that our spirits don't have all that much to do with our bodies. This is reflected in how we often approach the issue of faith. When we start to think about how we might grow in our faith, how we are to be more of who God has called us to be, often times we don't ask the question, "What should I do and how should I live that will make a difference." We tend to think in terms of reading books or attending classes, and while these things certainly are helpful, they only go so far.

The point is this kind of separation between our bodies and our souls is not something we find in the Bible. Whenever we see God doing something of spiritual importance, it always is corollated with a particular way of life. God doesn't just mark his people out for some kind of spiritual devotion to him, he gives them a law and a form of life in which to embody that devotion. The Israelites were not just a nation like all other nations, they were a people set apart ad God would never let them forget that distinction. Their spiritual lives and their physical lives were deeply and profoundly intertwined. You could not be a part of the people of God in a religious sense unless you also participated in the life and celebrations of the Israelite people. That is to say, you could not worship God unless you celebrated; it was a very command of God that was not to be ignored.

I think it is truly amazing to realize that God not only allowed celebration among his people, he not only commanded it, but that it was woven into the very fabric of their existence. Whatever else you might have been, if you did not celebrate, you were not an Israelite, you were not a person of the covenant. If this is the case, if to be a member of the community of the faithful, to be part of the people of God is to celebrate, to allow the spiritual aspects of your life to spill over into every area of your life, including your physical life and your celebratory life, then it challenges any attitude toward celebration where we relax and we celebrate so we can get back to work because we need to rest from time to time if we are going to be able to really work hard.

It is because of all of this that I want to encourage you to participate as fully as you can in the events and activities today on this Celebration Sunday. It is a moment, perhaps one we should have more often, where we affirm the physicality of our spiritual lives and the spirituality of our physical lives, where we bring our gifts and talents into relation with our faith and we bring our faith into relation with our gifts and talents. We should not think to ourselves, "Why do we feel the need to celebrate at church?" Rather, we should be asking, "Why doesn't celebration play an even larger role in our lives of faith?

Remember that our celebrations as Christians are not just free-floating expressions of joy. Rather, they are a testimony that the miracle that God has worked deep in our souls is not confined in our souls as if they were a separate compartment from the rest of our lives, but that the good news of Jesus Christ has overflowed into every aspect of who we are, that because our souls are glad, we as entire people are glad and that, through our celebrating, we give praise and glory to the God who has done so much for us. Let us pray.

AMEN

Exodus 11:1-10

01/25/12 Exodus 11:1-10 GUMC Youth

Over the last few weeks we have been looking at some of the overarching, super-important stories in the Old Testament. We looked at the calling of Abraham and saw that, when God calls people, he often calls the people we would least expect to do the things we would least expect, when we would least expect it. We looked at the story of Abraham nearly sacrificing his son, Isaac and saw that it isn't up to us to decide the best way to worship God or the best sacrifice to give. God takes the very best we have to give and substitutes something else, something that he gives, in its place. Last week, we looked at the selling of Joseph into slavery and saw that, though God does not in any way cause suffering, tragedy and evil, he enters into the midst of it and brings good out of the things that we would least expect could have anything good come out of. Tonight, we are looking at another story. Though all the stories we've looked at so far have come from the book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, tonight's story comes from the book of Exodus, the second book of the Bible.

Because we are switching books, I want to take just a moment to remind you all of the timeline that we are dealing with. First, of course, you have Adam and Eve, then after a long time you get Noah and his ark, then after another long time, we get Abraham, which is where we started getting really interested in the story. Abraham had two sons, Ishmael and Isaac, Isaac had two sons, Esau and Jacob, also known as Israel. Jacob had twelve sons, one of which was Joseph, who we talked about last week. Tonight, we pick up the story over four hundred years later than what we talked about last week.

In the years between the nation of Israel coming to Egypt and the story of the Exodus, the Israelites have become a large nation of about two million people. They have become so numerous that the Egyptians have started to be afraid of them. After all, if Egypt were to be attacked, if they wanted to, the Israelites could join the other side and be a real threat to the Egyptians. They were scared to death that this might happen, so they decided that the best thing to do was to enslave the Israelites and put them to hard labor. Now, you might say, "Why would you do that? If you are afraid they are going to join forces with your enemies, making them slaves is only going to make them more likely to try to overthrow you." That might be, but if you enslave a people and if you teach them over the course of generations that they are less than human, that they are worthless and weak, it is possible to so destroy their hope that things could be different, that they never dare to stand up to the people who are treating them that way.

The point is that, though this evil thing was happening to the people, God had not ignored them, but was waiting for just the right time to liberate his people. Eventually, the time came. Egypt was so worried that the Israelites might become strong and fight back that they decided that every newborn male needed to be killed upon birth. The Hebrew midwives, who were the ones who were helping out at the births, didn't want to do this, so they lied to Pharaoh, saying that the Israelite women were so hearty that they gave birth before they could get there. Realizing that he wasn't going to win this way, Pharaoh gave the order that all the male babies must be thrown into the Nile to drown. There was a woman who had a boy and wanted to protect him, but she couldn't hide him forever. She put him into a basket that was sealed up with pitch so it wouldn't sink and put him in the river. Notice that her son was "thrown into the Nile" but in a very different sense than the Pharaoh wanted.

Anyway, this baby is floating down the Nile and happens to go by Pharaoh's daughter who has compassion on him and adopts him for her own, naming him Moses and raising him in the royal household. Remember this, Moses, who ends up delivering the Israelites from slavery to the Egyptians, grew up as a kind of adopted child of Pharaoh's daughter. That means that he must have seemed a bit like a traitor to his own people since he was an Israelite but he was living in luxury in the Pharaoh's house while all the rest of the Israelites were working hard as slaves. Also, it means that, when he goes before Pharaoh with all the demands from God, he isn't just going in front of a powerful ruler, but before someone who is either his step-brother, or some kind of nephew. We need to remember that Moses is not just having to chose whether or not he will be a hero of God's people, he is quite literally having to choose between his family that he was born into, the family of the people of God, or the family that raised him, the family who used their wealth and power to oppress that other family. In a sense, Moses really had to choose between his God and his family. Whenever you think about Moses, always remember that this is a very personal issue for him.

Anyway, you all know the story. Moses finds himself in trouble so he runs away from Egypt, settles down and raises a family. Eventually, when he is growing old, about eighty years old, he sees the burning bush and is told that he needs to go back to Egypt and be the vehicle by which God liberates his people. You know, its kind of amazing that Moses was actually called even later in his life than Abraham, who was seventy-five years old when God called him. There were a bunch of plagues unleashed upon the land of Egypt, though the Israelites were spared from them. After many chances to do the right thing, Pharaoh refused to let the people go, so there was one more plague to come. God was going to kill the firstborn children of every house.

Now, I want to make sure I point something out because it is important. Most of the plagues were only directed at the Egyptians. For example, when frogs came out of the Nile, they didn't invade the areas where the Israelites lived but only bothered the Egyptians. When God was going to kill the firstborns, though, Israel was not exempt, but God hadn't abandoned them. God gave the people something very specific that they needed to do in order to be delivered from the disaster that was coming. They had to take a lamb, kill it, wipe its blood on the doorframe of the house, and eat it with bitter herbs and unleavened bread. They were to do all this expecting that they were going to be driven out the next day. They had to have this feast with their bags packed, as it were.

Now, we need to understand that not all of the Egyptians were hardhearted and refused to listen to Moses. We know, for example, that there were some of Pharaoh's officials who listened when Moses warned them of hail and saved their animals by taking precautions. It is entirely possible that there were a few Egyptians who followed through with the things Moses told the Israelites to do and so saved their children. But at that point, there is a crucial sense in which they stopped being Egyptians and became Israelites themselves, since they had taken sides in this conflict and the Egyptians were certainly not going to be friendly to them anymore.

The main point, the main thing we need to learn from this story, is about the nature of redemption. When God's people were in trouble, God redeemed them, but we need to realize that the redemption didn't come like we might think it should. God doesn't say "I am just going to kill the firstborn children of the Egyptians" but "I am going to kill all the firstborn children in the land, but here is a way to be redeemed." This act of divine redemption was so important because through it, God rescued a whole nation from captivity. Because of this, there are two things that we need to understand about redemption in general and our redemption in particular.

First, we need to see that redemption is not automatic, it requires obedience. We have to actually do something in order to be redeemed. Now, I want to make sure I am absolutely clear so you don't misunderstand what I am getting at. It is not as though, when we are saved, it is because we have saved ourselves. God is the one who does the saving. It also isn't like we do some of the work and God does some of the work, as if our salvation and redemption were some kind of partnership where we are saved because of some kind of team effort. God does everything, but he doesn't do everything in a way where God somehow sets himself against us, where he somehow saves us against our will, where he somehow does what he does in a way that we are saved without it actually impacting who we actually are. Rather, God does everything for our salvation and redemption in and through us. Paul says this in Galatians 2:20, one of the more famous verses in the Bible. "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me."

You see, according to Paul, the Christian life is a life that is crucified with Christ. It is a life that, in a very real sense, is Christ's life lived in and through him. And yet, though the life that Paul lives in his flesh is Christ's life, it isn't as though Paul has been set aside, has he? He is still Paul, he still does the kinds of things that Paul does, he is still prone to make the same mistakes that Paul has made. Though Christ is living his life in and through Paul, Paul is still there; he is not merely an empty shell. The same is true for us. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, Jesus lives his life in and through us. This doesn't make us any less who we are, but ever more who we were meant to be than we would ever have been on our own.

Another great example of what I'm trying to get at comes from Jesus himself. He says, in a famous passage, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me." Sometimes, when we hear that verse, we think that Jesus is just telling his disciples that following him can be hard sometimes, so they should get themselves ready for what can be a difficult time. First, Jesus is not just saying that the Christian life will be hard from time to time, he is saying that, at the end of the day, the Christian life will kill us. After all, to take up your cross is to be on your way to execution. By that, I don't mean that all Christians will be killed for their faith. What I mean is that we are not done living as Christians until we are done living in general. To be a Christian and to follow Jesus is to make a lifelong commitment; a commitment that lasts as long as we do.

But that is not all of what Jesus says. The most important part of what he says here is "take up your cross and follow me." The point is not just to take up our cross, as though hardship for hardship's sake was a goal in itself. The point is that we take up our crosses and follow Jesus, that we do what he does, that we go where he goes, that we say the things that he says, that we become the kind of people who are like him. Jesus takes up his cross and dies for us, on our behalf and in our place. We take up our own crosses and follow, not because bearing our cross contributes even the slightest bit to our salvation, but because it is us doing what Jesus was doing and participating in the salvation that God has worked out and is working out in our lives. Whatever else it might be, it is not salvation unless it is changing our lives, not just on Wednesday nights or on Sunday mornings, but every day of the week.

The other thing we need to make sure we notice and remember is that redemption is costly. Remember, it is not that God was going to punish the Egyptians and spare the Israelites, but that he was going to kill all the firstborn children. The difference is not that God treated the Israelites fundamentally differently than the Egyptians, but that God provided a way to be saved and the Israelites took it, trusting that God would actually substitute their lambs in the place of their children and take them instead. Think about what this means, though. God's redemption didn't make itself seen in the lives of the people until they actually became participants in it. They had to actually kill the lamb, rub its blood on their doorposts, cook it, and eat it. There was no shortcut to salvation that allowed them to bypass actually responding in faith to what God was doing.

Also, we need to remember that, though the children of the Israelites were spared, things still died. One of the things we read about in the New Testament is, "Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins." There is something about the seriousness of sin that means it cannot be done away with just with a wave of the hand, even a wave of God's hand. Sin is such a serious thing that it can't be forgiven unless something dies. When God delivers people, they aren't just given a kind of "Get out hell free" card, like some seem to think, but when someone is forgiven, something has to die.

That is exactly what God himself has done on our behalf and in our place. The celebration that came into existence because of God's delivering his people from this final plague is called Passover, because the angel of death passed over the homes of the Israelites. It is no coincidence that, when Jesus had his last supper with his disciples, it was in the context of a Passover celebration. Jesus was saying to his disciples, "Do you remember that when God brought you up out of Egypt, your salvation was brought about through the eating of the sacrificial lamb? In the same way, your salvation from sin will be brought about through your eating of my body and blood. This bread is my body, this cup is my blood. Every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, do it in remembrance of me, just like you remember your deliverance from Egypt every time you celebrate the Passover meal."

Whenever you participate in Communion at church, as you eat the bread and drink the juice, remember that Jesus is your Passover lamb. Just like the lambs at Passover died so that the people of Israel could live, Jesus died for you so that you can live, so that you can live the life of joy that God has promised you. Always remember that you have been bought with a price, that Christ died for you and that you have been made a child of God to be a witness to God's love in this world that can be so dark. Let us pray.

AMEN

Genesis 37:12-36

01/18/12 Genesis 37:12-36 GUMC Youth

We've been spending the last few weeks looking at some of the major and crucial stories in the book of Genesis in order to help us understand who God is and what it means for God to interact with us. What we find is that these early stories help shape the way we see and understand the world and they help us to realize that there are some ways of looking at the world and at the Bible that are simply not all that helpful. With that in mind, I want to turn your attention to the story of Joseph's brothers selling him into slavery.

But before we can get into the story and what it means for our understanding of God and life in general, we need to do a little bit of background work. Jacob, Joseph's father, had twelve sons and he had daughters above and beyond that. Lots of kids. He had a total of four wives who were the mothers of his children. Joseph was the first of only two sons that were born to his favorite wife, Rachel. As you may or may not know, the firstborn child, especially the firstborn son, was really important in those days. Now, Joseph wasn't exactly the firstborn. In fact, he had ten brothers, or more exactly half-brothers, who were all older than him. So here was this kid who was basically the youngest, but his father treated him differently than he did his other children. He gave him a special coat that seems to have been incredibly elaborate and expensive. Nothing makes siblings more jealous than having just one of them get a special gift.

But that isn't all. We read earlier in chapter thirty-seven that Joseph once told on some of his father's other wives, the mothers of his brothers, which probably didn't make them, or their sons, happy with him. Beyond that, Joseph started having dreams, which isn't so bad, but he started telling everyone about them, which may or may not have been a mistake. Listen to the dreams he had. He said, "There we were, binding sheaves in the field. Suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright; then your sheaves gathered around it, and bowed down to my sheaf." As you might imagine, a dream that basically had his brothers bowing down to him and treating him like a king probably didn't make them very happy. How about this other one? "The sun, the moon, and eleven stars were bowing down to me." Now, the dream doesn't just have his brothers bowing down to him, but his father and mother, too. I don't know if you have ever been jealous of your brothers or sisters or if they have ever been jealous of you, but this is one surefire way to make them mad.

That brings us up to the start of the story as we just read it. Jacob sends Joseph to Shechem to visit his brothers who are shepherding there to bring back a report about how they are doing. When they see him coming, though, his brothers decide that they are going to kill him. After all, the only certain way to ensure that all those dreams he had aren't going to come true is to take him out. Now, conspiring together to murder your half-brother is not a good thing to do, as you might well imagine. Reuben, the oldest brother knew this and he wanted to do what he could to prevent his brothers from actually killing Joseph. He convinces them to just throw Joseph into a pit, planning to go back later and rescue him, but before he can save his brother, the others have sold him to a group of Ishmaelites (who would be like modern day Arabs, though this is long before the rise of Islam), who take him to Egypt.

Now, you all know the rest of the story, right? Joseph is sold to be the servant of Potiphar, the captain of Pharaoh's guard. Eventually, Potiphar's wife tries to sleep with him and he runs away, only to have her put him in jail. While he is in jail, he is trusted enough to help and be the right-hand man of the jailer. He becomes famous in prison as someone who is able to interpret dreams so he is called for when Pharaoh has his dreams about the fat and skinny cows and the healthy and withered ears of corn. He so amazes Pharaoh that he is made to be the second most powerful person in the whole kingdom of Egypt. He then almost singlehandedly saves the nation from famine and makes Pharaoh incredibly powerful at the same time. Because of that, Joseph isn't just the second most powerful man in Egypt, he was probably just about the second most powerful man in the whole world at the time.

Anyway, the famine that the Pharaoh's dream predicted that Joseph interpreted does actually come and it has tragic consequences for people all over the region, including where Joseph's father and brothers are. They come to Egypt to get food twice and end up face to face with their brother, the brother they sold into slavery all those years ago, the brother they told their father was dead, as the only one who can save them. Joseph actually does save them and gives them a place to live and takes care of them so they can last out the rest of the famine.

But here is the problem. So long as his brothers never had to see Joseph again, so long as they kept him out of sight and out of mind, they could pretend that they really hadn't done anything all that bad. But when God brought Joseph back into their lives again as their savior, they realize that they could be in some serious trouble. They can relax a little because they are pretty sure that Joseph won't get back at them while their father Jacob is still alive, but what happens when he dies? At the very end of the book of Genesis, this is what we read. "Realizing that their father was dead, Joseph's brothers said, 'What if Joseph still bears a grudge against us and pays us back in full for all the wrong that we did to him?' So they approached Joseph, saying, 'Your father gave this instruction before he died, "Say to Joseph: I beg you, forgive the crime of your brothers and the wrong they did in harming you."'"

Do you see what they did there? They made up a story (Jacob didn't actually tell them to say what they said) in order to get off the hook, in order to save their own skins, so they don't get the punishment they so completely deserve. What is amazing is what Joseph does in response. "But Joseph said to them, 'Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God? Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today. So have no fear; I myself will provide for you and your little ones.'"

The question that I want to ask in light of this story, where it really plays itself out in our lives today is, "Was the selling of Joseph into slavery by his brothers good or was it evil?" This might seem like a silly question, because you probably already have an idea of whether it is good or evil which may or may not be based on what the Bible says, but it is incredibly important; so important that, once you know where to look, you find the answer people give to this question and those like it shows up all over the place.

Now, it seems to me that the most commonsense answer to the question, "Was the selling of Joseph into slavery good or evil," is "It is evil, of course." After all, it is the dominant opinion in our modern American world that slavery is evil and if selling someone into slavery is evil in general, surely it must be even more evil (if that is possible) to sell your brother into slavery. But that is not the only way people answer the question. There are some people who look at the end of the story where it says, "Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good," and say, "regardless of the fact that we want to say that Joseph's brothers did something that was evil, God was intending something good to come out of it. It is true that we could never encourage someone to sell their brother into slavery, but if God used it for good, we must conclude that it was actually a good thing. After all, if Joseph was not sold into slavery, he would never have interpreted the Pharaoh's dream and would have never been put into a position where he could save his family. Lots of things that are undeniably good came from it and we can see God's hand at work in it, so it must be good."

I should mention at this point that this is not my position. I disagree at some really important points with this view. You need to understand that if we actually take this view seriously, it eliminates any concept of real tragedy and ends up driving us to pure fatalism and determinism, the idea that things only happen the way they do because they are planned to happen that way, that they could not have happened in any other way. It also completely destroys any concept of good and evil because we can never say if anything is evil because we don't know what good God might be causing to come of it. It is not much of a step between saying that, because God saved the Israelites through Joseph being in Egypt, his brothers were right to sell him into slavery to saying that, because many people grow a lot as human beings through battling hard against cancer, cancer must be good. Even if people die from it, this view can't acknowledge that cancer might actually be an evil that is in violation of God's good purposes for humanity because we never know but God might bring something good out of it.

The real question that we need to deal with here is whether things are ever really evil. The view that says that Joseph's brothers did good by selling their brother into slavery is saying that things really aren't ever truly evil, or even if they were, we would have no way of knowing whether they are really evil until the end of time. At the moment that Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery, it seems clear that they are doing something evil, but once we see that it was through Joseph being in Egypt that God brought about the deliverance of his family, this view says that we have to go back and say that we were wrong when we said that the selling of Joseph into slavery was evil.

Do you see the problem with this? It completely robs us of any ability to judge whether things are good or evil, even based on a standard given to us by God himself. How do we know but that every tragedy in our lives might someday be revealed to be the key piece in the puzzle for something far better to happen that we can't imagine would have happened without it? Think of all your personal tragedies, and I'm not talking about times when you didn't get to do something you wanted to do, but times when your or people you love were broken by sickness and tragedy, when someone you knew died unexpectedly or tragically. Think of all the tragedies you have heard about, about the people who, in spite of all the growth they had while fighting their cancer, ended up dying because of it, of all the fatal car crashes and sudden heart attacks that have taken people. Think of all the national tragedies, of the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Twin Towers, of the senseless attacks in schools or military bases, or anywhere by crazy people with guns. Think of all the tragedies that occur on the international scale, of the Holocaust, of various genocidal movements, of angry wars that get waged. There is evil and tragedy everywhere we look, it seems sometimes. Is it really possible that somehow, in some way, God will bring some kind of good out of all of those tragedies that will somehow make them all better?

I want to share one more thing from a famous book I read that is interesting. There is a book by Fyodor Dostoevsky called Crime and Punishment. In the book, the main character has written an article where he argues that extraordinary people, people who have made incredibly important contributions to our knowledge and lives, would have been justified in doing whatever it takes to do those things, even if it meant breaking our laws. Specifically, he says, "I maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known except by sacrificing the lives of one, a dozen, a hundred, or more men, Newton would have had the right, would indeed have been in duty bound... to eliminate the dozen or the hundred men for the sake of making his discoveries known to the whole of humanity." This same main character has, at the time we find out about this article, killed two people. The question is raised whether this man considers himself to be one of the extraordinary men that is exempt from the law and also it asks how we are to tell, ahead of time, whether someone is that kind of person. The moment we decide that good and evil can't be decided at the time but need to be determined in light of what happens later, we have gotten ourselves into all kinds of problems.

My point is that tragedy happens; evil happens, and the solution to the problem is not to pretend that it doesn't, it isn't to pretend that somehow, when enough time has passed and we see the big picture, it isn't really tragic and evil. We don't do justice to the tragedies that people experience if we pretend that, someday, they will come to realize that they were never tragic, but just seemed like they were. Further, I think we do a tremendous disservice to the gospel, if we pretend that there really aren't any problems, that evil really isn't real. The amazing lesson we learn from the story of Joseph being sold into slavery is not that God causes things that we think are evil but that are really good if we just really understood them. The amazing thing that we learn from the story of Joseph is that our God is a God who can work good out of the most astonishing evil. There is no denying that selling their brother into slavery was wrong, that it should not have happened, that it is a crime against God's will for us, but God was not stopped by that evil act, but used it and made good come out of something that seemed like good couldn't have come out of it. When Jesus was crucified, it wasn't an act of goodness by human beings, it was the evil rising up of people like you and me against the God who loved them. And yet, God was not defeated or stopped because of that evil, but used it as the very place where we are joined to him forever. That doesn't show us that the crucifixion was actually good, but it shows us that God is really amazing and is not stopped by evil.

So when your life is attacked by evil, when you experience tragedies, when things that shouldn't happen actually do happen, know the power of God is a power that takes these tragic, sometimes even stupid events, and does not abandon you in the midst of them. When you feel overwhelmed and ready to bust out into tears, don't let anyone tell you that the tragedy is for the best, that it was somehow meant to happen, because when tragedy strikes, when real evil happens, there is good reason to cry, because it is a sign of the brokenness of the world in which we live. When Jesus' friend Lazarus died, he wept, even though he knew he was going to raise him from the dead. However, even though tragic things happen, and the things are really tragic, do not give up hope that the God who has been able to use the evil of Joseph's brothers to save a whole nation, and the God who took the cross where Christ was murdered and transformed it into the salvation of the world, can use the tragedy in your life and bring good out of it. Let the good that comes out of tragedy teach you, not that tragedy or evil is good, but that God is better than we could ever imagine. Let us pray.

AMEN

Genesis 22:1-19

01/11/12 Genesis 22:1-19 GUMC Youth

Have you ever heard the story of Abraham and Isaac before? It is often called, at least in Jewish circles the "Akedah" or "The Binding of Isaac." It is an amazingly important story if we want to understand who God is and how he has interacted with us. I would say that, for Christians, it is definitely in the top three most important stories in the whole Old Testament. It is at the same time one of the most amazing and also most frightening stories we ever read, depending on how we look at it. We are going to look at this story from a couple of different directions, so I want you to make sure you listen the whole way through, so you don't miss anything or get the wrong idea.

Before we start, I want to ask you, when you heard this story, what did you think of it? Was it a good story or a bad one? Is the God you hear about in it comforting or frightening, or perhaps a bit of both? The fact of the matter is that it has been my experience that many Christians tend to paint a bit of a one-sided picture of this story. We are a little afraid of what we read but we are more afraid of what people who are hostile to the Bible and Christian faith will do with it. Immanuel Kant, one of the most influential philosophers in all of history, argued that the love that a father ought to have for his son is a more certain and binding standard than any command from outside that relationship, even if a voice were to come from heaven. Christopher Hitchens, the recently deceased journalist who was also a strong advocate for atheism made a comment, referring to this story, about how he would reject anyone who suggested that he should be devoted to a God who asked him to sacrifice his child or to respect one who was willing to do so.

If these are the kinds of things that people say about this passage, it can come as no surprise that many Christians and churches simply ignore it, as if they are hoping that it will go away and stop bothering them. But there are several ways that people do talk about this story while trying to point out its positive aspects. One way that people talk about it, which comes from the New Testament, is to emphasize what the story of Abraham and Isaac has to tell us about God, but not that God is a bloodthirsty God who demands child sacrifice. Rather, it draws on the end of the story, where we read God saying to Abraham, "Because you have done this, and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will indeed bless you..." and so on. Paul, in his letter to the Romans says this, clearly echoing the story of Abraham and Isaac. "What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?" In this way of looking at things, the point that we should get from this story is not that God wants us to sacrifice our children, but that God is willing to stop at nothing to redeem us, even allowing Jesus to die.

Now, the way you almost always hear the story of Abraham and Isaac talked about in church, aside from what we just talked about, goes something like this. "Abraham has gone down as a hero of the faith because he was willing to give the very best of what he had to God. If we want to be like Abraham (and we do), we should be willing to give the best that we have to God." Of course, the problem with this way of thinking is that it is really isn't possible to avoid the conclusion that we should follow Abraham, even when it comes to sacrificing our children. After all, what parent would say that they have something more important than their children? Nobody would. Another philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, made fun of this tendency. He asked what would happen if someone decided to take a message like that seriously. Someone would, after being told to offer the best he had because Abraham did so might go home and get ready to sacrifice his own son. After all, his child is surely the best that he has. The preacher, if he found out that the man was planning to do this, would come and lay into him and call him a monster and other things. Kierkegaard's point was that the man could simply respond, "It was in fact what you yourself preached on Sunday."

I want to suggest that the story of Abraham and Isaac has a different meaning altogether and, not only that, it is actually one of the very most important stories in the whole Bible; so important that we cannot avoid it but must try to tackle it head-on. Before we talk about how we should understand this passage, I want to say something about how the rest of the ancient world thought about sacrifice. You might be wondering why I, as a Christian pastor, should want to explain how pagan people throughout time and place have thought about sacrifice, but it is actually incredibly important. If we don't understand what pagan people have said and if we can't wrap our mind around why people would find that way of thinking convincing, we can never really understand how radical the gospel really is, how completely different from that way of thinking Christian faith really is.

First of all, you need to know that, though Israel has a long and rich heritage of animal sacrifice, it has never affirmed human sacrifice. The closest Israel ever gets to sacrificing a human is this passage and, it is important to note, Isaac is not actually sacrificed. However, though Israel never affirmed human sacrifice, there were several groups who lived around them who did. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that Israel was a lonely island of humanity in the midst of an ocean of child sacrifice. The fact that we do not practice human sacrifice in our country today is just one way in which our culture has been influenced by the Judeo-Christian tradition. In spite of the fact that many of us would find human sacrifice to be obviously evil, there have been many groups of people who have not felt the same way.

Let me give you an example to try to make it clearer. There were some South American tribes throughout the centuries who played a game that is somewhat similar to our modern game of basketball. The greatest athletes of the tribe would train relentlessly to be chosen to be on the team. When two teams played it was for keeps. When the game was over the tribe would sacrifice a whole team, but they didn't sacrifice the losing team, they sacrificed the winning team. Though all the players knew that, if their team won, they would die, nobody played to lose. Everyone wanted to be on the winning team; everyone wanted to be sacrificed to the gods.

This seems a bit odd to modern Americans, doesn't it, so we need to try to understand what was going on. Why would people want to sacrifice the winning team instead of the losing team? It was precisely because the winning team was better and the people wanted to sacrifice the very best. Not only that, but think about what it would be like to live in that kind of culture. If you got to be one of those who were chosen for sacrifice, think about what a huge honor that would be. If you were sacrificed, it would mean that you were the very best in your whole tribe, the best thing to give to the gods, the best offering you could possibly make. That is a pretty intense honor, even if it seems barbaric by today's standards.

The point is that there is something in the depths of our humanity that wants to offer our very best. Though we live in such a consumeristic culture where we are tempted to give the very least we have to in order to get something, isn't there something about the things we care about that makes us want to give the very best we have? If you love to play sports or music or theater or anything else, you don't set out saying, "What's the least I have to do in order to get by," do you? No, you set yourself to work hard and to do the best you possibly can. You work hard, you go to practices, you give of your free time, all to give the best you have.

This deep desire to insist on making a sacrifice of the very best we have to God is, in my judgment, not a Christian desire, but a pagan one and the strongest evidence we have in the Bible for this is the story of Abraham and Isaac. God comes along to Abraham and says, "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I will show you." We need to remember that, as barbaric as this might sound to twenty-first century American ears, it would not have sounded strange at all to Abraham, who grew up and had spent seventy-five years of his life in a pagan city that, if it was anything like other pagan cities, practiced human sacrifice. During Abraham's life, he did not have the Ten Commandments to tell him that God did not approve of murdering people; he did not have the whole prophetic tradition, where God carefully explained and nuanced his desires for his people in response to their unfaithfulness; he did not have Jesus to look at and understand what he had to show him about what God was and was not like. He spent his whole life surrounded by people who thought that sacrificing your child made absolute sense. What is interesting is how powerfully God overturns that whole impulse here, and it is much stronger than simply saying, "Don't sacrifice your children."

Abraham and Isaac go to the mountain and Abraham is right about to do what he was told to do, to the point where his knife is already raised. He was prepared to give the very best he had, just like everyone else he knew was willing to do. The story of Abraham and Isaac has more to tell us about the barbaric nature of human beings than it does about God demanding a horrible thing and we know that because of how God handles the situation. God stops Abraham from doing what he is about to do. He says, "Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him." But what happens after that? This is what we read. "And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place 'The Lord will provide;' as it is said to this day, 'On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.'"

That may not mean much to you at first, but we need to notice what God does here. Abraham is completely prepared to offer his son, the best that he has, but God stops him from doing so. Abraham sacrificed the ram that God gave in Isaac’s place.  What has God done?  God has given a sacrifice that was intended to replace the very best that Abraham could have given.  It is as if God was saying, “The very best that you have is not good enough.  Instead, I want you to give me what I have given you to give.”  You see, what matters most is not the size of the gift, or even how important it seems to us, but the fact that it is God who has called for the sacrifice and that it is God who has provided for it.

The big difference between the Israelites and all the pagan nations around them was that the pagan nations offered to their gods what they thought they should give while Israel offered to God what they were told to give. The pagan nations thought for a while and then said, "This is the sacrifice that I should give. It is the best that I have, so that must be what the gods want." The Israelites said, "It might not seem like what we are giving is the best we have, since our children are surely better than our animals, but this is what God wants us to give, so that is what we will give. In spite of what it looks like, it actually is the best we can give because it is what God has provided."

What this means for faith is astonishing. It means that we don't have to sit around, wondering and worrying about whether we have given God a big enough or a good enough sacrifice. It means that we don't have to lay awake at night concerned about whether we have been good enough for God to love us. God takes the very best thing that Abraham has to offer, allows him to even get to the point where he is really going to offer it to God and then gives him a replacement. In so many ways, that is what God has done in Jesus. We want to give God the best we have, we want to work really hard and earn God's love, but every time we get ourselves all worked up, that now we're really going to give our best, God says to us, "Stop! Do not do that thing that your culture has told you that you need to give. I am glad that you don't want to hold anything back, but what I really want from you is something greater than you could ever give. What I really want is for you to offer me the Jesus I sent for you."

Just like God takes the ram that he provides for Abraham instead of Isaac, takes the sacrifice that he gives instead of the very best that Abraham could give, God takes the Lamb that he provides, that is, Jesus Christ, instead of the best that we have. Now this is where faith comes in. You see, it doesn't take any faith to believe that God will accept the best that we have. After all, we don't have anything better. It is easy to believe that God will accept the best we have, or at least, if he doesn't, then we can rest assured that we did the best we could. It does take faith, however, to really believe that God's ways are better than our own, that God would actually prefer what he has given us to give to him over what we muster up on our own. It takes faith to cling to the fact that what God has done is better than what we can do and to trust in that so completely that we do not live our lives worried that we have not done enough, but rejoicing that God has done it all, so we do things his way.

So, I encourage you, as you go about your business this week to think about all the times you worry about whether you have given enough, or if your faith is strong enough, or whether you've been a good enough person, and every time you do, I want you to think about the fact that God has given us something better than even the best we can do, that we can trust that in Christ, we have what we really need to offer to God. I want you to remember that this is why we try to live like Jesus lived; because he was the one who shows us what God really wants and I guarantee you that it is a better way to live than trying to figure out how to make God happy on our own. God has made us free in Christ and that is very good news. Let us pray.

AMEN

The Calling of Abraham (Genesis 12:1-9)

01/04/12 Genesis 12:1-9 GUMC Youth

Tonight we are starting a new series for the teaching part of our Wednesday nights together. I've been reading the Bible pretty seriously for about eight years now (remember, if you start now, you will be way ahead of me when you get to be old like me) and I'm a pretty seriously analytical thinker. I like to get things worked out in my head, figuring out how all the pieces fit together. The point is that, just because I have gotten to the point where I understand the timeline of the Bible pretty well, it doesn't mean that everyone else has done it, too. What I thought would be helpful is to look at the Old Testament for a while and look at some of the really hugely important stories, events and people that help us to understand Jesus and our faith as Christians, and to do it in something close to chronological order. We can even make a kind of timeline to keep things straight. Just so you know, you should do your best to try to be here every week, because every passage we look at is going to be a really big deal; seriously, they are going to be stories and passages that we really need to take seriously if we want to understand who Jesus is. It isn't like if you miss one, you'll be lost, so you can jump back in if you have to miss, and you can totally still invite your friends. In fact, it might not be a bad idea to invite them, especially if they don't know anything about the Bible or God, because we are going to be covering a lot of groundwork in the next several weeks and it would be a great introduction to God's interaction with us. After all, we are asking the question, "What in the world has God been up to?"

So, in order to kick things off with this, I wanted to start by looking at the story of the calling of Abraham in Genesis 12. You see, though the story of Adam and Eve is interesting, when we are looking at most of the Bible and especially if we are trying to understand Jesus and the New Testament, we are looking at the history of a particular nation, Israel. So, we need to understand the people who lived in this nation and where they came from. The Jewish people have been known for a long time as the people of God or the "chosen people," but they didn't drop out of the sky one day or anything. They came from a particular place at a particular time. The Jewish people trace back their heritage to a single man, named Abram, whose name God changed to Abraham.

Now, Abraham was seventy-five years old when God called him. Up until that time, Abraham lived in a city called Ur in the Ancient Near East, actually in modern day Iraq. God called Abraham and simply said, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed."

One of the things that I hope to show you as we go through the Bible is that lots of people have taught us to look at the Bible in a certain way that, to be perfectly honest, is not all that helpful. Not only that, but it often leaves faithful people open to attack by the hostile secular world who are looking for every opportunity to poke holes in Christian faith. The atheists in our culture want to treat the Bible as if it were nothing more than a collection of fairy tales and, unfortunately there are plenty of Christians who don't help to set them straight. I want to try to give you the information you need and to provide you a way of reading the Bible that will help you to stand strong when people try to ridicule your faith.

When we read the text, all we read is that God said to Abraham, "Go," and that he goes. There are many people who would argue that Abraham just believed everything that he ever heard, that he just had a weird dream one day and just followed blindly. They would also say that Abraham lived in a primitive time, where people just attributed everything they couldn't understand to some mystical force that they called "God." And yet, if we actually look at the story of Abraham carefully, we find that this isn't the case. There are lots of times when God tells him things that he simply doesn't believe. God says a little later, "You are going to have a son." The only problem is that Abraham was called when he was seventy-five years old, and it was several years later when he was told this. Abraham didn't believe God so he was going to name one of his servants as his heir, which was a totally common thing to do at the time, but God said "no." Abraham and his wife tried over and over again to do things their own way because they just couldn't believe that they were really going to have a child of their own when she was pushing ninety and he was pushing one hundred. So much for Abraham being someone who just blindly believes everything he is told.

It is true that Abraham believed he was called by God to get up and move and do what he does, but it was not as if everyone who heard of him fell back in amazement and said, "Surely God has chosen you." Lots of people tried to take advantage of him, lots of people fought with him. If everyone believed it every time someone said "God told me to do this," they certainly wouldn't behave toward Abraham as they did. The people at the time weren't any more prepared to actually take God seriously than we are today. Basically, what I am trying to encourage you to do is, in spite of all the strangeness of the Bible, in spite of the fact that the people in the Bible speak differently than we do, in spite of the fact that we might need to learn about some of the differences between their culture and ours, they are still people just like you and me. In spite of all the things that have changed, there is a lot that hasn't changed at all. The people we read about in the Bible are real people who do all kinds of stuff that real people do, regardless of what someone who wants to make Christians look foolish would like to say.

God calling Abraham out of his city and to a new place isn't just some neat story, it actually is incredibly important for our understanding of all God's interactions with humanity. You see, one of the things that God tells his people over and over again, over the course of hundreds of years, is that he is not like the gods that the other nations worship. He is trying to establish a whole new way of living, believing and even thinking that is very much unlike what the people of Ur were doing. You are all in school, you all know how serious a thing peer pressure can be. It is incredibly hard to live in a way that is completely different than how everyone else is living. If God wanted to actually have Abraham learn who he was and not immediately forget that he was supposed to be different, he had to get him out of his hometown.

But that's not all. We are going to spend a fair amount of time in the next several weeks looking specifically at Jewish history. Some of you might wonder why we would do that if none of us are Jewish and if the gospel is meant to be for everyone. The reason is because we are all products of our culture. You look at the world in certain ways because you were born and raised in twenty-first century America and not in ancient India or anywhere else. There are things about twenty-first century America that are, for right or wrong, embedded into your cultural DNA, as it were. You believe in things like Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, you believe that all human beings are created equal, you believe that government should be of the people, by the people and for the people, you think that democracy is always a better choice than a dictatorship, you think that capitalism is the best choice, really the only choice. You believe that the freedom to speak your mind is a right that must not be taken away by the government. None of these things are in the Bible, not in those words anyway. They are all taken from American culture.

The point is that every single culture in the world has the same kind of baggage. If God wanted to communicate with people and wanted to avoid all that baggage that can confuse people, how would he have to do it? He certainly couldn't just take a group of people who live in the middle of one of those cultures and hope that they could just forget their whole culture while they were living in the middle of it. The only way that God could deal with this is to create a culture from the very beginning. He had to take someone and their family out of their comfort zone and put them in a totally different place, he would have to take that family and all their children and their children's children, and set them aside as people with whom he would interact in a special way, reshaping the way they think and live, to give them ways to understand him that they could never have so long as they allowed the surrounding culture to tell them what to think.

That is why the calling of Abraham is so amazingly important. It is God doing exactly this. God is taking Abraham and forging a brand-new community, a brand-new culture, where he can shape their very lives into something that will let them hear the word of God clearly and be able to live like we were meant to live and know God like we were created to know him. Now, as you might imagine, you can't just take someone and have them forget where they came from. It isn't like God was able to reshape Abraham's culture overnight. It took hundreds of years and it took lots of interesting and difficult experiences for God to be able to do what he needed to do and we are going to look at some of these experiences of the Israelites over the next few weeks. The point is that God knew that it was going to take a long time to prepare the way for Jesus, but that didn't stop him. He knew that it was worth it and so he took all the time he needed to get humanity ready to experience and receive Jesus.

Look at the story of Abraham being called by God this way. God had a plan. It was God's plan all along to send Jesus and reach the whole world through him. Jesus came at a particular place and at a particular point in time. But we can't forget that Jesus didn't just drop down out of nowhere. God had taken a whole nation into his plans, to work with them and help them to be the people that could make sense out of Jesus. Abraham was an absolutely key player in these plans, but he seems like kind of a funny key player. He wasn't even called until he was seventy-five, then he didn't actually have the son that God promised him until he was a hundred years old. God took him from his hometown and had him walk around the Promised Land, but he didn't get to settle down and put down roots. He had to wander all over the place, looking at the land that God had promised him but that his family wouldn't really get to move into for another four hundred years.

What I want to point out to you is that you have no idea where God might be calling you in your life. You might have all kinds of plans about what you want to do when you get out of high school, you might have all kinds of hopes and dreams that you think are pretty amazing, but you have no idea but that God might have some even better plans for you. Abraham seems at first glance to not be that big a deal, but he was so important that the Israelites always traced their relationship with God back to their father Abraham. On the one hand, he didn't do that much because he was old and just wandered around where God told him, but he becomes such a symbol of faith, such a hero of God's people, that both Jesus and those who hated him could agree that Abraham is one of the most important people in the history of the world.

Think about how amazing Abraham's role in our Christian faith really is. If Abraham hadn't listened to God, the whole history of the world would look different. I don't mean that God wouldn't have come if Abraham hadn't left his home. God would have found a way. God could have chosen someone else, but the fact that God actually did choose Abraham has shaped the whole course of history.

There wasn't much about Abraham that made him special. He was old, he made a lot of mistakes, and he actually had his share of doubts. But that didn't stop God from taking him, ordinary though he was, and making him a great leader. Who knows? God might be calling you to a greatness you never even imagined. Listen carefully to God, because if he is calling you, no matter how difficult it might seem his plans are, they are better than anything we could come up with. Let us pray.

AMEN