02/01/12 Exodus 20:1-21 GUMC Youth
Tonight, we continue on in our series, "What in the World has God Been Up To?" by looking at God giving his law to his people on Mount Sinai. I'm sure that most of you have heard the Ten Commandments before. Often, throughout history, Christians have tended to separate the commandments into two "tables" (that is, tablets), based on the kind of relationships that they have to do with. Most traditionally, you have the "first table" which includes the first four commandments: No other Gods, no idols, don't take the Lord's name in vain, and honor the Sabbath. These commandments focus first and foremost on our relationship with God. The "second table" includes the other six commandments: Honor your parents, don't murder, don't commit adultery, don't steal, don't lie, and don't covet your neighbor's stuff. These commandments are primarily focused on our relationships with other people.
Now, I want to point out something that you may or may not have noticed in the last few years. Every once in a while, you hear people arguing that America was founded on the Ten Commandments, or there will be some big story in the news about whether or not the Ten Commandments should be displayed in some public building. What are people really talking about when they say things like this? Are they really talking about all the Ten Commandments? What I find is that most people, when they want to emphasize the Ten Commandments, are really just looking at a few of them. We want to emphasize that it isn't acceptable to kill one another, to just break the marriage promises that we make without consequence, to take what doesn't belong to us, or to lie, especially in court. Those are all great and important values, and they are all found within the Ten Commandments, but can we really say that by affirming those values, we are affirming the Ten Commandments? It seems to me that we are only affirming four of them. We aren't all that interested, it seems, in ensuring that there are no other gods before God; in fact, one of the things you have to live with if you want religious freedom is that other people might not follow your God. By the same token, how often do you hear people arguing that a shared Sabbath is crucial to American success? How about looking at how people treat their parents, however old they may be, as a major part of whether they are "good" people? Almost never.
The reason why I bring this up is that most people I have heard who talk a lot about affirming the Ten Commandments are really only supporting what we could call the Four Commandments, and they aren't even at the top of the list. The worship of God is, if we can make any claim that the most important things are listed first, which I think we can, far more important than the things we usually hear about. To talk about the Ten Commandments as if what they have to say about our relationships with other people is what really matters, or even if it is the only thing we care about is to miss the whole point. The Ten Commandments have much more to do with our relation to God than they do with our relation to one another.
I understand that not everyone likes rules. What I want to ask you is, "What function do rules or commandments have?" Are there good functions or are there only bad ones? All of us, not least you who are still in school, can give examples of rules that we don't like. We don't like rules that tell us when we need to go to bed, when we need to get up in the morning, that tell us how to dress, what we can and cannot say, what movies we can watch, and any number of other things. Sometimes, we want to break rules, not because we actually want to do what we aren't supposed to do, but that the very declaration, "This is bad," makes us want to do it, even if we never wanted to do it before. There was a famous poet, Carl Sandberg, who wrote, "Why did the children put beans in their ears when the one thing we told them they must not do is put beans in their ears? Why did the children pour molasses on the cat when the one thing we told them they must not do is pour molasses on the cat?"
There have been people who have tried to spell out what kinds of uses the law can have. Martin Luther, for example, had two uses for the law. The first was to convict us of sin. So long as we never look at something like the Ten Commandments, we might be able to convince ourselves that we have never really done anything wrong or, if we have, we can convince ourselves that it really wasn't that bad. After all, few of us have committed murder or adultery. But have you ever coveted something that someone else had? Did you ever find yourself wanting what you didn't and couldn't have? Even if we never broke any other commandment, we still find ourselves, as the "good" people, in violation of the laws God gave to his people. So long as we look at those four commandments that our society likes to look at, we can talk about ourselves as people who don't break the laws of God. The moment we look at the rest, we realize that there are many times when we allow other things, even if we don't call them "gods," get in the way of our relationship with God. Sometimes its school, sometimes its relationships, sometimes its sports or other activities. The point is that if we actually had to answer for everything we've ever done we would find that we break the Ten Commandments all the time. Psalm 130 says, "If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand?"
The second use of the law, according to Luther, is that law can be used to hold people back from acting on their sinful ideas. For example, you might be incredibly mad at someone; you might feel that your life would be so much easier if they simply weren't around. However, even if you would get to the point where you would be willing to kill them, the fact that you would be severely punished for doing so might stop you from following through. In a similar way, though a little less serious, you might want to go as fast as you possibly can down the highway in order to take as little time as possible to get where you are going and yet, because you can get a pretty serious fine, you might not actually do it.
Now, a little later on, John Calvin comes along and adds a third use of the law. He points out that, as true as it is that the law can be a mirror, showing us the sin that we commit every day, and as true as it is that the law can be a kind of curb, that keeps us, at least sometimes, from doing wrong, it is also a guide, a resource we can use to help us live as we are supposed to as Christians. Calvin really emphasized this third use of the law. If Luther focused on how the law is used by those who are not yet Christians, Calvin wanted to emphasize how the law functions for those who are already Christians. For those of you who are thinking to yourselves, "This isn't a Lutheran or a Presbyterian Church, why do we care what Luther and Calvin had to say" (which may be none of you I know), John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, absolutely agreed with Calvin that we should use the law as a guide for Christian behavior. In fact, he emphasized the importance of a transformed life more than just about anyone else in the history of the church.
I want to bring up something that I read for a class in high school. It was a book that was written as a novel but was a vehicle to talk about philosophy and life. This particular author criticized the formulation of the Ten Commandments, not so much because he felt they didn't form a good way to live, but because many of the commandments are of the form "Thou shalt not." He argued that putting rules in a negative form (that is, putting restrictions on what you can do) is just setting people up for failure. Like we talked about earlier, telling someone, "You can't do this" might just make them want to do it more. This author suggested that instead of saying, "You shall not commit murder," God should have said, "You shall value life and work to preserve it."
As much as I agree with the idea that telling someone they can't do something might make them want to do it (even God recognizes this, as we read in Romans 7), I think we need to realize that God was not being dumb when he put the commandments in the form of "Thou shalt not." If you say, "You shall not commit murder," you've got a line in the sand, you have a point where you can say, "Once you cross this line, you have gone too far, but until you do, don't lose too much sleep over it." For example, and actually this example come from the Bible, that you and I are out chopping wood. You swing the axe up to strike again and, all of a sudden, the axehead flies off and hits me in the head, killing me. Is it a tragedy? Absolutely, will it cause problems of various kinds in the community, of course, but did you sin? Not really. You might feel horrible, you might wonder what you might have done differently that could have prevented it, but you didn't hate me ahead of time, you didn't plot at home how you could kill me. It is deeply unfortunate, but not truly sinful.
On the other hand, if you say, "You shall value life and work to preserve it," we never know quite how to interpret it. How can we tell the difference between someone who does not value life as much as we would like them to and someone who is working against life? How do we determine what life is supposed to be and what it looks like to value it? Maybe, for most of us, this isn't a problem we come up in daily life, but it is something that people in hospitals, for example, have to deal with all the time. What if someone is in serious pain, battling hard against a disease against which they simply cannot win, especially if the medicine is a big part of what is making them so miserable? Is it treating life more valuable if we insist that they keep fighting until their final breath or is it treating it as more valuable if we allow them to spend their last days in relative comfort, perhaps even in their home?
I think the beauty in the negative form of the commandments is that it gives us some concrete boundaries, not altogether unlike the boundaries our parents have given us, especially when we were very young and simply didn't know what was good for us and what was bad for us. God tells us, "You need to know that there are certain limits within which human beings were designed to live and if you get too far outside of them, you are going to create lots of problems for yourselves. It is true that you might figure out many of these things for yourself, but there are some you wouldn't necessarily notice unless you were told and I want to save you the turmoil that comes from doing those things." To say "Thou shalt not," you set up guideposts to show you boundaries, inside of which you can do more or less whatever you want. To say, "You shall do this," gives us a general direction, but no guidance as to what to do in concrete situations.
My point, and what I want you to really get out of this tonight, is that, in spite of the fact that people today seem to say that God's law is all about holding us back and making sure we don't do anything wrong, the law is actually intended to be liberating, to make us free. It's true that there are some things that God tells us not to do, but the things we aren't supposed to do are things that aren't good for us anyway, so by saying, "I don't want to listen to God," what we are really saying is, "I want to make poor choices." The whole point is to free us up to love God and love our neighbors more.
Let me give you an example. Most people around, if they believe in God at all, only believe in one God. Polytheism, or the belief in multiple gods, has gone pretty seriously out of style in today's world. But it wasn't always the case. In fact, until Judaism came along, basically everyone was polytheistic. What this meant, especially in the ancient Greek world, was that most people believed that there were gods or spirits in every tree and under every rock. If you wanted to drink from a river, you were supposed to ask permission of the river god; if you wanted to chop down a tree for firewood, you were supposed to ask permission of the god who lived in the tree. You couldn't hardly walk down the street without asking for forgiveness for kicking a stone with your foot by mistake. The fact of the matter is that this is not an easy way to live. You were never sure if you had offended some random god by something you did, either on purpose or by mistake.
The point is that the laws that God gave the Israelites in the Ten Commandments, helped to free them from this kind of mentality. You don't have to worry about appeasing all the gods of the trees and rocks and rivers because there are no such gods. The only God there really is is the God of the universe, the God of the Israelites, the God who came among us as Jesus Christ. God wanted his people to live free from all the silly things that people can get caught up in, so he made sure to tell them the truth about the gods that everyone else got worked up about; they simply don't exist, or at the very least, they are so weak, that they can't even be called "gods."
Notice that the most liberating of the Ten Commandments are the first ones, where God tells us that he is the only God. He is the only real authority, he is the only one that we need to make absolutely sure we listen to. Every other authority is subject to him; and that is really freeing. The point is that God is not trying to micromanage your life; he is trying to free you for more joy, more celebration, more devotion, more love. Love is spontaneous; you can't force it, but you can do things that hinder it. That is why Jesus says that all of the law is summed up in these two commandments: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. If you kill your neighbor, or even hate them, you aren't loving him or her. If you are stealing from them, or even just being driven by jealousy, you aren't loving them. If you constantly talk back to your parents and do what you know you aren't supposed to do, you aren't loving them. If you say you worship God but then put all kinds of things in his place, you aren't loving him.
The law marks out boundaries, outside of which, love for God and neighbor cannot really happen. So long as you stay within those general boundaries, you are free to be who you were made to be, free to love as God moves you to love, free to have fun and live life to the fullest. The law wasn't given to ruin your life, it was given to free you from the problems that we often cause ourselves. The law was given in love. Let it free you to love others. Let us pray.
AMEN
Showing posts with label Exodus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Exodus. Show all posts
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Thursday, January 26, 2012
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
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
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Luke 16:19-31, The Rich Man and Lazarus
10/09/11 Luke 16:19-31 Grace UMC
It would be very possible to preach a sermon on any number of topics using the story of the rich man and Lazarus. One could prepare a sermon on the reward for the righteous and the punishment of the wicked, or about what happens to us once we die, or perhaps the give and take between receiving blessings during this life and those that we receive in the life to come. There are many ways we could look at this, but I want to draw attention to the last interchange between the rich man and Abraham.
"He said, 'Then, father, I beg you to send him to my father's house - for I have five brothers - that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.' Abraham replied, 'They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.' He said, 'No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.' He said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.'"
The rich man's reaction is something that has found a prominent place throughout Christian history in the writings of various people. How often have we heard of people who lived their whole lives, pushing God off until tomorrow, until finally there came a time that there were no more tomorrows? Immediately, such people, we read, are overwhelmed by remorse. What they would not give for just one more day, to go and do what they ought to have done before but had, tragically, left undone.
What is more, we see this day by day in our own lives, even if in a somewhat less extreme form. How many of us can remember what we used to do when we were teenagers and wish we could go back and tell the teenage version of ourselves that we should live differently, that we should make better choices? How many of us look at the state of the world today and realize that people today are making the same mistakes we did yesterday and haven't learned from them? How many of us wish we could just sit people down and talk some sense into them, to teach them what we have learned over so many years and with so much pain?
The fact of the matter is that, when I look back on my life, just about every bad decision I ever made was preceded, at some point, by someone who was older and wiser than I was, who warned me about the temptations and trials that I would go through, and they knew what they were talking about because they had gone through them already and had watched their friends and everyone they knew, in addition to total strangers, go through them. They could see with the clear vision of hindsight what seemed far less clear to me at the time. I ought to have trusted them. The fact of the matter, however, is that I not only didn't listen to the voice of experience, I don't know for sure if I could have done so. I am repeatedly amazed at our ability, as human beings, to simply brush aside anything that we don't want to deal with.
This is precisely what Jesus is getting at with this story. The realities of reward and punishment are as clear as can be to the rich man. He is experiencing one for himself and he can see the other one before his very eyes. Surely, if someone who had this kind of first-hand experience could come and bear witness to what was coming, everyone would listen, it would be indisputable proof of what the future held in store, and nobody would have to endure what this rich man had to suffer.
It is an argument that makes a lot of sense to us. If someone who was dead could come back to us and share their experiences, wouldn't that seem to be the ultimate proof? And yet, I think that, when we think this way, we tend to overvalue the role of miracles in the act of convincing human beings of the truth of God. Take, for example, the story of the Exodus from Egypt that you all probably learned in Sunday School or, if you are like me and didn't grow up in the church at all, probably learned it from various movies that are made every so often about it. Imagine the scene in your head. Ten plagues are unleashed on the Egyptian people who had gone from hosting the Israelites, to dominating them and making them their slaves. The land is plagued with the turning of water into blood, overrun with frogs, gnats, and flies. Livestock was struck with disease, boils broke out on all the people and animals, terrible thunder and hail storms ravaged the countryside, locusts came and devoured the produce of the land, unnatural darkness covered the whole country, and finally the firstborn sons were killed. But that is really only the beginning. The Israelites were then led across the sea, which was parted to let them pass. Even after these astonishing miracles took place, that was not the end. Every day, the people were given Manna from heaven to eat and were led, day in and day out, by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.
These were people who had seen more miracles in a matter of weeks than most of us have ever seen or will ever see over the course of our whole lives. If miracles could convince people beyond a shadow of a doubt of who God was, surely the Israelites would have been convinced. After all, it had profound consequences. Without God, they were slaves, now they were free. They owed everything, not just in a spiritual sense, but in a very literal sense, to the God who redeemed and saved them. And yet, when Moses goes up Mount Sinai to speak with God, what do we read? We read that the people lost patience, that they pressured Aaron, their priest, to make a golden calf for them to worship because, after all, whatever might have been the case before, they haven't seen God move lately. For goodness' sake, it had been a whole month without a dramatic miracle, never mind the fact that they were still eating bread from heaven and always lived in the sight of the pillar of cloud and of fire.
I still remember when I first noticed this as I read the Bible. I remember longing for God to move with power in the community in which I found myself, that he would perform undeniable miracles, signs and wonders, so that true revival would break out. When I saw the Israelites in this light, for the first time, the thought crossed my mind, "If God did everything I asked him to do, and did all kinds of miracles, it might not really convince anyone, at least not for long." It started to make sense to me why God would give such a serious law to his people. They, just like we, are easily distracted, and need not just a miracle, but a whole way of life that is devoted to God. It wasn't that God wasn't able to do miracles, or held back from doing them; after all, he did them all the time, but it seemed that God knew all too well that, at the end of the day, miracles only go so far in transforming hearts and lives.
But that isn't all. Let us look at the New Testament, at the life of Jesus. Everywhere Jesus went, he healed the sick, he restored sight to the blind, he made the lame to walk again, he did amazing things. However, we read, in Mark's gospel, to speak of nowhere else, that, one morning, when a crowd of people had gathered to be healed, Jesus left town, saying, "Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do." Jesus seemed to be more interested in proclaiming his message than healing the sick, although he certainly did that, too.
You know, it is interesting that Luke's gospel records a story where a man begs that a man named Lazarus be sent back from the dead in order to tell people about the life that is to come. The reason it is so interesting is because in John's gospel, we read an account of Jesus raising a man named Lazarus to do precisely that. The fact that Jesus had an advocate who everyone knew had been dead, in fact, had been dead for several days, but had come back, did not convince people who had already made up their minds not to believe. Instead of being convinced, they simply included Lazarus in their plans to kill Jesus.
But one of the most astonishing things that I ever read in the Bible about this is something that I never noticed until someone pointed it out to me one day. It is such a famous passage that I must have read it over and over again, but had just never noticed it. At the very end of the Gospel according to Matthew, when Jesus is about to give what has come to be known as "The Great Commission," we read this. "Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted." Some doubted! Can you imagine that? There they were, face-to-face with the Lord, resurrected in glory, Jesus Christ, who was clearly dead just the day before, and some doubted! Not only was it, apparently, not convincing to people who hated Jesus that he raised Lazarus from the dead, it wasn't even convincing to the disciples that Jesus was resurrected.
It was not until Pentecost that people really began to understand what Jesus had said and done; it was not until the Holy Spirit came upon the church that everything began to make sense. Before Jesus was crucified, Peter denied him and ran away, after he was raised, he decided to go back to fishing; it was only when he received the Spirit that Peter became the mighty leader of the church that we remember.
When we look at the issue in this way, we can really see that Jesus' story of the rich man and Lazarus is not merely a warning not to trust in miracles as the primary convincing force, but is truly a double-edged sword that cuts both ways. What does Abraham say? "If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead." On the one hand, it tells us, as we have been discussing so far, that we have a tendency, like the rich man, to overvalue miracles as a means of conviction, but it also tells us that we have a tendency, like the rich man, to undervalue the convincing power of the word of God, especially as made manifest in human beings.
You see, lots of people went to see Jesus as a miracle worker, but it was only when the disciples, empowered by the Spirit, began to go out and preach that people began to respond. Once again, they performed miracles, and miracles never dropped out of God's interaction with humanity, but it wasn't the miracles that had the impact on the people, it was the word of God, backed up by the power of the Spirit. Peter and John heal a crippled man on the steps of the Temple and are met with nothing but anger and skepticism from the authorities. But when Peter stands up and preaches, when he shares what God has done, the impact he has made, three thousand people were added to the number of believers.
I have emphasized that, in spite of the fact that miracles do not seem to play the real backbone of the plan of God to minister to humanity and transform lives, that is not to say that God doesn't do the miraculous. Far from it. Though I have been here for only a short time, I know that this congregation has been touched by genuine miracles. Many of you have been touched, either directly or indirectly, by the fact that God has and does still move mightily in ways that bear a striking resemblance to the healing and transformational miracles of the Old and New Testaments. And even though I don't know all of you so I can't say for sure, but if you are anything like the rest of humanity, there are still days where you feel weak, that you have your doubts, that, even if your faith seems strong, you don't always live in the full, unbridled confidence of the truth of the Gospel, in spite of the undeniable miracles you have seen and even experienced. In fact, I have a feeling that many days can go by with not a thought about those miracles, until you are reminded by someone else or you deliberately remind yourself of the power of God in your life.
The point is not to say that miracles don't happen, because they clearly do, and it is not to say that they do not have a profound impact on those they touch, because they clearly do, but it is to remind us that the power of God is most manifest, not in what the world would call clearly miraculous, but in the word of the Lord, spoken by ordinary people like you and me, who are empowered by the very Spirit of God. This is precisely why I will say now and you will hear me say again, that Pentecost is without a doubt the single most frightening day of the Christian year. It is the day that we are forced to come to terms with the fact that the disciples with whom we identify so strongly in the gospels, because they are weak and broken people, just like you and me, are utterly transformed into mighty heroes of faith, who speak the word with boldness, who go into the world and make a difference beyond what they would otherwise be capable of because they are united to the ministry of Jesus Christ and empowered by the Holy Spirit.
You see, brothers and sisters, that Spirit of God that made Peter preach with boldness, that gave the force to his words that transformed the hearts and lives of three thousand people in a single morning, is promised to you and me as well. The only difference between the Peter who denied Christ and the Peter who laid his life down to be killed for his faith is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit that, the scriptures teach us, takes up residence in our lives as those who belong to Christ.
What I am saying is that we, as human beings, have a tendency to say things like, "If only this miracle would happen, if only we had this kind of program at our church, if only we had these kinds of people to lead and participate in the ministries of our church, if only things were different than they are now, if only they were the way things used to be." And you know what? None of those things we long for are bad things, and, to be honest, they already exist in various ways. The point is that God is not calling us to something that is too hard for us, not because we are capable in ourselves to follow God's call, but because we, too, have been indwelled by the Holy Spirit.
Jesus' story told us to consider the words of Moses and the prophets. So let us consider what Moses tells the people in Deuteronomy, chapter thirty. "Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, 'Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?' Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, 'Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?' No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe." The command to go and make disciples is not something that is far off, not something that we need to go and find a miracle-worker before we can do it; it is not something that requires a special insight above and beyond what we have in Moses, the prophets, and Jesus Christ, but requires only that faithful people listen to what God has said and is saying, and do it, knowing that the word of faithful people, undergirded by the Spirit, is more powerful than the mightiest miracles. So, let us go and trust that God will take even our words and transform lives. Let us pray.
AMEN
It would be very possible to preach a sermon on any number of topics using the story of the rich man and Lazarus. One could prepare a sermon on the reward for the righteous and the punishment of the wicked, or about what happens to us once we die, or perhaps the give and take between receiving blessings during this life and those that we receive in the life to come. There are many ways we could look at this, but I want to draw attention to the last interchange between the rich man and Abraham.
"He said, 'Then, father, I beg you to send him to my father's house - for I have five brothers - that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.' Abraham replied, 'They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.' He said, 'No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.' He said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.'"
The rich man's reaction is something that has found a prominent place throughout Christian history in the writings of various people. How often have we heard of people who lived their whole lives, pushing God off until tomorrow, until finally there came a time that there were no more tomorrows? Immediately, such people, we read, are overwhelmed by remorse. What they would not give for just one more day, to go and do what they ought to have done before but had, tragically, left undone.
What is more, we see this day by day in our own lives, even if in a somewhat less extreme form. How many of us can remember what we used to do when we were teenagers and wish we could go back and tell the teenage version of ourselves that we should live differently, that we should make better choices? How many of us look at the state of the world today and realize that people today are making the same mistakes we did yesterday and haven't learned from them? How many of us wish we could just sit people down and talk some sense into them, to teach them what we have learned over so many years and with so much pain?
The fact of the matter is that, when I look back on my life, just about every bad decision I ever made was preceded, at some point, by someone who was older and wiser than I was, who warned me about the temptations and trials that I would go through, and they knew what they were talking about because they had gone through them already and had watched their friends and everyone they knew, in addition to total strangers, go through them. They could see with the clear vision of hindsight what seemed far less clear to me at the time. I ought to have trusted them. The fact of the matter, however, is that I not only didn't listen to the voice of experience, I don't know for sure if I could have done so. I am repeatedly amazed at our ability, as human beings, to simply brush aside anything that we don't want to deal with.
This is precisely what Jesus is getting at with this story. The realities of reward and punishment are as clear as can be to the rich man. He is experiencing one for himself and he can see the other one before his very eyes. Surely, if someone who had this kind of first-hand experience could come and bear witness to what was coming, everyone would listen, it would be indisputable proof of what the future held in store, and nobody would have to endure what this rich man had to suffer.
It is an argument that makes a lot of sense to us. If someone who was dead could come back to us and share their experiences, wouldn't that seem to be the ultimate proof? And yet, I think that, when we think this way, we tend to overvalue the role of miracles in the act of convincing human beings of the truth of God. Take, for example, the story of the Exodus from Egypt that you all probably learned in Sunday School or, if you are like me and didn't grow up in the church at all, probably learned it from various movies that are made every so often about it. Imagine the scene in your head. Ten plagues are unleashed on the Egyptian people who had gone from hosting the Israelites, to dominating them and making them their slaves. The land is plagued with the turning of water into blood, overrun with frogs, gnats, and flies. Livestock was struck with disease, boils broke out on all the people and animals, terrible thunder and hail storms ravaged the countryside, locusts came and devoured the produce of the land, unnatural darkness covered the whole country, and finally the firstborn sons were killed. But that is really only the beginning. The Israelites were then led across the sea, which was parted to let them pass. Even after these astonishing miracles took place, that was not the end. Every day, the people were given Manna from heaven to eat and were led, day in and day out, by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.
These were people who had seen more miracles in a matter of weeks than most of us have ever seen or will ever see over the course of our whole lives. If miracles could convince people beyond a shadow of a doubt of who God was, surely the Israelites would have been convinced. After all, it had profound consequences. Without God, they were slaves, now they were free. They owed everything, not just in a spiritual sense, but in a very literal sense, to the God who redeemed and saved them. And yet, when Moses goes up Mount Sinai to speak with God, what do we read? We read that the people lost patience, that they pressured Aaron, their priest, to make a golden calf for them to worship because, after all, whatever might have been the case before, they haven't seen God move lately. For goodness' sake, it had been a whole month without a dramatic miracle, never mind the fact that they were still eating bread from heaven and always lived in the sight of the pillar of cloud and of fire.
I still remember when I first noticed this as I read the Bible. I remember longing for God to move with power in the community in which I found myself, that he would perform undeniable miracles, signs and wonders, so that true revival would break out. When I saw the Israelites in this light, for the first time, the thought crossed my mind, "If God did everything I asked him to do, and did all kinds of miracles, it might not really convince anyone, at least not for long." It started to make sense to me why God would give such a serious law to his people. They, just like we, are easily distracted, and need not just a miracle, but a whole way of life that is devoted to God. It wasn't that God wasn't able to do miracles, or held back from doing them; after all, he did them all the time, but it seemed that God knew all too well that, at the end of the day, miracles only go so far in transforming hearts and lives.
But that isn't all. Let us look at the New Testament, at the life of Jesus. Everywhere Jesus went, he healed the sick, he restored sight to the blind, he made the lame to walk again, he did amazing things. However, we read, in Mark's gospel, to speak of nowhere else, that, one morning, when a crowd of people had gathered to be healed, Jesus left town, saying, "Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do." Jesus seemed to be more interested in proclaiming his message than healing the sick, although he certainly did that, too.
You know, it is interesting that Luke's gospel records a story where a man begs that a man named Lazarus be sent back from the dead in order to tell people about the life that is to come. The reason it is so interesting is because in John's gospel, we read an account of Jesus raising a man named Lazarus to do precisely that. The fact that Jesus had an advocate who everyone knew had been dead, in fact, had been dead for several days, but had come back, did not convince people who had already made up their minds not to believe. Instead of being convinced, they simply included Lazarus in their plans to kill Jesus.
But one of the most astonishing things that I ever read in the Bible about this is something that I never noticed until someone pointed it out to me one day. It is such a famous passage that I must have read it over and over again, but had just never noticed it. At the very end of the Gospel according to Matthew, when Jesus is about to give what has come to be known as "The Great Commission," we read this. "Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted." Some doubted! Can you imagine that? There they were, face-to-face with the Lord, resurrected in glory, Jesus Christ, who was clearly dead just the day before, and some doubted! Not only was it, apparently, not convincing to people who hated Jesus that he raised Lazarus from the dead, it wasn't even convincing to the disciples that Jesus was resurrected.
It was not until Pentecost that people really began to understand what Jesus had said and done; it was not until the Holy Spirit came upon the church that everything began to make sense. Before Jesus was crucified, Peter denied him and ran away, after he was raised, he decided to go back to fishing; it was only when he received the Spirit that Peter became the mighty leader of the church that we remember.
When we look at the issue in this way, we can really see that Jesus' story of the rich man and Lazarus is not merely a warning not to trust in miracles as the primary convincing force, but is truly a double-edged sword that cuts both ways. What does Abraham say? "If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead." On the one hand, it tells us, as we have been discussing so far, that we have a tendency, like the rich man, to overvalue miracles as a means of conviction, but it also tells us that we have a tendency, like the rich man, to undervalue the convincing power of the word of God, especially as made manifest in human beings.
You see, lots of people went to see Jesus as a miracle worker, but it was only when the disciples, empowered by the Spirit, began to go out and preach that people began to respond. Once again, they performed miracles, and miracles never dropped out of God's interaction with humanity, but it wasn't the miracles that had the impact on the people, it was the word of God, backed up by the power of the Spirit. Peter and John heal a crippled man on the steps of the Temple and are met with nothing but anger and skepticism from the authorities. But when Peter stands up and preaches, when he shares what God has done, the impact he has made, three thousand people were added to the number of believers.
I have emphasized that, in spite of the fact that miracles do not seem to play the real backbone of the plan of God to minister to humanity and transform lives, that is not to say that God doesn't do the miraculous. Far from it. Though I have been here for only a short time, I know that this congregation has been touched by genuine miracles. Many of you have been touched, either directly or indirectly, by the fact that God has and does still move mightily in ways that bear a striking resemblance to the healing and transformational miracles of the Old and New Testaments. And even though I don't know all of you so I can't say for sure, but if you are anything like the rest of humanity, there are still days where you feel weak, that you have your doubts, that, even if your faith seems strong, you don't always live in the full, unbridled confidence of the truth of the Gospel, in spite of the undeniable miracles you have seen and even experienced. In fact, I have a feeling that many days can go by with not a thought about those miracles, until you are reminded by someone else or you deliberately remind yourself of the power of God in your life.
The point is not to say that miracles don't happen, because they clearly do, and it is not to say that they do not have a profound impact on those they touch, because they clearly do, but it is to remind us that the power of God is most manifest, not in what the world would call clearly miraculous, but in the word of the Lord, spoken by ordinary people like you and me, who are empowered by the very Spirit of God. This is precisely why I will say now and you will hear me say again, that Pentecost is without a doubt the single most frightening day of the Christian year. It is the day that we are forced to come to terms with the fact that the disciples with whom we identify so strongly in the gospels, because they are weak and broken people, just like you and me, are utterly transformed into mighty heroes of faith, who speak the word with boldness, who go into the world and make a difference beyond what they would otherwise be capable of because they are united to the ministry of Jesus Christ and empowered by the Holy Spirit.
You see, brothers and sisters, that Spirit of God that made Peter preach with boldness, that gave the force to his words that transformed the hearts and lives of three thousand people in a single morning, is promised to you and me as well. The only difference between the Peter who denied Christ and the Peter who laid his life down to be killed for his faith is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit that, the scriptures teach us, takes up residence in our lives as those who belong to Christ.
What I am saying is that we, as human beings, have a tendency to say things like, "If only this miracle would happen, if only we had this kind of program at our church, if only we had these kinds of people to lead and participate in the ministries of our church, if only things were different than they are now, if only they were the way things used to be." And you know what? None of those things we long for are bad things, and, to be honest, they already exist in various ways. The point is that God is not calling us to something that is too hard for us, not because we are capable in ourselves to follow God's call, but because we, too, have been indwelled by the Holy Spirit.
Jesus' story told us to consider the words of Moses and the prophets. So let us consider what Moses tells the people in Deuteronomy, chapter thirty. "Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, 'Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?' Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, 'Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?' No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe." The command to go and make disciples is not something that is far off, not something that we need to go and find a miracle-worker before we can do it; it is not something that requires a special insight above and beyond what we have in Moses, the prophets, and Jesus Christ, but requires only that faithful people listen to what God has said and is saying, and do it, knowing that the word of faithful people, undergirded by the Spirit, is more powerful than the mightiest miracles. So, let us go and trust that God will take even our words and transform lives. Let us pray.
AMEN
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