The saber-rattling has triggered the guns of war, and so we pray these lyrics by the Reverend Carolyn Winfrey Gillette, a Presbyterian hymn-writer:
We pray for peace, O God of love and justice, as once again, we face a time of war. The meek and humble try — amid the crisis — to love and build, to nurture and restore. May leaders hear the truth the prophets teach us — that gifts of peace are well worth struggling for.
We pray for peace, O Christ who calmed the waters — who stilled the storm, who stilled disciples’ fear. You spoke with love and with amazing power; be with us now when trouble is so near. May leaders see the miracle you offer — that words and deeds can calm the nations here.
We pray for peace, O Spirit here among us; your love emboldens, judges and restrains. Take any hate and acts of impulse from us; make leaders wise, amid competing claims. May we seek peace, O God of love and justice; may love and mercy be our highest aims.
And somewhere on the other side of a broken garage window, my cousin’s carelessly tossed rock landed with a sickening thump.
My cousin and I sprinted like mad down an alleyway hoping to find some cover. And over our shoulders, an angry voice cried out after us: “Hey, HEY! You kids get back here!”
Jimmy and I juked around some garbage cans then ducked behind a shed, where my cousin begged me to take the blame when we got back to grandma’s house. To his way of thinking, grandma would be far less harsh with me than with him, which probably was true. So would I please confess to breaking the old man’s garage window? “Please, pretty please! I’ll give you a dollar!”
But I flat-out refused.
For no amount of money would I risk punishment for the high crimes and misdemeanors of another. The closeness of friendship didn’t matter, and the ties of family relationship made no difference. You did the crime, you do the time. I had no intention of being someone’s fall guy. I’ll never be the scapegoat who lets those guilty beyond reasonable doubts walk away scot-free.
Nevertheless, across the generations, scapegoating has been alive and well for several millennia. And one of the central-but-silent characters in this morning’s Scripture lesson from the Old Testament book of Leviticus is the scapegoat.
As part of a complex, bloody ritual intended to purify God’s people, the Lord through Moses instructs his brother Aaron to gather two goats on the Day of Atonement. Sacrifice the first goat, God instructs, then place both hands on the surviving goat, heap all the people’s sins, debts, and trespasses upon that hapless animal, and send it packing – far out into the desert, on a one-way voyage that carries away everyone’s brokenness in one grand gesture of removal, decontamination, and purification. Out of sight, out of mind! We’re good here!
Would that it could be that simple and easy in the long, fractured story of God and us, which as we’ve heard over the past month or so of Sundays is a story of an always-faithful God and somewhat-less-than-faithful people.
But there are some precious take-aways to be gleaned from this rather strange and somewhat bizarre scene, and I’ll get to those in a moment. But for now, listen with the help of the Holy Spirit for the Word of the Lord to you in these selected verses of Leviticus 16.
The LORD said to Moses:
Tell your brother Aaron [to] come into the holy place with a young bull for a sin offering. And he shall take from the congregation of God’s people two male goats for a sin offering.
Aaron shall offer the bull as a sin offering for himself and shall make atonement for himself and for his house.
He shall take the two goats and set them before the LORD at the entrance of the tent of meeting. Aaron shall cast lots on the two goats, one lot for the LORD and the other lot for the scapegoat.
Aaron shall present the goat on which the lot fell for the LORD and offer it as a sin offering. But the goat on which the lot fell for scapegoat shall be presented alive before the LORD to make atonement over it, that it may be sent away into the wilderness.
Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task. The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region, and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness.
This shall be a statute to you forever: In the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month, you shall deny yourselves, and shall do no work, neither the citizen nor the alien who resides among you. For on this day, atonement shall be made for you, to cleanse you; from all your sins, you shall be clean before the LORD. This shall be an everlasting statute for you, to make atonement for the people of Israel once in the year for all their sins.
And Moses did as the LORD had commanded him. (Selected verses of Leviticus 16)
A friend enduring a significantly painful time of loss and change called me recently to seek my thoughts about something a colleague said to her in an honest, sincere gesture of support and sympathy.
In response to my friend’s suffering, her well-intentioned co-worker said glibly, “Well, God must really be trying to teach you something though everything that is happening to you.” The comment didn’t sit well in my friend’s ears or rest easily upon her heart.
My friend’s response to her co-worker was brutally honest: “You know what? I’m not going there,” she said. “I’m sick and tired of people saying things like that. God doesn’t need to put me and my family through this hell to drive home the point of some life lesson. God surely can find another way.”
She’s right! The Lord surely can and does reveal himself through more helpful, life-affirming means in the midst of life’s struggles. God doesn’t cause our pain and suffering. The best we can say with any degree of certainty is that God allows heartache to happen for reasons known only to heaven.
Thus, the co-worker’s comment to my friend was a lazy platitude, a silly attempt to spiritualize pain and thus avoid it. The co-worker witnessed my friend’s suffering and tried to hide it.
But others don’t go down the road of avoiding pain and suffering by glossing over it with feeble piety, watery platitudes, and feel-good faith. They avoid heartache and brokenness by going straight to scapegoating: the dangerous and unhealthy act of piling all the blame upon another. We experience suffering, and fear sets in because suffering has come near. So, we find a scapegoat. Or we see others suffering, fear it will draw near to us, and so we protect ourselves by blaming another. And sometimes, tragically, even God becomes our scapegoat.
We lean toward scapegoating, I believe, because it is a concrete act that makes everything seem all cut and dried.
And scapegoating definitely feels good – at least for a minute or two, like checking Facebook when you’re avoiding a deadline, or sneaking a bite-sized Milky Way candy bar at bedtime. Scapegoating is a short-term fix, but it’s not a life-giving solution. As it turns out, people who see or experience suffering and immediately find ways to avoid, blame, or protect just turn around and hurt other people.
When faced with suffering in whatever form, the hardest thing to do, actually, is to suffer – to feel the burden of grief, bear the weight of uncertainty and sadness, and be nearly paralyzed by fear and anxiety. We avoid — and perhaps these are mainly what our glib platitudes in conversation and ubiquitous memes on social media are really declaring: The inconvenient truth that we are afraid and adrift. The persistent reality that we are alone and bereft. The nagging certainty that we are confused and aghast. The bloody inevitability that illness and death lurk around every corner, all day, every day.
So, we turn away, find a work-around, a scapegoat. We spiritualize our fear, or we flex our muscles at it. And when we do these things, we hurt ourselves, and we hurt others. We do violence to our faith and to the faith community – with our mouths, with our behaviors, with high-caliber munitions of every sort. And along that dark and shadowy way, we end up harming the very people we’re trying to protect.
And we’re not living the Gospel.
The crosses that so many of us wear around our necks as reminders of grace, mercy, forgiveness, peace, and love mirror a quite-real Cross that actually was a weapon of scapegoating with no earthly purpose other than to kill. In the midst of his fear, Jesus doesn’t spiritualize that weapon nor does he take up that weapon. Christ, instead, redeems that weapon. Jesus widens the lens, reveals another way – a different path forward.
We are all, I think, aiming to watch our fears run off into the wilderness. We chase them away, with platitudes and piety. With guns and bombs. With border walls and extreme vetting. With fake news and outright lies. But the truth is we cannot avoid it. We suffer, we grieve, we die. But because we are the Church – God’s gathering of the saints in light, we are the people who have seen another way.
So, let us be people of that way, in spite of our fear. Jesus took the punishment for every rock thrown, every evil plan conceived, every rancid word spoken, every temptation ever acted upon. Jesus once and for all died for all. For you and for me. And Jesus also rose, for you and for me.
And through our baptisms, by mysterious means that surpass all understanding, you and I were right there with Jesus – on the Cross, in the tomb, and finally, in the sweetness of Easter morning’s garden of new life. We were raised with Jesus to new life in this world and the next. No one knows exactly what new life in heaven’s next world will be like. We’ll all find out soon enough.
But for now, perhaps, with the help of the Holy Spirit, we do well to cease our scapegoating and finger-pointing.
Perhaps, with the courage of the Holy Spirit, we do quite well in taking responsibility for the roles that each of us is playing in making such big messes of our lives and our world. Perhaps, by the authority of the Holy Spirit, by the sacrifice of Christ, and by the desires of God, the powerful love of heaven will cast off into the wilderness our selfish DNA and transform us into selfless people, resurrect us from egoists to altruists, and redeem our self-interest into empathy, sympathy, and compassion for friend, neighbor, and stranger.
Bottom line, we need to see each life as valuable and regard each other as worthy of love. We must see each other as God sees us: Beloved creations willing to understand each other’s grievances, hopes, and dreams. For that to happen, we need to stop looking for scapegoats and deal with our problems. Which, to my way of thinking, aren’t immigrants, people of other religions, ethnicities or cultures, or even people of other political persuasions. Our problem is disconnection – from each other and from God. And in our disconnection, we’ve lost heaven’s vision of the Kingdom of God.
But we are a creative lot. Guided by the wisdom of the ages, claimed by Christ in baptism, and given the gift of the Holy Spirit, we can and will figure this out. And in the meantime, let us rise above our fear, halt our scapegoating, let go of judgment, and be more and ever-willing to be the hands and feet of Jesus Christ in a broken and fearful world.
Let us not get wrapped up in hollow rituals of atonement but rather rest easy in the at-one-ment that the Lord envisions and offers for all his people.
Ancient words, ever true. Amen, and amen!
Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message on Sunday, February 20, 2022. The seventh sermon in his series “Becoming Disciples: The Story of God and Us,” it is adapted from scholarship, commentary, and reflection by Kate Kooyman, Jennifer Dukes Lee, Jonathan Sacks, and Rebekah Simon-Peter.
Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message at the funeral for Norb Palmer on Saturday, February 19, 2022. The Scripture lessons were Psalm 23, Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, and Matthew 5:3-12.
Our lives arrange into a rolling litany of different seasons, rhythmic times for every purpose, surely appropriate for the moments at hand.
And so it was for Norb.
His children and grandchildren graciously shared with us their tender thoughts and treasured memories of those many times and seasons:
Times to plant seed in the fertile earth, and times to pluck up the bounty of the harvest.
Times to serve his country during war, and times to move on to other protective service in faithful stewardship of God’s Creation.
Times to laugh, and to joke, and to let a twinkling eye light up an entire room, warm up every soul on hand, and lift every sad, sagging spirit.
Times to hunt, and fish, and trap; times to roller-skate, and to square dance, and to embark on grand adventures across vast seas and to lands down under.
Times to hike high in desert mountains, times to walk far atop a Great Wall.
Closer to home, times to shell walnuts in the basement; times to pick up sticks in the yard; times to aim a potentially lethal blow gun at rascally rabbits somehow or other guilty of disturbing the beauty and tranquility of home, sweet home.
Times, probably by accident, to cut back some hostas with the lawnmower and crop dust some long-awaited, beloved hollyhocks with deadly herbicide.
And above all, by grace, times to love – unconditionally and totally, over 59 days of nightly courtship and 59 years of steadfast marriage. “No man ever told his wife ‘I love you’ more than Norb told me,” Nola shared with her family and me as we made funeral arrangements.
Even in his final days, hospitalized and weakened, the depth of a husband’s love for his wife still inspired a holy kiss on the warm, gentle hand of the bride whom he considered as wonderfully enchanting as the day they first met.
And now, sadly, comes a time to die, bringing us to our time of weeping and our season of mourning – perhaps, for some of you, the first time you’ve ever felt such searing pain and groaning agony.
And the words of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew shared earlier proclaim us “blessed,” for we will be comforted.
But there seems little consolation these days, as eyes well with bitter tears, and throats lump with grieving emotions; the raw, jagged edges of broken hearts still sharply and viciously stabbing deeply into the very fibers of our being.
Even though the writer of Psalm 23 fears nothing and finds comfort on a dark and lonely walk through the valley of the shadow of death, our own walk of faith – even with the Lord as our Shepherd – probably feels more like a long, hard slog up a slippery slope of grief and sadness.
But, my friends and neighbors, please remember this, and find strength and comfort that will carry you through the shadowy valleys of your todays and tomorrows:
In order for there to be a shadow, someone must turn on a light to create the shadow. For those of us whom the Lord has chosen as his own, that light is the love of God, the grace and peace of Christ, and the powerful presence of God’s Holy Spirit in Christ. And that strong light promises to wipe away every tear and make all things new once again.
No, earthly life without Norb in it certainly will not be the same.
But though it doesn’t seem even remotely possible in this moment, joy and laughter will one day return to once again be part of our varied times and seasons on earth. And, thanks be to God, in heaven, too!
For the empty tomb of Easter morning declares that death does not, cannot, and will not have the last word or final say. And the light of comfort shines brightly in the assurance that we are not saying farewell forever but rather goodbye for now. For we will, one day, be together again with Norb and all the saints, forever and ever.
These ancient words are ever true:
The Lord of sea and sky, snow and rain, wind and flame, vows to tend the poor and lame – the grieving, the poor in spirit, those hungering and thirsting for righteousness. The Lord’s saving hand sets a feast for all of them, all of us, providing the finest of satisfying bread, and forever holding God’s people close to heaven’s heart.
Glory be to Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. Amen!
Standing bare-footed before a burning bush and attending nervously to the address of God, the Old Testament prophet Moses receives a daunting task: “Go and free my people from slavery in Egypt.”
Moses reluctantly obeys his intimidating marching orders and eventually accomplishes his holy mission – leading God’s people out of Egypt, through the parted waters of the Red Sea, and into freedom. Not long after they step into their gracious, newfound autonomy, God issues Ten Commandments that intend to serve as Israel’s guide to continued liberty.
Having spent more than 400 years living in a house of bondage under the oppressive jackboot of a pagan people, the Israelites only know how to live as slaves. Slavery is the only lifestyle they know!
So, God hands down 10 clear, concise, and convincing rules to keep everyone from slipping back into pagan bondage, thus fashioning a life lived as heaven’s liberated daughters and sons. And only if God’s people live by the letter of God’s Law will they be the blessing to the nations that God intends when generations before the Lord establishes his covenant relationship with his chosen people.
That monumental moment in Exodus is the first receiving of God’s Law. And this morning, in our lesson from the book of Deuteronomy, Moses recounts that life-changing moment as the Israelites, having wandered in the desert for 40 years, now finally stand poised to cross the River Jordan into the land that God long promises them.
Despite all their negative-sounding “you shall nots,” the Ten Commandments actually hold a very positive intent.
God’s people easily might have left the far shore of freedom on the Red Sea, gone blindly out into the wilderness, and simply imitated the lifestyle of the Egyptians who had been their masters for so long.
Or they certainly might have stepped into the Promised Land and fallen prey to the false gods and idol-worshiping customs of the pagan peoples who lived there. Which, sadly, they do and find themselves again in bondage. And they only have themselves to blame! We’ll get to that part of the story of God and us in a few weeks. But for now, the God of goodness, the parent of a new family, does what only heaven can do to help the huddled masses learn to walk in safe stride along healthy paths.
Indeed, God spoke all these words, and by the power of God’s Holy Spirit, may these ancient words again speak to our souls and touch our hearts as we make our walk in this world.
Moses convened all Israel and said to them:
Hear, O Israel, the statutes and ordinances that I am addressing to you today; you shall learn them and observe them diligently. The LORD our God made a covenant with us at Horeb. Not with our ancestors did the LORD make this covenant, but with us, who are all of us here alive today. The LORD spoke with you face to face at the mountain, out of the fire. (At that time I was standing between the LORD and you to declare to you the words of the LORD; for you were afraid because of the fire and did not go up the mountain.) And he said:
I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.
You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not acquit anyone who misuses his name. Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work – you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.
Honor your father and your mother, as the LORD your God commanded you, so that your days may be long and that it may go well with you in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.
You shall not murder.
Neither shall you commit adultery.
Neither shall you steal.
Neither shall you bear false witness against your neighbor.
Neither shall you covet your neighbor’s wife. Neither shall you desire your neighbor’s house, or field, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
These words the LORD spoke with a loud voice to your whole assembly at the mountain, out of the fire, the cloud, and the thick darkness, and he added no more. He wrote them on two stone tablets, and gave them to me. (Deuteronomy 5:1-22)
Caring for a newborn baby is no cake walk, but experience tells me that the heavy lifting of parenting truly begins when babies are about nine or 10 months old and they start walking.
That’s when the security gates go up around the house to keep little tykes from wandering into places where they’re not supposed to go. Those barriers are particularly important if you’re raising a child who has little or no sense of danger, which was the case for some friends who once shared this story.
When their son was just a toddler, he had a strong wanderlust and scant respect for hazards and dangers. With reckless abandon, the boy careened around the house with absolutely no regard for potential harm to himself, and he had a particular fascination with the steps leading down to the basement. Throughout each day, he’d charge up to the brink and peer downstairs with a mischievous grin on his face.
Even with a security gate in place, mom and dad sternly cried “No, no, no!” But the boy continued to court danger and flirt with disaster, often standing on his tiptoes to gaze over the gate to spy what lay beyond. And he’d shake it. And he’d try to open it. And he’d sometimes shout at it in frustration. He hated that blasted gate!
Then, one day, mom and dad forgot to close the gate, and before they knew it, their boy took an unrestrained step into the wild side. They heard the sickening sound of his small, fragile body bouncing down those stairs, and they rushed to find him unconscious at the bottom of the stairs. He came to and was fine, no harm, no foul. But his parents nearly succumbed to the fear of a less-fortunate outcome.
Did their firm “no’s’” and that blasted gate intend to ruin the boy’s life? No, quite the opposite. Restrictions on the little boy’s movements and actions intended to keep him safe and preserve his life.
So also it is with God’s Law in the Ten Commandments, which serve three spiritual purposes.
First, the Ten Commandments serve as a mirror.
Gazing into that mirror exposes our sin and brokenness. When imperfect people like you and me look into the mirror of the Commandments, we see ourselves as we really are: sinful, wretched, and lost; in need of deliverance, in need of cleansing, in need of a savior. And thus, by the prodding of the Holy Spirit, we repent of our old ways and turn toward Jesus and the Cross of Christ to find forgiving mercy and healing resurrection.
The Ten Commandments serve as a mirror, and the Ten Commandment serve as a restraint – a restrainer of evil.
God’s Law functions to keep evildoers from being as bad as they otherwise might be. Thus, to some degree, the Commandments protect us from the sinful conspiracies of the ungodly. But God’s Law alone certainly cannot regenerate a sinful heart and broken spirit. Those are the domains of the Holy Spirit through the Gospel alone.
Nevertheless, as the great reformer John Calvin writes, the Commandments provide restraint that bridles the wicked, “keep[ing] their hands from outward activity and holding inside the depravity that otherwise they would wantonly have indulged. Consequently, they are neither better nor more righteous before God. Hindered by fright or shame, they dare neither execute what they have conceived in their minds, nor openly breathe for the rage of their lust.”
The Ten Commandments serve as a mirror, and as a restraint, and finally, the Ten Commandments reveal the will, desire, and intention of God.
Believers who have been transformed by the Gospel need the Law certainly not as a means of salvation but as a guide to right and holy living as individuals in community. The Law reveals God’s perfect righteousness and reveals that which is pleasing to God, and our lives ought to reflect that. But you only come to delight in God’s commands after the grace of the Gospel infuses your heart.
Turning again to John Calvin, “[B]ecause we need not only teaching but also exhortation, the servant[s] of God will also avail [themselves] of this benefit of the law: By frequent meditation upon it to be aroused to obedience, be strengthened in it, and be drawn back from the slippery path of transgression.”
That’s how we saints must press on, Calvin believed, for however eagerly we may with the help of the Holy Spirit strive toward God’s righteousness, our listless flesh always so burdens us that we do not proceed with due readiness. “The law is to the flesh,” Calvin writes, “like a whip to an idle and balky [donkey], to arouse it to work.”
The Ten Commandments serve as a mirror, and as a restraint, and finally as revelation of the will, desire, and intention of God.
Those abilities of the Ten Commandments serve up a stark reminder that our covenant relationship with God definitely is not just a hand-holding, arm-swinging walk in the park. Yes, we are saved by grace and sustained by grace, but to enjoy that grace – to be thankful for that grace – we must live within the guardrails that God erects along life’s path of freedom.
As the apostle Paul writes in a different context, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery (Galatians 5:1).”
In a strong rebuke of some of our day’s current thinking, liberty is not lawless living, but God’s Law most definitely guards our liberated living.
The Commandments are a guide to gratitude, focusing not just on the guilt of our sins but more importantly on the grace that forgives our sin. That long litany of “you shall nots” invites us to attitudes and behaviors that imitate God and reflect God’s goodness.
Of course, the negative formulation of eight of the Ten Commandments might make it hard, for some, to see how they show us God. After all, this top 10 list heavy with don’ts might lead some to assume that God only closes down our lives. But quite the contrary, God’s Law actually opens up life. It protects not just individuals but also society from actions that have the potential to destroy it. God’s Law recognizes the serious damage that things like disrespect for authority, murder and theft can cause.
“God spoke all these words,” and all of these words cover all of life. As our Creator, our God lays a comprehensive claim on our lives, and as such, our only faithful response is rendering complete submission, allegiance, and obedience to God out of gratitude for his mercies, reverence for his sovereignty, and trust in his continuing care.
God lays this comprehensive claim upon us not as a hard-hearted, heavy-handed tyrant, but as a loving Parent who would do anything to save his children and keep them from falling down the stairs of sin and brokenness into the depths of hell’s basement – as the Lord of love so powerfully demonstrates centuries later when he gives his only begotten Son for the life of a broken and fearful world.
And along the path that takes him to the Cross, Jesus declares that the greatest commandment is to love God with all your heart, and all your strength, and all your mind. And, Jesus says, the second greatest commandment is like it: Love your neighbor as you yourself would be loved.
Ancient words, ever true. Amen, and amen!
Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message on Sunday, February 13, 2022. The sixth sermon in his series “Becoming Disciples: The Story of God and Us,” it is adapted from scholarship, commentary, and reflection by Doug Bratt, John Calvin, Stan Mast, and Jeff Robinson.
When last we were together, we were traveling with the Old Testament’s Abram, whom God has told to step out in faith and get going.
Abram and his wife, Sarai, pack their bags and fly off into the unknown on the wings of God’s promises too breathtaking to take in and almost too good to be true, moving lock, stock and barrel hundreds of miles away from their homeland, with only the vaguest understanding of why they’re moving, and absolutely no clue about what will happen when they get there.
And so it goes when you’ve become a disciple whose trust is firmly in the Lord.
By faith, you’re all too happy and eager to step out boldly and bravely, even though you have absolutely no clue where you’re going, so long as you know that God is coming along for the ride. With God’s strong hand holding yours, everything is going to work out just fine. That’s the excitement of walking with God. God is in control and will unveil the route as the two of you go along, journeying in stages with Abram and all who followed him in faith, assured of God’s promises to fill the empty places in our lives with new life.
Perhaps it is, then, as I suggested to you last Sunday, that story of God and us hinges on believing that the answers to our prayers lie in the crosses we’re forced to bear and in trusting that we do not bear those crosses alone.
Which brings us to this morning’s lesson.
Save for the arrival of Jesus Christ, Exodus 3 shares the most spectacular revealing of God in the history of salvation. Its verses fire the Lord’s opening salvos in the battle to redeem a fallen Creation and broken people. The voice of God speaking to Moses from a burning bush begins the liberation of God’s people from their bondage of slavery in Egypt! This massive movement of God begins when the Lord calls Moses to be God’s mediator in the drama of salvation that begins to play itself out in these opening acts of Exodus.
And know this: While the Lord has been active behind the scenes in the lives of his covenant people for countless generations, God at this point has gone unseen and unheard for at least 400 years. No one’s heard directly from the Lord since he spoke to Jacob and gave him a new name: Israel.
So, you’ve surely got to empathize with the misery and rage of the Israelites suffering as slaves in Egypt, because, probably more than once, you’ve undoubtedly echoed the Israelites in lifting up similar cries of sorrow and lament: Where is God? Why is God so silent? Why doesn’t God come to help us?
Here, at long last, The Great I Am shows up with marching orders that will shake the foundations of Pharoah’s Egypt and shape the future for God’s people. May the Holy Spirit open your heart and mind to the Word of the Lord in these ancient words handed down to us in this age.
The Israelites groaned under their slavery and cried out.
Out of the slavery their cry for help rose up to God. God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them.
Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.”
When the LORD saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then God said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” God said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
Then the LORD said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt”
But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” He said, “I will be with you, and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.”
But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”
God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The LORD, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations.” (Exodus 2:23-3:15)
“Does Jesus Care?” is the pensive title to an old hymn that every now and again shows up on a funeral playlist.
“Does Jesus care when my heart is pained,” go the lyrics. “Too deeply for mirth or song, as the burdens press, and the cares distress, and the way grows weary and long?”
That sounds a little stodgy and syrupy, but the question at its heart remains as topical as ever: “Does Jesus care? Does God care?” Across the generations and yet today, we adopted sons and daughters of God naturally wonder if heaven cares about our painful experiences and emotions. Does God care about the sicknesses, the trials, and the challenges that each of us in our own way is enduring?
Those are gut-wrenching questions that the first hearers of Exodus 3 also must have pondered. And here’s why:
Egypt’s Pharaoh has hatched a scheme to slaughter all of Israel’s baby boys, because in the eyes of Egypt’s powerbrokers, there simply are too many greasy Israelites running around the country, and their large numbers supposedly pose a threat to national security. While Pharaoh’s own daughter rescues and adopts one of those babies, who grows to become the man standing before that burning bush atop Mount Horeb, Pharaoh nevertheless has blood on his hands for the brutal genocide of countless little boys.
Thanks to Pharaoh’s daughter, Moses escapes death only to be forced to flee Egypt as an adult to escape punishment for his own act of murder. His life of exile takes a turn for the better when he marries and goes to work for his father-in-law. But fortunes don’t improve for his family and friends back in Egypt, who who “groaned in slavery, their cries for help rising up to God.”
If you listen carefully, with ears of empathy, such cries still resonate across the vast landscape of all Creation. You hear them coming from deep within the hunger-swollen bellies of children dwelling in famine-stricken countries and food-insecure neighborhoods. Does God hear those cries? Does Jesus care?
If you and I listen carefully, with ears of compassion, we still hear the cries of parents working two or three jobs just to make ends meet and struggling to pay the bills and keep a roof over everyone’s head. Does God hear those cries? Does Jesus care?
If we listen carefully, with ears of deliverance, we still hear the cries of God’s oppressed people: Patients suffering in hospital rooms and nursing homes, friends and family members battling addictions, countless others wrestling with demons of every stripe. Does God hear those cries? Does Jesus care?
Or do the pleas of a desperate and hurting humanity simply vanish into thin air like so much dust in the wind?
Current events indeed give one pause to wonder if God really does still care.
Cries from the hungry, the oppressed, the downtrodden, and the enslaved still fill the air and echo off the hard surfaces and rough edges of a broken and fearful world with a steady, disturbing rhythm. God, at times, doesn’t seem to care. But that’s about to change.
The answer to the question of whether the Lord will do anything in answer to his people’s cries is far quicker than it is predictable. God turns, surprisingly, to Moses, the adopted of Egyptian royalty now happily living in a strange land, simply minding his own business and dutifully tending his father-in-law’s sheep far from the misery of his compatriots.
Sometimes, the Lord comes and speaks to his people when and where they feel far away. Some find themselves on the run, basically hiding from God and from others, in some kind of desolate place, precisely because it seems so isolated. Yet, in those lonely places, God often finds, catches, and somehow calls out to God’s people.
From Moses’s hiding place on a holy mountain, God calls to Moses by the name that reminds him of God’s rescue from Pharoah’s bloodlust. Moses finally learns that it’s the God of his ancestors who’s now calling out to him from that mysterious, fiery bush. The same God who made promises to his fellow Israelites now deigns to come down and talk to, of all people, Moses.
Is it any wonder, then, that Moses becomes terrified?
What’s more, Moses isn’t looking for God! He’s probably literally just looking for greener pastures in which to graze his sheep. And Moses isn’t looking for a new job. He’s already got one! And while God with the wave of heaven’s hand single-handedly could free the Israelites from the stranglehold of Pharaoh’s iron grip, God instead chooses to enlist Moses’s help in the fight for deliverance.
God’s plan for Israel’s liberation probably sounds pretty good to Moses – until God fills in the details. God tells Moses, “I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people out of Egypt.” “Are you kidding, God!” it’s as if Moses balks. “You want me to stand in front of Pharaoh?” As another biblical scholar notes, Moses’s “Here am I!” quickly turns into a “Who am I?” His eager readiness turns into resistance and reasons to say “no.”
Moses won’t just be a messenger. He’ll also be the one with whom God promises to stand before the rebellious Pharaoh – and, as it’ll turn out, a rebellious people. The divine “I” will go with the human “I” to accomplish God’s plan and fulfill God’s desires. But not even God’s promise to go with Moses is enough to convince him. As another notes, Moses’s “Who am I?” turns on a dime into a “Who are you?”
If he’s to accept this risky business, Moses needs to know exactly who this God is and what this God plans to do in accompanying Moses on such a dangerous mission. God’s answer is one of the most mysterious in the whole Bible: “I am who I am, I will be who I will.” It’s an answer that reflects the Lord’s faithfulness to both himself and his nature. God insists that Moses and Israel can count on God to always be who God is – that is, among other things, filled with faithfulness and overflowing with integrity.
That’s why the Lord both hears Israel’s groaning and shows his concern. God is what God is: faithful. That’s why God will rescue Israel from her Egyptian slavery. God is what God is: faithful and willing to walk the walk. That’s why God will plant freed Israel in the land God promised her ancestor Abraham. God is what God is: faithful, willing to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. God has the integrity of faith to care deeply and lovingly.
But how do we know?
How do we know that God cares about the cries of the hungry, sad, fearful and oppressed?
How do we know that God cares about the cries of families mourning losses of loved ones to COVID and cancer?
How do we know that God cares about the tears of the teenager thinking about ending it all because constant bullying doesn’t make life worth living?
How do we know that God cares about all the wars and threats of wars close to home and half a world away?
How do God’s people know that God cares so deeply about us? How do we know?!
The answer is Jesus Christ, whom God faithfully sends to live, die and rise again from the dead. God sends him to free us from all things that enslave us – including sin, evil, and death. Jesus Christ is God’s response to all of our cries. Does God care? One only needs to peer inside an empty tomb to see and hear an unequivocal “yes.” And because God cares, we can look forward to an eternal home in God’s presence in a new Creation.
And the next time you wonder why God permits such heinous suffering and heartache to happen in our world, ask yourself a better question: Why do you permit it? Why do we permit it?
God chooses the unlikely character of Moses to redeem an entire nation. So, why couldn’t and wouldn’t God choose you to do the same? Why couldn’t and wouldn’t God choose you to stand up to bully pharaohs of our time and thus free all those folks languishing in bondage?
The repeated refrain in the lyric story of God and us calls you and me to do the heavy lifting of co-creation and co-redemption with God. When the faithful God calls, your faithful answer is “Here I am!” And then let The Great I Am do great and beautiful, marvelous things through you – through the meditations of your heart, through the words of your mouth, through the movement of your hands and feet.
And so it goes when you’re a disciple whose trust is firmly in the Lord.
By faith, you’re all too happy and eager to step out boldly and bravely, even though you have absolutely no clue where you’re going, so long as you know that God is coming along for the ride.
Ancient words, ever true. Amen, and amen!
Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message on Sunday, February 6, 2022. The fifth sermon in his series “Becoming Disciples: The Story of God and Us,” it is adapted from scholarship, commentary, and reflection by Doug Bratt, Walter Brueggeman, Terence E. Fretheim, Stan Mast, and Scott Hoezee.
As we heard a couple Sundays back, the story of God and us starts off bright and beautiful with God’s creation of the cosmos and everything in it.
But what happens after that doesn’t bode well for the future of the world.
Lured into naughtiness and disobedience by a crafty serpent, the inept and blundering Adam and Eve mess up and get booted from the Garden of Eden.
But their sad-sack story, which we heard last Sunday, in the end serves up this delicious morsel of Good News: Living life east of Eden, as were Adam and Eve, as are you and I, with all its thorns and thistles, hardships and heartaches, comes with the assurance that, though we all have to face the consequences of our sin, God nevertheless prepares a way for us to remain connected to the earth, and to God, and to one another.
That, in a nutshell, is the story of God and us.
As the lyrics to the old hymn go, the breath of God breathes upon us, filling us with life anew, until our hearts are pure and wholly God’s, that we may love what God does love, and do what God would do, willing one will, and glowing with fire divine.
Perhaps, then, the only One with patience greater than Job’s is the Holy Trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit, who seem endlessly able to put up with human shenanigans and ever-willing to extend grace, mercy, and forgiveness that none of us deserves. Those promises of heaven – kept by the Spirit of God in Christ – continue to burn brightly even unto us today.
But, also like today, embers from the infernos of human passion, desire, greed, dishonesty, and wanderlust still glow with heat and energy sufficient to rekindle even more Dumpster fires in our lives and in our world.
Consider the next chapter in the story of Adam and Eve.
It reveals their son Cain murdering his brother Abel, and sin spreads out like a snake and wraps the whole world in its deadly grasp. God thus sends a Great Flood to destroy the world and rid it of sin, and God starts over from scratch with Noah, his family, and their floating zoo of an ark.
Things start to look up when the floodwaters recede, and God vows never again to send floodwaters to destroy the earth. But then Noah gets liquored-up on wine and curses his family, rendering ugly the beauty of the earth and its people in God’s post-flood re-creation.
Shortly after, the people of Babel starting building a gleaming tower as a monument to themselves and their own ingenuity, and God steps in to halt construction and scatter the people to the four winds.
Is there any hope for humanity? Well, yes, apparently so.
That hope begins with an old man named Abram, whose story begins in this morning’s Scripture lesson from Genesis 12.
The Lord calls Abram to step out in faith on the journey of a lifetime – a journey that will bless Abram and start forming a nation populated with people that the Lord will call his own.
Listen for the Word of the Lord to you this day in these ever-true ancient words.
Now the LORD said to Abram,
So Abram went, as the LORD had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land.
Then the LORD appeared to Abram, and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the LORD, who had appeared to him.
From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to the LORD and invoked the name of the LORD. And Abram journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb. (Genesis 12:1-9)
Wouldn’t it be great if the journey of earthly life was as simple and care free as getting your motor running, heading out on the highway, and looking for adventure along broad, straight, smooth ribbons of interstate freeway?
But no, more often than not, life in a broken and fearful world is not an easy ride.
Which is the hard lesson that one trucker in Asia learned some time ago.
I don’t know about you, but I get dizzy and queasy just watching that clip.
My stomach similarly knots at the thought of walking the Glass Plank Road that hugs the side of a mountain in China.
You need nerves of steel to stroll out on the glass walkway that hangs nearly 4,700 feet in the air, and for that reason, it’s known as the Walk of Faith, a white-knuckle hike that’s definitely not for the faint of heart. But those who summon up the courage to step out and get going are treated to an unforgettable experience of a lifetime.
That’s where Abram finds himself.
One day, out of the blue, God clears the divine throat and tells Abram to step out in faith and get going. And so Abram packs his bags and flies off on the wings of promises too breathtaking to take in and almost too good to be true.
Abram and wife Sarai pack up and go – moving lock, stock and barrel hundreds of miles west toward the Mediterranean Sea with only the vaguest understanding of why they’re moving and absolutely no clue about what will actually happen when they get there.
What Abram and Sarai did know was this:
They were doing the one thing that people of their day feared the most – leaving behind the land of their mothers and fathers. To forever leave the homeland of one’s ancestors meant that you’d die in a foreign land, and if that happened, people back then believed you’d be forever lost and alone in the afterlife. So folks tended to put down deep roots in the places they forever wanted to call home, because no one wants to spend eternity lost and alone.
With that hellish threat hanging over them, Abram and company leave the land they know best – walking away from the culture in which they grew up, and all the familiar traditions and trappings, sights, sounds and smells that make a place into a home.
The big move will be destabilizing. It will strip them of all their bearings and landmarks. Saying goodbye to what was will open a gaping hole in their lives, and everything will have to be reimagined and reinvented.
But in return for taking the first step on this great walk of faith, God promises to watch over them and to use them as the divine means of incredible blessing and amazing newness. God once again is beginning the work of redeeming a world run amok, and that work of doing a new thing will start with a hapless couple who’d long ago given up hopes that their lives would be blessed or that they could be a blessing to anyone or anything.
People who walk by faith often hear God’s voice telling them, “You need to leave now. It’s time to move on.”
Sometimes those marching orders have to do with a geographic change, as it was for Abram, but other times, God directs people to leave certain situations, sever relationships, or make other difficult-but-necessary changes.
When you walk by faith grounded in things unseen, God never lets you settle into places of stability. Just when you reach a certain place spiritually and decide to pitch your tent and relax for a while, God says, “Get going! And even though stepping out on a walk of faith scares the living daylights out of you, I promise that everything is going to turn out OK.”
Thus Abram’s caravan leaves town with bags stuffed full and boxes packed tight with the promises of God. Those promises are their sources of courage and determination, and those promises must be ours as well. We live and move solely off the promises of God, whose grace flows through heaven’s channel of promise.
Many of us, though, are more commandment-oriented.
Those folks wake up every morning with God’s moral law hanging over them, and they try to do right so God will approve of them at the end of the day. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. The Lord, after all, reveals himself to demonstrate a way of life that’s compatible with God’s holiness and helpful for human wholeness.
But trying to uphold every letter, jot, and tittle of God law is a fool’s errand, because living that way makes for an uphill climb that typically falls short of the summit.
We’ll all fare far better waking up confident in God’s promises – what the Lord says he’ll do is exactly what God will do for us today. Then and only then will God’s power working in us direct us tenderly yet firmly in the way of obedience and right living.
The tender-yet-firm unconditional love of the Lord for us – as revealed in his gracious promises of mercy, forgiveness, protection, justice, and restoration – is the only thing that draws us to a closer walk with God.
In his moment of promise, Abram feels so close to God that he builds an altar to the LORD and calls on his name. Abram’s heart reaches out to God in worship. God has been so good to him, so generous, so affirming, that the only thing Abram can do is fall down on his knees in praise.
Abram didn’t earn any promise or blessing by what he’d done. The promise comes to him all because of grace. And because of that grace – even though he has no map, no GPS, no AAA brochure, no lineup of motel reservations along the way, Abram travels with the assurance of promise that God will show him where to stop when he gets to wherever it is that God wants him and his entourage to go.
Abram couldn’t see God’s bigger picture, and Abram was OK with that.
Faith is happy to step out not knowing where it’s going, so long as it knows that God is coming along. As long as God’s strong hand is holding Abram’s, everything is going to work out just fine, and the caravan moves ahead in faith.
That’s the excitement of walking with God. God is in control, and that is enough. God will unveil the route as you go along.
Faith deals with the invisible things of God. It refuses to be ruled by the physical senses, rational logic, or irrational fears. So don’t be so afraid when you don’t know exactly how God will lead and take care of you. Just hold on tight to God and keep moving ahead.
Don’t worry so much about what the other person might be doing. It really doesn’t matter, because God has promised to uphold and defend you.
Our going will have its ups and downs, its peaks and valleys, its strong leaps forward, its woeful stumbles backward, but that’s the way it is when God calls you by name – you are summoned to a journey whose destination is glory, yet the path to that glory is long, dangerous, frustrating, and always fraught with the temptation to chuck the whole thing in favor of just looking out for good ol’ No. 1 in the here and now.
Thankfully, God’s faithfulness toward us is more constant than ours toward God, and so by grace, God’s Holy Spirit in Christ keeps steering us back onto the path of promise.
As we now know only too well, that path of promise meanders straight to a Cross.
If ever there were a more-gruesome picture of what promises made null and void looks like, it would be the Cross. From that Cross, the Son of God shouts on a Friday we call Good, “It is finished.” But by saying that, Jesus doesn’t mean that he is defeated, done in, and down for the count. He means that something is finished in the sense of being completed.
The blessing once promised to that man named Abram in Ur is completed at last in Calvary’s mournful mountain cry: From the horror of death comes the promise of resurrection.
Even though it sometimes feels like the world is intent on kicking the stuffing out your faith, even though it often feels like evil has the upper hand and is winning the fight, even though your inner spirit echoes with deep hollowness more often than not, you nevertheless still hold tight to the promise of resurrection through all your travels, thanks to a faith abiding still in the belief that the Lord always keeps his promises.
Believing that isn’t easy. But neither is taking that first step when God says “get going.” So Abram left. And so must we.
May God give us the grace to journey by stages with Abram and all who followed him in faith, assured of God’s promises to fill the empty places in our lives with resurrection.
John Newton is the the converted slave trader and drunkard who became a faithful pastor and author of the hymn, “Amazing Grace.” He also wrote a lesser-known hymn that reveals God’s faithfulness in allowing trials into our lives and our need to rely on God rather than turning to our own schemes when the going gets tough:
I asked the Lord, that I might grow In faith, and love, and every grace; Instead of this, he made me feel The hidden evils of my heart; And let the angry powers of hell Assault my soul in every part.
Perhaps it is, then, that story of God and us hinges on believing that the answers to our prayers lie in the crosses we’re forced to bear and in trusting that we do not bear those crosses alone.
That’s the assurance of Bethlehem’s manger that we heard just a month ago at Christmastime, when an elderly man holding a newborn King shouts with joy that his eyes have seen God’s salvation, prepared for all peoples, a light of revelation and glory. (Luke 2:28-32)
Incredibly Good News that John’s Gospel sums up in simpler terms: “From his fullness, we have all received, grace upon grace.” (John 1:16)
Ancient words, ever true.
Amen, and amen.
Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message on Sunday, January 30, 2022. The fourth sermon in his series “Becoming Disciples: The Story of God and Us,” it is adapted from scholarship, commentary, and reflection by Terence E. Fretheim and Scott Hoezee.
We have just begun a spiritual journey from one end of the Bible to the other in hopes of better understanding the big-picture story of God and us, and, along the way, we aim to become more faithful disciples of Jesus Christ through the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.
Thus last Sunday, we began at the beginning with the story of Creation – with God, with Jesus, and with the Spirit gazing out upon a mess, a really, big mess, and together deciding to do something about it.
The Spirit of God in Christ blows across a formless void of chaotic darkness to create goodness and light, the heavens and the earth, and all things bright and beautiful that dwell within.
Evening comes, and soon a new day dawns, then another, and then another, and before you know it, a story takes shape, and a history starts forming, with days and nights upon which you eventually look back and spy glimpses of messes never really cleaned, signs and portents of rekindled chaos sneaking back in and up, dimming the light, and re-casting the shadows.
This morning’s Scripture lesson explains why there’s trouble in paradise.
The first humans, represented in Genesis 3 by Adam and Eve, find themselves in hot water with God for breaking one of the rules that the Lord lays down for the Garden of Eden.
A crafty serpent leads Adam and Eve astray, and strange as it may sound, you and I are still paying the price for their rebellion against God, because evil continues its relentless assault on our bodies, souls, and spirits.
By the power of the Holy Spirit, listen for the Word of the Lord, and let these ancient words impart generous measures of grace-filled hope and assurance.
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the LORD God had made.
He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden?’”
The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’”
But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.
They heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?”
He said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.” He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.”
Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent tricked me, and I ate.”
The LORD God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, cursed are you among all animals and among all wild creatures; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.”
To the woman he said, “I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”
And to the man he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
The man named his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all living. And the LORD God made garments of skins for the man and for his wife, and clothed them. Then the LORD God said, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever” – therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken.
He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life. (Genesis 3:1-24)
The faces may change, but their stories are the same: None of them had a clue; none of them had any idea.
Randy had no clue that he would ruin his life when he took his first toke from a marijuana pipe.
Jennifer had no idea that her first beer as a teen-ager would begin a lifelong struggle with alcohol.
Erica and Nathan had no clue, no idea, that the abuse they endured growing up as sister and brother would tempt them into abusive relationships with their own children.
And then there’s Steve.
He, too, had no clue, no idea, that giving into one temptation would tear his family apart.
Steve’s relationship with his wife was frustrating and unfulfilling, and so when he met Joan, he thought he’d found someone who understood him in a way his wife didn’t.
Steve didn’t think his relationship with Joan would go any further than a casual friendship, but when the opportunity came for the two of them to become “friends with benefits,” Steve couldn’t resist and gave into temptation, giving absolutely no thought to the carnage his affair would inflict on his wife and children.
Steve surely wasn’t anywhere within earshot when his youngest daughter made her request during Sunday school prayer time: “Please pray for me. Another family stole my daddy.”
Adam and Eve had no clue, either:
No idea that their surrender to temptation – their act of rebellion, eating of a piece of fruit from the tree that God had proclaimed off limits – would forever change the entire course of human history and ignite a sordid pattern for human behavior.
Adam and Eve are given the whole garden except for just that one tree. But like so many people even to this day, Eve first, and then Adam, stomped their feet and declared, “If I can’t have it all, then what I do have means nothing.”
“In Adam’s fall, we sinned all,” goes an old rhyme.
Which is to declare that, in ways we cannot fathom, each and every one of us who has ever been, each and every one of us who is now, each and every one of us who is still to come, are bound up so tightly with Adam that we were, are and will be ruled guilty of the bad thing he and Eve did when they defied God and soiled God’s good order.
When Adam and Eve set themselves up as being wiser than God, when they refused the place that God had assigned them, all of us were right there with them.
The whole thing sounds ridiculous, right?
But that absurd idea is what the Church has believed and taught since ages past. We call it “original sin,” and “original sin” has two parts: corruption and guilt.
The easier of the two to get your head around is the first part – the idea that corruption, our tendency to rebel by giving into evil’s temptation, is passed on to us across the generations from the first humans.
The tainted nature and miserably poor judgment of Adam and Eve get passed down to you and me like industrial waste poured into a river and flowing downstream. If a company dumps hundreds of gallons of mercury-laden toxic waste into a river, then no matter how far downstream you go, any water you drink or any fish you catch will make you sick or even kill you!
So it is with the pollution of sin poured into humanity through Adam and Eve by the forces of evil in this world.
Yes, we are made to reflect the divine image, and yes, like the rest of Creation, God declares us good. But evil continues its relentless assault on God’s good Creation, and because of evil’s many temptations that all too often seem to get the better of us, the spiritual air we breathe and the divine water we drink are filled with diabolical toxins that are making our hearts and minds deathly ill.
If that image doesn’t work for you, try thinking about it in terms of genetics: Because of evil’s power, Adam and Eve corrupted our physical and spiritual DNA. The elegant double-helix that forms our very nature got kinked and twisted – as messed up and cattywampus as were the sorry state of affairs before Creation.
We know, for example, that children and grandchildren of alcoholics are genetically more likely to become alcoholics themselves than the descendants of people whose DNA has not been so tainted. Thus, sin gets passed down across the generations in the same way that mutated genes get passed on from parent to child.
The inherited bad behavior that isn’t genetic gets passed on from generation to generation by bad example.
Children abused by their parents or other relatives – or children who witness one parent abuse the other – are themselves more likely to continue the cycle of violence as adults by abusing their own spouse and children.
So the idea that we inherit corruption – a tendency toward sin, a weakness for falling prey to evil – makes a certain amount of sense.
But what about that other part of original sin – the guilt?
The Bible claims that it’s not just that we inherit Adam’s tendency to sin, but also that we are guilty of Adam’s sin and thus deserve punishment – even BEFORE we commit any sins of our own.
Doesn’t seem fair, does it?
If a crack addict gives birth to a premature, drug-addicted baby, you can understand jailing the mother on charges of child endangerment. But who in their right mind would lock up the baby, too?
If Grandpa Ed was an alcoholic who killed a drinking buddy in some drunken bar-room brawl 60 years ago, why would we tell his tee-totaling grandson Ed Jr. that he needs to be punished for what Grandpa Ed did way back in day?
No, it wouldn’t be fair, but as another writes, the bad momentum that evil set into motion through Adam and Eve has been building ever since, sweeping the rest of us away in a floodtide of not just corrupt hearts but of guilty hearts, too.
Just as I believe God lit the match that set off the explosion known to astronomers as the Big Bang to create the cosmos and everything in it, so also do Adam and Eve throw gasoline on the fire of evil that intends to wipe out all the goodness that the Lord God created.
In other words, we are guilty by association, and that’s what rubs us the wrong way and causes us to cry “foul.”
“Don’t punish me for what Adam and Eve did!”
“Don’t tell me I was there with them, because I wasn’t.”
“Don’t bother trying to convince me, pastor, that Adam and Eve are representatives of all humanity, because I never voted to have Adam or Eve represent me.”
Bottom line: none of us likes guilt by association. It offends our sense of fairness and justice. Yet, about six weeks from now, at some point during the upcoming season of Lent, we’ll join together in song and ask, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?”
And our Christian answer always is yes!
By grace and through some mysterious operation of the Holy Spirit, you and I were there, at Calvary, nailed and spiked to the Cross.
You and I were there when they crucified our Lord. Not just there among the blood-thirsty Roman soldiers, not just there among the rubber-necking onlookers, but you and I were crucified on the Cross with Christ.
And so now, by grace, when God looks at you and me, God sees not his rebellious children Adam and Eve but God’s one and only Son, Jesus Christ, into whose image the Spirit transforms us.
What Jesus did on the cross is supremely more powerful than what Adam and Eve did, infinitely more muscular than what Randy, Jennifer, Erica, Nathan, Steve, you, and I did and continue to do!
The sin of Eden’s garden as well as the sin of our days are no match for the cross of Jesus.
“Where sin abounded, grace hyper-abounded,” the apostle Paul will later suggest. It’s no contest, a mismatch of epic proportion. And this floodtide of grace comes to us even though our sin and guilt make us quite the unworthy recipients. As much as we are guilty by association, thanks be to God we are even more saved by association.
It’s all one whopper of a tremendously amazing gift!
If Adam and Eve gave humanity a gift that nobody wanted yet couldn’t refuse, Jesus now gives humanity a gift that everybody should want, because the gift leads not just to life but to eternal life.
The Lord so loves and values you and me; so cherishes and appreciates every blessed one of our family members, friends, and neighbors; so treasures and relishes the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the foreigner, and the immigrant that God accepts all of us – just as we are, warts and all – forever bound to Adam and Eve, caught up in their sin and equally vulnerable to temptation.
And God bestows the life-changing gift of grace simply because the Spirit of Christ associates us with the God who knew us before we were even born and continues know us by name in this moment.
This gift of grace is God’s absolute promise that Jesus has more than compensated for every mess that we’ve made, for every pot that we’ve stirred, and for everything else that ails us: Every dark thought that’s ever plagued our minds, every shortcoming we could ever name, every act of rebellion we’ve ever committed, every temptation that’s ever got the best of us.
Jesus overwhelms us – and our corruption, and our guilt – with a grace that restores the life God always intended us to have when Father, Son and Spirit created us!
Because of the gift given to us by Christ Jesus the Lord, we are in the process of being raised up to the fullness of what God meant us to be.
So maybe try complaining a little less about the “unfairness” of guilt by association and instead try lifting up your songs of praise a little more, because you’ve also been saved by association in this life lived east of Eden.
Living life East of Eden, with all its thorns and thistles, comes with the assurance we declared earlier in worship:
Adam and Eve had to face the consequences of their sin, but our God prepared a way for them still to be connected to the earth and to of God.
So it is with all of us.
In Christ’s birth, life, ministry, death and resurrection, we are made able to carry on – upright and strong – for our sins are forgiven.
For through Jesus – Son of God and Son of Man, God learns firsthand how forcefully evil is ever trying to lead us into temptation and how extremely hard it is to resist the allure of the shiny baubles that evil is always dangling before our eyes, and how absolutely necessary it is for the Lord to be ahead, beside, and behind our walk in this broken and fearful world, the wind of the Spirit filling our sails, and the breath of the Spirit redeeming our hearts and minds.
That, in a nutshell, is the story of God and us:
The breath of God breathing upon us, filling us with life anew, until our hearts are pure and wholly God’s, that we may love what God does love, and do what God would do, willing one will, and glowing with fire divine.
Ancient words, ever true, changing me and changing you.
Amen and amen!
Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message on Sunday, January 23, 2022. The third sermon in his series “Becoming Disciples: The Story of God and Us,” it is adapted from scholarship, commentary, and reflection by Terence E. Fretheim and Scott Hoezee.
The better you know the chapters and verses of the Old Testament – and the more you take to heart the stories held tenderly and eternally in those ancient words long preserved, the wiser you’ll become for salvation in Jesus Christ.
So says the apostle Paul.
Of course, finding Jesus crouched down behind every desert rock of the Old Testament makes no sense, because Jesus is never mentioned anywhere in all those first 39 books of the Bible. But Paul says Jesus is there, and you best tee up your soul for the salvation uniquely offered in Christ if you know well and truly take to heart those Old Testament words.
That’s the gist of the Scripture lesson we heard last Sunday from Paul in his letter first written to his youthful ward Timothy and now handed down to us for our walk in this world. Because God breathed out holy words, we now understand that God loves us a different way through Christ the Lord.
“Breathe easy, my dear, you can find sunshine in the rain,” go the lyrics to a pop culture song. “I will come running when you call my name. Even a broken heart can beat again. Forget about the one who caused you pain. I swear I’ll love you in a different way.”
God’s Holy Spirit definitely calls us to live and love in a different way. She begs and implores our living and loving on earth as it is in heaven in the ways of peace and grace, justice and mercy, forgiveness and reconciliation, hope and assurance, unity and community. Those themes appear and re-appear in the Bible regularly and often from cover to cover, and Paul deeply and passionately understands that.
Paul clearly sees what we too often miss today: the Bible is finally a single story, with a single plot, from beginning to end. The whole of Scripture leads you right to the bloody foot of Jesus’s cross and right to the gaping entrance of his empty tomb.
That’s precisely what the whole heavenly enterprise has been about from the get-go. Once you realize what God has been up to since the dawn of time – and even before that, everything falls into place and makes singular, final sense in Christ alone.
That’s the vision I’m hoping we all catch as we move through my new sermon series, “Becoming Disciples: The Story of God and Us.”
As we make our way through the Bible from start to finish, what I pray we discover is that it’s all one story and finally one message.
Let this video refresh your understanding of the sacred plot that unfolds in the pages of Scripture, in that one story, as it delivers its one message.
And so, we begin at the beginning, with the first morning, the first evening, and the first day of Genesis 1.
May the Holy Spirit open your body, soul, and spirit to the Word of the Lord, and let these ancient words impart faith, life, and hope:
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said,
“Let there be light.”
And there was light. And God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. And God said,
“Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.”
So, God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day. And God said,
“Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.”
And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. Then God said,
“Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.”
And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day. And God said,
“Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.”
And it was so. God made the two great lights – the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night – and the stars. God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day. And God said,
“Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky.”
So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them, saying,
“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.”
And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day. And God said,
“Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.”
And it was so. God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good. Then God said,
“Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
So God created humankind in the divine image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them,
“Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and steward it; and have faithful rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth. See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.”
And it was so. God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation. (Genesis 1:1-2:3)
In the beginning, there was God. And a mess. A really big mess.
You can’t see anything. Things bump into you, and you bump into them – pretty much all the time.
There are icky, gooey things; and soft, squishy things; and rough, hard things; and sharp, prickly things – ouch! And all the time, everything is bumping into everything else, because you can’t see a blessed thing, because there is no light. There is only a mess.
And there is God, and there is Jesus, and there is the Spirit.
So, the Three of Them decide to do something about the mess. The Spirit breezes over the mess to breathe out the living Word of God: “Turn on, light!” And light turns on.
And when light turns on, you can tell light from dark, and you start making out shapes and colors, so you can see the mess for what it is: Everything, all jumbled up, certainly not decent, definitely not in order. Water, and rocks, and clouds, and sand, and fire, and ice – all jumbled up.
You see the mess. And so does Father, Son and Spirit.
Thus, they keep breathing and speaking. And the more they breathe and speak, the more unjumbled things become. Clouds rise; water falls and pools into streams and lakes; sand, pebbles, and small rocks dot their banks and shores. Bigger rocks become rolling land of hill and dale, high bluff and soaring mountain. And a molten inferno burbles and gurgles under the rocks.
The Big Three keep breathing and speaking, and the unjumbled jumble begins to prance and frolic, teaming and pulsing with all kinds of life.
Life in the waters; life on the land, and hills, and bluffs, and mountains. Life in the ground, and life above it in the skies. Everything is popping and bopping with all kinds of life.
Life green and growing, life fuzzy and furry, covers the land; life finned, shelled, and tentacled swims in the waters. Life of every stripe bobs, hops, stands, wiggles, flies, walks, runs, ambles, and grazes. Life teams in every crack and groove of the good earth. Life watching other life, everywhere is life.
And the Godhead Three in One keeps breathing and speaking to create yet one more form of life, and women and men start singing and dancing. And when we come – when our kind comes wearing coats of many colors, we no sooner arrive than we start breathing and talking, too – rather like God is breathing and talking through our noses and mouths, laboring through our hands and feet, clearing still more flotsam and jetsam from the jumble of the mess and making space for still more life to join the dance.
How cool is that!
And when they see us breathing and talking, rather like they exist breathing and talking, the Trinity say as One, “This is good. Very good. Very, very good.” These days of light, pure light. These days without shadows, nothing to haunt, taunt, cloud, or occlude; nothing to eclipse or extinguish the light of day; nothing creeping and lurking in the dark of the night.
Days of light, pure light!
Shadowless days without darkness, no scary things that go bump in the night hiding under the beds of children; no boogeymen holed up in closets of sisters, brothers, parents, and grandparents; nothing to prevent heavenly and earthly light from shining on friend, neighbor, and stranger.
That’s where we wish we could live and move every day, setting up shop and abiding in those first six days, capturing its essence, bottling it up, keeping it, preserving it, reveling in it forever and always.
But we cannot.
As in the Creation story, so also in our lives.
The first days are ephemeral, fleeting, transient. Evening comes, and soon a new day dawns, then another, and then another, and before you know it, a story takes shape, and a history starts forming, with days and nights upon which you eventually look back and spy glimpses of messes never really cleaned, signs and portents of rekindled chaos sneak back in and up, dimming the light.
Thus shadows re-form.
And the disordered malice and viciousness that the Lord God once shoved aside to create a splendid cosmos, well, sadly yes, rears its ugly head once again, whenever it can, confusing us, terrifying us, paralyzing us, and forever getting in heaven’s always good way.
As the days accumulate, and you accrue memories both good and bad, you feel a little desperate sometimes, a little wistful, a little full of what C.S. Lewis called Sehnsucht, that longing or hankering for … something.
For a better day, a better life, a better country, a better world.
You maybe hanker for what things were like at the end of those first six days, punctuated with refreshing sabbath rest on day seven.
You toss and turn like a dervish, wondering if you can ever get back, ever get to the point of living with hope, and with good possibilities ahead, instead of a future made anxious by bad memories, by past disappointments. And by a tomorrow that appears equally as dismal as today.
You pray to return to a daily existence without pandemics, insurrections, and big lies, a day when “liberty and justice for all” really means something, a time when glazed eyes are pried open to gaze “o’er the land of the [truly] free.”
And in the story of Creation, if you look and listen carefully, you find your hope, your hope and assurance, that fresh days fragrant with new possibilities will soon peek and poke above dawn’s distant horizon.
For on the tense, fractured scene of our broken days is but one character playing three parts in the larger drama that’s unfolding: the Lord God himself – Father, Son, and Spirit, which makes the first four words of the Bible really all you ever need to know: “In the beginning, God.”
In the beginning, God!
God was there in our beginning. Which means God remains here in our midst. Which ensures God will be there at our ending, too.
And because that is true, we also rest easy in this knowledge: For us saints and sinners whom God has claimed in Christ by the Spirit, there’ll never be an ending.
Grace has cleaned the mess and paid the debt. For elsewhere in Scripture reappears “in the beginning.” In the beginning, on the first day of the week, women go to a tomb, and what they find on that first day of the week is a new beginning that changes everything.
That hinge-point in the story of God and us so changed everything to the point that we Christians still gather on Easters big and little:
Those first days of weeks that recall a resurrection that changed everything, a resurrection that provided a new beginning, a new start, a new first day every day where sins and regrets of the past really and truly are forgiven and blotted out, a first day every day where hope glimmers and shimmers with all the possibility God once had in mind when they began, in the beginning of the whole story, which cries out a clarion call: “Let there be light.”
And with a big bang, there was light!
There was morning. There was evening. The first day.
God was in that first day, and they are in all the days that follow, as much or more as Father, Son, and Spirit will be so, until the end of the age and beyond. For that is Gospel promise of our Lord, Jesus Christ.
Ancient words, ever true, changing me and changing you:
Breathe on me, breath of God, fill me with life anew;that I may love what thou dost love, and do what thou wouldst do.
Amen, and amen!
Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message on Sunday, January 16, 2022. The second sermon in his series “Becoming Disciples: The Story of God and Us,” it is adapted from scholarship, commentary, and reflection by Doug Bratt, Discipleship Ministries of the United Methodist Church, Terence E. Fretheim, Scott Hoezee, C.S. Lewis, and Stan Mast.
The apostle Paul this morning serves up a classic text that affirms the supremacy of the Bible as the Book among books.
Now nearing the end of earthly life’s race and ready to receive his heavenly crown of righteousness, the one-time persecutor of Christ’s followers shares a moving, heartfelt testimony about the power of God’s written Word.
As if that isn’t enough, Paul in our Scripture lesson tacks on a hodge-podge of warnings and cautions about people to be scorned and people to be praised, about the perils and pitfalls of front-line ministry and Christian living, and about our human tendency to seek out and listen to only those things that we want to hear.
At first blush, Paul seems to be letting loose a random stream of conscious thoughts to a younger protégé, Timothy. But strangely enough, when you zoom out and glance the entire passage, Paul’s tidings sparkle with exquisitely gilded unity. And at the heart of it all, the golden nugget that lends such unity to these otherwise rapid-fire, seemingly random reflections about life and living is the Word of God – the Bible, which, Paul says, wields the power to perfect us and equip us for holy work.
Listen, now, with the help of the Holy Spirit, for the Word of the Lord, and let these ancient words impart faith, life, and hope.
Now you have observed my teaching, my conduct, my aim in life, my faith, my patience, my love, my steadfastness, my persecutions and suffering the things that happened to me in Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra.
What persecutions I endured! Yet the Lord rescued me from all of them.
Indeed, all who want to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. But wicked people and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving others and being deceived. But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.
In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I solemnly urge you: proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths. As for you, always be sober, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully. (2 Timothy 3:10-4:5)
Though both Paul and Timothy are pastors, the commands for life and living that Paul shares with his apprentice apply far beyond those of us engaged in professional ministry to include every follower of Christ:
Do not follow every whim and desire, but stick with what God has laid before you!
Do not listen for sound bites, but dive deep into the rich, holy Word of truth!
Do not be carried away by lies and myths, but profoundly root yourself in the faith of Christ!
Do not look for a faith leader who makes you feel better, but pay careful attention to the one who reveals regular invitations to transformation that the Holy Spirit of God is constantly and consistently making!
Pretty straight-forward stuff, really.
But here’s the thing: It’s all-but certain that the Scriptures to which Paul refers are what today we’d call the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament. The New Testament as we know it today has yet to be written and compiled when Paul pens his letter to Timothy. The only Scripture available in Paul’s day was the Old Testament, which you can scour from Genesis to Malachi and never stumble across the name “Jesus Christ.”
Yet, Paul tells Timothy and us that the better we know those very Old Testament chapters and verses, the wiser we’ll all become for salvation in Jesus Christ.
That makes no sense, because nothing in all those 39 books of the Old Testament mentions Jesus. But Paul says Jesus is there, and you best tee up your soul for the salvation uniquely offered in Christ if you know well and truly take to heart those Old Testament words.
Paul clearly sees what we too often miss today: The Bible is finally a single story, with a single plot, from beginning to end. If you’d challenged Paul that it seems odd to suggest someone could become wise unto salvation in Jesus Christ from a bunch of writings that don’t even mention his name, your biblical dispute probably would have baffled Paul.
“Of course it’s one story,” Paul would push back. The whole of Scripture leads you right to the foot of Jesus’s cross and right to the entrance of his empty tomb. That’s precisely what the whole thing has been about from the get-go. Once you realize what God has been up to since the dawn of time – and even before that, everything falls into place and makes singular, final sense in Christ alone.
That’s the vision I’m hoping we all catch as we move through my new sermon series, “Becoming Disciples: The Story of God and Us.”
As we make our way through the Bible from start to finish, what I pray we discover is that it’s all one story and finally one message. And that’s why Paul immediately urges Timothy one last time to keep on preaching it and let the chips fall where they may.
The God-breathed words in all of those pages contain what we need for our proclamation of the Gospel in both word and deed that announces the arrival of the Kingdom of God. Those ancient words reveal to us the sovereign God who promises God’s own self will be with us through it all, giving us what we need to encourage us when we want to give up, and setting straight the record not just about what is true and noble, but also about what is right and wrong, what to do and what not to do, even though you might have every supposed right to do it.
Through the work of the Holy Spirit – the same Spirit who breathed the inspiration for its holy words, the Scriptures of the Bible are all we need. That’s why the pulpit stands as the centerpiece of our sanctuary. The Word of God that’s proclaimed from here is intended to be the focal point of our days, not pushed off to the side and hauled out when it’s convenient or profitable.
In contrast to accumulating teachers who will say what we want to hear, and in direct challenge to the temptation to just keep listening to those teachers and never getting into action about what we hear, Paul urges all who follow Jesus to stick with the one message.
Still, it remains as challenging as to contend for the faith in Christ and the story of God’s Word.
Ours is also a world with lots of “itching ears” that hanker for “new and improved” stories over and above the old, traditional ones.
But if God’s Word is Life itself – and it is, and if the whole story climaxes in the life, death, and resurrection of the one named Jesus – and it does, then we just have to keep living it – in season, and out of season, and until that time when the Lord himself returns to make all things new. Until then, we are simply asked to stay connected to our roots in faith, and to be faithful to the claim and call that God has laid upon our lives, individually as children of God and corporately as the Church.
The story of God and us is a story of God loving us in a different way – unconditionally, not counting against us the many sins and trespasses that make us hard to love. God nevertheless keeps on loving no matter what. And that same unconditional love is the gift that God calls us to share with others – love that pours the baptismal waters of mercy, compassion, grace, and forgiveness upon the sins, debts, trespasses, and brokenness of the world.
Though it’s a secular song, the lyrics to “A Different Way” by DJ Snake and Lauv unintentionally speak well of God’s unconditional love for us as well as the unconditional love that the Lord calls us to share with friend, neighbor, and stranger:
Could you believe I could be different? I’ll be the difference; I’ll lift you high. And I understand your hesitation. Our reputation, it’s no surprise.
So let me redefine you. And you can see the tide move, just like tears in the eyes do. And when you’re feeling alone, oh, I’ll be right here between the sea and silence.
So breathe easy, my dear, you can find sunshine in the rain. I will come running when you call my name. Even a broken heart can beat again. Forget about the one who caused you pain. I swear I’ll love you in a different way.
How you answer the Lord’s call to love in a different way is between you, God, and the Holy Spirit.
But as for me, in this new year, I want to let the Spirit to breathe more of the Word into the soul of my being. Inspired by a post making its way around social media, I want to hang out with sinners; upset religious people; tell stories that make people think; choose unpopular friends; be kind, loving, and merciful; and – also like Jesus – take naps on boats.
And I’m going to do those things simply because, when the breath of God created the world, God revealed a different way of living and loving. And because God breathed a holy Word, you and I are called to live and love in different ways, too. For indeed, our days are sorely lacking faithful saints who do.
“Forget about the one who caused you pain. I swear I’ll love you in a different way.”
May it be so. Amen, and amen!
Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message on Sunday, January 9, 2022. It is the first installment of a new sermon series, “Becoming Disciples: The Story of God and Us.” Scholarship, commentary, and reflection by DJ Snake, James D.G. Dunn, Chelsey Harmon, Scott Hoezee, and Lauv inform the message.
So often have we heard the Christmastime story about the coming of the Wise Men – and sung the time-honored carols about their intrepid following of a yonder star – that some of us probably can quote by heart the details of their bold voyage across field and fountain, moor and mountain.
But what we think we know and remember about these Wise Men bearings gifts and traversing afar doesn’t entirely jibe with Matthew’s Gospel telling of the miraculous event.
Even though their visit with the Christ Child is traditionally shared as part of the Christmas story, biblical scholars believe that these wise guys from the east – probably astrologers, not kings, coming from a home in what today is the country of Iran – may not have dropped by to see Jesus until as much as two years after his birth. So, the story of their arduous journey and surprise visit doesn’t have to be associated solely with Christmas.
Sure, the Wise Men – probably more than just the three we sing about – bring to Jesus valuable gifts that symbolize the uniquely wonderful significance of his birth. Gold symbolizes that Jesus was, and still is, the King of Kings. Frankincense, a type of incense often burned on altars in worship, emphasizes the divinity of Jesus as God in human flesh. And myrrh, an oil often used in embalming, points to his death of the Cross. You simply cannot ignore the importance and meaning behind these gifts as proclamations of Jesus’s holy birth.
Yet, when you start peeling back the layers of this treasured story that seemingly wraps up everything you need to know about Jesus’s birth, you discover some groundbreaking, revolutionary truths that serve well your living long after you un-deck the halls, pack away the holiday trappings, and settle in for a long winter’s nap.
Here in Matthew 2, our Scripture lesson for this morning, the evangelist spins not a Christmas yarn but instead shares a story for all seasons. So, listen with all your senses for the Word of the Lord to you this day.
In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking,
“Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.”
When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet: ‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.’”
Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.”
When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy.
On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road. (Matthew 2:1-12)
Every Christmas pageant that you ever enacted or attended probably ended in precisely same way.
Three small children wearing fake beards and gold crowns, and bearing shiny, aluminum-foil-covered boxes, step out on stage to signal the star-struck arrival of the Wise Men.
That, of course, triggers lots and lots picture-taking by lots and lots of proud parents and grandparents eager to capture the moment when the holiday cast of Bethlehem’s characters fills the stage from left to right to take their bows.
And basking in the pageant’s heartwarming afterglow, the giddy-with-excitement audience – now fully enraptured by the pageantry of “the reason for the season” – declares that this really and truly is “the cutest and best Christmas ever.”
But when the Wise Men show up in Matthew’s Gospel, their arrival is anything but cute.
Outraged tyrants, murder plots, and last-minute escapes compose a scene that’s actually quite dark and foreboding.
Matthew wants nothing to do with angels and heavenly hosts, shepherds and sheep, and Bethlehem hotels booked solid. Matthew doesn’t even offer up a sweet, little manger surrounded by lowing cattle. Those all belong to Luke, who gospels a much kinder, gentler telling of the Christmas story.
But thanks to Matthew, the Wise Men stand in the spotlight of Epiphany – somehow tacked onto the end of Christmas and its already-epic story like a post script or bonus encore.
The Wise Men likely are astrologers who observe the night sky looking for significance and meaning. They search for signs and omens in the heavens and interpret what they see in the moon, the planets, and the stars. They seek something of the divine and otherworldly in the movements and activities of constellations and galaxies like new-agey spiritualists or fortune-telling mediums.
The Bible doesn’t speak well of those who practice such sorcery and hocus-pocus, so we now know the Wise Men as upstanding kings, a later interpretation of the story that provides some legitimizing cover for the unseemliness of their real day jobs.
Career choices notwithstanding, the movement of a star pulls the Wise Men toward Jerusalem – the location of Temple, the beating heart of Israel’s ancient faith and worship. They arrive at the palace of Herod the Great, king of Palestine, a political appointee of the Roman Empire who murders his rivals to claw his way to the top and along the way earning himself a well-deserved reputation for ruthless cunning.
These supposedly wise men arrive at Herod’s house of horrors rather clueless. “Where is the child born king of the Jews?” they ask quizzically. “We’ve been watching the sky, and we’ve been following the star, and we’ve come to pay our respects.”
But they have absolutely no idea where to go or which way to turn. The wondrous star brings them this far, but something’s missing, and they can’t quite figure out what.
At this point, Herod freaks out – as do members of his unruly court and the other power-brokers of the day.
The birth of this new King scares the bejeebers out of them all, because Jesus threatens to loose their bloody stranglehold on power and control. Herod ends up sending the Wise Men to Bethlehem to get the location of the baby, so he, too, supposedly, can pay his own respects. But it’s all a trick. Herod plans to kill the Wise Men and do away with this new, upstart king once and for all.
When the Wise Men set out again, the star reappears. They again follow, and it lights their way. The star, still burning brightly, finally stops in the sky over the place where Jesus lay. Overwhelmed with joy, the Wise Men walk through the front door of the house and spy the child in the arms of his mother, Mary. The awestruck men – now face-to-face with the divine – kneel in worship, open their treasure chests, and offer the now-famous gifts quite fitting for the coronation of a king.
And here’s my favorite part: An angel comes to the Wise Men in a dream and warns them of Herod’s gory plans, and they escape, returning to their country by another road, heading for home by a different way.
The star draws them, and the story sends them.
The Wise Men find the source of their seeking – the One who draws them, the One who calls them. They become part of this story and go home another way – somehow different, someway changed.
Fast forward 2,000-or-so years, and here we are today.
Somehow gathered in worship around the same scene.
Somehow, the same Scripture has been read, and the same ancient promises have been made.
Somehow, here we are again following the star, hoping and maybe finding the overwhelming joy of a up-close-and-personal encounter with God – the kind that, like the Wise Men, sends us down a different way, following a different path, somehow changed into different people.
So, please listen carefully to God’s ancient promises.
Come, kneel humbly before the holy One who embodies the fulfillment of God’s promises.
And find this congregation as a place to share your gifts – as well as your joys and your hurts.
Those who, like the Wise Men, dare to go looking for God find their lives changed after meeting up with Jesus. Each of us goes back “another way” – or surely ought to, anyway – after encountering the game-changing, life-saving power of Jesus Christ! For indeed he is Emmanuel – God with us, God for us, God’s living Word to us.
Faith communities and the spiritually changed people who compose them are at their best when they seek the place where Mary cradles Jesus in her arms.
We are at our best when the old promises are spoken, heard, then lived out in gratitude. We are at our best when friends, neighbors, and strangers are able to come face to face with the living God through the gifting of our caring words and healing deeds, through the generous sharing of our time, talent, and treasure. We are at our best when we leave this sacred ground and carry the light of hope and assurance into the darkness of a broken and fearful world.
Here’s a glimpse of what that looked like at First Presbyterian Church over the holidays:
As we begin a new year, let the star draw you in, and let the story send you out.
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward all. Amen.
Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message on Epiphany Sunday, January 2, 2021. Scholarship, commentary, and reflection by M. Eugene Boring, Mike Ruffin, and Ryan Slifka inform the message.
