Hosea 3:1-5
March 21, 2010
The Lord said to me again, ‘Go, love a woman who has a lover and is an adulteress, just as the Lord loves the people of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love raisin cakes.’ So I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and a homer of barley and a measure of wine. And I said to her, ‘You must remain as mine for many days; you shall not play the whore, you shall not have intercourse with a man, nor I with you.’ For the Israelites shall remain many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or pillar, without ephod or teraphim. Afterwards the Israelites shall return and seek the Lord their God, and David their king; they shall come in awe to the Lord and to his goodness in the latter days.
I need to apologize to all of you this morning. I have to apologize because several weeks ago, when I talked about the prophet Jeremiah, I said that he was the strangest prophet of all of them. I now realize that I was wrong. After having spent the past week studying Hosea, I now realize that Hosea was much stranger. Jeremiah was plenty strange, but not when you compare him to our prophet for today. Hosea is a weirdly fascinating prophet.
Unlike most prophets, who are known for what they say, Hosea was known as much for what he did. You see, he used his life as a grand metaphor for what was going on in the nation of Israel, and what he did shocked people, as you can tell from our passage above.
Let me give some background to Hosea to help you get a sense of his life and ministry. Hosea lived and prophesied in the last two decades of Israel’s existence. Again, let me review what I’ve spoken about several times in talking about the prophets. If you remember, Ancient Israel was one nation under kings Saul, David, and Solomon, but after Solomon’s death it became divided in two. Around 922 B.C., the northern half became a nation called Israel, while the southern half became a nation called Judah. The capital of Judah was Jerusalem, and the capital of Israel was Samaria. The northern nation of Israel lasted almost exactly 200 years until the Assyrians attacked it and destroyed it in 722 B.C. The nation of Judah lasted until the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem in 597 B.C. Hosea was a prophet of the northern nation of Israel in its last days, and he preached a message that the Assyrians were going to destroy Israel according to God’s will.
The funny thing about Hosea is that he had a funny way of prophesying. He didn’t start his ministry by going out and preaching. Instead, he let his life become a metaphor for Israel, and then later he preached to Israel, using his own life as an allegory for the state of Israel’s relationship with God. The primary problem for Israel was that the kings and the people, afraid of the Assyrians who demanded that they worship the Assyrian fertility god, Ba’al, as their price for independence, were now worshiping Ba’al. And the worship of Ba’al was diametrically opposed to the worship of Yahweh, or God. While the worship of Yahweh centered around making sacrifices in the temple in Jerusalem, or one in Samaria, there was also an emphasis that real worship meant living according to the law. The focus of Jewish life was faithfulness in all things to Yahweh. The worship of Ba’al was different. The focus was on fertility rituals, which meant worship where priests and priestesses copulating in worship services was the center of worship. What the Israelites tended to do, in order to hedge their bets, was to worship Yahweh throughout the year, and then to engage in the fertility rituals of Ba’al in the spring. Hosea stood against the worship of Ba’al, so his life became a metaphor for God’s relationship with Israel, and their fascination with Ba’al—what Hosea called Israel’s adultery.
Hosea was instructed by God to find a prostitute and marry her. At least that’s what our modern translations of Hosea says—that she was a prostitute. The translation isn’t quite accurate. Hosea didn’t just go out and find a prostitute. He married a woman named Gomer, who was a particular kind of prostitute. She was employed in the service of the temple of Ba’al in Samaria. Her role was to be available to act out the fertility rites of Ba’al. She was sort of a temple concubine whose role it was to be available to men chosen to engage with her sexually in order to entice Ba’al to bring fertilizing spring rains.
Hosea marries her and instructs her to no longer be in the employ of Ba’al. This is an allegory for the fact that Israel has been unfaithful to God, but God is willing to call them back and love them, as long as they stay faithful. Apparently Hosea loves Gomer very much, and they have three children. Hosea is led by God to give the three children very strange names. The first boy is named Jezreel. That doesn’t seem so strange, but you’ll see why it is in a moment. The first girl is named Lo-Ruhamah, which means “Not Pited.” The second boy is named Lo-Ammi, which means “Not My People.” What odd names to give them, but there’s a reason.
He names the first boy Jezreel because it was in the village of Jezreel that great violence took place 100 years earlier. Israel had been ruled by King Ahab and his queen, Jezebel. Both had driven the nation of Israel to worship Ba’al, and the great prophet Elijah, had challenged them by showing up the priests of Ba’al in a duel. The duel took place on the top of Mt. Horeb, where Elijah built a fire and had the priests of Ba’al build a fire. All 400 priest called on Ba’al to magically light their stack of logs, but nothing happened. Elijah poured buckets of water on his stack of logs, and then called on Yahweh to light his fire. The fire roared to life. This angered Jezebel and Ahab, who tried to kill Elijah, and intensified their persecution of Jews who insisted on worship of Yahweh alone.
The grip of the house of Ahab was broken at the village of Jezreel. God anointed a new king to rise up. His name was Jehu, and he was a leading commander in the army of Ahab’s son, Ahaziah. At Jezreel, Ahaziah was killed, and Jehu went on to kill Jezebel and all of her 70 sons. Jehu restored a worship of Yahweh alone, and for many years afterwards Israel was faithful. But over time Jehu’s descendents moved back to a worship of Ba’al. By calling his son Jezreel, Hosea was saying that a massacre of Israel was coming.
He named his daughter Not Pitied as a way of saying to the people of Israel that when the massacre comes, they will not be pitied. They will suffer for their infidelity, and God won’t pay attention to their wailing.
Finally, he named his other son Not My People as a way of telling them that while he had chosen the Jews to be God’s people, they would no longer be the chosen ones. God would choose another people, and they would be left to suffer life without God’s blessings.
Over time Hosea used his family as an example of Israel, showing that God had taken back Israel after its infidelity under Ahab and Jezebel, but they had persisted in pursuing other gods. He preached about how the Assyrians would be God’s sword, how God would turn away from them as they suffered. This is what we think of as the classic Old Testament wrathful God who is willing to destroy people who have been sinful or unfaithful.
The problem with this view is that it really isn’t complete. Yes, God often speaks through the prophets as the wrathful, vengeful God, but in the end the prophets almost always return to speaking of God as a softie. God may judge us, but in the end God always turns around and treats us with gentleness and compassion.
As the Assyrians stand poised on the border ready to destroy Israel, God has Hosea speak a new message. He tells him to say that Jezreel no longer means a coming massacre, but now means a restoration of the relationship between the Israelites and God, just as Jehu restored Israel to a worship of God. The name “Not Pitied” will now mean “Pitied,” for God will look upon the people of Israel and love them. And the name “Not My People” will now mean “My People,” for God will always look upon the Israelites as God’s chosen.
Then we get to our passage for this morning where God has Hosea demonstrate the love God will show them. We are left to understand that Gomer has gone back into the employ of the temple of Ba’al. She does so not because she is hungry or poor. Hosea has provided for her. But she misses the finery of the temple. There she wore beautiful robes. She had sparkling jewelry. And she loved the taste of the sweet raisin cakes. Those raisin were an especial abomination to the faithful of Israel because they were baked in the shape of a phallus. Hosea goes to the temple and actually purchases his wife back by paying the price for a slave, which was fifteen shekels. He also adds a barrel of wine and a bushel of grain. When he brings her home he tells her that she is not to be sexually active with other men or with him. He will love her, but she has to prove that she is trustworthy. Much like Israel shall be without a king, she will be without someone to love her. But if she proves she is trustworthy, then she will be loved again. This becomes an allegory of God with Israel. They will be tested, but in the end God will love them. This leads Hosea to say the following right before the nation is attacked and destroyed by the Assyrians:
I will heal their disloyalty;
I will love them freely,
for my anger has turned from them.
I will be like the dew to Israel;
he shall blossom like the lily,
he shall strike root like the forests of Lebanon.
His shoots shall spread out;
his beauty shall be like the olive tree,
and his fragrance like that of Lebanon.
They shall again live beneath my shadow,
they shall flourish as a garden;
they shall blossom like the vine,
their fragrance shall be like the wine of Lebanon.
The story of Hosea is a story of judgment, but also a story of love. Hosea we get three basic messages from Hosea. First is a message of love. No matter what we do, including our rejectingGod, God will always love us. That is fundamental. Even when we think that God is going to turn away from us, or we believe that God has turned away from us because of the life we are living, God hasn’t. God will always turn back. I’m not sure we always believe that. There are many among us who believe that they’ve done terrible things in their lives that God will never forgive. Hosea reminds us that, yes, we’ve all done terrible things that deserve God’s judgment, but God always has a soft heart. God will always be there to love us, if we are willing to return to God. And even though God will allow us to suffer the consequences of our actions, God will always work to redeem our lives
A second message is that the worship of other gods is always the path to ruin. This isn’t only a message from Hosea, but also one from most of the other prophets. And you see it in life today. The difference is that today the other gods we worship aren’t Ba’al. Our gods are things like money, possessions, power, politics, fame, celebrities, and sports. You can see how powerful the worship of money and power is. We all have dreams that if we can just live the lottery we would finally be happy. But if that’s the case, why do the majority of people who win the lottery end up unhappy? They get all their possessions, and they become miserable. You can see how powerful the worship of fame and celebrity are by the most popular magazines out there. They are magazines like People and Us. Millions of these magazines are sold each week, magazines that profile the rich and famous. And we can’t get enough. But reading them is also a shallow affair. It’s mindless while killing the spirit. Also, we worship sports, devoting so much of our lives to games that in the end don’t mean anything. Don’t get me wrong, I love sports. I cheer on the Steelers and Penguins as they win championships, and I take pity on the Pirates. I love Pitt football and basketball. I love sports, but not to the point at which they rule my life. We let sports now rule our lives. Think about when you were a kid. It used to be that sports didn’t start until after church. Now you have to fight your kids over whether to go to church or to a practice or game on Sunday morning. And too often sports win. We worship these gods, and just as the worhip of Ba’al led people away from God, these modern false gods lead us away from God.
Finallly, Hosea has a message of commitment. By taking his wife back he is telling us that ultimately commitment is the path to both God and happiness. This is a tough message for modern lives. We are an incredibly commitment-phobic people, and we are getting worse every year. For example, look at the state of community service organizations such as Kiwanis, the Elks, Boy and Girl Scouts, and many others. They all have suffered major losses in membership over the years because no one wants to make a commitment to organizations. Look at the state of marriage. At present, 57% of all marriages will end in divorce. So what do people do to prevent the potential of divorce? They move in together. The problem with that is that 80% of all relationships where couples move in together end up in a split, and that includes those who end up marrying each other. They have an 80% chance of divorce. We see the fear of commitment in the church. When I started as a pastor over twenty years ago, if a person visited a church six times, she or he would join. Now, people don’t join until they’ve been visiting for over three years, and many never join. Heck, you’ve experienced this lack of commitment whenever you’ve invited people to a party. How many of you have asked people to rsvp, only to find that very few do. Why don’t they rsvp? Because they don’t want to make a commitment to your party in case something else comes along. We are commitment-shy.
This lack of commitment kills us spiritually, but being willing to make a commitment is the path back to God. Hosea reminds us that God has made a commitment to us, and that God will always honor God’s commitment. The question is to what extent will we make the same kind of commitment to God?
Hosea has a lot of messages for us, but three stand out. If we are willing to return to God, no matter what we’ve done, God has a soft heart for us. But we have to be willing to give up all those other gods that we worship—false gods like money, possessions, power, celebrity, and sports. And the path back to God comes from our commitment to God. When we make a commitment to God, our lives become blessed with love.
Amen.
Discovering the Prophets: Jonah
Jonah 1:1-17
March 7, 2010
Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying, ‘Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.’ But Jonah set out to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish; so he paid his fare and went on board, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord.
But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and such a mighty storm came upon the sea that the ship threatened to break up. Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried to his god. They threw the cargo that was in the ship into the sea, to lighten it for them. Jonah, meanwhile, had gone down into the hold of the ship and had lain down, and was fast asleep. The captain came and said to him, ‘What are you doing sound asleep? Get up, call on your god! Perhaps the god will spare us a thought so that we do not perish.’
The sailors said to one another, ‘Come, let us cast lots, so that we may know on whose account this calamity has come upon us.’ So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah. Then they said to him, ‘Tell us why this calamity has come upon us. What is your occupation? Where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you?’ ‘I am a Hebrew,’ he replied. ‘I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.’ Then the men were even more afraid, and said to him, ‘What is this that you have done!’ For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord, because he had told them so.
Then they said to him, ‘What shall we do to you, that the sea may quieten down for us?’ For the sea was growing more and more tempestuous. He said to them, ‘Pick me up and throw me into the sea; then the sea will quieten down for you; for I know it is because of me that this great storm has come upon you.’ Nevertheless, the men rowed hard to bring the ship back to land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more stormy against them. Then they cried out to the Lord, ‘Please, O Lord, we pray, do not let us perish on account of this man’s life. Do not make us guilty of innocent blood; for you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you.’ So they picked Jonah up and threw him into the sea; and the sea ceased from its raging. Then the men feared the Lord even more, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.
But the Lord provided a large fish to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights.
You know, there’s a funny thing about the Book of Jonah. Pretty much everyone knows who the prophet Jonah was and knows the basic story, but very few people really know what the story means and why its so important. So this morning I want to introduce you to Jonah so that you can learn why the story of Jonah was considered to be a major part of the Old Testament.
So let’s begin with who Jonah was. The fact is that we don’t know much about Jonah. What little we do know doesn’t tell us much. We know that Jonah did not write the book of Jonah, and we know it for a very simple reason. The story is told in a biographical way, not an autobiographical way. Also, it’s language uses words and phrases common to the 6th century B.C., yet the prophet Jonah lived during the 8th century B.C. in the northern kingdom of Israel. Last week I mentioned that after the reign of Solomon, the nation of Israel was split in two, with the southern kingdom of Judah (which contained Jerusalem) being led by descendants of Solomon, and the northern kingdom, Israel, being led by non-descendant kings. The Assyrians, who would eventually take over and destroy the northern kingdom in the 7th century, were constantly attacking it. Other than what the Book of Jonah says, we don’t know much about him, although Isaiah says that he was a great prophet.
The story begins with God calling on Jonah to travel east to the city of Ninevah to tell it’s citizens that unless they change their ways, God was going to destroy them. Jonah is a man who has spent his life listening for and following God’s call. So what does he do? He immediately gets up and heads west to the city of Tarshish. We really don’t know where that city was, although it probably was in what is today Spain, or on the island of Sardinia. Either way, he was trying to get as far away from Ninevah as possible. Why did Jonah head toward Tarshish? Simply put, he didn’t want to preach to the Ninevites lest God save them. He wanted God to destroy them.
You see, Ninevah was the capital city of the Assyrian Empire, the same empire that was constantly sending armies to attack Israel. They were the sworn enemies of the northern kingdom, and for good reason. Within a hundred years they would sack the kingdom and disperse the population throughout their empire as slaves. Unlike with the Babylonian exile two-hundred years later, when the Babylonians destroyed Judea, took their population into exile, and let them return fifty years later, those enslaved by the Assyrians never returned. We have a name for these people. We call them the “Lost Tribes of Israel.” The Mormons believe that these dispersed Jews eventually became the Indians of North America. That belief seems ludicrous to most of us Christians and also to Jews, but hey,… we’re not Mormons. At any rate, Jonah knew what the Assyrians could do to Israel, and he wanted to prevent it by having God destroy Ninevah. To ensure Ninevah’s destruction, Jonah promptly headed west.
Finding a ship in the port city of Joppa, he set sail westward. This is where the story becomes very familiar. He goes into the hold of the ship, and promptly falls asleep. A storm suddenly rises up and smashes the ship from side to side. Storms in the Mediterranean can be very powerful, as you may have noticed last week from the cruise ship off the coast of Spain that was hit by three huge waves that killed two passengers and injured many others. Jonah’s ship was in was tossed to and fro, yet Jonah slept. The crew of the ship was in a panic. They knew there was a real possibility that the ship would sink, and so they started praying to their gods to spare them. Nothing worked. Eventually they cast lots, which is the practice of shaking a cup with small bones or sticks of different lengths, throwing them onto a table, and then interpreting the configuration of the bones to discern what God, or the gods, wanted. They cast their lots and realized that it was Jonah who was causing the storm. So they woke him up to ask him what he had done to his God to cause the storm. Jonah tells them, and asks them to throw him overboard in order to still the storm.
This shows something really interesting about Jonah. Even in disobeying God he is the ultimate prophet. Like all the prophets he fears nothing because he knows God is with him. He’s able to sleep like a baby through a horrific storm. He trusts in God, even though he is disobeying. Also, he has incredible integrity in that he owns up to his transgression, and even asks them to throw him overboard. And the final thing is that he is the kind of prophet that when he speaks, people listen and are transformed, as you’ll see in a moment.
At first the crew refuses to throw him overboard. They may be rough sailors, but they aren’t murderers. They row harder against the storm, but to no avail. Finally, they agree to throw him overboard, but with much regret. They also pray to God, not their gods, to save them. And as soon as Jonah is thrown overboard the storm stills. The great fish then swallows Jonah. Most people make the mistake of saying that a whale swallowed him, but that’s wrong. First it’s wrong because the Bible says “fish,” not “whale.” Second, there are no whales in the Mediterranean. He remains in the belly of the fish for three days.
This part of the story causes problems for many people because it really is impossible for a human to remain in a fish’s gullet. All the digestive juices would have killed him if, in fact, there was a fish large enough to swallow him other than a great white shark. I think that when people get caught up in obsessing about whether it happened or not, they miss not only the point of the Book of Jonah, but much of the Bible. The Bible, despite what many fundamentalists and literalists believe, is not a book of history. It is a book that uses history to tell us about what God has done and is doing in the world. I’m fairly certain that there was a great prophet named Jonah. I’m fairly certain that he was called to preach to the Assyrians in Ninevah. I’m fairly certain that his preaching had some impact on them. At the same time, details are added to the story to communicate symbolically and metaphorically God’s will in life. Being in the belly of the fish taught something powerful about God, a message that makes use of the number 3. When you see the number 3 in the Bible, it often stands for a time of being transformed by God. For example, Jesus dies and three days later is resurrected. Jesus’ ministry was for three years, and during that time God transformed the world. Jonah spent three days in the belly of the fish, and afterwards he was transformed. Unfortunately his transformation was a smelly one, as he was spit out covered with fish goo.
From there he goes to Ninevah, and it takes him three days to walk across the city as he preaches. And much to his dismay, the city is transformed over those three days. The people hear his words, repent, tear their clothes in grief, and wear sackcloth, which is basically burlap (very itchy, and perfect for doing penitence). When he’s done, Jonah goes to a hillside overlooking the city, hoping that God will still destroy the city, but nothing happens. Jonah sits, seething in anger.
Overnight, God causes a great broom bush, a bush with a fan-like leaf that offers shade, to grow up around Jonah. Jonah, feeling the heat, is happy for this. Then, the next night God causes a worm to attack the tree and to kill it. It dies, and once again Jonah is struck by the heat, and becomes angry at God for killing the tree. It’s at this point that God speaks. God says to Jonah, in essence, “How can you be angry at my destroying a tree that I created to do with as I will?” He goes on to basically say, “Who are you to decide what I should do with my creation? Who are you to tell me which people I should love, and which I should hate? Who are you to decide whether or not I should spare the Assyrians?” And the story basically ends there.
So what are we to make of a story like this? I think we could spend a lifetime with it and cull wisdom for life. But I want to share two points that I think are prominent among the lessons.
First, the story of Jonah teaches that life spirals downward when we don’t follow God’s call. The story of Jonah uses a pretty powerful metaphor for this. Think about what direction (I don’t mean west) Jonah moves in after he refuses to follow in God’s direction. He goes down to Joppa, down to the docks, down onto the ship, down into the hold of the ship, down into the water, and then down into the belly of the fish. In the belly of the fish he realizes just how downward his life has gone, all because he didn’t follow God’s call. And in that belly he prays, offering to serve God and God’s will.
Our lives are the same when it comes to doing God’s will. God is calling us in life to serve and live in a certain way. When we do, life becomes full of blessings. But when we don’t, our lives spiral downward. It doesn’t take much evidence to show this. Think about the times your life has been at its worst, and think about what your relationship with God was like. Were you following God, or ignoring God? Most people find that their worst times were also the times they were furthest from God. That’s the story of Jonah in a nutshell. The Ninevites could have ignored God’s calling and been destroyed, but they didn’t, and life was restored. Jonah’s life was good, but as soon as he ignored God, his life spiraled downward. When I think of this I think of alcoholics and AA. Their lives spiral downward to rock bottom, but when they join AA and turn their lives over to God (the higher power), life gets better. The enduring lesson of Jonah is to look at our lives and recognize that as long as we ignore God, our lives spiral downward.
A second point is that to follow God’s will we have to give up our will. I think that the chronic spiritual battle in human life is between God’s will and our will. For too many of us the battle is won in the short-term by us, which often leads to point number 1. But if we are willing to let go of our will, and to let God’s will work through our lives, great things can happen. But they can only happen if we are willing to give up our will.
I’ve experienced this first-hand in my own struggle to become a pastor. This is not the career I would have chosen for myself, and it was one that I actively fought with God about. Yet when I finally relented and said “yes” to God, my life became immeasurably better. But I had to give up my will in order to discover this fact. For those of you who know Steve Cramer, who was a member of Calvin Church and is now a pastor at Crossroad Presbyterian Church, you’ll recognize the same dynamic. Steve says that for twenty years he grappled with God’s will. He sensed God was calling him to be a pastor, and he kept saying no. It’s not that his life was bad because of his saying no. He would simply say that his life was never completely fulfilled. But when he let go of his ego, everything became possible. I think he would tell you now that his life is fulfilled in a way that he never could have anticipated in all those years of saying no.
Now I certainly don’t want to give you the impression that saying yes to God leads inevitably to becoming a pastor. It doesn’t. But each of us is called by God to follow in some way, whether large or small. The question is whether we are willing to give up our will in order to do God’s will.
So I want to leave you with two questions to reflect on. Which direction is your life going, up or down? And if it’s going down, to what extent are you willing to give up your will for God’s will?
Amen.
March 7, 2010
Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying, ‘Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.’ But Jonah set out to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish; so he paid his fare and went on board, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord.
But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and such a mighty storm came upon the sea that the ship threatened to break up. Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried to his god. They threw the cargo that was in the ship into the sea, to lighten it for them. Jonah, meanwhile, had gone down into the hold of the ship and had lain down, and was fast asleep. The captain came and said to him, ‘What are you doing sound asleep? Get up, call on your god! Perhaps the god will spare us a thought so that we do not perish.’
The sailors said to one another, ‘Come, let us cast lots, so that we may know on whose account this calamity has come upon us.’ So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah. Then they said to him, ‘Tell us why this calamity has come upon us. What is your occupation? Where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you?’ ‘I am a Hebrew,’ he replied. ‘I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.’ Then the men were even more afraid, and said to him, ‘What is this that you have done!’ For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord, because he had told them so.
Then they said to him, ‘What shall we do to you, that the sea may quieten down for us?’ For the sea was growing more and more tempestuous. He said to them, ‘Pick me up and throw me into the sea; then the sea will quieten down for you; for I know it is because of me that this great storm has come upon you.’ Nevertheless, the men rowed hard to bring the ship back to land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more stormy against them. Then they cried out to the Lord, ‘Please, O Lord, we pray, do not let us perish on account of this man’s life. Do not make us guilty of innocent blood; for you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you.’ So they picked Jonah up and threw him into the sea; and the sea ceased from its raging. Then the men feared the Lord even more, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.
But the Lord provided a large fish to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights.
You know, there’s a funny thing about the Book of Jonah. Pretty much everyone knows who the prophet Jonah was and knows the basic story, but very few people really know what the story means and why its so important. So this morning I want to introduce you to Jonah so that you can learn why the story of Jonah was considered to be a major part of the Old Testament.
So let’s begin with who Jonah was. The fact is that we don’t know much about Jonah. What little we do know doesn’t tell us much. We know that Jonah did not write the book of Jonah, and we know it for a very simple reason. The story is told in a biographical way, not an autobiographical way. Also, it’s language uses words and phrases common to the 6th century B.C., yet the prophet Jonah lived during the 8th century B.C. in the northern kingdom of Israel. Last week I mentioned that after the reign of Solomon, the nation of Israel was split in two, with the southern kingdom of Judah (which contained Jerusalem) being led by descendants of Solomon, and the northern kingdom, Israel, being led by non-descendant kings. The Assyrians, who would eventually take over and destroy the northern kingdom in the 7th century, were constantly attacking it. Other than what the Book of Jonah says, we don’t know much about him, although Isaiah says that he was a great prophet.
The story begins with God calling on Jonah to travel east to the city of Ninevah to tell it’s citizens that unless they change their ways, God was going to destroy them. Jonah is a man who has spent his life listening for and following God’s call. So what does he do? He immediately gets up and heads west to the city of Tarshish. We really don’t know where that city was, although it probably was in what is today Spain, or on the island of Sardinia. Either way, he was trying to get as far away from Ninevah as possible. Why did Jonah head toward Tarshish? Simply put, he didn’t want to preach to the Ninevites lest God save them. He wanted God to destroy them.
You see, Ninevah was the capital city of the Assyrian Empire, the same empire that was constantly sending armies to attack Israel. They were the sworn enemies of the northern kingdom, and for good reason. Within a hundred years they would sack the kingdom and disperse the population throughout their empire as slaves. Unlike with the Babylonian exile two-hundred years later, when the Babylonians destroyed Judea, took their population into exile, and let them return fifty years later, those enslaved by the Assyrians never returned. We have a name for these people. We call them the “Lost Tribes of Israel.” The Mormons believe that these dispersed Jews eventually became the Indians of North America. That belief seems ludicrous to most of us Christians and also to Jews, but hey,… we’re not Mormons. At any rate, Jonah knew what the Assyrians could do to Israel, and he wanted to prevent it by having God destroy Ninevah. To ensure Ninevah’s destruction, Jonah promptly headed west.
Finding a ship in the port city of Joppa, he set sail westward. This is where the story becomes very familiar. He goes into the hold of the ship, and promptly falls asleep. A storm suddenly rises up and smashes the ship from side to side. Storms in the Mediterranean can be very powerful, as you may have noticed last week from the cruise ship off the coast of Spain that was hit by three huge waves that killed two passengers and injured many others. Jonah’s ship was in was tossed to and fro, yet Jonah slept. The crew of the ship was in a panic. They knew there was a real possibility that the ship would sink, and so they started praying to their gods to spare them. Nothing worked. Eventually they cast lots, which is the practice of shaking a cup with small bones or sticks of different lengths, throwing them onto a table, and then interpreting the configuration of the bones to discern what God, or the gods, wanted. They cast their lots and realized that it was Jonah who was causing the storm. So they woke him up to ask him what he had done to his God to cause the storm. Jonah tells them, and asks them to throw him overboard in order to still the storm.
This shows something really interesting about Jonah. Even in disobeying God he is the ultimate prophet. Like all the prophets he fears nothing because he knows God is with him. He’s able to sleep like a baby through a horrific storm. He trusts in God, even though he is disobeying. Also, he has incredible integrity in that he owns up to his transgression, and even asks them to throw him overboard. And the final thing is that he is the kind of prophet that when he speaks, people listen and are transformed, as you’ll see in a moment.
At first the crew refuses to throw him overboard. They may be rough sailors, but they aren’t murderers. They row harder against the storm, but to no avail. Finally, they agree to throw him overboard, but with much regret. They also pray to God, not their gods, to save them. And as soon as Jonah is thrown overboard the storm stills. The great fish then swallows Jonah. Most people make the mistake of saying that a whale swallowed him, but that’s wrong. First it’s wrong because the Bible says “fish,” not “whale.” Second, there are no whales in the Mediterranean. He remains in the belly of the fish for three days.
This part of the story causes problems for many people because it really is impossible for a human to remain in a fish’s gullet. All the digestive juices would have killed him if, in fact, there was a fish large enough to swallow him other than a great white shark. I think that when people get caught up in obsessing about whether it happened or not, they miss not only the point of the Book of Jonah, but much of the Bible. The Bible, despite what many fundamentalists and literalists believe, is not a book of history. It is a book that uses history to tell us about what God has done and is doing in the world. I’m fairly certain that there was a great prophet named Jonah. I’m fairly certain that he was called to preach to the Assyrians in Ninevah. I’m fairly certain that his preaching had some impact on them. At the same time, details are added to the story to communicate symbolically and metaphorically God’s will in life. Being in the belly of the fish taught something powerful about God, a message that makes use of the number 3. When you see the number 3 in the Bible, it often stands for a time of being transformed by God. For example, Jesus dies and three days later is resurrected. Jesus’ ministry was for three years, and during that time God transformed the world. Jonah spent three days in the belly of the fish, and afterwards he was transformed. Unfortunately his transformation was a smelly one, as he was spit out covered with fish goo.
From there he goes to Ninevah, and it takes him three days to walk across the city as he preaches. And much to his dismay, the city is transformed over those three days. The people hear his words, repent, tear their clothes in grief, and wear sackcloth, which is basically burlap (very itchy, and perfect for doing penitence). When he’s done, Jonah goes to a hillside overlooking the city, hoping that God will still destroy the city, but nothing happens. Jonah sits, seething in anger.
Overnight, God causes a great broom bush, a bush with a fan-like leaf that offers shade, to grow up around Jonah. Jonah, feeling the heat, is happy for this. Then, the next night God causes a worm to attack the tree and to kill it. It dies, and once again Jonah is struck by the heat, and becomes angry at God for killing the tree. It’s at this point that God speaks. God says to Jonah, in essence, “How can you be angry at my destroying a tree that I created to do with as I will?” He goes on to basically say, “Who are you to decide what I should do with my creation? Who are you to tell me which people I should love, and which I should hate? Who are you to decide whether or not I should spare the Assyrians?” And the story basically ends there.
So what are we to make of a story like this? I think we could spend a lifetime with it and cull wisdom for life. But I want to share two points that I think are prominent among the lessons.
First, the story of Jonah teaches that life spirals downward when we don’t follow God’s call. The story of Jonah uses a pretty powerful metaphor for this. Think about what direction (I don’t mean west) Jonah moves in after he refuses to follow in God’s direction. He goes down to Joppa, down to the docks, down onto the ship, down into the hold of the ship, down into the water, and then down into the belly of the fish. In the belly of the fish he realizes just how downward his life has gone, all because he didn’t follow God’s call. And in that belly he prays, offering to serve God and God’s will.
Our lives are the same when it comes to doing God’s will. God is calling us in life to serve and live in a certain way. When we do, life becomes full of blessings. But when we don’t, our lives spiral downward. It doesn’t take much evidence to show this. Think about the times your life has been at its worst, and think about what your relationship with God was like. Were you following God, or ignoring God? Most people find that their worst times were also the times they were furthest from God. That’s the story of Jonah in a nutshell. The Ninevites could have ignored God’s calling and been destroyed, but they didn’t, and life was restored. Jonah’s life was good, but as soon as he ignored God, his life spiraled downward. When I think of this I think of alcoholics and AA. Their lives spiral downward to rock bottom, but when they join AA and turn their lives over to God (the higher power), life gets better. The enduring lesson of Jonah is to look at our lives and recognize that as long as we ignore God, our lives spiral downward.
A second point is that to follow God’s will we have to give up our will. I think that the chronic spiritual battle in human life is between God’s will and our will. For too many of us the battle is won in the short-term by us, which often leads to point number 1. But if we are willing to let go of our will, and to let God’s will work through our lives, great things can happen. But they can only happen if we are willing to give up our will.
I’ve experienced this first-hand in my own struggle to become a pastor. This is not the career I would have chosen for myself, and it was one that I actively fought with God about. Yet when I finally relented and said “yes” to God, my life became immeasurably better. But I had to give up my will in order to discover this fact. For those of you who know Steve Cramer, who was a member of Calvin Church and is now a pastor at Crossroad Presbyterian Church, you’ll recognize the same dynamic. Steve says that for twenty years he grappled with God’s will. He sensed God was calling him to be a pastor, and he kept saying no. It’s not that his life was bad because of his saying no. He would simply say that his life was never completely fulfilled. But when he let go of his ego, everything became possible. I think he would tell you now that his life is fulfilled in a way that he never could have anticipated in all those years of saying no.
Now I certainly don’t want to give you the impression that saying yes to God leads inevitably to becoming a pastor. It doesn’t. But each of us is called by God to follow in some way, whether large or small. The question is whether we are willing to give up our will in order to do God’s will.
So I want to leave you with two questions to reflect on. Which direction is your life going, up or down? And if it’s going down, to what extent are you willing to give up your will for God’s will?
Amen.
Discovering the Prophets: Jeremiah
Jeremiah 13:1-11
Thus said the Lord to me, ‘Go and buy yourself a linen loincloth, and put it on your loins, but do not dip it in water.’ So I bought a loincloth according to the word of the Lord, and put it on my loins. And the word of the Lord came to me a second time, saying, ‘Take the loincloth that you bought and are wearing, and go now to the Euphrates, and hide it there in a cleft of the rock.’ So I went, and hid it by the Euphrates, as the Lord commanded me. And after many days the Lord said to me, ‘Go now to the Euphrates, and take from there the loincloth that I commanded you to hide there.’ Then I went to the Euphrates, and dug, and I took the loincloth from the place where I had hidden it. But now the loincloth was ruined; it was good for nothing.
Then the word of the Lord came to me: Thus says the Lord: Just so I will ruin the pride of Judah and the great pride of Jerusalem. This evil people, who refuse to hear my words, who stubbornly follow their own will and have gone after other gods to serve them and worship them, shall be like this loincloth, which is good for nothing. For as the loincloth clings to one’s loins, so I made the whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah cling to me, says the Lord, in order that they might be for me a people, a name, a praise, and a glory. But they would not listen.
Welcome to perhaps the strangest man in the Bible. That’s saying a lot because Jeremiah has to contend with other strange people like John the Baptist, who was a fairly strange man himself. But Jeremiah stands out as one of the strangest. What made him strange were his characteristics. He not only preached God’s message, but he did weird things to get his point across. Jeremiah was so odd, and so unique, that we’ve even coined a term in English to describe any kind of speech that resembles Jeremiah. We call it a “jeremiad.” A jeremiad is a speech combining criticism and lamentation.
The book of Jeremiah resembles the man himself. It is confusing and disorganized. It starts with the story of Jeremiah as a child. He begins to preach. Then suddenly we are shifted forty years into the future. Then we’re taken back to his young adulthood. Toward the end of the book we are suddenly taken back to the middle of his life. Jeremiah is a confusing book to read because it doesn’t necessarily follow a logical sequence.
This morning I want to introduce you to the prophet Jeremiah in all his oddities, so that you can gain an appreciation for how this prophet of old still resonates with us today. At the outset I’ll say that it is hard to capture the depth of Jeremiah’s life and ministry because it spanned forty years, and so much happened during those forty years that capturing it all in twenty minutes is near impossible.
Jeremiah began his prophesying very early in his life. We are told that when he was a teen or child God spoke to him and told him to go out and speak God’s word. Jeremiah protests, saying that he is just a boy and that no one would take him seriously. God responds by telling him that this doesn’t matter. Jeremiah further protests, saying that people will attack him if he says the things God wants him to say. God tells him that he has two choices. He can decide not to do God’s will, in which case people will attack him anyway and God will not help him; or he can do God’s will and be attacked, but God will be there to help him no matter what happens. Jeremiah agrees to be God’s prophet.
God often speaks to Jeremiah through objects. More specifically, God shows Jeremiah certain objects and Jeremiah learns metaphorical lessons from them about God’s will. For instance, at the outset of his prophetic ministry, God gave him two visions. One was the branch of an almond tree. The other was a boiling pot in the north, tilting toward Judea (as an aside, hundreds of years before the nation of Israel had been split in two—into Israel in the north and Judea in the south, which is where Jerusalem was—and sixty years earlier Israel was conquered by the Assyrians and the population was basically dispersed so that now it was not really Jewish anymore). What do you think God was saying to Jeremiah through the almond branch? To understand we’d really have to see how people of the Middle East view almond trees in the spring. Throughout the winter people would keep a watch on the almond trees because they were always the first trees to bloom. When it bloomed, they knew it was time to prepare to plant. God was saying to Jeremiah that just as people watch the almond tree for signs of spring, God was watching the people for signs of their return to God. Also, God was telling Jeremiah through the boiling pot that trouble was boiling in the north, and if people didn’t turn back to God, it would eventually pour out on the people, leading to their destruction.
As Jeremiah began his ministry, major changes were taking place in Judea. King Manasseh had died, and his son Josiah was now king. Manasseh had been a corrupt king who had managed to keep Judea intact in face of the Assyrians by paying a ransom for their independence. As part of the agreement with the Assyrians, the Jews had to worship the Assyrian gods as well as God (or Yahweh, as the Jews called God). In addition, they had been worshiping the Canaanite god Ba’al along with Jahweh. Many prophets had criticized Manasseh for this, but to no avail. After he died, Josiah eventually began a reform in Judea, outlawing the worship of gods other than Yahweh.
At first, Jeremiah’s message was encouraged the people to quit worshiping other gods, and to devote themselves completely to Yahweh. He told the people that they had been like adulterers and prostitutes, giving themselves over to other spouses, only to return when they were in need. He said that God refused to be a wronged spouse, and that they had to make their decision whether to be committed to God or not. In keeping with this message Jeremiah was led to do what we are told in our passage for this morning. God tells him to take a linen belt to a place near a great river and to bury it. Our passage says he took it to the Euphrates, but I doubt very much that this was the river, since it was over 700 miles away. I think that it is more likely that he did this near the Jordan River. The actual name of the river in Hebrew is not the Euphrates, but simply “the great river.” Anyway, who cares about that? Jeremiah then returns several days later and pulls it out of the dirt. It is ragged and decayed. The point God was making to Jeremiah was that the chosen people had been given a wonderful gift (linen belts were a sign of wealth), and in their dalliance with other religions they had wasted and corrupted God’s love and grace.
Jeremiah also used another metaphor to teach this same lesson. He went to a potter’s house to watch the potter make a pot. Potters were important craftsmen in the ancient world, and watching the potter work would have been a delightful event for families, and especially children. Potters smash the wet clay to get all the air bubbles out, and, placing the clay on their wheels, they form and shape the pots. At times the clay isn’t centered on the wheel, and the forming pot wobbles. It then must be smashed down and recentered, and a new pot formed. This is the metaphor God gives to Jeremiah, saying that because the people have gone over to worshiping other gods, they must now be recentered and reshaped, which will be a painful process.
Under Josiah’s reign, the people quit worshiping other gods and return to a devotion of Yahweh, but then Jeremiah notices a new problem. They are now confusing their faith with a nationalistic fervor, assuming that because they are centered in a worship of Yahweh, anything the nation does must be God’s will. Jeremiah now preaches a message that is even more unpopular than his original message. He tells the people, and the king, that God is displeased because they are confusing the nation of Judea with God, and that nationalism and their alliances with the Egyptians are displeasing to God, especially because they are saying that whatever they do is God’s will. Before they complained that Jeremiah was a pest. Now they call him a traitor and unpatriotic. This is what happens when people speak against nations that confuse nationalism and religion.
Eventually Josiah died, and his sons became kings. They encouraged the worship of other gods, and again Jeremiah preached that God was angry. He told the people that they had become like “Shiloh.” Now I’m pretty sure you don’t know what that means because I didn’t either. It took me a long time to research it and discover the meaning. We don’t get what it means, but the people of Jeremiah’s time knew exactly what he was saying, and they hated him for saying it. Shiloh was the place where the Ark of the Covenant was kept in ancient Israel 500 years prior to Jeremiah. The Philistines had defeated the Israelites in a battle that they had been warned that God was against. When they were defeated, they ran back to Shiloh and grabbed the Ark of the Covenant, assured that it would lead them to victory. It didn’t, and the Ark was taken by the Philistines and held for seven months. It was a travesty. For Jeremiah to say that the people were like Shiloh was him saying that they had taken what is of God for their own purposes, and that they were going to lose it all. Not a message designed to make people happy.
Jeremiah continued to speak out, and especially to the king. Under Jehioakim, he dictated his sayings to his secretary Baruch, and had Baruch read them to Jehoiakim’s counselors and generals. When they heard all that was written, they were afraid and told Baruch to take Jeremiah and hide because they would surely be killed. They gave the scroll to the king, who read each part, cut it up with a knife, and threw it into the fire. After it was all burned, he sought to imprison and kill Jeremiah. So what did Jeremiah do? He dictated another scroll, and put even more negative stuff in it, and read it before the king. Eventually he was imprisoned. Several times after that he was imprisoned and released, and under Jehoiachin, Jehioakim’s brother and successor, Jeremiah was thrown into a cistern to die. A cistern is a large tank or cave that holds water, and when it is low there is not much else in it but deep, deep mud. Jeremiah was thrown in the cistern to waste away, trapped in the mud. People sent by God eventually rescued him.
Eventually, Jeremiah’s prophesies came true. Under Zedekiah, Jehoiachin’s successor, the Babylonians attacked the city. Jeremiah told Zedekiah that this was God’s punishment, and that if Zedekiah surrendered he would be safe, and the people would be treated well. Zedekiah was cocky and believed that he was strong enough to withstand the Babylonians, especially since he assumed the Egyptians would come to his aid. They never did. The Babylonian King, Nebuchadnezzar, laid siege to Jerusalem for seven months, and when he finally took the city he destroyed it. He took all the artisans, craftsmen, and intellectuals back to Babylon to serve as slaves in what has come to be known as the Babylonian Exile. He captured Zedekiah, put his eyes out, marched him back to Babylon, and had him publicly executed.
Along with thousands of others, Jeremiah was placed in chains to be marched to Babylon, but along the way he was spotted by a Babylonian general who knew that Jeremiah had prophesied for the king to surrender. Jeremiah was released and told that he could go anywhere in the world a free man, including Babylon. Jeremiah said he was called by God to become a prophet to the Jews living in Egypt. And that’s what he did. Of course, you know what his message was to those Jews. He told them that they were like adulterers and prostitutes who had committed affairs with the gods of Egypt. Again, he gave God’s message to those who didn’t appreciate it. Eventually, Jeremiah disappears and we don’t know what happened to him.
When I look at the prophet Jeremiah, I recognize that what he said 2600 years ago is still relevant for today. Specifically I see three messages that still speak to us today.
First, we must be really careful about mixing Christian faith and patriotism. So many Christians today have done just that, not only when it came to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but to other things such as school prayer and the Ten Commandments in courthouses. I have to tell you that, following Jeremiah’s example, I don’t get hot and bothered over these issues. Why? Because I think that when people get up in arms about them they start to confuse the nation and devotion to God. I feel the same way when people argue about whether or not we are a Christian nation. I believe that calling us a Christian nation means confusing our national interests with God’s interests. So many who proclaim us to be a Christian nation use that designation to justify anything the U.S. does. Much of what we do is not what God is calling us to do, but we can’t tell if we confuse ourselves with God’s chosen people.
Again, I don’t get hot and bothered about school prayer and the Ten Commandments in courthouses because they distract us. Like Jeremiah I care much more about the quality of our devotion to God than I do about where that devotion takes place. I believe that if Jeremiah were here today he would tell us to quit worrying about those things, and to start worrying about the extent to which we are grounded in God, and we are letting that grounding lead us to acts of love, charity, compassion for the poor, and devotion to God’s ways. I’m not against school prayer or the Ten Commandments in courthouses. I just don’t think the issue is big enough to cause us to become so angry that, ironically, we act in un-Christian ways in order to promote this supposedly Christian cause. The point is not to confuse our nation with our religion. That’s straight out of Jeremiah.
A second message for today from Jeremiah is that life is always better when we are grounded fully in God. It’s so easy in this age to become grounded in everything but God. We just have too many other options. But Jeremiah’s point is that if we become grounded in God, our lives actually become easier and more blessed. I think you can look at your own lives and discover this. I’m reminded of this all the time from people who appear in and disappear from church. No matter what church I’ve been in, there has always been a portion of the church whom I only see when their lives are going poorly. They start to come to church, and over time their lives get better. Something about church makes people feel better about their lives. Then they disappear again, only to reappear when life gets worse. They are living testimony to what Jeremiah taught, which is that when we’re grounded in God, life gets better and easier, when we’re not it gets worse.
Finally, I think Jeremiah teaches us to have the courage to keep our faith in the face of all opposition. He is living proof that if you care passionately about God, people will question you, diminish you, and possibly even attack you. All of us have been with people, at times, who criticize or ridicule us for our faith. They will tell us that there is no God, and that religion is a bad thing. Have the courage to stand up in the face of them. We will always face these kinds of people, but Jeremiah reminds us that we can’t let their doubts and criticisms rule our lives.
The whole point is that Jeremiah not only spoke 2600 years ago, but he is still speaking today. The question is whether we are still listening.
Amen.
Thus said the Lord to me, ‘Go and buy yourself a linen loincloth, and put it on your loins, but do not dip it in water.’ So I bought a loincloth according to the word of the Lord, and put it on my loins. And the word of the Lord came to me a second time, saying, ‘Take the loincloth that you bought and are wearing, and go now to the Euphrates, and hide it there in a cleft of the rock.’ So I went, and hid it by the Euphrates, as the Lord commanded me. And after many days the Lord said to me, ‘Go now to the Euphrates, and take from there the loincloth that I commanded you to hide there.’ Then I went to the Euphrates, and dug, and I took the loincloth from the place where I had hidden it. But now the loincloth was ruined; it was good for nothing.
Then the word of the Lord came to me: Thus says the Lord: Just so I will ruin the pride of Judah and the great pride of Jerusalem. This evil people, who refuse to hear my words, who stubbornly follow their own will and have gone after other gods to serve them and worship them, shall be like this loincloth, which is good for nothing. For as the loincloth clings to one’s loins, so I made the whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah cling to me, says the Lord, in order that they might be for me a people, a name, a praise, and a glory. But they would not listen.
Welcome to perhaps the strangest man in the Bible. That’s saying a lot because Jeremiah has to contend with other strange people like John the Baptist, who was a fairly strange man himself. But Jeremiah stands out as one of the strangest. What made him strange were his characteristics. He not only preached God’s message, but he did weird things to get his point across. Jeremiah was so odd, and so unique, that we’ve even coined a term in English to describe any kind of speech that resembles Jeremiah. We call it a “jeremiad.” A jeremiad is a speech combining criticism and lamentation.
The book of Jeremiah resembles the man himself. It is confusing and disorganized. It starts with the story of Jeremiah as a child. He begins to preach. Then suddenly we are shifted forty years into the future. Then we’re taken back to his young adulthood. Toward the end of the book we are suddenly taken back to the middle of his life. Jeremiah is a confusing book to read because it doesn’t necessarily follow a logical sequence.
This morning I want to introduce you to the prophet Jeremiah in all his oddities, so that you can gain an appreciation for how this prophet of old still resonates with us today. At the outset I’ll say that it is hard to capture the depth of Jeremiah’s life and ministry because it spanned forty years, and so much happened during those forty years that capturing it all in twenty minutes is near impossible.
Jeremiah began his prophesying very early in his life. We are told that when he was a teen or child God spoke to him and told him to go out and speak God’s word. Jeremiah protests, saying that he is just a boy and that no one would take him seriously. God responds by telling him that this doesn’t matter. Jeremiah further protests, saying that people will attack him if he says the things God wants him to say. God tells him that he has two choices. He can decide not to do God’s will, in which case people will attack him anyway and God will not help him; or he can do God’s will and be attacked, but God will be there to help him no matter what happens. Jeremiah agrees to be God’s prophet.
God often speaks to Jeremiah through objects. More specifically, God shows Jeremiah certain objects and Jeremiah learns metaphorical lessons from them about God’s will. For instance, at the outset of his prophetic ministry, God gave him two visions. One was the branch of an almond tree. The other was a boiling pot in the north, tilting toward Judea (as an aside, hundreds of years before the nation of Israel had been split in two—into Israel in the north and Judea in the south, which is where Jerusalem was—and sixty years earlier Israel was conquered by the Assyrians and the population was basically dispersed so that now it was not really Jewish anymore). What do you think God was saying to Jeremiah through the almond branch? To understand we’d really have to see how people of the Middle East view almond trees in the spring. Throughout the winter people would keep a watch on the almond trees because they were always the first trees to bloom. When it bloomed, they knew it was time to prepare to plant. God was saying to Jeremiah that just as people watch the almond tree for signs of spring, God was watching the people for signs of their return to God. Also, God was telling Jeremiah through the boiling pot that trouble was boiling in the north, and if people didn’t turn back to God, it would eventually pour out on the people, leading to their destruction.
As Jeremiah began his ministry, major changes were taking place in Judea. King Manasseh had died, and his son Josiah was now king. Manasseh had been a corrupt king who had managed to keep Judea intact in face of the Assyrians by paying a ransom for their independence. As part of the agreement with the Assyrians, the Jews had to worship the Assyrian gods as well as God (or Yahweh, as the Jews called God). In addition, they had been worshiping the Canaanite god Ba’al along with Jahweh. Many prophets had criticized Manasseh for this, but to no avail. After he died, Josiah eventually began a reform in Judea, outlawing the worship of gods other than Yahweh.
At first, Jeremiah’s message was encouraged the people to quit worshiping other gods, and to devote themselves completely to Yahweh. He told the people that they had been like adulterers and prostitutes, giving themselves over to other spouses, only to return when they were in need. He said that God refused to be a wronged spouse, and that they had to make their decision whether to be committed to God or not. In keeping with this message Jeremiah was led to do what we are told in our passage for this morning. God tells him to take a linen belt to a place near a great river and to bury it. Our passage says he took it to the Euphrates, but I doubt very much that this was the river, since it was over 700 miles away. I think that it is more likely that he did this near the Jordan River. The actual name of the river in Hebrew is not the Euphrates, but simply “the great river.” Anyway, who cares about that? Jeremiah then returns several days later and pulls it out of the dirt. It is ragged and decayed. The point God was making to Jeremiah was that the chosen people had been given a wonderful gift (linen belts were a sign of wealth), and in their dalliance with other religions they had wasted and corrupted God’s love and grace.
Jeremiah also used another metaphor to teach this same lesson. He went to a potter’s house to watch the potter make a pot. Potters were important craftsmen in the ancient world, and watching the potter work would have been a delightful event for families, and especially children. Potters smash the wet clay to get all the air bubbles out, and, placing the clay on their wheels, they form and shape the pots. At times the clay isn’t centered on the wheel, and the forming pot wobbles. It then must be smashed down and recentered, and a new pot formed. This is the metaphor God gives to Jeremiah, saying that because the people have gone over to worshiping other gods, they must now be recentered and reshaped, which will be a painful process.
Under Josiah’s reign, the people quit worshiping other gods and return to a devotion of Yahweh, but then Jeremiah notices a new problem. They are now confusing their faith with a nationalistic fervor, assuming that because they are centered in a worship of Yahweh, anything the nation does must be God’s will. Jeremiah now preaches a message that is even more unpopular than his original message. He tells the people, and the king, that God is displeased because they are confusing the nation of Judea with God, and that nationalism and their alliances with the Egyptians are displeasing to God, especially because they are saying that whatever they do is God’s will. Before they complained that Jeremiah was a pest. Now they call him a traitor and unpatriotic. This is what happens when people speak against nations that confuse nationalism and religion.
Eventually Josiah died, and his sons became kings. They encouraged the worship of other gods, and again Jeremiah preached that God was angry. He told the people that they had become like “Shiloh.” Now I’m pretty sure you don’t know what that means because I didn’t either. It took me a long time to research it and discover the meaning. We don’t get what it means, but the people of Jeremiah’s time knew exactly what he was saying, and they hated him for saying it. Shiloh was the place where the Ark of the Covenant was kept in ancient Israel 500 years prior to Jeremiah. The Philistines had defeated the Israelites in a battle that they had been warned that God was against. When they were defeated, they ran back to Shiloh and grabbed the Ark of the Covenant, assured that it would lead them to victory. It didn’t, and the Ark was taken by the Philistines and held for seven months. It was a travesty. For Jeremiah to say that the people were like Shiloh was him saying that they had taken what is of God for their own purposes, and that they were going to lose it all. Not a message designed to make people happy.
Jeremiah continued to speak out, and especially to the king. Under Jehioakim, he dictated his sayings to his secretary Baruch, and had Baruch read them to Jehoiakim’s counselors and generals. When they heard all that was written, they were afraid and told Baruch to take Jeremiah and hide because they would surely be killed. They gave the scroll to the king, who read each part, cut it up with a knife, and threw it into the fire. After it was all burned, he sought to imprison and kill Jeremiah. So what did Jeremiah do? He dictated another scroll, and put even more negative stuff in it, and read it before the king. Eventually he was imprisoned. Several times after that he was imprisoned and released, and under Jehoiachin, Jehioakim’s brother and successor, Jeremiah was thrown into a cistern to die. A cistern is a large tank or cave that holds water, and when it is low there is not much else in it but deep, deep mud. Jeremiah was thrown in the cistern to waste away, trapped in the mud. People sent by God eventually rescued him.
Eventually, Jeremiah’s prophesies came true. Under Zedekiah, Jehoiachin’s successor, the Babylonians attacked the city. Jeremiah told Zedekiah that this was God’s punishment, and that if Zedekiah surrendered he would be safe, and the people would be treated well. Zedekiah was cocky and believed that he was strong enough to withstand the Babylonians, especially since he assumed the Egyptians would come to his aid. They never did. The Babylonian King, Nebuchadnezzar, laid siege to Jerusalem for seven months, and when he finally took the city he destroyed it. He took all the artisans, craftsmen, and intellectuals back to Babylon to serve as slaves in what has come to be known as the Babylonian Exile. He captured Zedekiah, put his eyes out, marched him back to Babylon, and had him publicly executed.
Along with thousands of others, Jeremiah was placed in chains to be marched to Babylon, but along the way he was spotted by a Babylonian general who knew that Jeremiah had prophesied for the king to surrender. Jeremiah was released and told that he could go anywhere in the world a free man, including Babylon. Jeremiah said he was called by God to become a prophet to the Jews living in Egypt. And that’s what he did. Of course, you know what his message was to those Jews. He told them that they were like adulterers and prostitutes who had committed affairs with the gods of Egypt. Again, he gave God’s message to those who didn’t appreciate it. Eventually, Jeremiah disappears and we don’t know what happened to him.
When I look at the prophet Jeremiah, I recognize that what he said 2600 years ago is still relevant for today. Specifically I see three messages that still speak to us today.
First, we must be really careful about mixing Christian faith and patriotism. So many Christians today have done just that, not only when it came to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but to other things such as school prayer and the Ten Commandments in courthouses. I have to tell you that, following Jeremiah’s example, I don’t get hot and bothered over these issues. Why? Because I think that when people get up in arms about them they start to confuse the nation and devotion to God. I feel the same way when people argue about whether or not we are a Christian nation. I believe that calling us a Christian nation means confusing our national interests with God’s interests. So many who proclaim us to be a Christian nation use that designation to justify anything the U.S. does. Much of what we do is not what God is calling us to do, but we can’t tell if we confuse ourselves with God’s chosen people.
Again, I don’t get hot and bothered about school prayer and the Ten Commandments in courthouses because they distract us. Like Jeremiah I care much more about the quality of our devotion to God than I do about where that devotion takes place. I believe that if Jeremiah were here today he would tell us to quit worrying about those things, and to start worrying about the extent to which we are grounded in God, and we are letting that grounding lead us to acts of love, charity, compassion for the poor, and devotion to God’s ways. I’m not against school prayer or the Ten Commandments in courthouses. I just don’t think the issue is big enough to cause us to become so angry that, ironically, we act in un-Christian ways in order to promote this supposedly Christian cause. The point is not to confuse our nation with our religion. That’s straight out of Jeremiah.
A second message for today from Jeremiah is that life is always better when we are grounded fully in God. It’s so easy in this age to become grounded in everything but God. We just have too many other options. But Jeremiah’s point is that if we become grounded in God, our lives actually become easier and more blessed. I think you can look at your own lives and discover this. I’m reminded of this all the time from people who appear in and disappear from church. No matter what church I’ve been in, there has always been a portion of the church whom I only see when their lives are going poorly. They start to come to church, and over time their lives get better. Something about church makes people feel better about their lives. Then they disappear again, only to reappear when life gets worse. They are living testimony to what Jeremiah taught, which is that when we’re grounded in God, life gets better and easier, when we’re not it gets worse.
Finally, I think Jeremiah teaches us to have the courage to keep our faith in the face of all opposition. He is living proof that if you care passionately about God, people will question you, diminish you, and possibly even attack you. All of us have been with people, at times, who criticize or ridicule us for our faith. They will tell us that there is no God, and that religion is a bad thing. Have the courage to stand up in the face of them. We will always face these kinds of people, but Jeremiah reminds us that we can’t let their doubts and criticisms rule our lives.
The whole point is that Jeremiah not only spoke 2600 years ago, but he is still speaking today. The question is whether we are still listening.
Amen.
What the Heck Is That?
Luke 9:28-36
February 14, 2010
Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, ‘Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah’—not knowing what he said. While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, ‘This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!’ When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.
I was reading this passage this past week, and clip from my memory suddenly shot out. I remembered a clip from Saturday Night Live from back in 1979. You can see the clip if you go to
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=50236871
That’s a lot of stuff to type into your browser, but it’s worth it. In the skit, the comedian Steve Martin walks out on stage dressed like a tourist with high black socks, shorts, and a Hawaiian shirt, while goofy piano music plays in the background. He stands in front of the camera looking beyond it at something we can’t see. He stares a bit and then yells out, “What the heck is that?” (although he doesn’t use the word “heck”) SHe yells out again, “What the heck IS that?... What’s that dang thing doing here? How’d that get here? What the heck IS that? What the HECK IS that? How did that dang thing deal get here?” Then, looking offstage to his right he yells to someone, “Hey! Come over here and look at this deal!”
At that point Bill Murray, looking much like the goofy groundskeeper from the movie Caddyshack walks over and says, “What the heck is that?” The dialogue ensues:
SM: “I don’t know what the HECK that is!”
BM: “What in the heck is THAT?”
SM: “Hey you kids! Get away from there!”
BM: “Uh,... I would not mess with that thing.”
SM: “Don’t put your lips on it!”
BM: “What the heck IS that?”
SM: (handing a camera to Bill Murray) “Well, get a photo of me with it anyway.”
BM: (bringing the camera to position) “Careful of that thing… (clicking the camera and then handing the it back to Steve Martin) Oh, I know what that thing is.”
SM: “Well what the HECK IS IT?”
BM: “What the heck is that thing?”
SM: “I don’t even care WHAT it is,… WHAT THE HECK IS IT?”
BM: “I don’t know what the heck that thing is.”
SM: “Oh, I know what it is.”
BM: “Oh yeah…” (and they both start walking off camera and there’s a pause)
SM: (both leaning back into the camera view) “What the HECK was that?!”
I’m reminded of this skit when I read our passage for this morning because I’m convinced that Peter, James, and John must have had a similar reaction. I can imagine the three of them standing together, rubbing sleepy eyes, looking at Jesus, and saying, “What the HECK is that? What the HECK IS THAT?” They were looking at Jesus, and suddenly his face is shining, and he is standing next to Moses and Elijah. Then a mist surrounds them and they hear a voice saying, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” What were they supposed to make of this? What are we supposed to make of this?
Today we’re just as mystified by the transfiguration as they were in Jesus’ day. One of the things that I like about the Bible is that often it describes experiences without explaining them, which, to me, gives it authenticity. In fact, one of the things I’ve learned to respect about the Bible is how it offers things without explanation, including putting contradictory stories together without saying which one is true. For instance, did you know that there are two creation stories in the Bible? There’s the story of the 1st chapter of Genesis, in which God creates the world in six days, and then rests on the seventh. Then in the second chapter we learn about the creation of the world in a completely different order. For example, humans are created on the 6th day in the Chapter 1 after everything else is created. In Chapter 2 God creates humans before creating plants and animals. The Bible doesn’t explain the discrepancy. It just puts both stories there. Also, if you look at the Noah story you find the well-known story in Genesis 6 of Noah taking the animals into the ark two-by-two. Yet in chapter 7 it is retold with Noah taking in seven pairs of every ritually clean animal, and two pairs of every ritually unclean animal. The Bible doesn’t try to explain the discrepancy. It just puts the stories there side-by-side.
Because we Presbyterians aren’t listeralists, we accept the discrepancy and recognize that the Bible isn’t just trying to tell us history. It’s trying to tell us about who and how God is. To me, the discrepancies lend a sense of authenticity because everything isn’t wrapped into a nice, neat package. Literalists are always trying smush everything together to make it all fit. The Bible doesn’t do that, and it doesn’t do that with our story for this morning. The transfiguration takes place, but there’s no real explanation about what was really happening, or what it really means. It leaves us a bit confused, wondering, what message are we supposed to get from it?
I believe that one the messages (there are always many messages to any biblical passage) of the transfiguration is that it gave the disciples and us a glimpse—just a glimpse—of eternal life. It gave a glimpse of what happens when we open to eternity and the divine, a glimpse of both the afterlife and eternity in this life. Jesus’ face shone with a light that radiated out from within him. I believe that this passage is saying that when we are truly open to God, to the divine, our lives can shine with this kind of light. The eternal life is filled not only with light, but also with love and joy. And in this moment Peter, James, and John fully see Jesus as he really is, not as they’ve been seeing him.
Of course, being human like us, they also do what most humans do when they are faced with things they don’t understand. They couldn’t just stand in awe. They had to do something. They looked at Jesus, Moses, and Elijah, and say to Jesus, “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” This is the common human affliction: “Don’t just stand there, do something.” Yet in the face of the transfiguration they were really being called to a different message: “Don’t just do something, stand there.” They were called to simply be with Christ, Moses, and Elijah and stand in awe. There was nothing else for them to do.
This is really great guidance for us. There are times in life where we are simply called to be open to God’s grace and to be willing to look for light and joy in the world.
I believe that the real spiritual life isn’t always so much a life of doing all the right Christian things. It’s not always about having to be perfectly moral or morally perfect. I believe the real spiritual life is about finding joy and light in life, especially in the small things. As many of the spiritual masters of Christianity have taught, God is found in the mundane, not the spectacular.
Unfortunately, a lot of us get caught up in the problems of life, and we can’t see the joy and the light that is already always there. And there is joy and light. If we are willing to look for joy and light, we can catch glimpses of the eternal and see life transfigured. But we have to be willing to be open to life in awe and joy.
Let me close by asking you to go to a computer and watch an internet video, which to me is a very spiritual video even though there’s no mention of God in it. It’s a video found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY&feature=user. Or you can go to the original website, which is http://www.wherethehellismatt.com. I’m not going to explain the video, other than to say that it’s a video of taking joy in simple things. And in that it is very profound. So go now and look at the video….
We are called to live transfigured lives—lives that live not only here on earth, but also in eternity.
Amen.
February 14, 2010
Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, ‘Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah’—not knowing what he said. While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, ‘This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!’ When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.
I was reading this passage this past week, and clip from my memory suddenly shot out. I remembered a clip from Saturday Night Live from back in 1979. You can see the clip if you go to
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=50236871
That’s a lot of stuff to type into your browser, but it’s worth it. In the skit, the comedian Steve Martin walks out on stage dressed like a tourist with high black socks, shorts, and a Hawaiian shirt, while goofy piano music plays in the background. He stands in front of the camera looking beyond it at something we can’t see. He stares a bit and then yells out, “What the heck is that?” (although he doesn’t use the word “heck”) SHe yells out again, “What the heck IS that?... What’s that dang thing doing here? How’d that get here? What the heck IS that? What the HECK IS that? How did that dang thing deal get here?” Then, looking offstage to his right he yells to someone, “Hey! Come over here and look at this deal!”
At that point Bill Murray, looking much like the goofy groundskeeper from the movie Caddyshack walks over and says, “What the heck is that?” The dialogue ensues:
SM: “I don’t know what the HECK that is!”
BM: “What in the heck is THAT?”
SM: “Hey you kids! Get away from there!”
BM: “Uh,... I would not mess with that thing.”
SM: “Don’t put your lips on it!”
BM: “What the heck IS that?”
SM: (handing a camera to Bill Murray) “Well, get a photo of me with it anyway.”
BM: (bringing the camera to position) “Careful of that thing… (clicking the camera and then handing the it back to Steve Martin) Oh, I know what that thing is.”
SM: “Well what the HECK IS IT?”
BM: “What the heck is that thing?”
SM: “I don’t even care WHAT it is,… WHAT THE HECK IS IT?”
BM: “I don’t know what the heck that thing is.”
SM: “Oh, I know what it is.”
BM: “Oh yeah…” (and they both start walking off camera and there’s a pause)
SM: (both leaning back into the camera view) “What the HECK was that?!”
I’m reminded of this skit when I read our passage for this morning because I’m convinced that Peter, James, and John must have had a similar reaction. I can imagine the three of them standing together, rubbing sleepy eyes, looking at Jesus, and saying, “What the HECK is that? What the HECK IS THAT?” They were looking at Jesus, and suddenly his face is shining, and he is standing next to Moses and Elijah. Then a mist surrounds them and they hear a voice saying, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” What were they supposed to make of this? What are we supposed to make of this?
Today we’re just as mystified by the transfiguration as they were in Jesus’ day. One of the things that I like about the Bible is that often it describes experiences without explaining them, which, to me, gives it authenticity. In fact, one of the things I’ve learned to respect about the Bible is how it offers things without explanation, including putting contradictory stories together without saying which one is true. For instance, did you know that there are two creation stories in the Bible? There’s the story of the 1st chapter of Genesis, in which God creates the world in six days, and then rests on the seventh. Then in the second chapter we learn about the creation of the world in a completely different order. For example, humans are created on the 6th day in the Chapter 1 after everything else is created. In Chapter 2 God creates humans before creating plants and animals. The Bible doesn’t explain the discrepancy. It just puts both stories there. Also, if you look at the Noah story you find the well-known story in Genesis 6 of Noah taking the animals into the ark two-by-two. Yet in chapter 7 it is retold with Noah taking in seven pairs of every ritually clean animal, and two pairs of every ritually unclean animal. The Bible doesn’t try to explain the discrepancy. It just puts the stories there side-by-side.
Because we Presbyterians aren’t listeralists, we accept the discrepancy and recognize that the Bible isn’t just trying to tell us history. It’s trying to tell us about who and how God is. To me, the discrepancies lend a sense of authenticity because everything isn’t wrapped into a nice, neat package. Literalists are always trying smush everything together to make it all fit. The Bible doesn’t do that, and it doesn’t do that with our story for this morning. The transfiguration takes place, but there’s no real explanation about what was really happening, or what it really means. It leaves us a bit confused, wondering, what message are we supposed to get from it?
I believe that one the messages (there are always many messages to any biblical passage) of the transfiguration is that it gave the disciples and us a glimpse—just a glimpse—of eternal life. It gave a glimpse of what happens when we open to eternity and the divine, a glimpse of both the afterlife and eternity in this life. Jesus’ face shone with a light that radiated out from within him. I believe that this passage is saying that when we are truly open to God, to the divine, our lives can shine with this kind of light. The eternal life is filled not only with light, but also with love and joy. And in this moment Peter, James, and John fully see Jesus as he really is, not as they’ve been seeing him.
Of course, being human like us, they also do what most humans do when they are faced with things they don’t understand. They couldn’t just stand in awe. They had to do something. They looked at Jesus, Moses, and Elijah, and say to Jesus, “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” This is the common human affliction: “Don’t just stand there, do something.” Yet in the face of the transfiguration they were really being called to a different message: “Don’t just do something, stand there.” They were called to simply be with Christ, Moses, and Elijah and stand in awe. There was nothing else for them to do.
This is really great guidance for us. There are times in life where we are simply called to be open to God’s grace and to be willing to look for light and joy in the world.
I believe that the real spiritual life isn’t always so much a life of doing all the right Christian things. It’s not always about having to be perfectly moral or morally perfect. I believe the real spiritual life is about finding joy and light in life, especially in the small things. As many of the spiritual masters of Christianity have taught, God is found in the mundane, not the spectacular.
Unfortunately, a lot of us get caught up in the problems of life, and we can’t see the joy and the light that is already always there. And there is joy and light. If we are willing to look for joy and light, we can catch glimpses of the eternal and see life transfigured. But we have to be willing to be open to life in awe and joy.
Let me close by asking you to go to a computer and watch an internet video, which to me is a very spiritual video even though there’s no mention of God in it. It’s a video found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY&feature=user. Or you can go to the original website, which is http://www.wherethehellismatt.com. I’m not going to explain the video, other than to say that it’s a video of taking joy in simple things. And in that it is very profound. So go now and look at the video….
We are called to live transfigured lives—lives that live not only here on earth, but also in eternity.
Amen.
The Power of Belief
Luke 5:1-11
February 7, 2009
Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, ‘Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.’ Simon answered, ‘Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.’ When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’ For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, ‘Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.’ When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.
At some point during my senior year in high school I became a big believer in the power of belief. My girlfriend’s mother, for some reason, thought that I would be interested in the writings of a pastor named Norman Vincent Peale, who had written the book, The Power of Positive Thinking. She was right. This book, and the spiritual attitude it advocated, dramatically changed my life.
The most dramatic change came when I went to college. Most of you would probably be surprised that I was a terrible student in school. I finished 12th to the bottom of my high school class, and for me a C was a good grade. Ds were okay because they weren’t Fs. I managed to mostly avoid Fs by shooting for Ds. For most of my life I had felt trapped in the identity of being a class clown and poor student. I was trapped not only by my history but by others’ expectations. People thought I was a bad student and a cut-up, and so they treated me that way. I was criticized a lot, which only served to keep me in that identity. I remember several times during junior and senior high thinking, “It doesn’t matter what I do, people are always down on me and just don’t like me. So why bother trying to change. I’m going to be criticized anyway because I won’t be able to change the way they want me to. So I might as well be what I want, not what they want.” My whole attitude was that I was a failure, so why try changing.
That all changed when I read parts of Peale’s book. I realized that I could change, and that I could change especially if I learned to ignore people’s criticisms. When I went to college I decided that I was going to change. So I slowly became transformed. I had to teach myself how to study, and I had to learn how to learn. My grades were mediocre at the beginning, but by the time I graduated I was on the Dean’s List. I went onto graduate school and my grades got increasingly better, to the point that when I graduated with my Ph.D., I graduated with a cumulative 4.0 gpa.
My change as a student happened because I changed my belief. By believing I could be better, I became better. This also had an impact on me in sports. When I graduated from high school I was a pretty good lacrosse player—at least good enough to be recruited by Dennison University and Ohio State University. But when it came to a college choice I let the weather determine it. I wanted to go south so that I could get away from grey skies and snow. So I went to Roanoke College in Virginia. They had a lacrosse team and I figured I could try out for it. What I didn’t know was how good they were. I didn’t know much about college lacrosse, but what I found out very quickly upon going to Roanoke was that at the time they were one of the best college teams in the country.
Back then there was not much difference between Division 1 and Division 3 schools. They all played each other, so that our little school of 1200 students had a lacrosse schedule that included schools such as the University of North Carolina, Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of Virginia, Ohio State University, as well as many smaller colleges. And Roanoke beat most of those schools at the time.
In the fall of my freshman year I tried out for the team, and quickly discovered that the other players were really good, and I wasn’t. I played defense, and was told by one of the offensive players that fall that in practice everyone wanted to go against me because they knew that they would score. I was terrible, but the power of positive thinking had taken hold. I believed that I could become a good player. So I kept working at it. I didn’t make the team initially, but halfway through the spring season I made it, which was really fun because we won a Division 2/3 national championship that year.
Over the next three years I kept improving. There were players who were better than me at the time, but I kept trying. Many of them eventually quit the team for a lack of playing time, but I kept at it. By the time I graduated as a senior I was a starter on one of the better teams in the country, and I was the defenseman who covered the best offensive player on the other team. I had gone from being the player everyone wanted to play against to one who was able to shut down the All-American offensive players. And it was all because of the positive attitude that I had shifted to four years before.
It was out of those two experiences that I began, spiritually, to really understand our passage. Our passage is one of belief, not only in oneself, but in God’s power. Jesus is with some of the disciples, specifically Peter, who work as fishermen. They are fishing in the Sea of Galilee for a small type of fish, a lake variety of tilapia, with very little meat on them. For a fisherman to be even moderately successful, the nets need to be full because to make a meal out of these fish requires at least three or four per person. Unfortunately, Peter and his crew are catching nothing. Jesus tells them to put their nets on the other side of the boat, and that they will catch a boatload, but they are skeptical. They haven’t caught anything all day. Why would switching to the other side of the boat work? They are full of doubt, but they do it anyway. And to their surprise their nets come up bursting with fish. They catch enough to fill two boats. It is an incredible catch. And all it took was a little belief in God’s power.
It’s amazing what a change of belief can do. So often if we believe something isn’t possible, it becomes impossible. If we believe something can happen, often it will happen. This is a foundation of much of Christian belief. Too many people today are skeptical and cynical, thinking, “I won’t believe it till I see it. I won’t believe it can be done until it is done.” In contrast, Jesus often emphasized a very simple idea: If we believe, then we’ll see. If we believe, then we’ll achieve.
The thing about Christian belief is that it isn’t belief like what our culture teaches, which is that we have to believe in ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with believing in ourselves. Certainly that is part of Norman Vincent Peale’s message. But Christian belief is in something greater. It’s a belief in the power of God not only to be in the world, but a belief that if we are open to God’s grace, it can work miracles big and small in our lives. It’s a belief that even though we may go through really tough times, if we are open to God’s power, our lives can be better. Our lives can be blessed.
What I’ve learned over the years is that so many people struggle in life because they don’t believe. It’s not just that they don’t believe in Christ or in God. They just don’t believe that their lives can be better. There are so many people whose lives are stuck in ruts, stuck in a cycle of disappointment, stuck in a belief that good isn’t possible for them, and it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart because I know from experience that if we are willing just to change the way we look at life and at God, it changes everything.
I’ve recently seen, in a book that we are presently reading and discussing in our men’s group that meets on Thursday mornings, how changing perceptions can change life. The book is Soul Survivor by Philip Yancey, in which he writes about thirteen people who have changed his life. Some are well-known, such at Martin Luther King, Jr., G. K. Chesterton, and Leo Tolstoy, but others are not known, such as Dr. Paul Brand.
Brand is a medical doctor who has specialized in treating lepers, or, more specifically, people with Hansen’s disease, which is the form of leprosy that often causes severe disfigurement. People with this disease often lose their fingers, toes, and other extremities. Brand has served as a doctor specializing in this disease in England, India, and Mississippi. He is considered one of the foremost experts of the disease, having developed surgical techniques to restore the use of the hand to people’s who’s hands have been crippled by this disease.
One of Brand’s most important discoveries was that people with this disease don’t lose their extremities because of the disease itself. He discovered that instead the disease kills the nerve endings in fingers, toes, and other extremities. Thus, people get infections from blisters, cuts, or splinters, and because they can’t feel the pain they let them fester. They lose their extremities because of unfelt infections. As a result of this discovery, he also began to think about pain in a different way.
We see pain as bad, whether it is physical or emotional pain. We tend to complain that when we are in pain, God must be absent. Brand says that our pain shows that God is present. For example, he says, “I thank God for pain,… I cannot think of a greater gift I could give my leprosy patients…. Most people view pain as an enemy. Yet, as my leprosy patients prove, it forces us to pay attention to threats against our bodies. Without it, heart attacks, strokes, ruptured appendixes, and stomach ulcers would all occur without any warning. Who would ever visit a doctor apart from pain’s warnings?
“I notice that the symptoms of illness my patients complained about were actually a display of bodily healing at work. Virtually every response of our bodies that we view with irritation or disgust—blister, callus, swelling, fever, sneeze, cough, vomiting, and especially pain—demonstrates a reflex toward health. In all these things normally considered enemies, we can find a reason to be grateful.”
So often we see our pain as a sign that God doesn’t care. The truth is that pain is evidence that God does care. God gives us pain to keep us safe. We think that a good God would keep us from pain, but think about the causes of our pain. Why do we feel such grief at the death of a loved one? The answer is that the pain we feel is from the love we are able to have shared with the loved one? The pain we feel at being unemployed or having a difficult life is the pain of something inside of us seeking something better. To fully comprehend this means shifting our perspective so that we can see life and God in different ways.
What we believe about God and life determines what we experience about God and life. If we are able to believe it’s amazing what we can see and achieve.
So, where’s your life in terms of belief? Do you believe in God’s goodness and power in your life? If not, perhaps that’s why your life is the way it is? If so, maybe that’s why your life is the way it is.
Amen.
February 7, 2009
Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, ‘Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.’ Simon answered, ‘Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.’ When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’ For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, ‘Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.’ When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.
At some point during my senior year in high school I became a big believer in the power of belief. My girlfriend’s mother, for some reason, thought that I would be interested in the writings of a pastor named Norman Vincent Peale, who had written the book, The Power of Positive Thinking. She was right. This book, and the spiritual attitude it advocated, dramatically changed my life.
The most dramatic change came when I went to college. Most of you would probably be surprised that I was a terrible student in school. I finished 12th to the bottom of my high school class, and for me a C was a good grade. Ds were okay because they weren’t Fs. I managed to mostly avoid Fs by shooting for Ds. For most of my life I had felt trapped in the identity of being a class clown and poor student. I was trapped not only by my history but by others’ expectations. People thought I was a bad student and a cut-up, and so they treated me that way. I was criticized a lot, which only served to keep me in that identity. I remember several times during junior and senior high thinking, “It doesn’t matter what I do, people are always down on me and just don’t like me. So why bother trying to change. I’m going to be criticized anyway because I won’t be able to change the way they want me to. So I might as well be what I want, not what they want.” My whole attitude was that I was a failure, so why try changing.
That all changed when I read parts of Peale’s book. I realized that I could change, and that I could change especially if I learned to ignore people’s criticisms. When I went to college I decided that I was going to change. So I slowly became transformed. I had to teach myself how to study, and I had to learn how to learn. My grades were mediocre at the beginning, but by the time I graduated I was on the Dean’s List. I went onto graduate school and my grades got increasingly better, to the point that when I graduated with my Ph.D., I graduated with a cumulative 4.0 gpa.
My change as a student happened because I changed my belief. By believing I could be better, I became better. This also had an impact on me in sports. When I graduated from high school I was a pretty good lacrosse player—at least good enough to be recruited by Dennison University and Ohio State University. But when it came to a college choice I let the weather determine it. I wanted to go south so that I could get away from grey skies and snow. So I went to Roanoke College in Virginia. They had a lacrosse team and I figured I could try out for it. What I didn’t know was how good they were. I didn’t know much about college lacrosse, but what I found out very quickly upon going to Roanoke was that at the time they were one of the best college teams in the country.
Back then there was not much difference between Division 1 and Division 3 schools. They all played each other, so that our little school of 1200 students had a lacrosse schedule that included schools such as the University of North Carolina, Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of Virginia, Ohio State University, as well as many smaller colleges. And Roanoke beat most of those schools at the time.
In the fall of my freshman year I tried out for the team, and quickly discovered that the other players were really good, and I wasn’t. I played defense, and was told by one of the offensive players that fall that in practice everyone wanted to go against me because they knew that they would score. I was terrible, but the power of positive thinking had taken hold. I believed that I could become a good player. So I kept working at it. I didn’t make the team initially, but halfway through the spring season I made it, which was really fun because we won a Division 2/3 national championship that year.
Over the next three years I kept improving. There were players who were better than me at the time, but I kept trying. Many of them eventually quit the team for a lack of playing time, but I kept at it. By the time I graduated as a senior I was a starter on one of the better teams in the country, and I was the defenseman who covered the best offensive player on the other team. I had gone from being the player everyone wanted to play against to one who was able to shut down the All-American offensive players. And it was all because of the positive attitude that I had shifted to four years before.
It was out of those two experiences that I began, spiritually, to really understand our passage. Our passage is one of belief, not only in oneself, but in God’s power. Jesus is with some of the disciples, specifically Peter, who work as fishermen. They are fishing in the Sea of Galilee for a small type of fish, a lake variety of tilapia, with very little meat on them. For a fisherman to be even moderately successful, the nets need to be full because to make a meal out of these fish requires at least three or four per person. Unfortunately, Peter and his crew are catching nothing. Jesus tells them to put their nets on the other side of the boat, and that they will catch a boatload, but they are skeptical. They haven’t caught anything all day. Why would switching to the other side of the boat work? They are full of doubt, but they do it anyway. And to their surprise their nets come up bursting with fish. They catch enough to fill two boats. It is an incredible catch. And all it took was a little belief in God’s power.
It’s amazing what a change of belief can do. So often if we believe something isn’t possible, it becomes impossible. If we believe something can happen, often it will happen. This is a foundation of much of Christian belief. Too many people today are skeptical and cynical, thinking, “I won’t believe it till I see it. I won’t believe it can be done until it is done.” In contrast, Jesus often emphasized a very simple idea: If we believe, then we’ll see. If we believe, then we’ll achieve.
The thing about Christian belief is that it isn’t belief like what our culture teaches, which is that we have to believe in ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with believing in ourselves. Certainly that is part of Norman Vincent Peale’s message. But Christian belief is in something greater. It’s a belief in the power of God not only to be in the world, but a belief that if we are open to God’s grace, it can work miracles big and small in our lives. It’s a belief that even though we may go through really tough times, if we are open to God’s power, our lives can be better. Our lives can be blessed.
What I’ve learned over the years is that so many people struggle in life because they don’t believe. It’s not just that they don’t believe in Christ or in God. They just don’t believe that their lives can be better. There are so many people whose lives are stuck in ruts, stuck in a cycle of disappointment, stuck in a belief that good isn’t possible for them, and it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart because I know from experience that if we are willing just to change the way we look at life and at God, it changes everything.
I’ve recently seen, in a book that we are presently reading and discussing in our men’s group that meets on Thursday mornings, how changing perceptions can change life. The book is Soul Survivor by Philip Yancey, in which he writes about thirteen people who have changed his life. Some are well-known, such at Martin Luther King, Jr., G. K. Chesterton, and Leo Tolstoy, but others are not known, such as Dr. Paul Brand.
Brand is a medical doctor who has specialized in treating lepers, or, more specifically, people with Hansen’s disease, which is the form of leprosy that often causes severe disfigurement. People with this disease often lose their fingers, toes, and other extremities. Brand has served as a doctor specializing in this disease in England, India, and Mississippi. He is considered one of the foremost experts of the disease, having developed surgical techniques to restore the use of the hand to people’s who’s hands have been crippled by this disease.
One of Brand’s most important discoveries was that people with this disease don’t lose their extremities because of the disease itself. He discovered that instead the disease kills the nerve endings in fingers, toes, and other extremities. Thus, people get infections from blisters, cuts, or splinters, and because they can’t feel the pain they let them fester. They lose their extremities because of unfelt infections. As a result of this discovery, he also began to think about pain in a different way.
We see pain as bad, whether it is physical or emotional pain. We tend to complain that when we are in pain, God must be absent. Brand says that our pain shows that God is present. For example, he says, “I thank God for pain,… I cannot think of a greater gift I could give my leprosy patients…. Most people view pain as an enemy. Yet, as my leprosy patients prove, it forces us to pay attention to threats against our bodies. Without it, heart attacks, strokes, ruptured appendixes, and stomach ulcers would all occur without any warning. Who would ever visit a doctor apart from pain’s warnings?
“I notice that the symptoms of illness my patients complained about were actually a display of bodily healing at work. Virtually every response of our bodies that we view with irritation or disgust—blister, callus, swelling, fever, sneeze, cough, vomiting, and especially pain—demonstrates a reflex toward health. In all these things normally considered enemies, we can find a reason to be grateful.”
So often we see our pain as a sign that God doesn’t care. The truth is that pain is evidence that God does care. God gives us pain to keep us safe. We think that a good God would keep us from pain, but think about the causes of our pain. Why do we feel such grief at the death of a loved one? The answer is that the pain we feel is from the love we are able to have shared with the loved one? The pain we feel at being unemployed or having a difficult life is the pain of something inside of us seeking something better. To fully comprehend this means shifting our perspective so that we can see life and God in different ways.
What we believe about God and life determines what we experience about God and life. If we are able to believe it’s amazing what we can see and achieve.
So, where’s your life in terms of belief? Do you believe in God’s goodness and power in your life? If not, perhaps that’s why your life is the way it is? If so, maybe that’s why your life is the way it is.
Amen.
Who Are the True Prophets?
Dr. Standish
Luke 4:14-24
January 24, 2010
Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’ And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’ He said to them, ‘Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, “Doctor, cure yourself!” And you will say, “Do here also in your home town the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.” ’ And he said, ‘Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s home town.
Do you have a favorite heirloom? I have one in my office that is one of my prized possessions. You may not be surprised to know that it is a book, but what book may seem kind of odd in light of the values of our modern age, where only new ideas, new products, and new fads seem to have credibility. This book is a collection of writings by an obscure, 6th-Century monk named Dorotheos of Gaza.
Dorotheos lived outside the city of Gaza, which today is the main city of the Gaza Strip. Back then the area he was in was a desert. Before becoming a monk, Dorotheos lived a privileged life. He came from a wealthy Christian family who taught him to read and write at an early age. This was a rarity in those times when only 20% of the population could read or write. He eventually became a professor of rhetoric at a school in Gaza, and became a man of great prestige. It was in the midst of this that he made the decision to become a monk. No one is sure why, but it seems that it may have happened after his parents were killed in a great earthquake. Dorotheos was wealthy himself, but gave away his wealth so that he could become an impoverished monk. As a monk, he quickly distinguished himself as a deeply spiritual and faithful man, a man whom others—both lay people and monks—sought out because of his wisdom. After his death, his writings were collected, copied repeatedly by hand, and passed on for a thousand years because of their wisdom. For the past 500 years his writings have been printed and passed around. His writings have touched millions of people for over 1500 years.
During his lifetime he was considered a sage by many, but not so much by the monks in his own monastery. He was a prophet unknown in his own hometown. The monastery he lived in was not like those of today. Back then monks often lived in a large, makeshift dormitory where they slept, ate, and prayed. They had little food, and all were devoted to eking out an existence. They were in the desert, so during the summer they lived in extreme heat, and in the winter extreme cold. When a particular monk was considered to be more spiritually adept, he would be given a small hermitage to live in. These were very small, one-room huts with little more than a mat inside to sleep on. The elements were barely kept out. Often they shared their huts with snakes and scorpions that made their way inside.
The attention Dorotheos garnered caused some of this other monks to become jealous. They criticized him for talking to so many people, rather than praying all the time. They criticized him for being popular or sought out. There was a period of time when the monks treated Dorotheos very poorly because of his popularity. They tormented him by spreading their garbage around his hut and shaking their mats out before his doorway. So what? What’s the big deal about that? The big deal is that in the desert the small pieces of food attracted all sorts of insects, many of which were stinging insects. For a number of years, Dorotheos woke up every morning covered with bumps and welts from all the insects that had shared his hut. It was how he reacted that makes him so special. You see, Dorotheos believed in being radically humble, and it’s these ideas that really impacted me.
Let me share with you what Dorotheos taught about humility. First, he taught that humility begins with recognizing that neither you nor I are great. It begins with recognizing that we are not the center of the universe. As we become more humble, we recognize that God is the canter. And so we are able to dedicate ourselves more and more to living how God wants us to live, not as we want. Through this we begin to bear God’s fruit and share blessings.
He used a metaphor for humility, saying that in the Middle East there are a certain kinds of trees that when they grow naturally bear little or no fruit as long as their branches remain upright. In order to bear fruit, they must have stones tied to their branches so that they hang low to the ground. He says that the lower the branches go, the more fruit they bear. We are similar. The lower we are, and the more humble, the more fruit we bear in our lives, and this fruit nourishes others.
He also used to say that the nearer a person is to God, the more he or she sees himself or herself a sinner. That’s not the way we think it should be. We think that the more we grow spiritually, the more we should escape sin. But Dorotheos says that it’s the opposite that happens. Once, when he taught this, a prominent citizen of Gaza challenged him. Dorotheos responded with some questions of his own. He asked the man how he sees himself in relationship to others in Gaza. “Why, as a master of the first rank,” the man responded. Then Dorotheos asked him how he would see himself in Caesarea, which was a major port for the region. The man responded, “Well, certainly as one of the more important citizens.” And if he was visiting Antioch, one of the most important cities in the Roman Empire? “I would see myself as one of the common folk.” Finally, Dorothoes asked him how he would see himself if he went before the emperor in Rome. The man said, “I would see myself as one of the poor.” Dorotheos then said, “This is what I mean when I said that the nearer a man gets to God the more he sees himself a sinner.” When we come close to God, we see our faults and our flaws in God’s light. We see ourselves as we really are, and it causes us to ask God to lead and transform us even more. This is what humility is all about. Dorotheos was an amazing Christian thinker, but he wasn’t always appreciated in his own home.
Dorotheos easily could have said what Jesus said in our passage for today, which was, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.” It’s amazing that a man whose words were copied by hand for over 1000 years, and were sold for the past 500 was dismissed in his time. But that’s often the way it is with the great ones—with prophets.
What’s funny about prophets is that pretty much as a rule they had a small following in some circles, but were ignored by the world. In fact, most of the prophets we know of in the Old Testament would have been considered failures in their times. Often they were ignored, persecuted, and every once in a while, killed. We have a misconception about prophets. We tend to think of them as people who see the future. They really didn’t see or foretell the future. In fact, the few passages from the prophets that speak about the future are very sketchy. What prophets did was to tell about the present. They always spoke to people about their present situation, and how it reflected their relationship with God. The prophets tell people what God is saying now. Because they told the truth, the powerful of the day often hated the prophets.
Why are prophets typically so reviled when they’re alive, and so revered once they die? The answer is that prophets speak truth, and as Anthony de Mello once said, “The truth that sets us free is the truth we’d rather not hear.” If you are powerful, or like the system the way it is, who wants to hear that what we are doing is going against what God wants us to do? Often it’s not until prophets have passed that even the wealthy and powerful are able to recognize how true what the prophets said was.
The problem with prophets is that they tell us what God is really saying to us, and often we’d rather not hear what God has to say. In contrast, false prophets tell us what we want to hear. And the sad truth is that our culture is filled with so many popular false prophets who shout out only what we want to hear. For example, I hear false prophets on the left who whisper to us that religion is a farce, that going to church regularly doesn’t benefit your life at all, and that you can be spiritual on your own. What they are really saying is that you don’t have to listen to God if you don’t want to, you don’t have to serve God if you don’t want to, and that God really isn’t making any demands on your life. God, if God exists, is just a big puppy dog who merely wants us to pet him every once in a while. They are false prophets because they tell us what we want to hear, which is about a faith that requires nothing from us.
Meanwhile, we have false prophets on the right who tell us only that we are sinful, or only that we are bad. Also, there’s a new breed of falseness on the right coming from proponents of the prosperity gospel. I don’t know if you have heard that term, but it is a term applied to many of the megachurch pastors (like Joel Osteen) who preach a message that God only sees good and that God wants to bless us with stuff. Some of these preachers are more subtle, some are more outrageous. Osteen is much more subtle, and his message is appealingly positive, which I don’t necessarily have a problem with. The problem I see comes when they preach a message of God giving, giving, giving to us without any call for us to make sacrifices in our lives to join God in what God is doing.
For example, there are pastors like the Rev. Creflo Dollar (yes, that is his real name), who has churches in Atlanta and New York City, and preaches to members that God wants them to be wealthy and to have stuff or bling in abundance. He often leads his church in chants of “I want my bling! I want my bling!” He teaches that we can measure God’s grace in our lives by the possessions we own.
Interestingly enough there have been articles written recently questioning the role of the prosperity gospel in the recent housing and economic crashes (you can read one of those articles at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200912/rosin-prosperity-gospel). It seems that members of prosperity gospel churches are overrepresented among those who have defaulted on their loans. For example, one article I read talked about a landscaper, who made only about $35,000 a year, yet had taken out a loan to buy a $250,000 house, all because the pastor of his church told the members that God would provide them with possessions if they were willing to take the risk. It led him to financial ruin and bankruptcy.
Certainly God wants us to take risks, and God does bless us sometimes with material goods, but what these prosperity preaches preach is not what the gospel teaches. What they are missing is the reality of sin, the reality of the need for sacrifice, and the reality that sometimes following God doesn’t lead to gaining stuff and an easy life.
There are real prophets from God speaking all around you, but can you tell the real ones from the false ones? You can tell the difference because the real ones will generally speak about issues that we both do and don’t want to hear. There are three basic things that true prophets will talk about.
First, they will talk about the reality of sin. Real prophets don’t push the idea of sin away. The recognize that sin is a fact, and that we can see it in the violence, greed, warfare, selfishness, and indifference we can see all over the world. As G. K. Chesteron once said, all you have to do to recognize the presence of sin is to look around the world. There’s evidence in abundance.
Second, true prophets will also talk about love. True prophets will teach us that no matter how powerful sin is, love is many times greater. They will teach us that God’s love is all around us, and that it is ready to work through us, and that we are God’s hands and feet. True prophets will tell us that the answer to sin in the world is God’s love in and through us.
Finally, true prophets teach us that the only answer to sin, and the only way to immerse ourselves in God’s love, is to turn our lives over to God. It is in radically giving ourselves to God that we open our hearts, minds, and souls to love.
So, here’s my question for you. Are you able to hear not only the prophets in your midst, but Christ in your midst? Are you willing to listen to the truth you don’t want to hear in order to hear Christ’s truth that God wants you to hear?
Amen.
Are You Using Your Gifts?
by Dr. Graham Standish
1 Corinthians 12:1-11
Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed. You know that when you were pagans, you were enticed and led astray to idols that could not speak. Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says ‘Let Jesus be cursed!’ and no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit.
Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.
Did you watch the Baltimore Ravens/Indianapolis Colts playoff game last night? It was a pretty good game until the fourth quarter. I have to tell you that it took me about the whole first quarter to be able to watch the Ravens’ offense when they had the ball. That had nothing to do with any kind of lingering Steelers/Ravens rivalry. It all had to do with the fact that when the Ravens had the ball I was focused on only one player: number 74, their right offensive tackle. I was fascinated by him.
It’s a strange thing to just watch an offensive lineman when watching football. You miss the whole play and don’t see what really took place until the replays. So why was I watching number 74? Because he is an inspiration to me. Number 74 is an African-American player named Michel Oher. Normally I wouldn’t mention his race, but it has something to do with why I was watching him. You see Michael Oher is the subject of a wonderful film, The Blind Side. The film is about how Oher went from a wandering teen living in the slums of Memphis, Tennessee to become a college All-American offensive tackle and an eventual NFL first-round draft choice.
Oher didn’t start out as a football phenom. His introduction to football came about accidently (although I believe it happened providentially). Oher, almost by accident, became a student at the Briarwood Christian Academy, an elite private school in Memphis. He became a student mainly because the basketball coach saw him fooling around with a basketball shooting baskets. Oher was 6’ 5” and 300 pounds, but he had the agility of a guard. So the coach advocated for the board to admit Oher, not because he was such a great athlete, but because they had a duty to be Christian in reaching out to a poor young man.
When they admitted him, they didn’t realize that Oher didn’t have a home. His mother was a full-time drug addict, part-time drug dealer whom social workers guessed had something like 12 children with 12 different men. Oher had been forcibly removed from her care when we was seven years old, and he had bumped around from foster home to foster home. In the process he gained a reputation as a “runner,” meaning that he would be in the home for a bit, but would eventually run away. At the time he entered Briarwood he was sleeping on the couches of anyone in his neighborhood who would put him up. His possessions were several pairs of shirts, some extra underwear, and socks, all of which he washed in the sinks of Laundromats.
He had been attending Briarwood for a month or so when a white family, the Tuohy family, noticed him. The parents, Leigh Anne and Sean, were at a volleyball game with their son watching their daughter, and noticed Oher sitting in the upper bleachers. Sean Tuohy is somewhat well-known. He owns something like 80 Taco Bells and Kentucky Fried Chickens around Tennessee, and is the color analyst for Memphis Grizzlies basketball games. As Leigh Anne and Sean drove their family away from the volleyball game, they noticed Oher walking in the cold rain wearing nothing but a shirt, shorts, and shoes. They asked him if he needed a ride, and he said he was just going to the gym. As they drove away, Leigh Anne realized something wasn’t right, and went back to Oher and asked him why he was going to the gym, since it was closed. Oher said he was going there because it was warm. She realized Oher had no place to sleep.
They brought him home and let him sleep on the couch for the night. That one night turned into two, then three, then a week, then two weeks, and finally they gave him a room of his own. As they got to know him they realized that he was a special man, a gentle giant, who needed to be loved. They felt is was their calling to give him the home and the love he had never before received. And Oher blossomed. Eventually they adopted him and he became part of their family, causing some of their extended family and friends to question them. The Tuohy’s didn’t care. They knew that caring for and loving Michael was their calling.
As I said, Michael Oher blossomed in their home. He became a great football and basketball player, a good student, and eventually received a full scholarship to play football at the University of Mississippi, after which he became a first-round draft pick of the Ravens. Oher not only inspires me, but so do the Tuohys, who sensed the Holy Spirit moving in their lives, and responded with faith, love, and action.
Who inspires you? Which people, by the example they lived out in their lives, have taught you to live a better life? Gwen and Larry Mellon are another couple who’ve inspired me. Do you know who they are? If you haven’t, you may have heard about their legacy, a legacy that is now crucial in helping the earthquake victims in Haiti. Both Gwen and Larry started out living the lives of the super wealthy. Larry Mellon grew up here in the Pittsburgh area as part of the Mellon family. After graduating from college he joined the family business overseeing investments and their work with Gulf Oil, but after two years he couldn’t take it anymore. He wanted a different life. He ended up getting divorced and moved to Arizona, where he bought a ranch, herding cattle from sunup to sundown. This was around 1937.
Meanwhile, Gwen grew up in New York City, and went to elite eastern private schools and colleges. She married shortly after college, and had three children. But when her husband told her that he was moving to Europe for a business opportunity, leaving his family behind, she decided to divorce him and move to Arizona. It was there, while working on a dude ranch, that she met Larry Mellon. They were soon married and, along with her three sons, they raised cattle. Still, Larry was restless.
One day in 1946, Larry walked into the living room of their home, holding a Life Magazine that had an article on the efforts of Albert Schweitzer to start a hospital in Africa. He told Gwen that he wanted to do something similar. She agreed, so they moved the family to New Orleans so that both could engage in medical studies at Tulane University. Larry became a medical doctor in 1950 at the age of 44, and the two of them moved to Deschapelles, Haiti to create L’Hopital Albert Schweitzer. Deschapelles is about 90 miles northwest of Port au Prince in an area that had no doctors for a population of a about 195,000 people. The people of the region were so poor that they couldn’t pay money, and often paid in rice, chickens, eggs, or pigs (Mellon believed that people should pay for their care, if only a pittance, because they would be more motivated to take better care of themselves if they did).
L’Hopital Albert Schweitzer is more than a hospital. It also teaches people how to farm more effectively, how to ensure their water supply is clean, and how to read. The hospital has had a huge impact on the life of Haitians for half a century. This hospital has been one of the main ones responding to earthquake victims this past week.
What inspires me about the Mellons is that though they were rich, which could have caused them to become self-focused and self-consumed, they were selfless. Their lives ran counter to our culture, which equates happiness with being rich and selfish. Our culture is persistent in thinking that wealth leads to happiness, despite the fact that in studies people today are less content than 50 years ago, and that something like 80% of people who win the big prizes in the lotteries are decidedly less happy than before they won.
What has inspired me about the Tuohy’s and the Mellons si that they are people who understood our passage at deep levels of their lives. Our passage tells us that God gives each of us gifts from the Spirit, gifts that are used to build up the body of Christ. It also reminds us that it is our choice whether we act on our gifts or not. The problem of our culture is that it is such a narcissistic culture that we have a hard time unleashing our gifts. Why? Because the more self-focused we are, the harder it is to want to use these gifts, which are always given to diminish ourselves and lift up others.
Our passage for this morning teaches a whole different mindset from our cultural mindset:. Each and every one of us has been given gifts by God to make the world better. They have been given to us to use in serving God. We were given a great example of how true this is this morning when Kim Sebring spoke to us about Project Hope. Project Hope is a mission she and her family started five years ago after the death of her son, Tyler, at age seven due to a congenital heart condition.
It would have been very easy for Kim, Mark, and their family to turn inward after such a hard tragedy, but they didn’t. They were inspired themselves, during Tyler’s stay at Children’s Hospital when they were given a basket of goods to make their stay easier. The basket had things such as a toothbrush, toothpaste, note cards, snacks, and more.
A few years after Tyler’s death, they decided to turn their inspiration into a mission of creating similar baskets for other families. The list of items in these baskets (actually now they are tote bags) can be found on their website (http://projecthope-zelienople-pa.com). They produce 60 tote bags a month, and have given Children’s Hospital, and thus parents of sick children, 3300 bags over the past five years. Kim, Mark, and their family found their spiritual gifts by tapping into their compassion for people who had struggled like them. By being open to the Spirit, they turned tragedy into love.
Whether you know it or not, you have a gift. Sometimes we aren’t so aware because we just aren’t that open to God, or at least to tapping into God all the time. But the truth is that you have been given a gift. You’ve been given many gifts. And the amazing thing about these spiritual gifts, the more we use them in life the more our basket of gifts from the Spirit overflows. Conversely, the less we use them, the more our basket shrinks. So the question is, what are you doing with your gifts? Are you keeping them for yourself, or using them for God? Are you making the world a better place through them, or are you keeping it the same?
Amen.
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