Resurrection Life

The thing about your identity in Christ is this:

2 Pentecost 2013

 

2 June 

 

Galatians 1: 1-12

 

Pastor Chris Enstad

 

Brothers and sisters, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.  Amen.

 

Carrie and I joined about 150 other people for a truly blessed moment on Friday night.  Brooke Boon, the founder of Holy Yoga, was in Minneapolis leading a conference and so we went to Christ Presbyterian Church for worship and Holy Yoga.  It was a blessed time, preachers are not often ministered to.  But Brooke did something at the beginning of her sermon that I am going to bring in here today and that is to bring an awareness of breath into even sitting still listening to someone else speak and so we are going to do that right now.  Let’s take two deep breaths and on each exhale, a sigh.  Do that with me.

 

There.  Do you feel it?  It is good to settle into an awareness of our selves and now we can take that awareness and apply it also to our awareness of God.

 

And here’s what I know.

 

You can not be something apart from who you are.  You are who God created you to be.  It can take a lifetime’s journey to become comfortable in one’s own skin.  Or not.  Either way, you are who God created you to be.  

 

You can pretend.  You can work really hard to change.  Some of those changes will work.  Some won’t.  And you’ll learn from your failures and you will try again.

 

But your core identity has been set.  Your code was downloaded into your heart when you were baptized at the font in the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit.  And your identity as a child of God was sealed with the sign of the cross.

 

You cannot be, any longer, something apart from who you are.

 

But other voices will tell you otherwise.  They will give you cause to question your identity in Christ.  Life will happen.  Life.  Man, if life hasn’t given you cause to ask questions about your faith and Jesus Christ then you are either really really lucky or you haven’t been paying attention.  

 

Voices in our culture will tell you otherwise.  What do you need from God?  You can worship God, if you even think you have to believe in him, out here with us in the world.  Or why even give time to faith?  What difference does it make in yours or anyone’s life?

The Galatians were running the risk of living into the identity of someone other than who they had been called to be.  Professor Mary Hinkle Shore likens it to when you are driving into a car park how the spikes in the ground drop out of the way when you are going the right direction but if you try to reverse they will shred your tires.  The Galatians were about to shred their tires.

 

Galatia is a region in the center of Turkey.  The Roman govenment put it together from people that were not related to each other.  The southern towns were put together with the country folk to the north.

 

It was the country folk who we believe Paul ministered to along with Silas.  And they weren’t even really Galatians... these were Celts who had been part of the invasion of Greece by Brennus some three hundred years before Christ was born.  These were the people that Paul was writing to.  The Celts.

 

Celtic spirituality was an easy thing for Paul to work with because the Celts Gods did not live up on Mt. Olympus like Zues.  Celtic spiritualty from the earliest days believed that the divine and the human exist with only a thin line separating them.  A liminal place.  Modern day seekers who experience faith in this way will often talk of liminal places those places where night is about to change to day or where we can sense that the spiritual and corporal worlds are interacting.  I’ve experienced that liminality along the north shore of Lake Superior but also in the city dump of Juarez, Mexico.  The key is to have eyes and hearts that are aware of just how close God is.

 

The Celts were ready, then, for the message that in Jesus Christ God had been made incarnate in man.  Ok.  Great!  We can do that.  Paul was there to preach not Gods but God, the God who created the whole kit and caboodle and the Celts in Galatia were converted.  And Paul left.

 

And new teachers showed up.  Paul said what?  Him?  But he wasn’t even with Jesus or even the disciples?  By what authority can he say those things.  No, if you want salvation you have to do it by first becoming Jews.  We have the law, we have Moses, it is to the Jews that Jesus preached.  Trust us.

 

And when he received news of this Paul tried to jump in front of the car as it was about to reverse over the spike strips.  NOOOOO.

 

Paul reminds the Galatians that God alone is incarnate in Jesus Christ and the Gospel that Jesus preached is the only word that one need hear or heed.  No extra rules, no ceremony other than what Jesus commanded.  

 

We can receive it wherever we are at and be transformed by it.  But the unique way in which any person is caught up by the Gospel is going to look different.  There is no one story that brings a person in God except the story of Jesus Christ however that story is received.  You cannot be something other than what you are.

 

And Paul reminds the Galatians, as he reminds each of us here today, we are woven together in the story of Jesus Christ not despite our differences but because of them.

 

Jew or Greek, male or female, Norwegian or Swedish, white or black, gay or straight, those differences should not be cause for alarm or even surprise but can now be received as evidence of just how majestic and amazing and diverse the Gospel was, is and will be.

 

Now breathe.   Breathe again.

 

On the seventh day, God rested.   He allowed creation to just be creation.

 

Let this Word, this Gospel good news, be.  Whoever you are, whatever brought you here, whatever awaits your return when you leave this place, you are God’s children.  A family of unique, different and beautiful people that spans the ages.

 

Amen.

 

Gotta love a good Lukan head-fake: A sermon for Advent 2 2012

2 Advent 2012

Luke 3: 1-6

Pastor Chris Enstad


Being a Christian follower of Jesus is at the same time the easiest and the hardest thing to be.  Easy in that one need merely declare oneself a Christian and there you are, a Christian.  Maybe, then, you buy a cross to wear and find a church to attend.  And there you are, a Christian.

And for most of us that is where our following ends.  I mean yes, we give to the church, we volunteer to make programs and services work but, even then, it is typically around 10 to 20 percent of a congregation’s membership that makes church happen for the other 80 or 90 percent of us.  

But, if we show up enough eventually the Word that we are hearing starts to make a claim on us.  We start to hear words like repentance, confession, transformation, and purification.  And then, one day, at the call of the Holy Spirit, we wake up and realize that hey, that Book, that Bible, those Words that are written in there are talking about things going on out here in the world, they are talking about me  and my life.  And that’s when things start to get hard, but the work that God calls us to in following his Son, while not easy, is definitely filled with joy and, as we are reminded in our theme for this week, it is a life filled with peace.

Advent is a season of preparation for the coming of Jesus Christ.  We spend these weeks making things ready for the birth of Christ.  This space is gradually being transformed to the festive and cheerful sanctuary where we will soon sing, “Hallelujah!” Our homes are being transformed as well, our tree is up, the lights are lit, our girls have discovered the thrill of wrapping little presents for each other to the joy of the wrapping paper industry, we discovered that our internet radio station has not just one but eight different 24 hour Christmas music channels from country to family Christmas music all the way to my new favorite “peaceful holidays” channel... yes, our homes are ready for Jesus to come.

But Advent doesn’t exist for any of those reasons.  Advent is a season of preparing our own lives for the coming of Christ.  We are accustomed to taking all of the good feelings that come with this season and forget one important truth: Christ is coming!  Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that “It is very remarkable that we so calmly face the thought that God is coming, whereas people previously trembled at the day of God, and the world fell into trembling when Jesus Christ walked over the earth.”  

For you see, God coming so close to us in the form of an infant child was not so that we could gather around his manger and fawn over him, God comes close to us to lay claim to us and to sever our relationships with all of the things of this world that we so falsely believe will give us the security, status and prestige that we long for.  And so, yes, while we do get excited about the birth of Christ, this season let us also reconnect with our fears and questions: if you were to hear that Christ was coming to your house tomorrow, that you could expect a knock on your front door, what would your first reaction be?

Listen to how Luke sets it up for us today:  In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Traconitis and Lysanias rulers of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas...  the word of God came to John, son of Zechariah in. the. wilderness.

Luke firmly roots this story not only in the historical facts of who was ruling and when, but after this long list of the high and mighty, naming the political and religious elite, he then, pulls our gaze away from Jerusalem to the woods.  Not to Caiaphas and Annas the high priests, but to John, the son of... who?  Zechariah?  

And, John began to preach, he preached a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his path straight.  Every valley will be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight.”

God is coming near, today is the day to prepare your hearts and your lives for his arrival.  What in your life needs straightening out?  What valleys of resentments do you need to fill up with the love and grace of God?  What mountains of ego and accomplishment need to be leveled out in the perspective that it isn’t about you and that we can’t all exist together if we are all at the center of our own little universes?

That’s where my thoughts go when I hear that Jesus is about to arrive, the fully human fully divine Son of God coming near to us in the form of the exact opposite of what we would expect from God, not another mighty ruler, not another religious elite, an infant child, sent to us in judgment, God’s judgment that we cannot be saved on our own.  We need help.

But, then, we give thanks for in coming to us as one of us God’s judgment on us came also with a gift, a gift of salvation wrapped up in the body and the blood of this little baby boy.  We do not have to do this stuff alone for we now know that God is with us.

And that, my friends, is Advent, the coming of the Lord.  That’s why Carrie and I love the joy in our girls’ faces when they hang the ornaments on the tree and sing Christmas carols and are nearly popping out of their bodies counting down the days until Christmas, but it is also why, after they are asleep, we catch ourselves sitting by that same tree with a different kind of joy, the joy of knowing that through all of our struggles in this last year since the last time the tree was up, God has also showered us with all sorts of goodness.  And we know that if Christ knocks on the doors of our home or the doors of our hearts, we would turn and see that yes, it is still pretty messy in our house and it is definitely messy in our hearts and yet we will open our doors regardless to worship the God of judgment and mercy.

May our Church reflect those same truths, may our mission and ministries be done in the fervent expectation that we do them always to be ready for Christ to come again, and may we find ways to open our doors to Christ who comes to us unlike anything we could expect, may we welcome him into our homes, into our church, and into our life together.

Amen.

Sermon from 16 Pentecost regarding Matthew 21: 33-36 in which the Preacher takes a good look at our "Christian" "Moral" nation

16 Pentecost 2011

October 2

 

Matthew 21: 33-46

 

Pastor Chris Enstad

 

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord, Jesus Christ.  Amen.

 

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.  Do you understand what you are doing here?  Why oh why are you continuing to mouth off to the religious authorities?  Why oh why are you challenging their authority in front of the crowd, don’t you understand that they work with the Roman government?  Don’t you understand what is going to happen to you if you don’t just keep your head down?  You are standing in the temple, in Jerusalem, in front of the chief priests and elders of the people talking down to them and telling parables that aren’t quite parables are they, they aren’t quite as hard to understand as some of your other parables, it’s like you’re not even trying to protect yourself from the charges of heresy and even treason.

 

Just last Sunday we heard you respond to the questioning of the authorities who came to you challenging your authority and you responded by challenging theirs and in fact knocked their authority down a couple rungs by forcing them to respond to your question regarding the baptism of John with the answer, “We don’t know.”  You told the parable of the two sons one who said he would go to work and didn’t and the one who said he wouldn’t go to work and then did asking which one did the will of the father... clearly it was the one who changed his mind.  You held out to the people of Israel yet another chance to repent and to live not just as children of God by title but by deeds as well.

 

And now today, today Jesus you continue to press your point with yet another parable, right on the heels of the first.  And now you are really going to far.

 

Why are you doing this?

 

Jesus tells this story:

 

A master of a house planted a vineyard, dug the winepress and then wanted to turn the business over to tenants who would pay rent freeing him to pursue other endeavors.  He sends his servants to get his payment, the first fruits of the harvest, and the tenants beat one, killed the other and stoned yet another!  And so the owner sent MORE servants and they did the same to them!

 

So the owner said, “Ok, maybe if I send my son they will respect him.”  But the tenants thought to themselves, “hey this is his only son if we kill him we can have the inheritance for ourselves.”  So they killed him.  “What do you think the owner will do to them,” Jesus asks the religious authorities?

 

“He will put them to death and give them vineyard to someone who will do right by him.”

 

“Ahh,” Jesus said.  “You know that it is written that the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” (that’s Psalm 118)

 

“Therefore the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits. “ 

 

And it turns out the chief priests and Pharisees didn’t have to think very hard to get it, and they they decided they needed to get him.

 

There are two very important, life and death important, things that we need to grasp by faith this morning. 

 

The first is that our God is a loving God.   A young pastor out in California named Francis Chan wrote a book about God’s love and he titled it, “Crazy love”.  For God’s love is indeed crazy, it is irrational, it makes no sense to us in how we treat each other and go about our daily lives of judgement, lack of mercy and compassion, it is truly a crazy God who would love us so much that he sent his prophets to proclaim His commands as our Creator and we rejected them.  

 

You don’t believe me?  Well how about let’s see how our lives and actions and politics and government and communities line up against God’s word then?  There are a whole lot of preachers getting up into their pulpits today to make a point that the church should be involved in vetting politicians.  My guess is that their sermons will be more about the empire than the Kingdom.  What politician can possibly measure up to the Word of God?  Shall we see how we are doing as a country?

 

How about Jeremiah? “ Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness and his upper rooms by injustice, who makes his neighbor serve him for nothing and does not give him his wages, who says, “I will build myself a great house with spacious upper rooms, who cuts out windows for it paneling it with cedar and painting it with vermilion.  Do you think you are a king because you compete in cedar?  Did not your father eat and drink and do justice and righteousness?  Then it was well with him.  He judged the cause of the poor and needy; then it was well.”

 

Oh yes the words of the prophets were rejected.

But this crazy God, this love-crazy God did not end it all for us then for good, no, he sent MORE prophets.  How about Ezekiel?

 

“If a man is righteous and does what is right and just -- if he does not eat upon the mountains or lift up his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel, does not defile his neighbor’s wife does not oppress anyone but restores to the debtor his pledge, commits no robbery, gives his bread to the hungry, and covers the naked with a garment, does NOT lend at interest or take any profit, witholds his hand from injustice, executes true justice between man and man, walks in my statutes, and keeps my rules by living faithfully -- he is righteous, he shall surely live, declares the Lord God.”

 

Our crazy-loving God offered us the means to repentence over and over again and we rejected those efforts every single time.

 

And so God sent his Son.  And we killed him too.  But our God, the God who loved us so much that he sent his Son to win us back to him.  That God who had all rights under any sense of justice anywhere in the world to call it quits for us once and for all.

 

That God won us back because that rejected stone became the cornerstone of a whole new world. 

 

Oh the chief priests and Pharisees got it all right, and they, in the end, got Jesus, but Jesus got us back.

 

Second, we must always remember that this world, our lives, our families, our time, our money, our possessions are not ours.  We are leasing them from the one who created them all in the first place.  God asks of us the first fruits of our labors and our worship and praise and to love our neighbor as ourselves.  Think back to the roots of sinful thoughts or occasions in your own lives and how many of those sins can be traced back to the moment when you forgot that this whole thing is on loan from God and mistakenly thought it was all about you and your will and your desires and YOUR opinions of your neighbors and the poor and the weak and the downtrodden?

 

When I turn on the TV and find people cheering that an old person be allowed to die because they couldn’t afford insurance, that a gay soldier might be booed for asking for equal rights from the countrymen he is protecting, and then cheered a state that has committed 237 execution supposedly because we are so certain of our own judgement that we see fit to take the life of another human being... we are so dead certain that we take it on ourselves to remove from God’s vineyard a person he created.  

 

Where is our Ezekiel today?  Where is our Jeremiah?

 

I don’t care what party you are from, I don’t care about your politics, I care about your souls, I am going to be held accountable for those.  So line your lives up to God’s word today people?  Would you not have rejected the Son sent to claim what was his Dad’s to give it to someone more deserving?

 

Thanks be to God that our God loves us more than we can love each other and forgives us for taking it upon ourselves to sentence his Son to death.  I pray that each of us and our own egos and wills and desires may fall on the rejected stone of Christ, to be shattered today once and for all... and a new house be built from those pieces, with Christ as our cornerstone, as our head, the first fruits of the true life to come.

 

Reading the Bible: End in sight!

Well, instead of a closing remark I thought it best to just say, "Thank you".  Thank you for joining me on a journey through the Bible.  I have already noticed that I have incorporated more history into my preaching and teaching and it has been good to be reminded of our broad God's Word really is.  The scope and depth of it is amazing!  In one book!

May you all make this a regular part of your journey.

Blessings to you!

Reading the Bible: Day 87: Acts 22 - Romans 4 (August 31)

Well we are getting close to completing the challenge of reading our entire Bible this summer!  Some of you have already finished, I hear so way to go!

Today I am going to focus just a bit on the Book of Romans.  The entire book is dedicated to Paul's theology of the Righteousness of God over and against the unrighteousness of man.  In the letter he exhorts the church in Rome to preach the Gospel rightly divided between law and gospel.  It is this little hook, law and gospel, that launched the reformation and continues to inspire churches in their evangelistic endeavors to this day.

We live lives under the law.  Follow the rules and you will not get in trouble.  When we mistakenly bring this line of thinking into what Christ did for us we miss the point of the death and resurrection completely.  It is because we cannot follow the law, for instance the Ten Commandments, that God sent his son to fulfil the law on our behalf.  This now frees us to live new lives in him.  And so we go about our lives ministering to the needs of others and proclaiming that good news not because we have to but because we can.

So the first four chapters of Romans center on God's righteous judgement.  We are not the judge, God is.  And God has already judged mankind and found us to be lost and hopeless.  The birth of Jesus Christ, that we celebrate on Christmas, is actually a judgement day for us!  Could we make our way back to being right with God on our own?  God determined the answer to be, "no".  And so he sent his only begotten Son to get us back.

And so our righteousness is not counted to us by the number of rules we follow but by another important reformation phrase, "faith alone".  To those who believe in Christ comes the justification of the sinner... you and me.

Reading the Bible: The Home Stretch! Day 86 Acts 12-21 (August 25)

The Acts 16 story of Paul and Silas in prison is a powerful image, for me, of the life lived in Christ.  Remember that they landed in prison for healing a demon-possessed girl.  They were not imprisoned, it seems, for the healing itself but because they took away the means of making a living for the girl's parents.  For this the two men were thrown in prison.

Two things to take away from this: note that throughout the entire book of Acts, as the early church was being planted, we see the profit motive bumping up against the motive of the Gospel.  My bible finds comparisons with Simon the magician, Elymas and Demetrius the silversmith!  It does seem that pure capitalism and the Gospel are incompatible.  I am not advocating pure socialism, either, however what does a system look like where the wealthy put their hope not in wealth but in something else entirely?  Read 1 Timothy 6:17-19.  Feel free to comment on this comment as well, I'm curious to know what others think.  Truly, in the name of healing that girl, Paul and Silas actually stole from her parents... so how do those two things exist in the same world (healing and profit?)

Secondly, look at how Paul and Silas reacted to their imprisonment: by praying and singing hymns to God.  It is vitally important that we continue to teach our young people to know their story by heart so that in times of trouble they have a deep spiritual well from which to draw the water of life.  So many young people are suffering at the hands of our amoral world because they do not know enough the love God has for them.  They do not have a liturgy to draw upon.  They have not been read the Psalms.  They have not memorized the Lord's Prayer or the Creed.  How can we be surprised that they are showing the signs not just of physical but of spiritual illness?

 

Reading the Bible: Day 78: Matthew 28 - Mark 8 (August 17)

Ahh, tradition.  The Pharisees had a bit of a problem.   Jesus and his disciples were walking around not washing their hands before they ate.  They weren't following the rules.  If Jesus and his disciples were supposedly such holy men, why this dismissal of the most basic of rules regarding clean and unclean hands?

Jesus responded by calling them, "hypocrites".  You see, they followed the rules with their hands but not their heart. 

If we put the Ten Commandments on the walls of our courtrooms we would have a better country (folks who say this appear to miss the irony that this is a Christian version of sharia law).

If prayer were allowed in school, bad things wouldn't happen there.  (A friend posted something to this effect on her facebook page today)

"You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men." - Jesus N. Christ

Outword piety and appearance of holiness is, in fact, the lowest common denominator of a life in Christ.  It is the transformed heart that Jesus came to get for the kingdom.  So, yes, post the ten commandments in the courtroom, but also post the Sermon on the Mount... you know, the part where Jesus presses the ten commandments and makes them EVEN HARDER.  You know, like, when you stab someone in the back you are murdering them?  How are our Christian politicians doing in this regard?

Did you know that prayer is actually allowed in schools?  Yes it is, ask any kid who didn't study the night before a big test what they are doing right before they pick up a pencil.  It is the organized prayer that all too often ends up being, again, outward displays of piety with no corresponding change of heart or life towards helping the outsider, the least, the lost, the lowly.  I'm quite ok with not making prayer another piece of bling that a "cool kid" wears to school.  

What if that kids mom and dad taught them how to pray "without ceasing" so that the fires of faith fanned on the home hearth transferred through their child to their friends as they became, then, the "aroma of Christ" to all those to whom they came in contact each day?

Traditions do not save us like some kind of magical talismen or chant.

Jesus Christ saved us.  Let's get back to that good news rather than doing our best to establish the coolest, hippest, savviest tradition and then banking on that to get us into the kingdom... 

Reading the Bible: Day 69: Ezekiel 45 - Daniel 5 (August 8)

The Book of Daniel is the story of God's lordship over all creation, including kings and empires.  Throughout the book we will see God setting up and then removing kings as He pleases.

The story of Daniel and his friends being taken into captivity has much to speak to our Church today.  Daniel, you will have read, refused to defile himself while in Babylonian captivity.  Their efforts to assimilate Daniel and his friends into their own culture and mores was met with resistance.  And this resistance was respected by the king.

Would that the Church would learn to be this resistance as well.  I'm not talking about resisting the culture of rap music or dressing like you don't care about your reputation, no.  In fact, I think the Church has been going along with our culture by playing the prim church lady shaking our proverbial finger at "kids these days" when the real decay in our communal life goes much more deeper than swear words and short skirts.

The church has gone along with our culture and allowed itself to be assimilated into world that has used it and thrown it away for political and financial gain.  The church has turned a blind eye to the needs of the poor and for advocating for the least and the lost and the lowly in order to keep its invitation to the country club elite.  We can discuss the poor over wine and pray over the lost on Sunday mornings but we dare not turn that discussion or those prayers into action or we risk being expelled from the hoi polloi.  

And so we see the church used and abused in our political process.  God, evidently, can tell politicians to run for office but then He better keep quiet when it comes time to legislate.

No, we would do our memory of Daniel well to say, "Thanks, but no thanks" to being a cultural institution.  A Christian's presence in the room should make people uncomfortable, not comfortable.

Over to the Other Side: A Sermon for 8 Pentecost 2011 Matthew 14: 22-33

8 Pentecost 2011

August 7

 

Over to the Other Side

Matthew 14: 22-33

 

Pastor Chris Enstad

 

Brothers and sisters, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen.

 

The story of Jesus and Peter walking on water has been told over and over again.  Most often it is told as a morality tale is it not?  

 

So, if you have faith, just get out of the boat and then keep your eyes on Jesus and he will take care of everything, just like with Peter.

 

And we are then given stories about people of great faith who accomplished something bigger than themselves and wouldn’t it be great if we could all do that as well?

 

But you know me by now and I’m not going to let these familiar stories get past us without taking a closer look at just what was going on.

 

Because Jesus came to the disciples walking on water, by then they had been up most of the night fighting a storm and then thought they saw a ghost, literally in the Greek the word is phantasm, and they were afraid.  But Jesus said, Take Heart, it is I, do not be afraid.

 

And Peter, before getting out of the boat which is lifted up as how faithful he was, actually challenged Jesus.  Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.

 

And Jesus did.  “Come,” he said.

 

And Peter got out of the boat and began walking towards Jesus, but soon he saw the wind and he became afraid and he began to sink and he cried out, “Lord, save me!”  And Jesus immediately reached out to him and grabbed his hand saying, “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?”  And then they got in the boat and the wind ceased and the disciples worshipped him saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

 

It is an inherent weakness in our makeup as human beings that we, more often than not, stumble into the mistaken belief that we can save ourselves.  Peter’s act, then, is truly given a high regard, look, just get yourself out of the boat and using the power of your own will you can keep your eyes on Christ and you will be saved!

 

But when we hear the text read aloud as though we haven’t heard it before or we forget all of the things other people tell us that the story is about we see that in reality relying on our own efforts doesn’t lead us to victory or salvation, no, when we rely on our own efforts we quickly succumb to the winds of life, we find ourselves in fear, we find ourselves over our heads.

 

Who of us has not found ourselves in that position, out of options, nowhere to turn, backed into a corner.  It is in those times that we finally confess the reality of our situation.  We, finally, yell out, “Lord, save me!”

 

And then what is left for us to do but to turn, then, and worship Jesus, the Son of God.

 

That is, interestingly, the only time in the Gospel of Matthew that the disciples call Jesus the Son of God.  

 

Jesus truly is the Lord of all creation.  His walking on the water shows the disciples and us that he is the master of what God has created.  Indeed when the disciples cry out in fear at what they fear is a phantasm, a ghost, Jesus answers then not, “It is I” as our Bible translates it.  No, the Greek reads “ego aimi” I AM.  These are the same words God used to identify himself in the Old Testament.  Take heart, Jesus says, I AM, do not be afraid.

 

Matthew is then elevating Jesus higher and higher is he not?  Last week we saw, in the miracle of the feeding of the 10,000 with 5 loaves and 2 fish that Jesus was more than another Moses, Moses who prayed to God for his people in the wilderness and was given food for one day, while Jesus prayed and received food for 10,000 with 12 baskets left over to boot!

 

And this miracle of walking on the water coming immediately after the feeding of the crowds when Jesus identifies himself as, “I AM” and the disciples then confirming that by worshipping him and calling him the Son of God.

 

But the hinge, the crux, the reason for this story appearing in this Gospel lies not in Peter getting out of the boat, or in Christ getting into the boat, although these are very important in and of themselves, but, for me, the heart of this story lies in the very beginning.  Immediately Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go before him to the other side.

 

Whenever Jesus and the disciples moved to the other side it means that they are moving from their people to the Gentiles.  They are moving from the people they know and to the unclean, the unlawful, the unsaved.

 

That, my friends, is our true calling today, I have pointed out how much I love the old church design that makes our sanctuary look like an upside down boat.  For we truly are in a boat and Jesus is here with us.  Yes, it may get tossed and turned from time to time, and the winds of life may threaten to overwhelm it, but it is here, in this boat that we are reminded that Jesus is Lord over all creation.  He is in the boat, we should be here too, but that boat is not made to stand still or to stay only in safe harbors of our own choosing, we, too are being sent to the other side.  We, too, are being sent to bring the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, to the least, the lost, the lowly.  We, too, are being called to go ahead of Christ to those we might consider unclean or who do not necessarily hang out with the best crowds or who have not made the best life choices.

 

Brothers and sisters, let us take this great ship, this church called Elim, out into the sea and over to the other side.

 

Alleluia!  Alleluia!

Thanks be to God.

 

 

 

Bible in 96: Day 62: Jeremiah 28-37 (August 1)

Ahh the New Covenant with Israel, this prophecy of Jeremiah is a reminder, for me, that in God we are all given a chance for a new start, a clean beginning, a new relationship.  The difference between this covenant and the last one is that rather than being written down on paper or stone, this time it would be written in our hearts.  What does a life lived in this new covenant look like?  How does the new covenant affect how we treat the Law (The Ten Commandments for instance)?