sermon-jan-24-2010-mp3 (Click here to listen to an audio version of this sermon.)

 

Today, we continue exploring the theme of “manifestation.” What does it to say that we are called to “manifest” God’s presence – individually and collectively?

 

Today’s Old Testament and Gospel readings focus on how the presence of God is manifested in and through the reading of Scripture.  In the reading from Nehemiah, Ezra the priest stands up on a wooden platform and reads the law in the square before the Water Gate in Jerusalem. This would be comparable to a modern day preacher climbing up into a pulpit in a huge cathedral to preach to a large crowd. The people who were listening to Ezra were exiles from Mesopotamia who had returned to their ancestral homeland. When they returned to Jerusalem, their city lay in ruins. Solomon’s temple had been looted of its treasures and then burned. The same thing had happened to the royal palaces and the city’s defense walls had been demolished.

 

The situation is not all that different from what we have witnessed with the recent devastation in Haiti. Although it’s impossible for us to understand the magnitude of the loss and the suffering that has and will continue to take place there, we can understand that, out of this chaos, the Haitian people will eventually come a new understanding of themselves and their identity as a nation. This is what happened following the devastation of Germany in World War II. This is what happened when the Japanese people rebuilt after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is what has begun to happen for the people of New Orleans. The task of rebuilding is more than the reconstruction of buildings. The spiritual foundation of the people has to be restored as well.

 

The people of Jerusalem had been living among foreigners and they had flirted with losing their religious identity. Many of them had married foreigners and had risked forgetting the teachings of the law. Fearing the spiritual collapse of the people, Ezra and Nehemiah resolve to set before the people the revealed way of life that was God’s intention for them. The people will need to recommit to life as it was set forth by Moses and the Commandments if they’re going to avoid repeating the same apostasy that had led to their destruction. And when the people understood what Ezra was reading they wept – wept out of fear and sorrow for what they had lost, and wept for joy for rediscovering their identity as God’s people.

 

What does this passage have to say to us today about how we make God’s presence known to others? We are not living in chaos. Our church has not burned down or been devastated by an earthquake or a tornado. But, if we look around us, we could say that the danger for us of losing our identity as God’s  people might be more likely to come from the fact that, like the exiled Israelites living in Babylon, each of us lives amidst a culture that, in subtle ways, questions and even undermines many of the things that we value.

 

What exactly is our identity as God’s people? And what makes the church distinctive? For example, what makes it different from a social or civic organization, like Rotary, or Toastmasters, or a school PTO? And why is it important for church communities to develop a clear sense of purpose or mission that spells out why they are different from any other community? In a time when mainline churches are losing members and people are less and less inclined to seek out a church community, maybe we should be asking this question of ourselves.

 

If we move to the Gospel reading, we see something similar going on, but there’s also something very different from the Nehemiah reading. In the Hebrew tradition God is manifested through the power and reality of the spoken word – at creation, God spoke and it was so.  But with the coming of Christ, this changes. The Word takes on a fuller dimension as the “word became flesh and lived among us,” to borrow a phrase from the Gospel of John. In this reading Jesus is giving his first sermon and it sets the agenda for his entire ministry.  As he speaks, Jesus proclaims the good news of the coming of the Kingdom of God and he is acutely aware that the kingdom of God has come into the world in a radically new way. God’s kingdom is not something far off. It’s not something that will be fulfilled only in the future, at the end of history, when the Messiah comes, as any faithful Israelite would have believed. God’s kingdom has broken into the world in Jesus, in his words, in his actions, in his life.

 

This means that we are not to look for the Kingdom of God in rules, regulations and religious duties, as did the scribes and Pharisees. We are to seek the Kingdom of God within our selves, within our own lives. The kingdom of God, Jesus says, is like a mustard seed. It starts out as something very small and grows to become the tallest tree. God’s kingdom starts out as a quiet call to listen to God’s voice within us, and then it grows as we become more attentive.

 

If we listen patiently and stretch ourselves to discern God’s will in our lives, we will be drawn to identify ourselves with Jesus and with the things that he does to bring healing, freedom and renewal to people.  Jesus was called to confront the things that imprison, bind and restrict human life from becoming whole and healed. And so our spiritual journey that begins in patient listening to the growth of God’s kingdom within, leads to our willingness to confront the things in our society and in our community which restrict and block the kingdom of God.

 

What is this passage saying to us today? I think it raises a question about the purpose of the church.  Is the church an institution that exists largely for the benefit of its members….to provide a place where people can come together to socialize, or to support and encourage each other, or is the church a group of people who have dedicated themselves to carrying out  specific ministries that do what Jesus suggests we should be doing? Do our ministries actually change lives by healing people, freeing people from what binds them, confronting the things in our society that restrict human life from being whole?

 

Listen to what the well known Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann says about the church today and about how churches receive the gospel message:

     We preach mostly to believers. Yet the gospel is too readily

     heard and taken for granted, as though it contained no  unsettling news

     and no unwelcome threat. What began as news in the gospel is easily assumed,

     slotted, and conveniently dismissed. We depart having heard, but without

     noticing the urge to transformation that is not readily compatible with our

   comfortable believing that asks little and receives less. The gospel is thus a truth

   widely held, but a truth greatly reduced. It is a truth that has been flattened,

   trivialized, and rendered inane. Partly, the gospel is simply an old habit among us,

   neither valued nor questioned.

 

Brueggeman’s words remind me of an old New Yorker cartoon. Two yogis are show sitting at the lip of a cave on top of a high mountain, presumably in the Himalayas. Pictured in the lotus position, looking skyward, they were obviously meditating but have been interrupted by a loud 747 passing overhead. One of them looks at the other and says, “Ah, they have know-how, but do they have know-why?”  In this gospel reading Jesus answers the know-why: In so many words he says, “The spiritual reality of the Gospel is to be manifested in physical reality on earth.”

 

This past week we have seen no better example of the “know-why” of the Gospel then the incredible relief efforts going on in Haiti. Today in Haiti, even as I speak, we are witnessing the Gospel happening….we are witnessing the Spirit of the Lord being brought to bear on human suffering.

 

Of course, as the situation in Haiti moves off the front page, as it will, and as our attention turns elsewhere, we will be left with these questions about our identity and about how we are manifesting the gospel in our ministries here at Good Shepherd. 

 

Jesus came to his hometown and preached a sermon that probably made people’s hair stand on end. At first, his listeners were complimentary, but then his audience got so mad that they tried to drag him to the edge of town and stone him. 

 

A few weeks ago, a woman came out of church and said, “Craig I didn’t like your sermon at all.” I smiled, looked her in the face and said, “That’s a good thing. It probably means you’ve been paying attention to the gospel.”

As we go forward this year, let’s not just content ourselves with being a people who know “how.” Let’s strive to be a people who know “why.” Amen.