Then They Remembered

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Palm Sunday

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

John 12:12-16

“¹²The next day the great crowd that had come to the festival heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. ¹³So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord— the King of Israel!” ¹⁴Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it; as it is written: ¹⁵“Do not be afraid, daughter of Zion. Look, your king is coming, sitting on a donkey’s colt!” ¹⁶His disciples did not understand these things at first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written of him and had been done to him.”

It SO HELPS to understand the context of and the history behind an action in order to more fully appreciate what message that action conveys – or conveyed at the time that it originally occurred.   

You’ve heard me say before, in approaching scripture, that our greatest challenge is to put ourselves in the place of those who first heard or read the passages that we study – whether in our Wednesday evening studies or in Sunday School or in worship.  At two thousand years’ remove from the original events and places and people we are reading about, we have to slog back through two thousand years’ of accumulated traditional understanding and interpretation and layers upon layers of presumptions and overlays from intervening eras and scholarly and theological commentary, which includes insights that time and distance preclude us from grasping as well as cultural and societal misconceptions and prejudices and skewed understandings due to ignorance of the original situations – and in saying that I am not only talking about any given period among the last twenty centuries, but I am also including our current culture and society. 

While our exploration and reasoning and computer models and scholarly study seem to be unparalleled in history, I must admit to the possibility and even the PROBABILITY that we are potentially as off-base as any of those ‘middle ages ignorant and superstitious alchemists of central Europe’ were, simply because there is no definitive, objective and unbiased record of the events just as they happened at the time from the time. 

Absent that, we go with what we have been able to decipher from the text itself, historical documents unrelated to the text, but which corroborate the story, and known history. 

Growing up, it was always something of a mystery to me how the same people who at the beginning of the week seemed to be welcoming Jesus and praising his arrival could in the space of just a few days turn so completely against him and cry for his execution at the end of the week.

What I’ve come to understand in the study of the events is that, in the very things that I was interpreting as positive, encouraging expressions from the people of Jerusalem, seen in the light of the context in which they were expressing those feelings the seeds of the very same devastating rejection and hatred are evident. 

All three basic elements that we, viewing the events from a post-resurrection perspective understand in the light of that resurrection, have within them the plainly evident indicators of the carnage to come. 

First, to put the scene into it’s timeline context:  It is the day after last Sunday’s meal at the home of Lazarus and Martha and Mary.  It’s been maybe a week or less since Jesus raised Lazarus from the grave.  Today we talk about a ‘News Cycle’ – that is, the length of time that a story can draw attention and capture an audience before they move on to the next big story.  Depending on the story, there is usually somewhere between a 24 and a 72 hour window of time during which any given story can dominate the headlines, conversations around water coolers, and radio talk shows.   In first-century Palestine, the news cycle was quite a bit longer.  People are still hearing about Lazarus’ being raised from the dead for the first time days later.  It is THE topic of conversation.  And here is Jesus, the very one who DID THE RAISING coming into Jerusalem.  You can pretty much BET that everyone that could was going to BE along that road between Bethany and Jerusalem to see him go by. 

Now, keep in mind the larger context:  Judea is under the occupation of Rome.  People have been chafing under that rule for decades.  A Century before the Romans first moved in, the Syrians had come in and conquered Jerusalem and Hellenized the Jews (convinced them to accept Greek culture) to a degree that caused consternation in one group of former priests led by Judas Maccabeus (the name means ‘the hammerer’) they first escape to the surrounding mountains, and then come back and kick out the Syrian conquerors, and set up what ends up being the last independent Jewish state until modern times. 

One key element in that story is that, after the deliverance of the Temple and the city form the Syrians, the Maccabeans used palm branches in their celebrations.  From that time on, the palm fronds were not simply decorative and colorful, they were also reminders of an event where a relatively small number of devout men overthrew and kicked out what would by objective standards be an overwhelmingly more powerful force of an occupying empire. 

So when the people along the road to Jerusalem were waving palm fronds in Jesus’ face as he passed by, they were symbolically encouraging him to do the same thing to the Romans that the Maccabeans had done to the Syrians.  And this was most likely not lost on the Romans.

Their mood was even reflected in their cry of ‘Hosanna!’ – a chant which meant ‘Save (or deliver) us NOW’ – and in their blessing of Jesus as ‘he who comes in the name of the Lord’ (drawn from Psalm 118:26). In the original context this phrase referred to the Temple pilgrim on is way to worship, but here it was reinterpreted by the crowd to mean the king of Israel on his way to conquest. 

In the midst of this demonstration Jesus carried out a demonstration of his own by finding a young donkey on which he sat – hardly the standing or strutting of a conquering hero that would have been the expected form of approach – to symbolize his mission as a man of peace.  The act brought to mind the actions of the King of Israel in Zecharia 9:9, where, even though he is the King, he enters the city as a King, yes, but riding on the foal of a donkey, and proceeds to “cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations;” the symbolism in Jesus’ act is strong – he is stating pretty emphatically that his is not a reign of power over a people, designed and wielded to subjugate unwilling followers, but a reign of a type of power that has not been heard of or seen before.  The power that will voluntarily give itself in the place of the other person, that will surrender to the will of God in spite of the fear and danger and ultimate risk that doing so will bring. 

And here comes the editorial note in John’s Gospel:

 ¹⁶His disciples did not understand these things at first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written of him and had been done to him.

The Gospel is written decades after the events.  In retrospect, things began to make a lot more sense than they had at the time.  The immediacy of the experience was overwhelming to them – it would be to anyone who was that close to Jesus through his ministry.  On a side note, as I mentioned last week, it didn’t seem to be lost on Mary, or on any of the other women who ministered alongside as well as to Jesus.  That may be a message for a future WMU emphasis Sunday…

Finally, the post scripted note from John:  when Jesus was glorified, THEN THEY REMEMBERED that these things had been written of him and had been done to him.  It took the experience of the resurrection, and seeing and being with the resurrected Christ, combined with the indwelling Spirit after his ascension, their own memory of the events, and the witness of the scriptures that they already held in their hearts to bring them to the understanding of what Jesus was doing and saying in those actions on the road from Bethany to Jerusalem on that day, the first day of his final week.

As the disciples remembered, may we continue to remember the fullness of the meaning of what Christ did, what Christ is doing, and what Christ has done for us and for the whole world.    

Let’s pray.

Filled With The Fragrance

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Lent 5C

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

John 12:1-11

¹“Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. ²There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. ³Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. ⁴But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, ⁵“Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” ⁶(He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) ⁷Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. ⁸You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” ⁹When the great crowd of the Jews learned that he was there, they came not only because of Jesus but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. ¹⁰So the chief priests planned to put Lazarus to death as well, ¹¹since it was on account of him that many of the Jews were deserting and were believing in Jesus.”

There are different angles from which we can approach the passage this morning: 

There is the literary angle, where this text serves as a bridge connecting the resurrection of Lazarus in the previous chapter to the triumphal entry and subsequent passion of Jesus. Set exactly a week before the last supper and Jesus’ subsequent arrest and torture and death, the act of the anointing of Jesus’ feet by Mary with this nard, this incredibly expensive and fragrant ointment, prepares the listeners and readers of John’s Gospel for what is to come, and on another level makes a statement about who Jesus is … the ointment being fit for a King… the Messiah, our Savior. 

There is the Social Justice angle.  Which kind of straddles the position Judas takes and the statement Jesus makes, drawing on the fact that Jesus’ response to the criticism of Mary’s use of the ointment to wash Jesus’ feet  - his statement that in the passage is inserted as “you always have the poor with you…” is taken from Deuteronomy 15:11, which reads: “Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.”  It is a clear call to care for the poor, not to relegate them to invisibility and marginalize them.  God’s command is to engage and care for them. 

That’s not going to be the message this morning, as much as I think both of those angles are worth unpacking.  They are for another time. 

This morning I would like to focus on the act itself:  the extravagance, the “shocking intimacy” of a woman using what in Hebrew culture was considered her ‘crowning glory’ – her hair – to sop up the excess ointment that she had just used to clean the most humble part of a person’s body – the feet, since they were commonly covered with dust or mud, depending on the time of year, and would be unsightly and generally better left ignored. 

In the Gospel of Luke, the woman is left unnamed, but not uncharacterized.  She is called ‘a sinner’, the implication being that she was a prostitute, and not only does she bathe Jesus’ feet with the ointment, but also with her tears.    

I can’t completely remove us from those other two angles I mentioned.  I DO have to draw on them, the literary and the social justice angles, to fill out the picture we are viewing.

This meal DID take place sometime after Lazarus’ resurrection … in John’s Gospel it is found just a few verses earlier… it is worth noting that there is a repeated reference to the sense of smell in these two chapters … in verse 38 of chapter 11 there is a mention of the stench that will waft from the tomb where Lazarus has been laying for four days if the stone is rolled away, as Jesus has requested before raising Lazarus.  And now, in chapter 11, the house is filled with the fragrance of expensive perfume …

I’ve heard … and experienced, that the sense of smell is the most powerful sense when it comes to triggering memories.  You’ve heard me say before, the smell of chopped cilantro puts me back in the neighborhood feria, walking past the stand with all the spices and condiments… it takes very little to take me back there when I am smelling that.  I know if we went around the room and asked what smell triggers the most vivid memories for each of us, there would be little hesitation in identifying exactly what the smell was and what the memory was.  I would suspect that the writer of John’s Gospel had experienced that as well … and was communicating that here. 

There is a suggestion that the ointment – the nard – was something that Mary had been saving – or saving up for – for some time… the idea, again leading into the literary angle, of preparing Jesus’ body for a ‘proper burial’ – something that Mary was apparently able to discern was coming, but that the disciples were not – since most victims of execution by crucifixion were usually left to hang and at least partially decompose in the elements, later to be thrown into a common pit for burial with other bodies indiscriminately, there was no opportunity for preparing the body for religiously sanctioned burial before it was too late.  The element of foreshadowing comes into play. But again, that is part of the literary angle.

What I’d like to focus on is the statement that Mary was making in the simple act of washing Jesus’ feet with – whatever – it happened to be horrifically expensive perfume here, and she was doing it in front of everyone … which in and of itself was proclaiming how she felt about Jesus – after all, he HAD just resurrected her brother from the tomb, and he was already a close beloved friend. 

Can you imagine what it would have been like to share a meal with a family who, days earlier, would have been preparing a meal for mourning the passing of their brother, and have it turn into a meal WITH the brother in attendance?  … It makes you wonder what dinner conversation might have been like … it gives a whole new meaning to the question “what have you been up to lately?”  (Oh, not much, you?)

Two things stand out in the washing of Jesus’ feet by Mary.  The first IS the costliness of the ointment.  It was worth roughly the equivalent of a years’ wages for a regular workman in first century Palestine.  Roughly speaking, that would be like spending the cost of a really nice SUV on something that was going to get washed down the drain in a couple of minutes. 

The other is the element of the intimacy of the action.  Mary didn’t care that it would be considered improper for a respectable Hebrew woman to be touching a man who wasn’t her husband or her son in public, much less that she would be using her hair – which was kept covered except for her husband in a private setting – to wipe the part of the body held in lowest esteem in their society – the feet – she was, in essence, giving herself up – her name, her reputation, her standing, for Jesus. 

I remember as a younger man, I was more than willing to be considered a little excessive, a little radical, for Jesus.   There was no sense that I needed to protect anything in order to be seen as someone who was GIVEN to Christ.  

Planning a lifetime of service in ministry, it only seemed natural that I turn every expectation over to the service of the Kingdom.  Family, Home, belongings… on some level it has remained so.  But on another, it has changed slightly.  Now I have to REMIND myself that I am doing that.  It’s not so obvious.  Having a family, having responsibilities, duties, filling a place in this community – not only within this community of faith called Jerusalem Baptist Church, but also in the Warsaw and the Northern Neck communities, it has become something different – this telling myself that what I am and what I have here now is all the Lord’s to give, and the Lord’s to take away …

I guess it’s just the fact that I have to remind myself that makes it different… that’s all. 

How are we alike in this way?  As believers, I would think that on some level we all came to a point in our lives that we realized that all we had and all we supposedly ‘owned’ belonged to the Lord and would be available for the purposes of the Kingdom … but how often do we have to remind ourselves of that fact?  How long has it BEEN since we did that reminding? 

I think our reminder call comes this morning, with a woman spilling a year’s wages worth of perfume on Jesus’ feet, and wiping it up with her hair, and looking up at us and asking ‘what are you willing to give – and to give up for Christ?’ 

Let’s pray.

Be Reconciled

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Lent 4C

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

2 Corinthians 5:14-21

“¹⁴For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. ¹⁵And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.¹⁶From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. ¹⁷So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! ¹⁸All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; ¹⁹that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. ²⁰So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. ²¹For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

Periodically, you come across a passage of scripture that has so much meat in it, so much depth and breadth of meaning that, in just a few sentences, the whole of the Gospel can be drawn out.  

I’ve often heard Paul referred to as a ‘Religious Genius’, and though the term may well apply, it is slightly discomfiting … because it implies that the Christian faith was the brainchild of Paul rather than being based on the teachings of Jesus.  I DO believe in giving credit where credit is due, Paul DID crystallize much of what has come down to us as our Theology, but I do not believe that, in saying that, it diminishes the centrality of the message and the person of Jesus because if it weren’t for Jesus, I don’t think Paul could have come up with this stuff on his own. 

So let’s get down to it:  Paul is explaining to the Corinthian church why he does what he does … why he BOTHERS … why he goes to the trouble of finding a place to preach, risking and more often than not, suffering persecution, engaging people in a dialogue that results in salvation, and then spending time – weeks, months, even years, nurturing and discipling those people who have declared their faith in Jesus as the Messiah. 

What we have in this passage is a concise description of what it means to look at the world through the eyes of God. 

¹⁶From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. 

What Paul is saying is that, in taking on the Lordship of Christ, in accepting the presence of the Holy Spirit as our guide, companion and comforter, THAT is the perspective from which we begin to view the world, not from our former perspective, as fallen, fallible, frail human beings … not that we stop being that, but we hopefully begin to grow … out of it.

Our view of our fellow human beings takes a decidedly different turn.  We are called as followers of Jesus to look at them through the eyes of God – through “God goggles”, as the camp pastor at PassportKids camp told us the summer before last.  It was a great turn of phrase… the point being that, if we hold on to looking at the world through our own, narrow and limited understanding of how WE perceive the world, it is impossible to get past our preconceptions, our subjective understanding and our very superficial view of what is going on in the world around us.  We can’t get past the outside of a person … what they look like, what they wear, what they sound like, what they own … we can make a substantial EFFORT, and yes, on occasion, we CAN ALMOST come to see them apart from all that stuff … but as human beings, as created beings wired to function in that way – visual queues are what we are SUPPOSED to pick up on in order to make value judgments about someone that is approaching us.

When we make the decision to believe and declare that “Jesus is Lord” – that earliest and most fundamentally radical statement of the early church – Paul says we become new creations.

Does that mean that we get new bodies, stronger bones, more (or less) muscle and fat?  No!!  We are reborn in our spirit!  Nothing necessarily changes in outward appearance … I’ve seen pictures of me before and after July 12^th, 1973, and I look pretty much like the same emerging geek that I always was; same horn-rimmed glasses, same eyes, same nose, chin, mouth, ears.  The physical didn’t change.  What DID BEGIN to change was what was inside. 

And that is ultimately what matters.  That is what makes us who we are, that is where we define our being.  We can say, “this is what I look like, but let me tell you who I AM.” … there’s a difference. 

There’s a radio program I love to listen to, called “Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me!” on NPR, and the host of the show is a man named Peter Sagal.  Until this past week, I had never bothered to look their website up on the internet.  When I did, I had a difficult time adjusting to the image of the actual person from the image I had developed in my mind over the last few years of listening to the show.  He doesn’t look ANYTHING like what I had imagined … even though I had intentionally tried NOT to establish any preconceived notions of what he looked like.  I was on the receiving end of that experience when I worked at Bell Atlantic.  My co-workers who lived and worked out of the Baltimore/Washington area office had me pegged as someone darker, shorter, and heavier than I turned out to be.  It was somewhat amusing to see their reactions when we DID finally get to meet face-to-face! 

All that to say this:  we are not truly defined – and no one is – by our outward appearance, we are defined by the inward presence of a growing awareness of who God wants us to be in relation to each other and to God.            

And THAT is what Paul was getting at with the folks in Corinth.  They were still seeing each other from their human perspective.  Some were rich, others weren’t.  Some were slaves, others weren’t.  Some were Jews, others weren’t.  In other words, they were still seeing each other by the world’s standards, focusing on what made them DIFFERENT from each other rather than on what made them ALIKE.  And Paul is telling them – and us – that that “ALIKENESS” is the Holy Spirit dwelling in each of them and in each of us.  And insofar as that “alikeness” is a uniting element, they were to apply it to the rest of their lives and the rest of their interactions with each other – Paul calls it ‘The ministry of reconciliation’ … 

It is important to note here that it isn’t Paul who is calling the folks at Corinth to this ministry of reconciliation.  Paul points out that it is God who is doing the calling… but it is a little more than a call … different, in some way … the word used is ‘entrusted’.  If Paul had said, as he does in other places, that he ‘charged’ the Corinthians with a task, it carries the weight of … well … an order, more or less.  There’s a somewhat legal or military tilt to the idea being presented.   But when the word ‘entrust’ is used, as it is here, what impression does that leave? 

Isn’t it a more … relational term?  Doesn’t it carry more of a connotation of equals at either end of the transaction?  If I entrust something to someone, it means, just as the word includes, that I trust them to do something  … the way I would do it.  So to hear that God was reconciling the world to God’s self through Jesus Christ, and that God has entrusted THAT SAME MINISTRY to us … then we are faced with the same task that Jesus Christ was about during his ministry.   

Have we met that responsibility? Have we fulfilled it? Are there ways in which we have, and other ways in which we haven’t?

As we continue to move through the season of Lent, I hope that we would ponder these questions even as we explore the ways in which God is calling us to greater and deeper and more wonderful ways of bringing about that very ministry of reconciliation.

Let’s pray.

So That You May Live

 Sunday, March 7, 2010

Lent 3C

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

Isaiah 55:1-3, 6-9

¹“Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. ²Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. ³Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, … ⁶Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; ⁷let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. ⁸For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. ⁹For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

What’s the saying, “if it seems too good to be true … it probably is!”

To give a bit of historical context to the passage this morning:  Israel has been in exile in Babylon for the last 50 years, and even though they were in exile, the Babylonians allowed the Israelites freedoms that made the exile less … exilic … less of a hardship, if you will.  The Israelites were allowed to own land, to establish and grow businesses, to practice their faith.  The only thing they COULDN’T do was to go back to their homeland – to Palestine. 

Then, in 539 BCE, Cyrus the Great of Persia conquers Babylon and within the same year issues a decree stating that all the Israelites who want to may return to their ancestral home, back to the land that most of them have no living memory of, but only know of through the stories they heard from their parents and grandparents. 

Picture this:  you are born and grow up in a city that for all practical purposes you consider to be home.  You realize you’re a little different from your neighbors down the street, you speak fluent Babylonian as well as Hebrew, because you learned the one language from your friends and the other from your parents.  You grow up, you meet and fall in love with your husband or wife and marry, you start to have kids, you set up a little shop in the front part of your house, you start to build it up, your life seems to be coming together fairly well … word comes to town that there are things happening in battlefields far away … and then in the capital … then you start seeing soldiers coming through town in different armor than what you are used to seeing… then one day a herald comes to town and calls a press conference in the central square.  He steps up on the platform next to the fountain, pulls out a roll of parchment, and begins to read from it. 

What he reads makes the old folks in your group cry and hug each other.

The people of Israel are free to return to their home. 

But you, well, you look around at your friends and are a little mystified as to what the big deal is about… after all, you’ve got a business to run, a family to raise, a house to build, a wife to support, and you were just thinking about approaching the caterer down in the next block about that feast you were going to throw for your next anniversary in a couple of months … and you also had plans to speak to the mason about adding on that second story you and your wife have been talking about since your third child, Josiah, was born… and now she’s expecting your sixth baby … you DEFINITELY need the room.       

The conditions in Babylon were not so bad … in fact you could even say that the Israelites were doing really pretty well. So there was very little incentive for folks to leave their known comforts for what would probably end up being, first, a grueling cross-country trip from here to there, and second, once THERE, well … from what the scouts had reported, there was going to be a LOT of rebuilding to do … a LOT of free labor to donate, and not a lot of time to fix up a house for your family, much less open shop and try to make a living.  There goes the hot tub for the courtyard you were beginning to dream about. 

This part of Isaiah is written specifically for you.  It’s the voice of God calling you, inviting you to reconsider, to reevaluate what is truly important in your life.  It seems like an extravagant statement to begin with – in a land where water is a relatively scarce commodity, and was used as currency in some areas, or to establish the value of a person or of land, you’re invited to come and drink as much as you like – and not only water, but wine and milk as well… and all at no cost! What wretched excess!  Where’s the catch?  Where’s the hidden cost?

This is an invitation to live into the extravagant grace of a God who welcomes with open arms and celebrates the life given to us in ways we can hardly even imagine.  This is an invitation from the one who MADE heaven and earth to partake IN the bounty of heaven and earth through HIM. 

It is a gentle invitation, away from what we can so easily come to consider significant, important to our wellbeing and meaningful parts of our lives, and they actually end up being so much dross, so much garbage. 

Lent is a time to consider that invitation even more profoundly than during the rest of the year as Christians.  Our call is to constantly be vigilant and intentional about NOT letting other things cloud our vision, blur our focus away from God.  But during this season especially, we are invited to delve even deeper, explore more fully those aspects of our life that we so easily take for granted: our comforts, our enjoyments, our habits, and hold them up to the purifying light of the gospel – that invitation that extends beyond the limits of the tribes of Israel into the world at large and beckons us to a life of engagement – a life given to God, to love and to serve through loving and serving others more than ourselves. 

If we have been living as though what is temporary matters, as if what we own and can buy and touch and show off to our friends is what life is all about, we might be understandably uncomfortable at the prospect of approaching a Holy God with that in our baggage.  After all, we hear over and over again of a vengeful, angry God, a jealous God who punishes the wicked for their iniquities. 

But in our passage this morning, we have a clear image of a God that is not so inclined to destruction, who is more inclined to do the opposite:  verse 7:

“Let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.”      

That is the Gospel – the good news, told hundreds of years before Jesus walked the earth. 

And the writer seems to be reading the minds of those who will hear these words read or who will read them and ask themselves … “WHAT??  What about the righteous? Those who HAVE kept the commandments, who HAVE lived in the fear of the Lord, who HAVE kept the faith?? 

God’s answer is simple, however hard it may be for us to hear:

^“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

In short, God is simply saying ‘you don’t understand because … you are not me.’ 

Is this really too good to be true? 

Maybe. 

I’m going to go ahead and trust that it IS true. 

How about you?

Let’s pray.