Theirs Is The Kingdom

Sunday, July 27, 2003
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
(2 Timothy 2:22), Matthew 5:1-10

5:1 When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. 2 Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying: 3 "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 4 "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. 5 "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. 6 "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. 7 "Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. 8 "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. 9 "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. 10 "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Righteousness” is an unsettling word.

More often than not, it comes with the word “self” in front of it and is, of course, a negative term. Webster’s defines self-righteousness as being righteous or moral in one’s own opinion. We could dwell on self-righteousness easily for the next 20 minutes and leave here feeling all the better for it. Being self-righteous is certainly not a desirable character trait, and we’re usually much more likely and able to identify it in others as opposed to ourselves. But it is that way with any given sin.

What I’d like to concentrate on this morning is what it means to BE righteous, and perhaps touch on what we can do to hunger and thirst for righteousness.

What is the big deal about righteousness, anyway? Why fret over it? Why pursue it at all?

If we are to be a people called of God and called by God’s name, as Dan mentioned last Sunday night, then we need to understand who God is.

God is, first and foremost, Holy. That is a theological term. It is also an ethical term, but it was a theological term first. Holiness is the distinctive thing about God. It is that which, more than all other things, makes God God. God is Other. God is God and not human.

A Jewish Rabbi was asked what the essence of Judaism was, and after a moment’s thought, he replied, “Ethical monotheism. God is not only one; he is also ethical. He is just and requires justice of those who believe in him.”

Men, women, and things are not holy within themselves. They become holy because they are dedicated to God. The people of Israel were holy, not because of any virtue, goodness, or gift within them, but because God had chosen them to be his people.

Yet the term holy was ethicized. That this could happen tells a lot about Judaism and Christianity. It indicates the heavy stress both religions put on morality, and how the theological and ethical are bound together. The theological and the ethical belong together the way the back and palm of my hand are bound together.

When we say that God is holy in an ethical sense, we say that God is just and righteous.

God is Just. When we say that God is just, we mean that he is faithful, trustworthy, and responsible. God wants life ordered with equity and fairness. God becomes angry when the strong take advantage of the weak and the rich exploit the poor.

God is righteous. Although God’s righteousness and justice mean essentially the same thing, God is spoken of as being righteous much more frequently than as being just (see Ps 7:9; Jer 9:24). The reason is likely that righteousness expresses relationship better than justice does.

The righteous person God calls each of us to be is a two-directional person who is right with God and right with his neighbor. Therefore, justice or righteousness is relational in nature.

The relationship through which we, as a fellowship of believers, are called to pursue righteousness, to BE righteous, is that relationship we have with God through Jesus Christ. I’m not talking of salvation as such here, though that is an integral part OF the relationship we have with Christ. I’m talking of what it means to live out that salvation, to live out the righteousness that we are granted by faith in Christ.

Rosa Parks was asked years after the event, why she sat down in the front of the bus that fateful day. Her answer was not “I wanted to address the issue of racial injustice in the United States”, nor was it “I wanted to start the civil rights movement” it was, “I was tired”. One gets the sense from her answer that she wasn’t just talking about her feet, but about her heart and her soul as well.

Being righteous means being so in tune with the Spirit of God that we are able to discern what grieves him, and likewise are grieved over the same injustice. The righteous person is in right relations with his or her brother or sister BECAUSE OF a right relationship with God. Such a person is socially oriented. Humans are social beings. We seek the company of others like us. Generally speaking, we do not live in solitude. We require SOME degree of interaction with our fellow human beings. God’s call to be in relationship with him is also a call to be in community. In doing that, we are called to preserve the place and wholeness of the community, meeting the demands of communal living.

The challenge to us is immunity.

If you live with something long enough, you begin to take it for granted. You forget that it is there, you consider it a part of everyday life. Women who have been in abusive relationships, when asked why they didn’t leave, often reply “I didn’t know it could be any different.” We become immunized to the wrong that is in the world. Partly, that is one way we protect ourselves. We philosophically look over the day’s news and end up saying “and that’s the way it is”, when God has called us to acknowledge that that may be the way it IS, but that’s not the way it needs to stay.

In Luke 4:18 we find Jesus announcing his ministry at the synagogue:

"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,”

We cannot, must not ignore the prophetic element in God’s call to follow Christ.
We are in the position to recognize an injustice and call a spade a spade, regardless of who it is perpetuating the injustice.

One of my favorite television dramas is ‘The West Wing’. In one episode last year, a new member of the staff finds himself facing the president for the first time in a hasty and unbeknownst to him, predetermined meeting. The President rattles off some supposed policy statement, and the man, petrified, starts to agree and walk away, but hesitates, and still shaky, stands his ground and with humility, respect, but ultimately steely resolve, speaks up against what the President has just said. The characters stare at each other for a moment, and the President breaks the standoff by saying, “speak truth to power, good job”.

How often do we find ourselves in a similar position, maybe not in the white house, or a Hollywood sound stage, or for that matter in the line at the grocery store, but fail to say anything?

Last Tuesday I drove to the history land nursery site on Newland Rd, and got there a little earlier than usual. Jesus, the foreman, who has made it to the last two gatherings we’ve had, was driving a small tractor across the drive as I arrived. He motioned me to come over to him and I did, and I sat down next to him. We rode over to a gas tank so he could fill up the tank of the tractor, and as it was filling, he asked if he could share something with me, a bit of constructive criticism. He told me that he’d heard from some of the men who are there that I seemed too timid, too hesitant in my devotionals, and that he didn’t know if that was due to uncertainty with the language, or the subject matter, or what, but that it would be better received if I were a little more forceful, more self-assured in my delivery.

It brought to mind all those instances in Acts where we read of Paul or the other apostles speaking boldly of the Gospel of Christ. So I am working on my delivery at the devotionals, convicted by the words of a fellow pilgrim.

I mentioned at the beginning of the message that we need to understand who God is. We’ve been discussing righteousness throughout; did you know that the word righteousness is used 223 times in the Bible? Even though righteous is a relational term; it is not a term that would draw people close TO God on first reading.

We are agreed that the Bible is God’s word, but there are few attempts to define God in the Bible. It is almost as if the Bible as a whole is trying to give us a picture of who God is, and succeeds in presenting Jesus to us, but hardly ever attempts to explicitly put it down in words.

In the New Testament, there are 3 attempts. Three simple words each. John 4:24: God is Spirit. 1 John 1:5: God is Light. And 1 John 4:16: God is Love.

What is it that compels us to attempt righteousness? What is it that calls us out of our sin and into that right relationship with God? What else but his love? And that love best expressed in the face and person of Jesus.

If you are here today burdened by your sense of unrighteousness, perhaps you are feeling that call of a loving God who is telling you “it is not your righteousness that I require, but your obedience in following me through my son Jesus.” We invite you to take on HIS righteousness, and to follow him as Lord of your life.

If you are here and have already claimed that righteousness in following Christ, your invitation is to turn that righteousness to Justice. Live out that right relationship not only with God, but with your fellow man. If you would like to do that with this body of believers, we would welcome you.

If you are here and feel like you have been immunized to injustice, that you’ve developed a jaded eye to the world and how it is, your challenge is to shed that scales and see the world as God sees it, a broken, hurting, place that even now groans for the coming Kingdom of God, and to join in the inbreaking of that kingdom.

Lets pray.

By Water and the Spirit

Sunday, July 20th, 2003
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton, VA
Matthew 3:11-17, Romans 6:4

I have a question for you:

What does God do when someone is baptized?

Baptism is an “ordinance”. In Baptist doctrine, that means it is a command given by our Lord, which we follow out of simple obedience to the Great Commission we find in Matthew 28:19 to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” It is one of two, the other being the ordinance of the Lord’s Supper, or Communion, which we celebrated last Sunday. As things have worked out, we will be celebrating the second ordinance this afternoon at the Coates’.
In our passage, we find Jesus asking for Baptism.

Why would Jesus of all people ask for Baptism?

Why would he even feel it necessary to follow where John had led hundreds if not thousands of others before him to be baptized for repentance from sin? If anyone didn’t need this, it was Jesus. If anyone KNEW he didn’t need this for the same reason as all the others who were going through it, it was Jesus.
John was aware of that. He was aware of his own sin, when he looked at Jesus and says, "I need to be baptized by you, and you come to me?”

In his following statement, Jesus redefined the purpose of the act of baptism.

"Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness."

What Jesus is saying, and what convinced John to go ahead and baptize him, is that this is the next step. This is what needs to happen now. The event marks the beginning of Christ’s public ministry. In a sense, it marks Christ’s commissioning to service. In the passage, we also find the presence of the trinity – the Body of Christ, the words of the Father, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

If we turn to Paul’s letter to the church at Rome, chapter 6, verse 4 and following, we find the model for baptism that has been dominant in the church since the 4th century:

4 Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. 5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. 6 We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. 7 For whoever has died is freed from sin. 8 But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.

Paul goes on to describe baptism as our symbolic death to the old life, to sin, and rebirth to new life in Christ, free from sin. It still carries with it an element of John’s baptism, in that it represents the cleansing from sin, which comes with repentance, but it also speaks of what we are alive TO: ‘So we too might walk in newness of life”

What we find in both passages is very simply the presence of God. What George Beasley Murray calls a ‘rendezvous of grace’ – God has agreed to meet us in Baptism. In that we are called to unity with Christ, through his death, burial and resurrection, suggests that God has said, “When you do this, I will be there”.

Today we will be observing two points in the lives of members of our community of faith where this is happening.
In baptizing Hannah, we are observing only the second public step in her lifelong pilgrimage to follow Christ. The newness of life she is beginning to experience spiritually is not that far removed from her own newness in this world.

In baptizing Soozin, we are reminded more of Christ’s baptism. When Jesus spoke of the baptism he was requesting to be performed as a way to ‘fulfill all righteousness’, that term is a direct reference to the will of God. It is ‘the next step’ which follows a lifetime of steps that have already shown a faithful sensitivity and obedience to that will – and to the leading of the Holy Spirit in her life. When she came up here a few weeks ago to join, ask for baptism, and in rededication of her life, it was a humbling moment for me. To see a life already dedicated be Re-dedicated is a challenge to us all to find new ways by which we can follow Christ.
In a couple of days, we will observe a third instance of this newness of life.

Most of you know that Fox Schools passed away this past Friday. On Tuesday, Beulah Baptist Church and Jerusalem Baptist Church, both families of faith to which he belonged while with us, will celebrate his passing into the new life, which awaits all of those who have given their lives to Christ.

This is what it comes down to:

John said “but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; … He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

In joining Christ in his death, burial and resurrection, we welcome into our lives the Holy Spirit, who brings to us not only life, but who also works in us to purify and refine us – makes us into who God intended us to be. It is an unfinished task while we are on earth. The Glory of which we are a part is not made fully evident until we reach up from that last resting place, grasp the hand of him who led us and preceded us there, and are lifted up into eternal newness of life.

If you are here today and have not yet followed Christ, your invitation is to be buried to sin and death, and to be reborn in newness of a life of commitment and obedience to Christ and his Lordship.

If you are here and have already dedicated your life to Christ and followed him in baptism, your invitation is to grasp again that sense of the newness of Christ in you. If you are looking for a church home, a place of service, and people with whom you can work alongside for the Kingdom, we would welcome you.

If you are here and have long since followed Christ in baptism, and ARE a part of this family of faith, your invitation is to be an encourager to those who come after you, to be an example and to live out Christ in such a way that you are transparent and HE is Apparent, to anyone with whom you come in contact.

Let’s pray.

Just a Gift

Sunday, July 13th, 2003
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton, VA
Mark 14:17-31

Steve accepted the gift of a brass and copper rooster I'd brought him with grace and an introspective, quiet air. Holding the small wall hanging, he asked, “Did you know the rooster is a traditional representation of Peter? It was used by the early church as a reminder to all of us that, at some point in our lives, we are guilty of betraying Christ.”

My first reaction was “Gee, Steve, it's just a PRESENT!” but I was taken aback by the comment, struck by it's truth, and surprised at the simplicity and directness of the symbolism. It had turned a passing act in a friendship into a searing moment in memory, reminding me of just how likely I was to betray our Lord.

In the passage, Jesus has just uttered a conversation stopper. He has gathered his disciples in the upper room, and is sharing the Passover meal with them. He knows it is probably his last night to be with them, and he knows, with more clarity and certainty than anyone else in the room, what the next hours will mean to him and to them.

It is at the beginning of the meal, he shocks them all by telling them that one of those who is sitting around the table with him, who is dipping his bread into the same bowl with him, will betray him. That act, the dipping into the same bowl, would not be something unusual. In Biblical, as well as modern-day Palestine, it is part of the tradition that everyone share from the same, central bowl at the table. The identification of the betrayer as someone who is dipping his bread into “the same bowl” was as much an indictment of all as of one of those who were gathered that evening. Their reactions are predictable. After all, they’ve been following him around for the last 3 years, watching him heal, preach, and teach. Each in turn responds, “Surely, not I?” There seems to be an assumption on their part that things would continue the way they had been going all along.

We do that as well, don’t we? We get into the automated mode, occupying ourselves with the regular, predictable, expected, and less-obtrusive aspects of living out our Christian Walk … we have our regularly scheduled meetings, our appointments, our gatherings, with the same people, reviewing the same issues, arriving fort the most part, to the same conclusions, and find ourselves slipping into autopilot. It is when we are confronted with the unexpected that we are made aware of our hidden weakness.

It really doesn't take any effort at all, does it? We’ve all had those moments, the ones we’d rather forget. The harsh word to an innocent child, the disengagement from someone who obviously, desperately, needs us to become Christ to them, to reach out with a helping, caring hand, and feed, or clothe, or just listen to them, or an action, taken in direct opposition to what Paul called “that which I want to do”, that tears at the very essence of Christ in us, and betrays him to a world that may only have that single, fleeting chance to see him through us. We’ve all had those times when we knew, as soon as the moment was passed, that we’d been Peter, and we can almost hear the echo of the cock’s crow dying in our ears.

It is utter darkness, to be confronted with one's weakest self.

But the story doesn’t end with Jesus telling them that one of them will betray him. Neither, for that matter, does the meal.

In the Gospel of Mark, it is AFTER this darkest moment, AFTER Christ has acknowledged the betrayer in their midst, and despite that, that he picks up the loaf of bread, blesses it, breaks it, and passes it to his disciples, "Take; this is my body" and follows that with the cup, saying "This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many”. Mark seems to be pointing out the proactive nature of God’s grace. Before Peter has denied him, Jesus offers him the wine and the bread. Christ’s invitation precedes our sin. He knows our weaknesses, he understands that we will fail, yet he still extends the invitation to remain with him at the table, to join him and to eat of the bread, drink from the cup, to share in the coming of his Kingdom. In Luke’s account of the last supper (22:32), We find Jesus telling Peter that after he has turned back, he will go on to strengthen his brother’s faith with his own. Jesus not only knew that Peter would deny him, but that he would also become the pilar of the early church that we read of today.

This week in Vacation Bible School, the theme has been Jesus, our greatest treasure. In the last session before the closing on Friday, the question was posed: if Jesus is OUR greatest treasure, what treasure can we bring Jesus?

The answer, of course, is the treasure of our lives; our hearts, minds, and souls.

We have an opportunity to respond in kind.

Peter’s vehement statement to Jesus that “Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you” proved to be hollow in the short term, but just look at what Peter did after he turned back. It was through the power of the resurrection that Peter’s denial and Christ’s forgiveness and acceptance of him on the shore of the sea of Galilee that Peter became the anointed missionary and evangelist, who brought thousands to join the church that we read of in Acts. Tradition has it that Peter ultimately DID die for Christ.

The disciples did not know on Thursday night that Sunday was coming. We here have the unspeakable grace of knowing what happened. We stand on this side of the resurrection, and can claim all the joy that comes from that.

The Jewish understanding of remembrance is different from the Greek, and western understanding. Remembrance in western tradition is a more superficial event. It is strictly recalling a memory, an intellectual exercise. In Jewish tradition, the event is in a sense, relived. Christ is calling us to relive the moment. We’ve been revealed as capable of betraying him, and yet we are still welcomed at the table, because ultimately, Christ knows our best selves as well as our worst. Christ calls us to communion with him and to remember that, in spite of what we know we are capable of, his grace, his sacrifice, his love, has covered it all.

That copper and brass wall hanging was just a gift, but with a few words, the gift had been transformed into a treasure, perhaps for the recipient, but most certainly for me.

It is in those few words that this ordinance becomes a treasure. We gather to proclaim Christ’s sacrifice. His broken body, his shed blood. There is little to rejoice in for that. Jesus’ pain and suffering should have been our own. Yet he willingly took it on himself, and bore our punishment, and offers to us his eternal life. We are reliving that evening. We’ve been revealed, unmasked, and at the same time invited. We are still guests at the table, and it is truly cause for joy to come to the table and accept the invitation to the feast. There is still a solemnity to it in that, if we accept the invitation, we are invited to follow Christ – to carry his yoke. To suffer his passion, his COMpassion, to live as he lived, to love as he loved, and to give as he gave – fully and completely – our lives to God.

Nation of God

Nation of God
Sunday, June 29th, 2003 (first sermon preached as Pastor)
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Psalm 117

1 Praise the Lord, all you nations! Extol him, all you peoples! 2 For great is his steadfast love toward us, and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever. Praise the Lord!

He’s protecting her!

The image was unforgettable. It was 1991, and I was watching a news report on the U. S. troop activities among the Kurdish people of northern Iraq, in the aftermath of the gulf war, trying to deal with the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of refugees into eastern Turkey.

In the background, an army helicopter was lifting off after having delivered a load of supplies. A marine was in the middle foreground, kneeling towards the camera, his arms around a little girl, probably no more than 5 or 6 years old. As the helicopter lifted off, the marine hugged the girl closer to him, wrapped his arms around her, and took his cap off and placed it over her head, protecting her from dust and small pieces of debris being tossed around.

The following Christmas, my sisters, brother and I arranged to all be in Chile together, it being my parents’ last one to spend there before returning to the States for retirement. We were traveling in the southern part of the country, and stopped for a meal at a restaurant in Pucón, a small town on the shores of lake Villarica. As we sat waiting for our meal, our discussion wandered to how we each felt about the war that had been fought earlier that year. Suffice it to say that the opinions around the table ranged from one end of the political spectrum to the other. In recounting the moment captured on videotape that I’d seen, I got so choked up that I was almost unable to complete the thought.

Celebrating the 4th of July has always been a mixed bag for me. Having grown up in the southern hemisphere, July is deep WINTER, not high summer, so there were not many picnics and fireworks displays to attend. There were OBSERVATIONS of the fourth of July, by expatriate citizens as well as Chileans who were friendly towards or admiring of the United States.

The only opportunities I had to attend and enjoy a 4th of July picnic was when we were back here in the states on furlough. That ended up being twice before I came back to the States ‘for good’. Once when I was 7, then 10. What was most memorable – and miserable - for me, was the heat and the humidity of Western Kentucky, rather than anything having to do with commemorating the Declaration of Independence. I’d grown up on the edge of the Atacama desert, the driest desert in the world. My sense of identity during childhood was much more tied up with Chile’s equivalent of George Washington: Bernardo O’Higgins (that’s a good Hispanic name, isn’t it?) in his struggle to win independence from Spain and Arturo Prat and his heroic and fatal boarding of a Peruvian ironclad ship in the War of the Pacific.

The context in which my Chilean patriotism was developing was radically different from that in which my sense of patriotism for the United States would develop several years later. Chile was under a military dictatorship for the last 7 years I lived there. There was no vocal opposition to the regime of Augusto Pinochet, or if there was, they were summarily labeled communists and if not already, exiled or imprisoned. I have no real memory of opposition being voiced even in small groups, until my last two years of high school, and then by only 2 or 3 people in my school. It was simply unheard of.

Coming back to the states, by contrast, presented me with a seeming cacophony of voices from all sides of any given issue. There was no ONLY and ‘official’ – and therefore in my mind correct – position espoused by a fatherly figurehead.

At first, I felt lost amidst the clamor. While I longed for the safety I felt in hearing and accepting a single point of view, in being confronted by thoughtful, intelligent, reasoned opposition I began to develop a sense of respect and appreciation for the free interchange of ideas. I did not always agree with one side or the other, but the manner of discourse was captivating. I’ll admit, CSPAN is not my favorite channel, or one that I will linger on for more than a few minutes, except on rare occasion, but to know that congress is in session, and policy is being hammered out, and compromises are being reached for hopefully the good of the majority of the people, is a powerful thing, especially when you’ve lived in a society that at one point in recent history decided to settle differences with bullets instead of debates.

Even more powerful than that, witnessing a presidential election has proven to be an emotionally moving experience for me. However you feel about the politics involved, the fact that the government of this country is able to peacefully transfer power between parties is still a point of which we as citizens can be justifiably proud.

There are two flags at the front of this sanctuary: The flag of the United States, and the Christian flag. How do you feel about both being present? (Janice answered: Proud!) Does having them both say more about how we as a congregation feel about the separation of Church and State, or freedom of religion? For a long time, I had to struggle with the fact that a national symbol was displayed in a house of worship, where we preach that God loves all people, regardless of nationality. Then I realized that having the flag of the United States in the sanctuary was recognition of the fact that within our identity as Christians, we must also recognize, acknowledge, and celebrate our identity as citizens of this country, with our own national history, culture, and worldview.

It is entirely appropriate to pray for God’s blessings on our country, just as we would for our community and our congregation. It is entirely appropriate to thank God for blessing our nation, just as we would thank God for blessing our community and our congregation. We would, in fact, not be fulfilling our role as intercessors in prayer if we did not do so.

As Christians, we are called to be salt and light. When you add salt or light, both are dispersed into whatever medium they are introduced – be that a dish of food, a darkened room, or a nation.

We must be thankful that we live in a society that values freedom. That in and of itself is cause for praise. Were it not for the experiences of the founders and signers of the declaration of independence with ‘established churches’ in the various colonies and in England, and their foresight in dis-establishing a state church, we would not be who and what we are today, but probably something very much different.

As Baptists, we can be proud of having had some influence in the first amendment being included in the bill of rights. One of the basic tenets of our doctrine is the separation of Church and State. Both the freedom TO practice our faith as well as to be without faith have to be true options and are necessary if we are to allow for a choice to be freely made to follow Christ.

At the same time that we are thankful for that freedom, we must also recognize that our truest, deepest, and most profound freedom is not derived from legal documents, but through the working of the Holy Spirit in our lives. In our own congregation, through news from Sondra and Tiffany Smith, we know of countries where it is illegal to become a follower of Christ, and yet it still happens. The freedom we find in accepting Christ as savior is found regardless of whether we are here in Emmerton or across the world.

In Galatians 5, Paul writes:

13 For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. 14 For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." 15 If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.

In three sentences, we receive from Paul a synopsis of what it means not only to be a member of the body of Christ, but a good citizen as well – of whatever country you live in. Think of it. One preacher has said, if we all followed this command, we wouldn’t need any laws! We wouldn’t need any police, or courts, or jails either!

In 1st Peter, 2:9, we find an even clearer proclamation of what it means to follow Christ:

9 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

And now we find ourselves back at the Psalm. What is our response to freedom, to God? What is our response to Christ? God does not coerce. God does not force us. God allows us to choose. God draws us near, in infinite love. And in joyous reply, we respond in praise and worship:

1 Praise the Lord, all you nations! Extol him, all you peoples! 2 For great is his steadfast love toward us, and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever. Praise the Lord!

If you are here this morning and are oppressed, weighed down by the law of sin, and guilt, and shame, your invitation is to come and learn what it feels like to be the citizen of a new Kingdom, free from that burden.

If you are here this morning and are looking for a place where you can continue to exercise the freedom you’ve already found in Christ, your invitation is to join with us in being that salt and light.

If you are here this morning and already know Christ and are already a member of this family of faith, your challenge is to find new ways to spread that light, to be that salt, to be ever more aware of the Holy Spirit’s movement in your life, and to be as responsive to him as possible.

Let’s pray.

Tough Act to Follow

Sunday, June 15th, 2003
Upper Essex Baptist Church
Trinity Sunday
Father’s Day

Text:

Luke 15:11-32

11 Then Jesus said, "There was a man who had two sons. 12 The younger of them said to his father, "Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.' So he divided his property between them. 13 A few days later, the younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living. 14 When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. 15 So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. 16 He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything. 17 But when he came to himself he said, "How many of my father's hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! 18 I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; 19 I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands." ' 20 So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. 21 Then the son said to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.' 22 But the father said to his slaves, "Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. 23 And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; 24 for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!' And they began to celebrate. 25 "Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. 26 He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. 27 He replied, "Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.' 28 Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. 29 But he answered his father, "Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. 30 But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!' 31 Then the father said to him, "Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. 32 But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.' "

“Just STOP!”

I could hear them in my voice: exhaustion, stress, anger, and impatience.

The words were directed at my daughter, Hannah, who is 7, and had just a few minutes earlier been told by her grandmother that she was not going to be able to read the promised book to her that night because it was already 10 O’clock, and we were all going to be getting up early the next day to move the family to Emmerton. Hannah’s Uncle Scott and Aunt Becky and cousins Breanna and Colin had come over to help us load the truck and spend some last few hours with us before the move.

I had spent the day driving a vanload up to the parsonage and then loading the truck. 5 hours of driving and 4 hours of sweating and straining to get furniture and boxes had taken it out of me.

The computer was set up in the room where the kids were sleeping, and I was in need of some dedicated time to compose my thoughts for this morning, and was sitting at the desk.

Hannah was disappointed as only a 7 year old can be when a promise to them is not kept. She was quietly crying and sitting on the bed. Unknown to me, her grandmother walked past the doorway to the bedroom, and she called out in a plaintive voice,

“Grana, where are you going?”

I whipped around and said,

“Just STOP! It is after 10, and you need to go to sleep! Please lay down! So STOP!”

I could hear in my voice how harsh I was sounding, how cold, how uncaring that she was probably crying in part because this was the last night that we were going to be living so close to Grana, with whom, by all counts, Hannah has a special relationship, a mutual admiration society, if you will, and Grana wasn’t going to be able to read to her one last time there.

*****

Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son is, very simply, the story that brought me back to Christ.
Steve Shoemaker, one of my former Pastors, has a sermon on the parable, in which he describes the homecoming scene differently from the way I had envisioned it in my mind:

The father lives not out in the wilderness, but on the edge of a town, at the end of Main Street. His son has to walk THROUGH town in order to get home. The younger son’s behavior has been an offense not only to the family but also to the village. He has broken the rules that help keep a community intact. The whole town probably condemned the boy. Their attitude was, “If he comes back, let him come back a beggar!”

In the parable, Jesus vividly describes how much the father loves the son. Rather than let him suffer the humiliation and abuse of the villagers, the father has compassion, and HE sprints to his son and hugs him and kisses him – the verb describes affectionate, repeated kissing, more like a mother greeting a long-lost child than a father’s formalized greeting.

The Father stepping into our place.

Taking on our humiliation, our abuse, and our shame. THAT is why Jesus did it. God takes it upon himself to reconcile the world TO himself through the cross.

God runs to us.

The gauntlet that we should have walked, all the shame and humiliation we so richly deserve, is taken and wiped away by the love of a sprinting, hugging, kissing father who wants nothing so much as to welcome us home.

The image of such a loving God is compelling enough to draw me closer every time I read this passage only if I put myself in the prodigal son’s position.

From either of the other two perspectives, the parable becomes a challenge.

There are at least two other stories going on in addition to the prodigal son’s, though. There is the older son’s story, and there is the father’s story.

Being an older brother myself, and having a younger brother who at one time in his life was prodigal in his own way, there for a while I was more than able to identify with the elder son in the parable. I was the one who’d been ‘the good son’. The judgmental, almost pharisaic way in which the elder son responds to the younger son’s return and the ensuing party was not that far removed from some of my own self-righteous thoughts and attitudes –this was before it was my turn to play the prodigal, and what subsequently brought me to the point of identifying so much more with HIM.

The other story is the father’s.

Father’s day is getting to be a tough holiday for me. I think I’m a pretty good son, now, again. I think I’m doing OK as a husband. As a brother, well, you can ask him. I’ll warn you, he’s got some stories to tell on me that to this day make me cringe to remember. My CURRENT relationship with my brother is something that I treasure. I love and respect him very, very much. When it comes to fathering, though, it’s a different story.

Nothing is more important. Nothing.

And nothing is more difficult.

And nothing has come harder.

Nothing will make as much of a difference to the people who mean the most to me than this business of being a father.

There’s a song that came out several years ago, by a contemporary Christian trio of singers, Phillips, Craig and Dean, entitled “I Want To Be Just Like You” the refrain (chorus?) goes like this:

Lord I want to be just like You
‘Cause he wants to be just like me
I want to be a holy example
For his innocent eyes to see
Help me be a living Bible, Lord
That my little boy can read
I want to be just like You
‘Cause he wants to be like me

I never get through a hearing of the song without pretty much dissolving into a puddle.

As you may have read, Jerusalem Baptist Church, just down the road a ways from here, called me to be their Pastor last Sunday. Over the last 2 months, as we’ve been meeting with them and waiting to hear from them, in addition to carrying on with the Hispanic ministry for the association, I’ve been able to experience … and sometimes enjoy something that I’ve not had an abundance of over the last 3 years – free time with my children.

The rain we had over the last couple of weeks made it hard for the boys to have any outside play time, and either Caleb’s or Judson’s anxious and repeated requests of, “now can we go to the park daddy?” or, “now can you play with me daddy” would sometimes become too much to withstand, so the replies to emails got delayed, the sermon preparation got put off, and the papers I’m supposed to be working on for a couple of classes that I took at seminaries remained undone.

I wonder if the younger son in our passage had to ask more than once for his share of the inheritance. Since the context is a parable, it’s a purely hypothetical question, but it would be hard for me to imagine an actual father agreeing to the request on the first go-around. It brings to mind the commercials that are on TV now for the AARP, where the man walks into the office of the CEO of a huge insurance company and asks him to ‘fix’ the problem people in their 50’s and 60’s have in trying to get affordable health insurance after they’ve lost it, and the CEO pauses a moment and says “ok”. The other version of the commercial has a woman calling the President of the United States and after a minute or two on hold, reaching him, and asking him to fix the funding of Social Security, to which he answers ‘Of course’. The voice over comes on and says ‘if it were that easy, you wouldn’t need the AARP’.

Reading the passage and placing myself in the father’s position is sometimes a similar exercise in the study of the improbable. After all, the main point Jesus is trying to make in telling the parable is to try to help his hearers understand the nature of God and his kingdom. The father in the parable represents God. A tough act to follow, if there ever was one!

But I think Jesus intended for there to be more to it than just that description of God. There are layers in the parables that Jesus told that speak to us in different ways at different times in our lives. Not only was Jesus describing God’s Kingdom, he was describing how we are to act as a part of that Kingdom, and as a part of God’s bringing that Kingdom ever closer to reality in the world. We can’t get away from the implication that, as the father acted, so should we.

In short:

Be generous:

Our possessions, the things we own, are just that – things. They are not and never have been as important as the relationships we have with each other. That goes for blood relatives as well as brothers and sisters in Christ that we find in our respective communities of faith – our church families. How radical would it be to part with a third of your possessions at the request of a member – any member – of your family?

Be forgiving:

It is one of the most basic of Christian virtues and activities, and is one of the hallmarks of our faith, because it is through forgiveness of our sins that we become followers of Christ to begin with. To quote Steve again,

Forgiveness is the step of finally giving up your attempts to make the past different. The past cannot be changed; it can only be forgiven.

Be conciliatory:

Here is where we’re challenged to step in to settle arguments. To be peacemakers. Over the last week and a half I’ve been following with deepening sorrow and hope the tortured attempts between Israeli and Palestinian leaders to once again bring peace to the middle east. While that is an example on a national scale, it can be equally vexing and complicated a matter to try to bring estranged family members to reconciliation. Nevertheless, we’re called to try.

And lastly, be celebrative.

Tony Campolo tells of his being on a trip to speak and, unable to sleep, going to an all-night diner. He is approached by a couple of women there, who by the way they dress are obviously prostitutes, and they find out he’s a minister. He finds out it is one of the women’s birthday, and that she’s never had a birthday party in her life. Ever. They end up throwing her a birthday party, there in the diner, at 2 AM. In the middle of it, the woman asks Mr. Campolo what kind of God his church believes in, and his response to her is “one who throws birthday parties for prostitues at 2AM”

The father in the parable exemplifies these four attributes, and by implication, Jesus seems to be telling us,

“You’ve been like the younger son and the older son, try being like the father”.

*****

I asked Hannah to forgive me for being so short with her a few minutes later, as she was going to sleep. She looked at me and smiled and said ‘it’s ok daddy. Some people just do that’. I thanked her, and promised her that I would continue to work on not being so short tempered.

If you are here this morning and you feel like the prodigal son, your invitation is to have that change of heart, and turn, and begin the return to the father who will run to you and throw himself around your neck and welcome you home.

If you are here this morning and feel like the older son, hear the gospel of grace: God is saying, “All that I have is yours. Come join us! Your brother was dead and is alive now. How can we not be joyous and celebrate!?

If you are here this morning and long to be even a little bit, like the father in the parable, man or woman, your invitation is to follow Christ as your Lord and Savior, and let him mold you and shape you into that generous, forgiving, conciliatory and celebrative person that our Heavenly Father who loves us so wants us to be.

Let’s pray.

Only Christ, Only Love

Only Christ, Only Love
Sunday, June 1, 2003
Jerusalem Baptist Church
1 Corinthians 2:1-5

1 When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. 2 For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. 3 And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. 4 My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5 so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.

Manuel was 11 years old. We were sitting cross-legged across from each other off to one side of the central plaza in the town of Orihuela, in the southeastern state of Alicante, Spain. It was close to 11 at night, and the place was packed. Though 11 PM is late for most of us here in the States, in Spain, in summer, it is the equivalent of early evening, where some restaurants don’t begin to serve dinner until 10.

The heat of the day keeps people indoors out of the sun for the better part of the afternoon, and things start to pick back up after 6 or even 7 at night. Our program, hosted by the local Baptist church, didn’t start until 8 or 9PM. I and my team mates had just finished performing a puppet show In which we had explained the meaning of each page of the little book without words, you may be familiar with it, where the color of each page represented something: black was sin, red was the blood of Christ, white stood for being washed white as snow, green represented our growth as Children of God, and Gold represented Heaven. Dozens of children who were playing in the plaza had gathered around as the guitars started up, listened to the choruses, and stayed for the puppet show. We each had a stack of the booklets, and were handing them out to the kids who had been paying attention and could tell us what each color meant.

We were supposed to be following up their explanation of what each color meant, getting to the core of what the message was – that they needed Christ. For the most part, I was just enjoying their good humor, joking, and encouraging them with hints about each color.

Manuel was different. He confidently stepped up to me, and I held up the book, open to the black page. He looked me right in the eyes and said “Pecado”. That’s Sin in Spanish. I asked him what “Pecado” meant. He explained it pretty clearly: anything that separates you from God.

I turned to the next page, the red one, and he gave me the explanation with almost no hesitation. I asked him if the sins that Christ died for included his, and he nodded his head.

I turned to the white page, and he went through that one, as well as the next two.
With each answer, it became obvious that there was more going on than a simple repetition of what he’d heard a few minutes earlier.

I asked him if he wanted to sit down, and as I did, a couple of his friends who had gone in line before him and had been running around playing, ran up to him and made as if to get him to chase them. I expected him to shrug, and run off with them. Instead, he shrugged them off, and motioned them away, and told them,

“No, esto es importante”

…

Paul says, “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.”

What is it that is so compelling about Christ crucified? Is it the manner of death? The pain? The beating and torture he suffered?

All those details are arresting, and significant, but they pale in comparison to the reason that is at the heart of the matter: WHY did it happen? Why THAT death? Why the beating and the pain? Why the suffering?

In Luke, chapter 15, we find one of the best stories that helps us understand WHY.

11 Then Jesus said, "There was a man who had two sons. 12 The younger of them said to his father, "Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.' So he divided his property between them. 13 A few days later, the younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living. 14 When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. 15 So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. 16 He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything. 17 But when he came to himself he said, "How many of my father's hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! 18 I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; 19 I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands." ' 20 So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. 21 Then the son said to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.' 22 But the father said to his slaves, "Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. 23 And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; 24 for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!' And they began to celebrate.

The parable of the prodigal son is one of the most familiar stories of the New Testament. Most of us could retell the basic story with no hesitation.

Steve Shoemaker, one of my former Pastors, has a sermon on the parable, in which he describes the homecoming scene differently from what I had envisioned it in my mind:

The father lives not out in the wilderness, but on the edge of a town, at the end of Main Street. His son has to walk THROUGH town in order to get home. The younger son’s behavior has been an offense not only to the family but also to the village. He has broken the rules that help keep a community intact. The whole town probably condemned the boy. Their attitude was, “If he comes back, let him come back a beggar!”
In the parable, Jesus vividly describes how much the father loves the son. Rather than let him suffer the humiliation and abuse of the villagers, the father has compassion, and HE sprints to his son and hugs him and kisses him – the verb describes affectionate, repeated kissing, more like a mother greeting a long-lost child than a father’s formalized greeting.

The Father stepping into our place. Taking on our humiliation, our abuse, and our shame. THAT is why Jesus did it. God takes it upon himself to reconcile the world TO himself through the cross. God runs to us.
The gauntlet that we should have walked, all the shame and humiliation we so richly deserve, is taken and wiped away by the love of a sprinting, hugging, kissing father who wants nothing so much as to welcome us home.

…

“No, esto es importante”

“No, this is important”

I looked at Manuel, slightly stunned to be honest, not really knowing where to start, and finally asked him if he wanted to talk about what he’d just explained to me. Traditionally, Catholics in Latin America and Spain have a narrow perception of Christ, and it is mostly limited to how they see him most often: nailed to the cross, bleeding and in pain. The resurrection is celebrated at Easter, of course, but then Christ is taken into heaven. There is little immediate connectedness with a living person, and for the rest of the year, until Advent, the images surrounding them in church or hanging around their necks is the one of Christ Crucified. Over the next few minutes, Manuel and I talked about Christ being not just a man who died on a cross thousands of years ago, but of the fact that he is a living person, with whom we can enter into relationship, and who is with us every day. We can talk to him, and as we grow closer to him, we begin to recognize his voice. That July night in 1986, my new friend Manuel met my old friend, Jesus.

Paul continues,

4 My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power,

As the Rappahannock Baptist Association’s missionary to the Hispanic population on the northern neck, one of my activities is leading early morning devotionals once a week at History land Nursery, the site across the river and above Tappahannock.

I was somewhat nervous on the morning of my first one, and I greeted the men and went right into reading from the passage I’d chosen and then rattled through the devotional pretty quickly, and ended with prayer, wished them a good day, and headed on out into MY day. I realized later that I needed to make some adjustments.

The following week, I explained that catching them before they went to work meant that they HAD to be at the location, but they didn’t HAVE to listen to the devotional. I was there for THEIR benefit I went on to explain that I was also coming as ‘solo yo’, ‘just me’. I intentionally didn’t bring a Bible, stood before them and explained that if all I did was stand before them and read a passage and say a few words about it, but didn’t put those words into action, they would only BE words.

What I was there to do was to introduce them to Jesus Christ, and deepen their relationship with him.

What Paul was testifying to in Corinth and around the Mediterranean, what was radical then and is radical now, is that you can know Christ, “So that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.” I believe that was what Paul was speaking of. A demonstration of the Spirit and of Power.

What more powerful way to demonstrate the Spirit than to introduce someone to a risen Lord and have that person respond? Christianity is not only a set of rules to live by. It is not only a set of teachings put down on paper by followers of a martyred leader 2000 years ago. It is a relationship with a living, risen Lord.

Though the parable does not end with the celebration, we do not know how the younger son went on with his life after being welcomed home.

How would you have reacted? Did he continue to live off his father’s generosity? Did he fall back into old ways of being, unable to overcome the force of habit?

Isn’t that the question for each of us today? We are confronted with a God who extravagantly, ridiculously, sacrificially rebuilt a bridge that we had burned, a God who loves us so much that, even though we have gone and squandered our inheritance, made selfish choices, with no thought of how it would affect others around us, when we get to the point of recognizing our mistake, and turn, and begin to walk through the gauntlet of self-recrimination, we are confronted with a sprinting, hugging, kissing, welcoming God who celebrates our homecoming with so much joy that it leaves no room for any other emotion.

It is in the person of Jesus Christ that the gauntlet has been run. It is through the humiliation of the cross, taken upon himself, that God has shown his love for us. It is ONLY through Christ and ONLY by his Love that we are once again being welcomed home.

How will we respond? Will we continue to live as we did before? Will we do the same thing tomorrow that we did
yesterday? Will we think the same way tomorrow as we did this morning? Or will we fully engage in that relationship, letting Jesus mold us, shape us, and make us who God intended us to be all along?

Just as the parable ends without telling us what happened to the prodigal son, my knowledge of Manuel ends that night. I left the next day. I entrusted him to the care and nurture of the congregation and the Pastor of the Baptist Church of Orihuela. I don’t know what Manuel is doing today. I think about him often, and pray for him, but I have not had any further contact with him.

Perhaps it is better this way. When we come face to face with Jesus, we each have to make our own choice, and no one else can make it for us.

Lets pray.

Unto Harvest

Sunday, May 4th, 2003
White Stone Baptist Church, White Stone, VA
John 4:7-38

7 A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, "Give me a drink." 8 (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) 9 The Samaritan woman said to him, "How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?" (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) 10 Jesus answered her, "If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, "Give me a drink,' you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water." 11 The woman said to him, "Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12 Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?" 13 Jesus said to her, "Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life." 15 The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water." 16 Jesus said to her, "Go, call your husband, and come back." 17 The woman answered him, "I have no husband." Jesus said to her, "You are right in saying, "I have no husband'; 18 for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!" 19 The woman said to him, "Sir, I see that you are a prophet. 20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem." 21 Jesus said to her, "Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. 24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth." 25 The woman said to him, "I know that Messiah is coming" (who is called Christ). "When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us." 26 Jesus said to her, "I am he, the one who is speaking to you."
27 Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, "What do you want?" or, "Why are you speaking with her?" 28 Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, 29 "Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?" 30 They left the city and were on their way to him. 31 Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, "Rabbi, eat something." 32 But he said to them, "I have food to eat that you do not know about." 33 So the disciples said to one another, "Surely no one has brought him something to eat?" 34 Jesus said to them, "My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. 35 Do you not say, "Four months more, then comes the harvest'? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. 36 The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. 37 For here the saying holds true, "One sows and another reaps.' 38 I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor."

He knew he needed to be doing something else.

As most college students do, he had a small mountain of reading waiting for him in his room, and at least one paper to start working on, but he found himself wandering aimlessly around the house where he and his 5 roommates lived. It was September, classes had just started the month before, and it was still hot. The clanking window unit in the Living room of the apartment barely managed to keep it and the adjoining bedroom cool. He stepped out into the hall, and walked up to the front door, and saw Greg, the roommate he knew the least, sitting on the porch swing. He slowly opened the door, stepped out, and walked over and sat down in the glider next to him.

“Hey,” he said quietly, smiling.

Greg stared back at him, wide-eyed.

After a couple of minutes of slightly awkward silence, and not knowing what else to say or do, Greg’s roommate stood up and walked back into the house, planning to begin his reading, but he ended up wandering from room to room again. The first bedroom on the left, then the second on the right, then into the living room, through his own bedroom, into the kitchen, that seemed to have been attached like an afterthought to the back of the house. It leaned a little, and the small refrigerator and smaller stove would both have been at home in an antiques shop.

He felt unusually restless, unsettled, and soon found himself walking back through the apartment and back to the front door, with Greg still sitting on the swing. Again, he opened the storm door, stepped out onto the porch and over to the glider and again sat down, just as he’d done a few minutes earlier. Again, he nodded at Greg, smiled,

“Hey.”

Greg still looked at him in that odd way, wide eyed, at a loss for words.

They sat silently on the porch, occasionally Greg’s roommate looked over at him, but mostly he just let his eyes wander up and down the street. Still, not a word crossed between them.

After a few minutes, Greg was the one who stood up and walked back into the house, leaving his roommate more than a little confused about what had just happened, wondering as to Greg’s lack of people skills, sitting on the porch, in the heat of the afternoon.

…

Turning to our passage, we find Jesus in the middle of the day, sitting at the first-century equivalent of a front porch: the community well.

He is heading home, weary from walking, resting at the well, having sent his disciples into town to fetch some food, when the Samaritan woman shows up.

It is noon.

Not the normal hour to be drawing water for the day. By that alone, we learn some of the woman’s story. She is not comfortable, and most likely, not welcome to join the rest of the women of the village, who gather at the well in the morning, when it is cooler. She would rather bear the noonday heat and solitude than the taunts and cold shoulders of her neighbors, who were not beating a path to her door to ask her to join them at the next Mt Gerezim annual Spring Banquet.

One wonders what thoughts were racing through her head as she approached the well and saw the stranger sitting there. There may have been some comfort in the knowledge that he probably didn’t know who she was, or the history of which the entire town was already well aware. She may have crossed paths with the disciples looking for food as she headed out of town, and, seeing that they were Jews, made the connection between them and the man, and felt sure that a Jewish man would have nothing to do with her. On the other hand, heading into another un-chaperoned encounter with a man, she knew that if anyone from the town saw them, word would spread like wildfire again.

Jesus surprises her by doing just the opposite of what she expected him to. He does engage her in conversation, as a man, tired and thirsty from the journey, asking for a drink of water.

Her response is both surprise and alarm. Surprise that this Jewish man would actually speak to her, and alarm at why he would be talking to her anyway. To give herself time to gather her thoughts, she deflects his request by asking a socially and religiously loaded question -

"How come you, a Jew, are asking me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?"

There is a note of exasperation in Jesus’ answer, as if he’s saying, “I was just asking for a drink, for heaven’s sake, but if you need to make it an issue, let’s talk:

“If you only knew who you were talking to, you’d be asking me for a drink of living water.” …

Our three year-old, Judson, has, in the last couple of months achieved a goal for which Leslie and I are REALLY thankful: to get himself dressed, including putting on his own shoes. And, sometimes, he gets his shoes right. He excitedly runs into whichever room we are in, and proudly, breathlessly announces, “I did it, I did it!!” On one of those occasions, unthinkingly, I glanced over and commented, ‘you’ve got your shoes on the wrong feet’ … he got this look on his face, paused, and then replied, “No they’re not, Daddy, they’re MY feet!”

I need to be constantly reminded that what I am saying, especially with him, is processed in very concrete terms. At that age, he still hasn’t quite developed a capacity for abstract thought …

It seems the same was the case for the Samaritan woman. Her ears caught ‘water’, but missed ‘living’. Standing next to the well, her thoughts were still very much on the task at hand.

“This is a deep well, how can you draw water with no bucket?

Jesus answers with that beautiful image of a well of life, springing forth from our very souls, satisfying our thirst like nothing else will.

Her reply is telling. She is beginning to get it. She wants the water Jesus is offering her. Her thirst is that same thirst we all share, for being in relationship. “If drinking the water he’s talking of will mean that I never have to come back to this well ALONE, then please, give me some!”

How often have we cried for that companionship, that relationship, that connection? That is what draws us together; it is why we are in relationship with God and with one another. God calls us to be in community.

When Jesus asks her to go bring her husband, she immediately replies with the truth – that she has none.

“You’ve had five husbands, and the man you’re with now isn’t your husband. Congratulations, you got it right.” What Jesus is acknowledging is her HONESTY. She knows what she has done and who she is, and doesn’t try to hide it from him.

It is in that moment, when we recognize our brokenness, our failures and our shortcomings, and bring them before God, bring our selves, with no pretense, to the Holy Throne, that Jesus steps in and says, “I know, and I love you.”

The fact that this stranger at the well knows who she is and what she’s done, and still speaks to her, brings to her mind the Messiah, the chosen one of Israel. Her question may have been a rhetorical one, “I know the Messiah is coming, I’ll just ask him when he comes” …

Here Jesus goes back to being concrete, as real as flesh and blood: “I am he, you don’t have to wait any longer or look any further”.

Can you imagine what she must have felt? To see before her a dusty, sweat-streaked man, dressed in a simple robe, with sandals on his feet, and to look in his eyes and see the Messiah, the long-awaited one. To understand that she had been talking to him and, more astonishingly, that he had been talking to her.

And she finds her voice. In her excitement, she leaves her water jug and runs to tell the townspeople. She finally has something to bring to the table, and it is an invitation from Christ himself to drink the water of life.

When the disciples finally show up, they’re not portrayed in all that positive a light. First, they are bigoted, though, to their credit, they didn’t come out and say what they were thinking when they saw Jesus talking to ‘that woman’. Next, they don’t ‘get it’ when Jesus tells them about the food he has that they don’t know about. He tries to explain, and finally, when he sees the crowd of people coming from the town to see him, prompted by the reports of the woman he’d just been speaking to, he motions to them and says, “Look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting”…

The other three roommates came back from their afternoon classes. After they’d eaten supper, as evening fell, Greg called them up to his room. He explained that he had found out a couple of days earlier that his fiancé was expecting their baby. His life as he had known it was collapsing around him. He knew he and Linda would get married, but he had pinned his hopes on completing his college education and just didn’t know how that was going to happen now that he had a family to support. He told them that that afternoon, he’d gone so far into a tailspin that at one point he’d contemplated suicide. While sitting on the porch swing, he had prayed silently, asking God to send Jesus to him, and God answered with the one who opened the door, stepped out, walked over and sat down in the glider next to him. A few minutes later, just to be sure, Greg prayed again, asking God to show himself. And for the second time that afternoon, I stepped out on that porch, sat down on that glider, looked Greg in the eye and said, “Hey.”

What happened outside Suhar is what can happen in each of our lives. Christ meets us where we are. In the middle of our parched yearning, he sits next to the well we thought would quench our thirst, and offers us his living water. If we’ve received that water of life from him, his invitation to us is to go tell others and bring them to him. If you’ve not yet encountered Jesus beside the well, then your invitation is to enter into relationship with the one who knows you better than you know yourself, and welcomes you with open eyes and arms.

Let’s pray.