2012
Sermons
Dez 30 - Jesus Must
Dez 30 - I Will Not Forget
Dez 28 - Hear, See, Do
Dez 27 - Fresh Every Morning
Dez 24 - The Fullness of Time...for Us
Dez 23 - Emotions of Advent: Graced Wonder
Dez 16 - Confused Anticipation
Dez 9 - Moods of Advent: Anger
Dez 2 - Moods of Advent: Anxiety
Nov 25 - Not Overwhelmed
Nov 18 - Piles of Troubles
Nov 11 - Thankfulness
Nov 4 - The Communion of Saints...
Okt 28 - Look back, around, ahead!
Okt 21 - Consecration Sunday 2012
Okt 14 - The Right Questions
Okt 7 - God's Yes
Okt 6 - Waiting
Sep 30 - Insignificant?
Sep 23 - That pesky word "obedience"
Sep 16 - Led on their Way
Sep 15 - Partners in Thanks
Sep 12 - With Love
Sep 9 - At the edges
Sep 2 - Doers of the Word
Aug 26 - It's about God
Aug 19 - Jesus Remembers!
Aug 15 - Companion: Gratitude
Aug 12 - Bread of Life
Aug 11 - God's Silence and Speech
Aug 5 - One Faith, Many Gifts - Part 2
Jul 29 - One Faith, Many Gifts
Jul 25 - Rescue, Relief, Reunion, Rest
Jul 22 - Faithful Ruth, Mary, and God
Jul 15 - New World A-Comin'
Jul 8 - Take nothing; take everything
Jul 1 - Laughter
Jun 24 - Salvation!
Jun 17 - Really?
Jun 10 - Renewed by the Future
Jun 3 - Remember, O Lord
Jun 3 - Out of Darkness, Light!
Mai 27 - Dem bones gonna rise again!
Mai 20 - It’s all about me, me, me.
Mai 13 - Blame it on the Spirit
Mai 12 - More than Problems
Mai 6 - Pruned for Living
Apr 29 - Called by no other name
Apr 22 - No and Yes
Apr 22 - Who's in charge here?
Apr 22 - Time Well-used
Apr 15 - The Resurrection of the Body
Apr 8 - For they were afraid
Apr 7 - It's All in a Name
Apr 6 - For us
Apr 6 - No Bystanders
Apr 5 - The Scandal of Servant-hood
Apr 1 - Two Processions
Mrz 28 - The Rich Young Man, Jesus, and Us
Mrz 25 - The Grain of Wheat
Mrz 18 - Grace
Mrz 14 - Elijah, Jezebel, and us
Mrz 8 - The Best Use of Time
Mrz 7 - David, Saul, and Us
Mrz 4 - Despair to Hope, for Abraham, for Us
Mrz 2 - The Word and words
Feb 29 - Jacob, Esau, and Us
Feb 26 - In the wilderness of this day
Feb 22 - It Doesn't End Here
Feb 19 - Why Worship?
Feb 12 - The Person is the Difference
Feb 5 - Healing and Service
Jan 29 - On the Frontier
Jan 22 - What about them?
Jan 15 - Come and See
Jan 14 - Joy and Pain at Christmastime
Jan 8 - To marvel, to fear, to do, and thus believe
Jan 1 - All in a Name
What about them?
Third Sunday of Epiphany (First Service) - January 22, 2012
I'm just vaguely remembering an old Star Trek episode in which Captain Kirk and the crew land on a previously unknown planet torn apart by civil war.
The one side tries to recruit the Enterprise to help them annihilate their foes.
“Just look at them.
They're ugly, and evil,” the leader says.
Kirk looks at the speaker, who is bizarrely black on his left side and white on his right side...and then across the way at his hated foe who is just as bizarrely white on his left side and black on his right side.
What about them, indeed! Which them?
The human reaction is always murderous hatred.
Mr. Barone told me of a small boy who was digging a hole in the back yard.
The neighbor leaned over the fence and asked what he was doing.
“Oh, my goldfish died”, the boy said.
“That's a mighty big hole for a goldfish,” said the neighbor.
“It's inside your cat”, said the boy.
It's OK. You're allowed to laugh.
It is a way to deal with serious things, to defuse a tense situation, and move forward.
That is how the story of Jonah is so effective.
We can laugh at the funny parts and then consider carefully the serious point of it all.
God assigns a job to Jonah.
Jonah pouts. I hate those people.
I don't want to give them God's message.
I want them all to fry.
So, I'll go the other direction.
Yes, I'll just jump on a ship and sail away from God, Jonah thinks.
Now that is funny.
All it takes is a little bit of wind and storm and fish to dump him back on land.
Then God starts all over again with him.
“Go to Nineveh....”
He takes the hint.
(You're allowed to at least smile.)
He delivers God's message,
and then waits to see what will happen.
And it is effective; the people repent, from the king on down to ordinary folk.
He was so hoping for destruction.
Then there is the funny episode of the castor plant that grows up and shades him from the hot sun, only to be attacked by a worm and killed in a day, thus making Jonah angry again.
And God questions Jonah,
Why are you so upset about a plant that grew in a day and died in a day, but not about all the people of Nineveh, a city mighty and populous?
What about them?
And the book ends there, with a question.
And the question echoes down through the centuries in every situation where we have a division of some sort that would separate people from God.
What about them?
One of the most serious has been between Jew and Christian.
“What about them?” each has always said of the other.
Even after all these centuries of wrangling, questions still remain, because the Jews are the chosen people and Christians are the people of the new covenant and both statements are true.
In humility I must say that I can't solve the problem;
but God has given me a job to do, and that is to preach Christ crucified and risen from the dead to anyone who will listen, and when I get that job done, then I will have time to speculate about other things.
Of course, I only imagine that job will ever be completed when we are together in the fullness of heaven, so I'm therefore not going to have any time at all to speculate.
So, back to work I go.
That's the only way I can deal with it.
Perhaps that solution won't satisfy you.
Perhaps you can discern some other way to proceed.
If so, go right ahead, so long as it does not cloud the centrality and uniqueness of Christ Jesus as God
come in the flesh for the benefit of all people.
There have been a series of very big shifts in thinking that have taken place over the centuries:
--each person having his or her own personal god, to
--tribal or regional gods, to
--regional names for the same gods as other regions, to
--mutually exclusive claims of gods, such as we have for God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, to
--science or nature as a god, to having
--supposedly no god at all.
And then to further complicate things we have in the present day the pluralist movement that tries to say that everything is the same.
Have you ever seen a photo of a Bahai Temple?
There is one in the mid-west, and I saw one in Haifa, Israel.
They are beautiful, stunningly well-kept, white buildings.
They have 7 aisles coming from seven directions, each naming a major religious figure from the past, coming together at a central altar, one god at the center of many religions.
It sounds so...fair.
And so utterly foreign to scripture.
“I the Lord your God am a jealous God”
we hear in connection with the commandments. [Ex.20:5]
“This Jesus is the stone that was rejected but has become the head of the corner,” according to Peter. [1P2:7]
Paul warned the Corinthians about those preaching a different Jesus.[1Cor1:12]
He scolded the Galatians for turning to a different gospel. [Gal.1:6-9]
“There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved,” Peter preaches. [Acts 4:12]
What do moderns say when they bump up against such passages?
It comes out sounding something like...
“Just relax now...those are such extreme words.
“They are culturally conditioned.”
“Christians have Jesus and Buddhists have Buddha, Muslims have Muhammad, etc. and they are all on the same path anyway.”
To say that is not to take seriously the claims of any of the religions; it turns out to be is the most intolerant view of all!
Of course we need dialogue among people of different religions.
The world surely needs greater tolerance and respect for people of other loyalties.
But the greatest respect one can hold for another is to say that I care about you so much that I want the best for you; I want to introduce you to my Savior Jesus.
An introduction is not coercion; the other person can respond to the introduction or turn away.
To the Athenians, Paul Said, “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you....”
Paul was not successful that day, but he and others undoubtedly came back many other times later on, and eventually a church grew there.
It is not just the reluctant project Jonah that has a job from God.
We do also: Jesus says to us at the end of Matthew's Gospel: “Go therefore into all the world and make disciples, and, he promises, he will be with us to the close of the age.
The question is ....in what part of the book of Jonah are you and I living this day?
--are we hearing the call of God for the first time?
--are we saying NO for the first time?
--are we running away from God's call?
--what about them?
--are we getting thrown overboard?
--are we drowning in the world's mess?
--is someone pulling us out of the mess this day?
--are we hearing God's call for the second time, or twentieth time?
--are we following through with the tasks to which God has set us?
--are we complaining about it?
--what about them?
--are we sitting by, waiting to see what will happen?
--are we hoping for disaster? or are we praying for the success of God's plans?
--are we surprised when God gets a harvest when we thought there would be none?
--are we annoyed that the Lutheran Church in dirt-poor Ethiopia is now larger than the mighty ELCA, and is growing far faster than the ELCA is shrinking?
--what about them?
--No, what about us?
Let's get going, in our day, in every needed way.
Let us all say...Amen.
|
Please note: The preceding sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him. |