Green Blades Preaching Roundtable

Hymn Suggestions:

ACS 1069 God Bestows on Every Sense

ELW 684 Creating God, Your Fingers Trace

ACS 1071 In Sacred Manner

The lessons for this Sunday remind me of a small plaque my neighbors gave me on Confirmation Day.  Beneath the symbol of a fish was Joshua 24, “As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.” Years later, I learned that these words may have been so cherished by God’s people that they became woven into part of an ancient covenant renewal ceremony, perhaps held annually.  If so, I can see that.  In matters of faith and in the life of faith communities, there is great value in renewing our sense of commitment and resolve.  At my last call, annually we did what many congregations would do on the Baptism of our Lord Sunday in January: we would remember our own baptisms, and we would recognize and celebrate the baptismal vows of parents and sponsors of the children who had been baptized in the previous three years.  Like many congregations, we also invited all members to join in the affirmation of baptism ceremony on New Member Sundays, not only so that the congregation could give voice to their welcome and support of new members, but so that they might have the opportunity to renew their own commitment.  These were our covenant renewals in which we more fully spoke our vows to follow God and renounce the ways that lead us from God’s will. Being reminded repeatedly of who we are and whose we are and what we stand for is a good thing.

Each of these lessons carry with them the underlying a priori assurance that God is good and that God is with us, but the explicit message of each is to be ready, resolved, and to respond. These lessons, to me, do not stand in the indicative mode, but forcefully move to the imperative.  Jesus is blunt in saying, “No one who puts hand to plow and looks back is ready.” You get what he is saying: ‘eyes forward, know where you are going.’ You could definitely feel from these lessons that just preaching the good news is not enough if all we walk away with are warm thoughts.  Jesus is challenging us to make faith active in love, to walk the talk, and to practice what we preach.   Psalm 16 spells it out well by describing the result of choosing wrongly. “Those who choose another god multiply their sorrows.”  Committing ourselves to God’s will and Christ’s way matters.  In the story of Elijah, we can see a man who has lost his resolve and is ready to give up because he is overwhelmed by the apparent opposition.  But God reminds him to see beyond the merely apparent; to see that the so called apparent can be deceptive, and to perceive the enduring presence of God.  Paul picks up this challenge, telling us to be led by the Spirit and not fall prey to the ways of a lower spirit.  When we read the lists of these divergent ways of being, it is obvious which ways are of Christ, and which lead to destruction and death.

I believe we live at a time when the church of Christ needs to be plain and forthright about being led by the Spirit of life and love.  We need to be discerning and determined.  There are some in places of influence who preach that empathy and compassion are weakness.  There are some who claim to be of Christ, but promote a divisive, contentious, and dominating spirit devoid of grace.  There are some who try to convince people concerned about God’s creation that their efforts are an alien religion.  They are wrong; they are the ones promoting an apostate religion.  They are the ones who have chosen another god. God in Christ is clear. We love because God is love, we care about the ‘least of these,’ we care about ‘the widow and the fatherless,’ about ‘the sojourner in our midst,’ and the alien who resides in our land; we seek justice, equity and peace; we put away all malice, tear down walls of hostility, reject ethnic and social division; we heal the wounded; we till and keep the garden of the earth.  These are the clear imperatives of the Bible and are Godly values. These other people promote the contrary and divisive heresy because that line of thinking supports and even unleashes the selfish hungers within each person and within each mob.  These others have chosen another god, and they are actively multiplying sorrows which spill over and pollute every sphere of human and non-human life on earth.  The evidence of their destructive value system is evident.

As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.  And that means to reject, and to renounce the contrary religion of might makes right, white supremacy, male dominance, and all the ways by which an individual can justify grabbing and hoarding all that he can with utter disregard for the lives of his neighbor.  There is so much harm being done to the vulnerable and to our planet home, but the risk and the sorrows will be multiplied further if the way, the truth, and the life of Christ are further twisted and distorted to serve the deceiver.

Therefore, these are days for people of a broadminded faith to lay claim to a far-reaching mandate.  We follow our God whose very presence among us was as a fellow earthling, born as a man of dust.  True Christ was revealed to be the man of heaven, but the incarnation itself points us to witness God’s presence in the mundane realities.  While among us, Jesus asked us to consider the lilies, to be aware of the sparrow, to think about planting and harvesting, and to see the presence of God in the faces of the vulnerable. The wisdom literature and the psalms direct us to consider what we observe in nature in order to learn more about God and the ways of good life here and now.  These are the Biblical signposts directing us to learn from the Book of Nature as well as from the Book of Faith.  Therefore, as Christians, we rightly use and promote all scientific research and teaching.  We are learning from God’s own creation how to restore and maintain life on this planet home.  Some people still think there is a science/religion split.   That is a false dichotomy. We learn from ecologic sciences how we must leave carbon in the soil.  That is where God’s systems sequester it for slow release and use.  We learn that striving for renewable energy such as sun and the prevailing winds is an act of faith and obedience to the will of God.  We learn that to send pollutants into the airstreams and watersheds breaks the commandment, thou shall not kill.  It is an act of faith to call for less drilling and more careful mining.  It is an act of faith to persuade political leaders and business leaders to slow down and to reverse the carbon levels in our atmosphere and lower the temperature of the oceans.  This is a huge mandate, one that can appear overwhelming. But we are people of faith, and we believe nothing is impossible with God.  We can stand against the god of multiplying sorrows; we stand with the God of life.