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Mystic
Congregational Church, UCC This is an inconvenient set of scriptures.
It’s about obedience and accountability.
It messes with every compromise that we have ever made in our individual
relationship with God. I am not talking just about the sort of obvious
compromises—the ones that say, “Oh, I can mess up because Jesus already died
for my sins. I’m alright.” It’s a little more subtle than that. A compromise might be to say, “I believe in the God
of the New Testament more than the God of the Old Testament.”
That means I believe redemption over rejection and heaven over the other
place, not even so sure the other place exists.
Of course, we relate to some parts of God more easily than others.
There are parts and descriptions of God and God’s actions that we
struggle with. But we should not
make it so easy that we just dismiss everything we can’t handle and create God
in our image. I used that phrase in
the opening prayer—that’s the little temptation that we make God fit our
needs and that we make God fit our agenda.
God should always be a little bigger than that. It says in Deuteronomy, “See, I am setting before
you today a blessing and a curse: the
blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding
you today; and the curse, if you do not obey the commandments.”
There is accountability for you. The
redeeming grace of God does not take away the need for us to fulfill God’s
will. Rachel Dunn is the pastor in North Stonington.
At an association meeting the other day, she offered a benediction.
She said, “May you love God so much that you love nothing else too
much. May you fear God enough that
you fear nothing else.” We are
not always comfortable with the fear of God.
Sometimes, we create this image of a very gentle, very caring, very
personal God, and the fear falls a little bit by the wayside. But, of course, there is the other side to that.
Some of us come from an experience where the fear of God was everything
you learned as a child. I spoke to one of you these past couple of weeks.
He said, “Ever since I’ve been raised by Irish Catholic nuns, I have
lost any possibility of connection to organized religion.” Those Irish
Catholic nuns, in his case, put the fear of God in him.
That is not the fear of God that Rachel is talking about. Martin Luther was a monk—lived the religious life;
did everything he was supposed to be doing; had committed himself to God.
Yet, he was completely struggling with the idea of how God’s grace
could actually become a part of his life, how we could obtain God’s grace.
He always felt the devil in the room.
One time, he took his little jar of ink, and he threw it at the devil. He could not get to a point where he could feel that his life
was good enough to deserve God’s grace. The
way he resolved that was, ultimately, to understand that it wasn’t about
earning God’s grace by how you lived, by what you did.
It was about accepting God’s grace as a gift. Today’s Scripture, however, is all about what we
do. It is all about our works.
It is not done with the faith alone.
But Jesus says, “If you have faith and you don’t act on it, I won’t
know you. If you call on my name
and you don’t do anything about it, I won’t know you.”
The difference between what Luther was struggling with is that in this
notion, we know of God’s redemption first, and then we act on it and do the
good works. It’s not the good
works that redeem us but it’s the good works, the way we live that,
inevitably, comes out of our faith. Only then is the faith complete. How we can fear God enough in the right way?
How can we be obedient? How
can we have God’s claim on our life touch, actually, every part of it?
There are two obstacles to that that I see. First of all, my German churchgoing friends and my New
England churchgoing friends have one thing in common—we don’t like to be
told what to do. You don’t like
for me to tell you when to pray, how often to pray, and what to say in your
prayer. We consider faith,
ultimately, our individual relationship with God.
Even if we go to church, most of us consider faith as something that is
between God and myself. No pastor
is telling you what to do. Second obstacle:
our life is entirely compartmentalized.
Here we are talking about the idea that obedience to God, faithfulness to
God, permeates everything we do and say while we are putting compartments in our
life all the time. This is my three
hours of exercise a week. I have to
schedule that in order for it to happen. (I’m
talking about somebody else, of course—I don’t do three hours of exercise.)
This is the time I spend with work.
I put on my suit—this is my work.
This is the time I spend with my wife.
I have to schedule that. In
fact, I advise couples to schedule time together because if they don’t do
that, it may not happen. We even
intentionally compartmentalize our life. There
comes a problem when we compartmentalize God out of parts of our life.
It is a problem when God becomes the Sunday thing, the good thing you do
once in a while. Our ethics can get compartmentalized, too.
“Oh, when I was with that person, I didn’t act as a husband.
I acted just as myself.” That’s
compartmentalizing ethics. “When
I talked about this issue, I just talked as a friend.
I didn’t speak as a member of my company.
I didn’t reveal anything. I
just had a friendly chat with a colleague.”
“In that moment, I didn’t act as a parent. I’m just one of four or six or however many people who live
in our house.” When we go too far
in creating our life in these segments, then there’s a danger that we
compartmentalize our ethics as well. Now, to that, there’s the Deuteronomy scripture
that says, “You have to believe this. You
have to wrap it on your hand” which means it will inform everything you do.
You create, you touch, you do with your hands.
You have to put it on your forehead which means that it forms everything
you think and feel. You put it on
your doorpost as a reminder of what happens in Exodus for those who oppose that
are marked with the blood or spirit by the spirit of God.
But if you put it on your doorposts, every time you go in and out of your
house, you remember what you believe. You
remember the presence of your God. Orthodox
Jews touch the doorpost every time they go in and out as a reminder. I want to read to you from Deuteronomy 6 which is the
Shema Israel, the words that should be in those little boxes on the hand and on
the forehead. “Hear, O Israel:
The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your
soul, and with all your might. Keep
these words that I am commanding you today in your heart.
Recite them to your children and talk about them when you area away, when
you lie down and when you rise. Bind
them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write
them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”
It’s the same idea, almost the same phrases as what we read earlier.
There is no compartmentalizing there.
God is in every breath that you take. It’s about teaching one another and your children.
This is not limited to the hour of Sunday School they go to and, maybe,
the hour of fellowship. This is the
teaching that happens in how you live together as a family.
To be honest with you, I want us to form a group of parents of teenage
children so we can to each other how to do that.
I need that, frankly. So
let’s do that. Both of these scriptures are about teaching.
The Deuteronomy is God teaching God’s people about the law.
The Matthew is the end of Jesus’ sermon on the mount—teaching
disciples and the crowds that were surrounding them how they should live.
If you look at Matthew, it’s very practical advice.
If you look at the Matthew and you look at the sermon on the mount,
there’s a golden rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
It says, “Don’t judge others because they will judge you.
Don’t give too much emphasis on your money because when it matters, it
doesn’t do much for you.” That’s
the kind of advice that is Jesus’ teaching in the Scripture. Jesus makes it very plausible in this image of the
house that is built on sand, or the house that is built on the rock.
In the place where he was teaching and preaching, if it was a dry day,
the ground was solid hard. So as
you were building your house, it could have felt like a very solid contraption.
But when the crisis comes, the ground just washes away and the torrential
rain has the ability to undermine your foundation and just take your house away.
It is in the crisis that you find out whether your faith has a foundation
or not. At the moment that you fall
in love with faith, you may not know how strong your foundation is. When I was a teenager, I went to fabulous youth
events in a monastery in France as well as a monasteries in my neighborhood.
They were great. They were
gatherings of hundreds of youth and incredible music; a feeling that you’re
with like-minded people that you can talk honestly to each other.
All that bothers you and the rest of your life, for a while, didn’t
matter. I was ecstatic! It was really a life-changing experience.
However, a big part of it was the emotional, sort of psychological,
sensation of being together. When we came home, we went back to school.
We did dishes again and cleaned our rooms.
There was a big letdown. So,
unless we were able to make this faith, that we were falling in love with, into
a solid foundation, it wouldn’t hold very much.
Now, this has to do with our congregation, as well.
Frankly, we can do more teaching in our congregation. I just announced a membership class.
It will start next Sunday. We
haven’t been good enough about teaching one another what it means to be a
member of the church. In the past, we have sometimes erred on the side of
saying, “Well, come in and figure out what it means to be a member as you go
along.” We might have said,
“Don’t worry about requirements. Just
come in.” The fear was that if we put up too high a measuring stick
that people wouldn’t come. I
think it’s the opposite way. We
need to be clear that membership in the church has expectations attached to
it—expectations of attendance, of participation, and of contribution of your
gifts. Only if we make that
invitation to discipleship explicit will we afford people the opportunity to
experience that discipleship. Richard Donovan writes, “The church that cares
about filling pews rather than developing disciples will probably do neither.”
Why don’t we have discipleship classes that follow the membership
classes for everybody that invite a conversation of what it really means in all
of our lives to be Christians? Why don’t we have opportunities for connections with others
in small groups that address how we live our lives? That teenage parents’ conversation is only one example.
We are hoping for a young mothers’ class.
We’re looking for opportunities to bring people who are in a similar
situation together and have them connect with each other and teach each other by
their example. Finally, let’s
continue those Adult Ed conversations about our own struggle of understanding
God, and what image of God works for us, and how can we struggle together with
those parts in the word that make it difficult to relate to God. I am going to close this with a prayer.
I am giving you a prayer that is an opportunity to try a live a more
obedient life and a life knows of God’s presence at all times.
Let us pray together. O, Holy One |