Is the Lord Among Us or Not?

A Sermon for the 3rd Sunday in Lent (RCL A) 3-27-2011, offered by Nathan Ferrell for Trinity Episcopal Shared Ministry

Texts: Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 95; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42

Is the Lord among us or not?

What a question for the people of Israel to ask! What a question for us to ask!

Is the Lord among us or not?

When we meet the people of Israel here in this story from the Book of Exodus, they are traveling in the wilderness toward Sinai. Just a few weeks earlier, God had delivered them in an amazing way from the hands of the Egyptians. They had seen the dead bodies of the Egyptian army floating in the waters of the sea. And they had rejoiced and celebrated that deliverance from their oppressors. Now, we find them journeying on by stages toward the appointed meeting place with God at Sinai, where they will receive the great gift of the law, the guidance they need to live as God’s free people in the world.

And so what do they do? In our story here, we hear them complaining against God and against Moses, and at the end of this episode, we find them asking this question, which surely seems to be the product of remarkable ingratitude and arrogance and presumption.

Is the Lord among us or not? Come on, God. Are you going to take care of us or not? Are you even here with us, or what? Do you actually have any power after all?

Let’s be honest for a minute: how many of you have ever posed a similar question to God? How many of you have ever complained to God about how life has worked out for you? Even if you have seen God do amazing things in your past, how many of you have complained about God’s apparent lack of involvement at other times? I know I have.

So what are we to think? Do we doubt God’s presence and power? Is this a clear sign of our lack of faith? Does this mean that Christ is not alive in us after all?

I want to suggest to you that it is not. Let me show you this morning how God in fact wanted the Israelites to make these complaints in the wilderness; and that God even now expects and welcomes our questions and our complaints.

When the Israelites left the land of Egypt, they were freed from their physical slavery, but they were not yet free from the bonds of slavery in their minds and in their souls. Hundreds of years of slavery meant that they were not yet ready to live as the free and faithful people of God. They were not yet ready to receive the Torah, the law, not yet ready to receive the gift of the law, and so God puts the people through a series of tests in the wilderness to prepare them for what is to come.

Similar to Jesus in the wilderness during his forty day fast, these tests for the Israelites follow a clearly devised pattern: attack by the Egyptians, a desperate lack of water, the lack of food, the lack of water once again, ending with an attack by the Amelikites. All these things took place in the span of their wandering seven-week journey from the shores of the sea to the mountain of Sinai.

The structure is clear and intentional: it is clear that God wants the people to complain. Of course the people need food to eat. Of course they need water to drink. They are in the desert, after all! God knows that they need water, and so God leads them to a place where they will most certainly be thirsty. Why? So that they can learn that God is the place of the nourishment, not Egypt nor any of the powers of this world! So that they can learn that God is the only one upon whom they must rely for their life and health and salvation.

In this wilderness wandering, heaven replaces earth as the source of their food (remember the manna that fell from the sky), Sinai replaces the Nile as the source of their water, the power of God replaces Egypt as the source of their security!

Remember: Horeb is known as the mountain of God. Horeb is another name for Sinai. And Horeb is precisely the place where God revealed the divine name and plan to Moses in the burning bush! And here, God sends Moses back to this same place for the gift of water straight from the hand of God! Moses is commanded now to take his staff and, not to strike the Nile any longer, but strike the rock at Horeb, so that the needs of the people may be met by the gracious providence of God.

So what did God think of the people’s complaining? The Psalmist certainly understood the people’s actions in a negative light. Serving as the mouthpiece of God, the psalmist said: “Harden not your hearts, as your forebears did in the wilderness, at Meribah, and on that day at Massah, when they tempted me. They put me to the test, though they had seen my works” (Psalm 95:8-9).

But there is another way to look at this episode, as I have already suggested. I believe that God intended to put the people into these difficult situations, as a means toward a greater end. This was a necessary hardship, one which God alone could see and understand from the point of view of eternity. To support this, please consider another example of hardship and suffering, one which we will be remembering soon during Holy Week.

On the night before he suffered, our Lord Jesus Christ, after that final meal with his friends on Maundy Thursday, goes out alone into the garden of Gethsemane in order to spend time with the One he called Abba, to find strength to face the ordeal to come, to get prepared for what is coming. Remember please: Abba, God, is the one with whom Jesus, in his earthly ministry, has spent numerous hours alone in prayer and meditation. Many times in the gospel narratives, we find Jesus going out alone to pray, to spend time alone with his Father, seeking direction and guidance and strength.

Remember too that this Abba is also the one with whom Jesus, as the eternal Son of God, has shared an eternity of intimacy and love. Nothing, ever, in all eternity has ever come between Jesus and the Father.

And so, facing the greatest challenge and difficulty of his life, Jesus goes out alone into the garden to spend time with Abba, to find strength for the day to come. He goes out there to find heaven – the intimate presence of God, with which he was so familiar. And what he finds there instead is hell – the actual absence of God.

This is why he sorrowed with such pain in the garden! Do you think he did not have the strength and the courage to face his death bravely just as countless other martyrs have done? Were his tears a sign of weakness? Of course not. What struck our Lord Jesus so deeply there was the loss of the one upon whom he had always relied, the absence of that relationship which had been the backbone of his entire existence!

Do you understand what that must have felt like?

How many times have you cried out to God for help, when you were facing something very difficult or painful right in front of you, and you were given nothing?! How many times have your prayers been left hanging, like they never went any further than your own breath? How many times have you struggled with the same kind of question as the Israelites: Is God among us or not?

But let me ask you this: were the struggles and hardships of the Israelites in the desert without purpose, or did they work as part of God’s plan to fulfill God’s desires and dreams for the people? Were the struggles and hardship of Jesus in Gethsemane without purpose, or did they work as part of God’s plan to fulfill God’s desires and dreams for all people?

Are our own struggles and hardships without purpose, or do they work as part of God’s plan to fulfill God’s desires and dreams for us?

How quick we are to assume that, because we cannot see the bigger picture, then of course there must not be any greater purpose behind our struggles and pain! As if our own perspective was the sole measure of reality!

My friends: let the examples of our ancestors in the wilderness, and of our Lord in the garden, serve to calm our minds and remind us to put our whole trust in the good purposes of God, even when we cannot see them. As St. Paul has written, God has proven his love for us. Therefore, we have no right to allow anything into our hearts but joyful confidence and hope. Thanks be to God. Amen.


BTW:
Doubt is not the opposite of faith. The opposite of faith is fear.

Hate is not the opposite of love. The opposite of love is apathy.

The Whole Fullness of Deity

Sermon for Proper 12 C RCL 7-25-2010

Offered by Nathan Ferrell for Trinity Episcopal Shared Ministry

Texts:             Hosea 1:2-10; Psalm 85; Colossians 2:6-19; Luke 11:1-13

Recently, I heard a story from someone who attended a church summer camp a number of years ago. During one of the large group gatherings, a group of men dressed all in black rushed into the chapel. They were carrying machine guns and they immediately went up to the front and tied up the four pastors who were there, and they held a gun to the head of the main pastor. And one of the masked men yelled out over the noise to the hundreds of camp kids and counselors who were there that anyone who is a Christian needs to stand up.

A few brave souls stood up – the faithful few, but the rest ran out all of the doors in a chaotic scramble. There were kids running all through the woods, scared and crying, with girls screaming, older kids cursing. And as this one particular camper tells the story, she and her friends were running back to their cabin to find a safe place to hide when they saw camp counselors going along all of the paths with flashlights and bullhorns. And the counselors were proclaiming to everyone with their bullhorns: “Don’t be afraid. It’s not real; it’s only a play!” You see, it all was just a skit designed to be part of the chapel lesson that night!

Some zealous, probably well-intentioned, but very inexperienced young person must have planned that skit, because they thought that it was a great way to teach a lesson about the boldness of Christians, that we ought to be brave to stand up for our faith in the face of any kind of danger.

This lesson is very much like the one intended by those who have often posed this question: “If you were arrested for being a Christian, would they have enough evidence to convict you?”

I don’t often think about my potential response to this kind of challenge to my faith, but I thought about it this past week in response to our reading today from the Letter to the Colossians.

Here in our passage today, we are given a litany of different forces at work in the milieu of the first century which had the potential to distract or subvert the faith of these Christians. Philosophy, empty deceit, human tradition, the elemental spirits of the universe (whatever these might be, nobody seems to know!), matters of food and drink, festivals, new moons, Sabbaths, self-abasement, the worship of angels, visions, human ways of thinking.

We, of course, cannot relate necessarily to this particular list, because we have our own forces at work in our society that have the potential to de-rail our life with Christ.

And as I thought about these challenges to my faith, it seems clear that the greatest danger, for me at least, is what I will call the general malaise of secularism. That is, it is so easy to fall into an easy pattern of busyness, to go about life doing what we do, trusting in our abilities and our technologies to keep life moving along. And before we know it, a day, a week, a month passes before we really give God much of a thought.

It’s really all about time. When the question is asked if they would have enough evidence to convict me as a Christian, I think that the most important measure of this is the amount of time that I intentionally spend on my relationship with God.

There is no deep and healthy relationship without a noticeable, measurable amount of time spent together by two people with the intention of knowing each other more deeply.

As most of you know, we men tend to be very good at being able to pick up a friendship right where we left off, even if we haven’t seen each other in a year or more. That’s how it is for me and my friends. We see each other once or twice a year. It’s really no big deal to most of us men, and I have a hunch that a lot of men feel this same way about God. “It’s no big deal,” they think, “when I get back to church eventually, God and I will pick up right where we left off!”

But it doesn’t work that way with deeper relationships. You can’t do that with your spouse, your partner, your girlfriend!

When we are talking about our relationship with God, what we are talking about is the intentional time that we spend in prayer. When you boil it all down, our regular daily practice of prayer IS the measure of our closeness, and our bond of connection, with God.

Jesus himself spent regular time in prayer abiding in that close connection with the one he called “Abba”. When the disciples ask about his prayer practice, so that they might learn from his experience, he begins with this signature note of his teaching about the nature of God: Abba.

Of course, we say “Our Father, who art in heaven.” We say it so much that it is likely that we forget how tremendous a gift that this represents. To call God our Abba, our Daddy, our Papa, means that we have now been brought into the same intimate connection with God as Jesus himself experienced. The same. Brothers and sisters together in the same family!

The mystery of the Incarnation allows pulls us in this direction: God became what we are in Christ – God took up our human nature – in order that we might become what God is – that we might take up the divine nature.

St. Paul sums it up very clearly for us in our reading today. “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Colossians  2:9). That’s mind-blowing, and to be honest, we humans still haven’t quite figured out all the implications of that.

Eugene Peterson, in his free-form contemporary translation called  The Message, puts that verse in this way: “Everything of God gets expressed in him, so you can see and hear him clearly. You don't need a telescope, a microscope, or a horoscope to realize the fullness of Christ, and the emptiness of the universe without him” (emphasis added).  

The fullness of God’s nature is seen clearly in Jesus Christ, because he is the Incarnation of God. But this verse continues, and here we find the kicker: “AND YOU have come to fullness in him” (Colossians 2:10).

You and I have come to fullness in Christ. What more can we ask for, then, but to actually and tangibly experience this fullness, this completeness in our daily lives because of our close relationship with God.

This week, my friends, as you go about your busy lives, spend a few minutes each day thinking about the Lord’s Prayer. Don’t rush through it, as usual. Pause on each phrase, each distinctive word, and let the Spirit guide you into new and creative ways to understand these familiar words. Meditate on them, my friends. Chew on them mentally.

And remember that it is a gift of the fullness of Christ that we are privileged to call God our Abba, our Father. Amen.