LENT 5C 2010
Hole in our Gospel #5
Today we are rapping up our Lenten Sermon Series. Next week we begin our journey with Jesus walking with him as he enters Jerusalem to the cries of Hosanna, to the trial, with the cries of Crucify him, then to the cross and to the grave, and then joyfully and with fear, with the disciples, to the empty tomb. I hope and pray that you will set aside some extra time this Holy Week to reflect upon your life and your faith. What we celebrate during this week is the core of the Christian message – Christ has died.. Christ has risen. It is this truth which changed the world, and which can change our lives. It is this truth which gives us the hope and the courage to read such books as the Hole in Our Gospel, and to take it seriously, and to actually do something about what we read.
The theme for this week in our reading is: Repairing the Hole in the World. Now if you are like me, at this point in this journey, you can feel a little overwhelmed. The problems are so big. The solutions are so complex. Who are we and what can we do? We can hardly deal with our own personal problems, let alone worry about people we don’t even know. This, of course, is the core of the challenge of the gospel. Here we face the heart of the matter. Why should we care? It is not really my problem. Many of us are doing OK.. as a matter of fact, as we have been learning, many of us are very, very rich – in the top 1% of the richest people in the entire world. That is doing pretty well. But again, why should we care? Why should we do anything.
Every Sunday we pray a prayer, which can become simply meaningless words if
we don’t pay attention to them, which we call the Lord’s prayer, because it is
the one prayer we have that Jesus taught to his followers. In this prayer we
pray: Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done. On
earth, as it is in heaven.
As I reflect upon these phrases, it is clear to me that often my greatest concern -- what I think about most of the time, and what I labor for most of the time, is what I want. In essence, while I pray… thy will be done, what I really do is “my will”. And, instead of desiring and working for the Lord’s kingdom, I often worry more about my kingdom -- the kingdom of my world.
Lets pause here for just a moment, and let me ask you to think about what your top priorities are in life. Think about your top two or three. And of course, be honest with yourself.
Pause
Now I would guess that for many of us, our top priorities would be things like good health, families, financial security, a job or a better one, a boy friend or girl friend, and on and on.
How many of us can truthfully say that the main priority of our life is to love and serve God… that everything else is secondary to this?
It is really here that the crux of dealing with the hole in our gospel lies.
Over and over again, in many and different ways, the Bible calls us to place God first in our lives. Jesus said that the first and greatest commandment is to love God with all that we have. The second, of course, is to love our neighbor. When we don’t place God first, then we have idols which we serve, and again, over and over again we are taught not to worship idols. As the first commandment instructs us: “thou shalt not bow down to them or worship them.” But the truth is, when we don’t make our relationship with God first in our lives, we then are serving other gods.
Along with this journey, we have been confronted with many facts.. and they are facts. We can deny them or ignore them, but they still are true. We are rich and… there are many, many people in the world that are poor and dying for lack of food, water, health care and opportunities.
But these facts alone will have little impact upon us until we realign, or re-orient our priorities. When a person becomes a Christian for the first time, we often say that they are converted, which means they changed from one pattern of life to another. The truth is, most of us will not take the challenges of the Bible seriously unless we place loving and serving God a priority in our lives – unless we are converted!!
So this is my first challenge to you today. Our human compassion will often make us feel for the poor and needy, and from time to time motivate us to do radical things for others, but in general, until we make God’s will our will, our efforts will be minimal. For instance, if you did what Pastor Liz asked of you last week, and really calculated the amount of money you give away to God compared to your income, I know that for many of you it would not be anywhere near 10% -- which even our church, the Episcopal church, says is the MINIMAL standard of giving! Now, why is that, when a large % of people could do this without going into poverty, or really changing their life style all that much? Of course the answer is simple… we don’t really believe that giving to God is important, nor do we really believe this Bible stuff. We can say we kind of believe it, but not really. It all sounds good, but we have other priorities than giving to God and the poor and needy.
When we go about building our kingdom, it takes time and effort and money, and often there is nothing but a little left over. We can have a nice house, cars, computers, cell phones, cable TV, and on and on, and still feel poor. How can this be? It is because, as Isaiah said, we are spending our money for that which is not bread, and we are laboring for that which does not satisfy! (Is. 55:2). How can we have so much and still feel unhappy and feel like we are struggling to make it? It is because we expect more and more and compare ourselves to others who have more, and then we have to work more and more to have more and more, and the cycle is endless. We constantly live beyond our means, and there is nothing left over for God. Anyone who is my age knows how much more we have today than when we grew up. But it takes more work and effort to have all of these things.
Now let me pause and say to those of you who don’t have much, or are looking for work, and are barely making it, that I am not speaking to you at this point, except in the truth of making Jesus a priority in your life. Now is not your time to be giving, but that time will come. Many times when we face a crisis it can be a time of conversion, a time when we evaluate what we have been doing with our lives and how we are going to live in the future. Please don’ t feel guilty. We are all in different places in our lives. There are often seaons of doing well, and times of struggle.
I have been talking about giving and money simply because it is one, concrete way for us to evaluate what our priorities really are. In a sense, our checkbooks do not lie. Central to the challenge of this whole Lenten series is what we do with our wealth. But as I have been trying to suggest to you, this is not really the challenge at all. The challenge is first, have we been converted, …. have we decided to make loving and serving God a priority in our lives. Until this happens, most of us will simply play at caring and giving. We might like a church and support it. We might have a social cause or two that we care about, but our real priority in our lives will be our own kingdom, not the Lord’s.
But our lives can be transformed, and we can make loving and serving God the priorities of our lives. It is a simple, day by day, decision of the will. We make an intentional, prayerful, day by day decision, and then we struggle to live it out in concrete ways.
A very important theme in my life comes from Romans chapter 12, verses 1 and 2.These verses sum up what we hope to see happen in this Lenten season.
I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by
the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and
acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 2Do not be conformed to this world, but be
transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the
will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect. Romans 12:1-2
These verses say it all: Through God’s mercy we are called to present our lives first to God… to make God the priority in our lives, and then we are challenged to not be conformed to the values and morals of this world, but to be transformed, to be renewed, in how we live and how we view the world.
One of the simple yet powerful truths that we have been learning, a truth that is goes against the values of the world around us, is that God cares for the poor and needy in the world. As a matter of fact, in a sense, God comes to us in this disguise. There is a great verse in proverbs that says:
Proverbs 19:17 ( NRSV ) 17 Whoever is kind to the poor lends to the
LORD, and will be repaid in full.
In this passage we have the image of God being in the world in the lives of the poor. When we are kind to them, we are lending to the Lord. This is what Jesus taught. When we give a cup of cold water to someone, we are giving it to Jesus. When we feed, clothe, or visit someone, we are doing it to Jesus. This is all very powerful imagery, representing a truth for us to learn.
As you read the material for this last week, there will be some great quotes about how, even though we might feel small, and we can only bring a little, like the loaves and the fishes, to help others, we still need to do something. One of my favorite quotes this weeks is:
If you think you are too small to make a
difference, try spending the night in a closed room with a mosquito. (African
saying)
Another great quote is from Mother
Teresa. We
can do no great things, only small things with great love.
In the face of the great needs and suffering of the world around us, and in the face of the complexity of the problems, we do feel small and helpless. But I would like to end this series by challenging you not to think small, first in terms of what you give. I know, from being in this congregation for its entire life, that many of us can give much more radically. We can raise our giving by a whole lot. Yes, in terms of the problems of the world, even this will be small, yet in the lives that are changed by our giving, the results will not be small at all.
And we can dream and think about what we do
with our time and our energies in a bigger way, and how they might be used for the service of
others. Jim and Mary Higbee will return from
Much more could be said, but I need to wrap this up. I want to end this series by saying that it is our intent that that these five weeks are not just a church program that we do and then move on to something else. We see this time as a deepening of our Christian responsibility to others. It is a life long process. The challenge will never go away. Until we are the ones who need help, who need to be visited, who need to be clothed, who need to be given water, and for many us, this time will come… we cannot say that we are done. There will never be a time in our lives when we say, until the very end, that we have done all we can do. I can remember my Aunt Edie, almost deaf, in the rest home, still leading Bible studies and caring for others, right up until the very end.
It is our prayer that this Lenten study will be blessed by God, and that this community of faith will go deeper and farther in mission to the world around us. It is our prayer and hope that some of you have been moved by this series and that your faith has grown. And it is our hope that some of you have been, or will be, converted by this series – that you have come to the realization that you have not made God the priority in your life, and that you have, or will, pray and turn you life over to Him.
While I haven’t been very good in giving up much this Lent, and my fasts have been few, this has been the most challenging, and the best Lent I have ever had. I hope it has been for many of you. AMEN!