The Family

Text: Galatians 3:23-29

Focus: Family Celebration

Function: To Help People see the family nature of Church

Form: 3 points

Intro: Today we are celebrating family. You are all invited to stay for a potluck and a program afterwards.

And I love the theme on the cover of the Bulletin: “You are all children of God.”

I confess, emphasizing that part of the passage, “you are ALL children of God” changes my perspective on the passage.

It seems like the times that I have studied this passage before, I have come to emphasize the line: “because of Faith...” you are all Children of God.

I have emphasized the part that in order to be children of God, we must have faith.

And faith is important. It is the difference. Faith is trust in God. Rest in God. Faith in God is born out of relationship with God.

I believe that a formal relationship with God is an important part of our faith journey.

But the emphasis of the passage is not that you must have faith, you must trust God, but that everyone who does is part of the family.

He makes sure we know what the family of God consists of. And it is a breaking down of barriers between ancient divisions.

For the Jews, it meant that their racial heritage did not make them any more special. The same applies for us.

Two of the other major dividing factions of the time are also shown to be irrelevant in the family of God. The first is the distinction between the classes of people who are free and who are slaves, remember, in Rome 2/3 of the population were slaves, it was a slave economy. And the section distinction is between the genders.

This Church, this faith, this family, cuts through ancient divisions between people to bring us all into the same place, Children of God.

We are all part of the family and the family realizes that every part is just as important.

There is an emphasis here that I remind myself to remember, “Because of our faith, everyone is important.”

It is like he is saying, “now that you have faith, see the value in every single person.”

And, I see the importance of the family analogy in the way we value others.

Look at 1 Timothy 5:1-2: ¹Do not speak harshly to an older man, but speak to him as to a father, to younger men as brothers, ²to older women as mothers, to younger women as sisters—with absolute purity.

I think there is an assumption here. And that is this, when dealing with family, we do not have the luxury of merely winning an argument, but with family, we have burden of working it out.

Now I know we live in a broken world and this is idealistic in nature. And I know that at best effort, sometimes it is not possible to work things out, or safety and other issues get in the way, but the idea is still the same, we talk in such a way as to not win an argument, but to work it out because we have to.

That commitment to family means that we value and respect the people here so much that we will work it out with them.

The love inherent in the family of God is designed to be unconditional. That does not mean that we do not have conflict, but it means that we live through it for the purpose of community.

God’s love is unconditional, so is ours.

Family love is also deliberate.

In my morning devotions both yesterday and today, I was reading the feeding of 5,000 Jewish people in the desert and the feeding of 4,000 Canaanite people in another desert by Jesus.

I am reading it in the Gospel of Mark, but in both Mark and Matthew, the author points out both miracles and then has a section where Jesus chides the disciples for their lack of faith later when the food supplies are running low.

I have always read those miracles as miracles that prove that if we, like the little boy, give our loaves and fishes, a small portion, then God will take what we have, and by the power of the Holy Spirit multiply it into miraculous force and great things could happen.

It was always a lesson in faith about giving our little bit to God and then God would multiply it.

It depended on a visible sign. But I wonder now more and more if the actual miracle was the miracle of sharing.

First, the boy offering his gifts as a metaphor for his talents is not present in the second account.

The emphasis in either point is not on the boy who gave, but on Jesus who made it adequate.

But the miracle of sharing, the miracle of community, the miracle of trusting God for the moment by giving what we have now to those in need with the trust that God will provide in the future seems to make more sense today to me.

But more than that, the disciples reaction to the need of the crowd and the problem with feeding the crowd is telling.

The crowd is hungry and Jesus tells the disciples to feed them.

Their answer is that the task is enormous. “A year’s wages would be needed to buy that much food,” they say.

The task is enormous.

They are being commanded to care for others.

Actually caring for others takes the willingness to sacrifice time and effort for them.

I hope it was the miracle of sharing because the value of stopping, caring and nurturing others is what it means to be a part of the family of God.

In First Corinthians 12, we get another look at this family called the church as it relates to the fact that it is also an individual body.

When one part of the body hurts or is sick, the entire body is in distress and is distracted.

When one part of the body does not do its job, or cannot do its job, the whole body, again, is affected and at times, it can even die.

Every part of the family is important and needs to be cared for and nurtured.

And again, it takes time and effort.

Actually, I am becoming more aware that it takes a lot of time and effort.

I remember taking biology in college and the professor was working out the ratio of sunlight to the growth of a plant and less than .01% of the sunlight is actually absorbed and used for growth.

And then I look at the corn as it gets tall (Lord, give us more rain), and I realize that all that sun energy is used to produce this big plant and out of that plant, we just use a part of a part of a part. The carbohydrates inside the husk of the kernel provides energy for our bodies. It is less than .01% of the plant.

So, the energy from the sun is reduced from an hundredth percent to a thousandth percent and then it gets consumed by the body and only a small percentage of that is actually used by us.

I remember thinking that God designed an incredibly inefficient system.

And then I thought of the thousands of years that humanity spent most of its effort just making sure that this process happened year after year and I realized something.

The culture does not live that way anymore. We don’t walk past our neighbors house on the way to the local village where we know and grew up with everyone anymore.

This ancient system of a yearly cycle of a lot of effort to survive brought the community together to a place where they depended on each other.

God designed the world for us to stop, take the time to nurture and care for each other. I see the importance and value of community. I see the beauty and value of the Church that, according to our scripture this morning is intentional about including outsiders.

I see that God designed the family, both the nuclear family and the Church family to be this place where people take the time to stop, care for and nurture one another.

I believe that we have to be intentional about maintaining our sense of family and interdependence since we live in a fast paced society and continue to build a place where we can all nurture and be nurtured.

Priceless

Text: Luke 9:51-62

Focus: The cost of Discipleship

Function: To help people see Jesus

Form: Storytelling

Intro: Sometimes I love the irony of the NT. Throughout the gospels, oftentimes, as is the case today, the disciples seem clueless, but last week, we saw that the women were right there, in the middle of it, most often, getting it.

Today's text stays true to form.

Where did this violence come from?

There were plenty of Jews who did not welcome Jesus either, and yet, the disciples want to call down fire from heaven for these people with whom there was already racial tension.

Why such judgment? Were they excited about the new found power and the new coming kingdom and were they asking out of curiosity for what might be coming?

You know that Samaria was a Roman province a little bit separate from Israel, just North of Jerusalem and South of Galilee. The Galileans were pure-bread Jews like those from Israel and the racism was so intense between the two cultures that Jews would cross over into another foreign land to travel between regions.

And, this wasn't just crossing the street to the other side to avoid a person of another race, this detour added miles to a foot journey.

And Jesus makes the attempt to connect with them. And, because Jesus was just passing through, they ran Him off.

This is a classic case of racism and it reminds me that violence is not the solution to fear of the other. Violence begets violence.

One of the ways that I am learning to become aware of my own pre-judged biases is when I start judging a whole group of people by the actions of a few.

WE know that WE and the people we hang around with, most often similar to us, are basically good and if one of US is not good, then that person is an exception. But, we are not as quick to give the same grace to those who are different from us.

Because of learned prejudices we are more quick to accuse an entire race or culture of something that we would be offended of being called ourselves. For example, people say that the poor are poor because they are lazy. Or the big one is the accusation that entire races, genders, or sub-gender groups of people are all merely motivated by their desires and they have no ability to plan ahead.

And the thing is, xenophobia is learned behavior. We were at the pool yesterday, kids from all races were playing together because they had not yet learned to hate and fear.

For some reason, it has been at times human nature to classify all by the actions of a few. Our cognitive minds know it is not logical but our animal brain wants to fight. Perhaps we evolved it tribally, or God created the need through our endocrine system for the purpose of love and family.

God knows that love and community keep us safe.

Jesus is extending the community, trying to build the circle, and this violent reaction occurs between Jesus' followers and the other.

And our religious speech is a big part of this fear, love and behavior.

Jesus calls us to love, not hate, even our enemies.

I can't help but realize that the murders in Orlando where a whole group of people were killed just a few weeks after a governor decided to link transgender people with pedophilia.

It appears that when we permit it in our religious institutions, it shows up in our politics as that kind of hate speech.

In this case, it appears it led a crazy person to do violence.

But look at the disciples, they ask Jesus for extreme violence.

And remember, this is a racially tense situation. This is a situation calls for tact.

Jesus and the disciples were welcomed in Samaritan villages on plenty of occasions before. Jesus made a point of it.

Apparently the problem was traveling through without the decency to stop and or shop.

The text tells us their issue was the traveling through. Did the Samaritans think that Jesus abandoning them? Was He insincere? Was all that talk of love and harmony just a ruse? Why wasn’t He stopping this time?

Isn't that part of the nature of cultural conflicts?We don't take time to understand?

I am excited that Hope Church is taking the time to understand and educate ourselves.

Calling down fire from heaven was a sort of OT, “wrath of God” response.

Jesus rebuked them for thinking it. It is wrong to think that way. “Love our enemies” still means to love them enough not to kill them.

Our theme today is on the cost of discipleship. In the first section of text, we see how racism and inherit social structures get in the way of discipleship, the cost of overcoming them can be to high for some.

Now we move on to a few more who were not quite ready to accept Jesus on Jesus' terms.

The great passage on counting the cost. (Re-read 57-62)

We don’t know if any of them said yes or no, the text leaves that a mystery.

All we know is that before the decision to follow the cost is outlined.

For one man, it is a reminder that earthly possessions are a distraction, for another it is giving up the family obligation of caring for his father, a biblical commandment by the way, and for the other, the decency of a healthy goodbye to his family. There is nothing wrong with any of the things asked to be forsaken. Most all of us have all of those things along with our commitment to Jesus.

When I asked Jesus into my heart to forgive my sins, I had no idea that I was surrendering everything I had to follow Jesus.

They didn’t understand the cost, but it appears that they felt it was true and they were compelled to follow Jesus.

Before they made their bold claims, how did these guys know what the cost is/was?

What is the cost? How could they know the cost? Is it merely by faith without logic? Obviously not, since the command is to think about it.

I place a lot of value on spiritual intuition during prayer and meditation, but this isn’t just a Spiritual feeling that Jesus demands, it is also a well thought out intellectual process. Faith does not mean that we suspend logic, God is the Lord of both faith and logic, as to whatever those differences are.

So what is the cost of discipleship?

I didn’t understand that, and yet I was compelled. Maybe I was compelled by those who promoted a form of easy believing, but the thing is this, in that situation, I did meet Jesus.

I don’t believe that I was tricked, but I do see that they, like me, still live through the prejudices, fears and loves of our culture, just like Jesus disciples.

The Cost of Discipleship is paid by Christ. It is priceless and we can never pay it ourselves.

The cost is paid. What is the link between these passages?

Well, things were getting serious.

Both groups were hanging on to the past prejudice. They weren't willing to pay the price of love. Jesus rebuked His own for not loving the other.

And it is right at this point that the story of Jesus goes into these metaphors about cost of discipleship.

Romans 12:1 “I beg of you, Brethren, present yourselves to God as living sacrifices...”

We constantly, with Jesus, surrender ourselves and go against the prejudices of the culture in order to be the good news of Jesus Christ.

It is a constant process of decision to be different than the fears and learned prejudices of our society in order to make the circle of faith bigger.

Where the Women Were

Text: Luke 7:36-8:3

Focus: The Holy Spirit (Pentecost 5)

Function: to train people in humility

Form: Storytelling

Intro: How do you react to this story of Jesus, the woman and Simon the Pharisee?

I remember a great Annual Conference address, “Do you see the woman?” whereby the speaker compared the washing of Jesus’ feet by a woman in both Simon the Pharisee’s house, and Simon the Leper’s house.

Jesus appeared much more comfortable in the house of the outcast than He did in the house of the Religious leader.

And in both cases, first, defending Himself against the Pharisee, and then defending Himself against a person who would use religion for a source of personal greed, points to the woman and demands that instead of passing judgment on people, they should look at the person, their circumstance and then, always then, give them grace.

Jesus does something huge here. He condemns religious exclusion in every form simply based on the capacity of a person to turn to Jesus for healing and restoration.

That, Jesus is showing us, is what the Church is and should be.

Remember, we have the power to forgive people their sins.

We empower people to live holistic lives that are surrendered to Christ Jesus.

I used to frame this as Jesus confronting self-righteousness.

But it is more. Jesus is condemning the structures that were designed to keep people on the outskirts of society. And, it happens in order to maintain power and control.

So again, how do we react to this story?

Before our church got the hearing devices, one lady, who barely heard depended on reading my lips to fill in details of my sermon. I keep my mustache trimmed because of her. And sometimes, she would call because she misunderstood something that I said.

But this one day, she reacted to me telling people that “woman of ill-repute” was an euphemism for Prostitute. She absolutely refused to believe that such a man of God, as Jesus was, would ever allow such a person to actually touch Him.

And then she realized that the Simon’s self-righteous offense was the sin in the story.

The story itself is intended to elicit, or, if you are offended as Simon the Pharisee, or this woman was, to provoke an understanding inside of us as to how we ourselves can use our own levels of comfort/discomfort to exclude or include others who are on the outside.

And something else is not lost in this story beginning with the rest of the today’s text.

The introduction to the gospel of Luke self describes it as an historic time-line of the events around Jesus as Luke saw it.

The women that were following Jesus followed Him for quite some time and yet, for some reason, right after this story of the sinful woman, Luke decides to add to the narrative of Jesus these women in His group.

This might be an unfortunate chapter break. The Chapter break between chapters 7 and 8 are not part of the original text. We tend to separate the footnote of who these women were from this story of the woman who washed Jesus’ feet.

But that was not Luke’s intent and the fact of that is not lost on those who prepared our text for the 5^th week after Pentecost.

On the 5^th week after the beginning of the Church’s focus on who and what the Holy Spirit is and does and the power present in the Church, we focus on who and what these women are and were.

Unfortunately, we do not get much mention of the women who supported Jesus in the gospel accounts, but I find some things about it significant.

In an historically male dominated culture and church, we are tempted to think of the story of Jesus as “Jesus and the 12 disciples.”

But here, all of a sudden, the men are mentioned only as the 12 and the women are elevated and are called out by name.

So, let us put this all together.

The religious folk are the antagonists in this story. They want to keep the circle of who is in and out smaller and Jesus opens the door to yet another group of people who are welcome in the Kingdom.

The women represent everyone who humbly comes to Christ.

They didn’t bicker.

They didn’t seek the limelight.

They loved and were spiritual.

They came from all walks and stations of life.

From these different stations, they created a real live community, focused on Jesus Christ.

The Sinful woman approaches Jesus with love, humility and enough brokenness to recognize the healing power of Jesus’ ministry of love, grace, acceptance, forgiveness and finally, repentance.

The religious folks were to proud to see their own need for a Savior.

And in the power of this woman’s love, the presence and power of the Holy Spirit Herself comes into the room, and through her love, both the woman’s and the Spirit’s Love, Jesus is anointed.

Now, in the second anointing, at Simon the Leper’s house, Jesus is anointed for death. This time, it is near the beginning of His ministry, and again, just as the Holy Spirit anointed Jesus for ministry in the form of a dove, here, the Holy Spirit anoints Jesus in the form of a woman.

Where the women were was right there, in the middle of it all, full of faith, setting an example of what it means to love in community.

Jehovan Rophe

Text: 1 Kings 17:17-24

Focus: Healing

Function: To prepare for anointing service

Intro: I am grateful for Pentecost and what it means to us to have the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead, living inside of us.

Today, the lectionary texts focus on healing and as I see it, healing is what we need.

Another text from today comes from Psalms 30, let me read verses 2, and then my favorite 2 verses from that Psalm, vs 11-12

From Psalms 30:

²O Lord my God, I cried to you for help,
and you have healed me.

¹¹You have turned my mourning into dancing;
you have taken off my sackcloth
and clothed me with joy,

¹²so that my soul may praise you and not be silent.
O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever.

The caption above the passage in the New Revised Standard Version, a caption that was added by the translators, says that it is a prayer of thanksgiving for recovery from a serious illness.

And I think, that every time I have seen an answer to prayer that appeared to be some sort of divine intervention, most often, an hard heart is changed (often mine), or an incredible coincidence happens, and yes, I have even seen what appears to be physical and supernatural interventions that seem to defy God’s laws of nature.

And when that happens, many times, my heart has broken out into the song of these last two verses -God has turned my mourning into dancing.

My dad, a man of whom some have said had a gift of healing, always reminded me that the laws of Nature are God’s laws and God will not break God’s own laws lightly.

And that brings us to the circumstances of this Psalm. The life of David is pretty well chronicled in the Bible and there is no other record of David having a life-threatening illness.

But David struggled throughout his life. I think at times, his own worst enemy was himself. Most of David’s struggles have to do with relationships. It appears that he loved and fought fiercely.

In 1 Samuel 22, we read of how David was betrayed by a dear friend. He was betrayed for political power and reasons. He was betrayed to the point where he spent the next several years away from the Capital of Israel hiding in caves for his life.

I believe that the healing David needed was restoration to the people in his life.

When the Church was growing thousands at a time right after Jesus’ resurrection, we read a phrase in the book of Acts, “The Lord was adding daily to their numbers those who were being saved.”

That term, “saved,” had been picked up by the Evangelical community to speak of the salvation that happens when by the power of the Holy Spirit they sense that their sins are forgiven and washed away.

It is a great feeling and it is deeply spiritual.

But there is so much more to it than merely having our sins forgiven.

I met the pastor of a Congregation in a declining neighborhood near the Parliament in London, England.

His Church was on a turn-around from 12 people to 150, and it was a congregation very much like ours in its diversity, education and theology.

The turn around, he believed was one of faith in what it means for God to be our Savior.

Salvation, he said, is complete. It heals spirit, soul, mind and body. When we decided that our mission was to bring this holistic salvation to our community, we realized that our job was to focus on wholeness in every aspect of life for the community God has called us to serve.

And the point that I took away from that interview was that God’s heart is for reconciliation and healing in every way possible.

Healing is in the heart of God.

Now, God is not as afraid of death as we are.

Since Jesus defeated sin and brokenness and the power of death on the Cross, since Jesus overcame death through the resurrection and gave that same hope to us, we too can have hope both in the love and the power of God.

That brings us to the other text from today, the widow’s son.

Jesus refers to this miracle and to the fact that the boy healed was not even an Israelite.

The miracle happened during a time of drought and famine, a judgment of God because they were turning away from God. There were many widows who were depending on their sons for their retirement support.

Without this son, the lady would most probably die.

Her situation was dire, but so was the situation of many other people.

And the woman asks the question that everyone asks when a tragedy happens: “Why did God do this to me?”

It goes back to this big question of faith. Does God care for me? Does God see my problems? Does God care. And one of the names for God is Jehovah Rophe, the God who sees (our problems).

And this time, in answer to prayer, it appears that God changed the inevitable course of nature that God set up and rose the boy back from the dead.

And Jesus points out to the crowd that apparently God healed what was to them “an undeserving person.”

I love the song “I Believe” by Brooks and Dunn. There is a line in it where he says “If anyone deserves a ticket to the other side, it would be that sweet old man.”

We think in terms of who is and who is not deserving.

But Jesus points out that God is acting in History for God’s own purposes.

This miracle, it appears from verse 24 where she says: “Now I know that you are a man of God…,” shows that God used this to validate the ministry of God’s prophet.

God was doing something in the nation of Israel. I see this, God is acting in history, in the affairs of mankind. I don’t understand how and why all the time, but I see this, Jesus uses this miracle to demonstrate to people that God does indeed care for creation because God cared for her.

The message is this, Not only is God concerned with the governments and institutions that control humanity, but God cares for the individual person as well.

God’s salvation is both corporate and personal.

Today, we are looking at the personal nature of that reconciliation.

I invite you during this next phase of our worship service to come for anointing.

I plan to ask God for healing for my surgery, but more than anything, right now, there are two relationships that I need comfort in reconciliation.

I am going to ask for that as well.