Justice Revival

Text: Isaiah 1:10-18

Focus: Justice as a form of worship

Function: to give a passion for doing justice

Form: Bible Study

Intro: In order to justify the enslavement of people as a Christian nation, from the pulpits in European and American churches from the 16^th to the 21^st century, although very few today, those voices are still heard shouting out that white means right because if one is righteous, then one is made whiter than snow. Sadly, I wish I was making this up, but that is the history of slavery, racism and America’s original sin.

And yet, I only heard about this since I began studying God’s Word to seek out the meaning of this healing, this salvation, that God gives to humanity.

I heard it in Haiti at a conference for clergy that I was helping to lead and a young, black, Haitian pastor began to explain the history of racism and oppression that was Haiti before the slave revolution. I heard the history without the white colored lenses through which we have heard the history of slavery. It was terrible how religion was used to dehumanize an entire race of people and then enslave them. It is downright embarrassing and a thing that I bear some responsibility in just for the fact that I am from that race and that religion.

He was telling us in this sort of chant, it was a slow cadence like I was in a Stephen King movie, the chant was like their own version of Halloween, or their own bogey man story about how the demons are after them. Their peril came from the color of their skin. They are black, made black by the curse of Canaan, and the only way they can be safe here on earth and gain eternal life was by faithfully serving the white man.

All of it was based on this scripture “white as snow.” The idea was logically made that if white was pure, black was opposite and therefore evil.

It was merely a way to enslave an entire people.

I mention that I never heard that until I was in my 30’s and conducting a seminar in Haiti.

Up until then my memory of this verse: Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow with two things.

It never says that black is evil. The “Whiter than snow” phrase is a metaphor about purity and the entire Psalm is about forgiveness, repentance and salvation.

There was the hymn (sing) “whiter than snow, Lord, yes whiter than snow, now wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.”

I love that hymn. It is a lullaby tune that called up a sort of infantile scene of a newborn baby that is absolutely pure and without blemish.

I remember I used to change up the words just a little bit and instead of singing (sing) “now wash me,” I would change it to Christ in the vocative and make the chorus a prayer by singing (sing) “Lord, please wash me and I shall be...”

The Bible says to remember the joy of our salvation, to remember with joy the fact that God has both healed and accepted us into God’s family.

When I sing that hymn, I remember that brand new experience of being washed, cleansed, restored and accepted into God’s family.

The song reminds us of God’s mercy towards us.

Most often, when I heard those words about being washed and cleansed, it reminded me of my shame, of my own youthful thought life, of those areas that I hoped no one would ever know about me.

I remember my Spiritual formation professor in Seminary leading us in a guided meditation, he told us to imagine the place, or places, in our lives that of which we are the most ashamed. He asked us to ponder if there was or is a place that we want no one to know about, that maybe we are terrified to admit is within us.

And then he told us to imagine Jesus Christ Himself at this place... ...with His arms open... ...loving us in the midst of our brokenness and understanding the power of human weakness.

He didn’t leave us there, obviously, because if the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead dwells in us, that same spirit will move us, set us free, heal us and save us, spirit, soul, mind and body.

I heard some pretty scary sermons in my day about my own ability to sin and how important it was for me to be careful and if I really admitted it, I was just might be that bad.

But none of that changed the truth that even if my sins were red as scarlet, an image of the evil of actually shedding innocent blood, and that is consistent with the context of the text, even if my sins are damning my soul, through repentance, healing and salvation will come.

The sermons were given in good intention, but I often wondered why there was so much left out of the text.

We read those first few verses and the very first words the jump out to the casual reader of the Bible is the mention of Sodom and Gomorrah.

What is the first thing we think of when we hear Sodom and Gomorrah? The first thing we think of is that they are the symbol of sexual impurity.

I have heard a lot of sermon about Sodom and Gomorrah, God’s judgment. I have heard a lot of sermons about my sins being, -well the color “red” as crimson got changed often to black, but those sins mainly pertained to my ability to control my sexual purity.

And you know the story, Lot was living in the city of Sodom, angels came to visit his house, the people were so evil that they wanted rape the angels, God stuck them blind, the angels drug Lot, his wife, and his two daughters out of town right before God destroyed them with a volcano.

And because of that, homosexual men have been condemned as the cause of God’s judgment on a city.

A dire warning comes from this passage indeed and I submit that it is a dire warning for 21^st Century America as well.

From verses 11-15a, the prophet describes God’s attitude about their insincere worship because their hands have innocent blood on them.

Listen to those words (Read)

¹¹What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?
says the Lord;

I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams
and the fat of fed beasts;

I do not delight in the blood of bulls,
or of lambs, or of goats.

¹²When you come to appear before me,
who asked this from your hand?

Trample my courts no more;

¹³bringing offerings is futile;
incense is an abomination to me.

New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation—
I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity.

¹⁴Your new moons and your appointed festivals
my soul hates; they have become a burden to me,

I am weary of bearing them.

¹⁵When you stretch out your hands,
I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers,

God is displeased with their worship services and although they are trying, God is not in the mood to listen because of their sins.

This is indeed great preaching material.

And then at the end of verse 15, we read why God is displeased:

I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.

Sodom and Gomorrah are mentioned, but not in context of the sexual violence that occurred right before their destruction, but in the context of the other time they are mentioned by a different prophet.

Look at Ezekiel 16:49:⁴⁹This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.

And here is how we know this.

The passage is about God’s displeasure with God’s people because of the injustices going on in their land.

Isaiah is reminding the people that Sodom and Gomorrah were not condemned because of the sexual predation, they were condemned because of the way they permitted injustices to happen.

This was something that the even the common folks in Israel knew hundreds of years later.

And yet today, the wrong idea is perpetrated about the reason for this judgment. I wonder if it is because we ourselves are to close to the Sodomites, and not because of the Supreme Court’s decision, but because we too have “excess of food, prosperous ease and lack of concern for the refugee, the illegal, the minority, the oppressed, the poor, the needy and everyone else who is marginalized.”

This is what God cares about and every student of scripture knows this.

And so, God gives them the formula for repentance in next verses:

I love the way it starts in verse 16. It goes back to that heartfelt prayer of forgiveness, healing and salvation from that lullaby: “Now wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.”

Here the words:¹⁶Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;

But O how I long to have heard the rest of verse 16 and 17 as what it means for us to repent.

I heard how my imperfect thought life was going to take me straight to hell and there wasn’t really much I could do about it except pray harder, read more of my bible, spend more time at youth group, pray some more, read some more and if that didn’t work, then it had to be my fault, I just wasn’t being honest with God.

But the passage says it differently. Hear these words, they are a lot easier than beating oneself up for not being perfect. Here the word of the Lord: ^16bremove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil,

Remove evil.

Focus on the word evil. Evil is not a white lie told to cover someone else’s feelings. Evil is wickedness. If we want revival, then we need to be concerned about the big things, the big evil things that destroy others, planets, ecologies, economies, homes, families, cities, nations and humanity.

When we see evil, we remove it. Do we want revival, then we do our part to remove the evil that we see happening in our lives.

And just like the prophet is getting warmed up, he moves on to verse 17: ¹⁷learn to do good;
seek justice, rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan, plead for the widow.

Learn, seek, rescue, defend, plead and don’t quit, don’t shut up, don’t stop and don’t lose hope.

We are the kingdom of God here on earth and this is what God’s people do.

Seek good and do it, that is what it means to love God.

I love this form of repentance, I love this form of revival. We want revival to come, then see to the doing of justice. Make justice a mission in your life, and you will indeed be repentant.

Listen, by doing this, we combat the evil that is prevalent in our world.

(pray) Lord, give us a revival of justice.

Help From Above

Text: Psalms 121

Focus: Courage

Function: to help people focus on God in worship.

Form: exposition

Intro: There is a history to this Psalm that I want to look at this morning. And coincidently, I have an history with this Psalm that sort of ties the story together.

Obviously, the first verse of scripture that most people ever memorized is John 3:16.

At times as a child, I played the smart Alec preacher’s kid. My favorite was responding with “Jesus Wept” as my favorite memory verse.

It is ironic that it is now one of my favorite all time Bible verses. It does such a great job of capturing our reason to have courage: Jesus Christ. Jesus is the incarnation of God, He is the Word of God made flesh, and as incarnate God, He wept with us, He had friends, He groaned and I believe still groans, with humanity. Every time we cry, our great High Priest can sympathize with our pain.

So, in the 5^th grade when the Sunday School teacher in the voluntary “Christian education take out” session that happened in the Baptist church across the street from my elementary school, right before lunch time every other Wednesday, challenged me to be serious and memorize more, I choose Psalms 121 because I loved the way the poetry sounded to my ears.

And because I choose it, it became a big thing for me, I was going to make it personal.

I am grateful for the challenge to memorize scripture because those experiences started to make the scriptures mean something to me.

Now I have to tell you that the entire premise of the Psalm sort of rattled my theological cage until I took a bible course in the Poetical books of the Old Testament.

I finally learned that the first line: “I will lift up my eyes unto the hills...” was not a form of idolatry.

The verse really bothered my young mind because I was told and still believe that God is Omnipresent -God is everywhere.

So, if the Psalmist claims that God is in the hills, then he must be claiming that his god is some sort of idol carved into some mountain somewhere.

I saw all kinds of problems with that, the biggest being that if the bogey man was not up in the hills, but down here on the prairie with us, and God was up in the hills, then how was God going to get there in time to help me?

I needed my God, my protector, right there where God could help me. Nope, Hill God was not good enough, Omnipresent God is much better.

I honestly wanted to go up to the preacher and whisper to him that there was an obvious error in one of our primary texts. I mean, I wouldn’t have used that language because I was a kid and I didn’t have the verbiage for it, but it would have been what I meant.

And then I reasoned that the Psalm made complete sense if you turn the first line into a sort of rhetorical question that assumes a negative response.

I thought it might have been easier to understand if it said, “Do we have to wait for God to come from the hills to rescue us? No! Our God is here because God is everywhere.”

But then, I realized that the poet used poetic license and I read that Psalm for many years. Often times when I read it publicly, I would supply the interrogative by reading it “Do I look to the hills for my Help?” and then a pause in order for the reader to understand that “no” was implied.

And then I learned that:

• “Their God is a god of the hills” passage.
  • Apparently, In 1 Kings chapter 20, an enemy spy took the words of this Psalm and convinced the Syrian King to lead his troops to be captured by the Israelite king.
  • And although God did not approve the the Israelite king, God also takes offense at the idea that we relegate God to the hills.
  • Or maybe, it is because someone took it so literally that they started preaching it and an enemy agent who didn’t know the history of the text fooled himself by taking it to literally.
• Then I learned:
• “The God of the hills” was an idiomatic expression used by the Hebrews that was meant to express -fast forward to young Phillip 2800 years later- God’s Omnipresence. “Even the mountains were made by God.”

All of that both reinforces my wonder at the gift of the scriptures that God has given us and at the same time, I can see from those scriptures themselves what can happen if we try to stretch the meaning beyond its intent.

The intent? Courage and trust in God.

Even when they had it wrong, God was still faithful toward them.

Verse 4 is particularly encouraging to me, The Lord never slumbers nor sleeps.

I had a professor in Seminary who wrote his Doctoral Thesis on the evolution of the worship of God.

Through a collection of ancient scriptures of many different religions, he was able to trace how humanity started out believing in Creator God, and then deliberately chose what he called “lesser gods.” What he meant was that humanity basically knew about Creator God, but choose to worship idols instead.

And he graphed a sort of chart that showed a divergence away from monotheism toward polytheism and then back toward monotheism, at least, in the Western cultures.

The principle religions of the West and middle East, Christianity, Islam and Judaism are all monotheistic religions.

Remember, by the time 1 Kings happened, what we know as Psalm 121 was already an ancient text, hundreds of years old.

It has become a sort of confession of faith, a sort of creed for those faithful to Jehovah and it calls people to separate from idolatry toward faith in God.

The Psalm is a declaration that God, our God, is real, alive and has a purpose for us as a people.

This was a big thing with huge implications. It was a question, are you going to follow the king with his new gods, or are you going to go back to the ancient faith, the one that we have our national identity tied to?

When we read about the idolatry that was prevalent in Canaan before the Israelites displaced them, we read their justification for it was because these idolatrous religions ritualized abusive sex and legalized forms of oppression against women and aliens.

The OT law system was very clear about human rights, especially for the resident alien and the poor.

Whenever the OT prophets, who confronted this idolatry throughout the history of Israel and Judah preached, they spoke very clearly about why God hated the idolatry. And although the idea of God being jealous is mentioned a few times, it is taken out of context. God hated idolatry because it allows for oppression of the poor.

When I think about our culture and the moral outrage leveled by the Church and I hear groups of people marginalized as evil because of their faith, their race or their sexual identity, I want to shout because when Daniel stood before Belshazzar when the writing on the wall appeared, during the middle of a party that was for all intents and purposes an orgy, Daniel said nothing about the orgy going on, but tells the king to make sure the poor get justice and God will repent of God’s destruction.

And that keeps bringing me back to this Psalm. Psalms 23, 25, 27, 39, 40, 51, 67, 73, 100, 103, 121, 127, 139 and 150 all serve to keep me, to keep us focused on our worship of God. Literally, the best part of my day is that part of the day when the Psalm comes up in my morning devotions.

Even though by this time they had it wrong, the use of the Psalm, the use of it in their worship, delivered them from destruction.

First, it focuses them, us, back on God, our Saviour. It -they- remind us of simple, basic and yet profound truths. They help to keep us from idolatry.

And many may chuckle and say that it is working as well as elephant repellent in anywhere but Africa and India or a zoo. Idolatry is dead, we don’t need it.

But here is the thing, where does our help come from? Does it come from our bank account, our IRA or the Lord? That is not meant to shame anyone. But remember, money is still the biggest idol.

(Pray) Lord, help us.

For All Time

Text: 1 Timothy 1:3-14

Focus: Communion liturgy

Function: To help people see the importance of the ordinance of communion through the passing down of symbols.

Form: Bible Study

Intro:

This passage of scripture for preachers energizes me. Everyone, I suppose, likes and looks forward to a good challenge. And it gets better when it happens to be in the chosen profession of a…? (pause) An…? ...a preacher? or a Christian?

This is the first of the Pastoral Epistles, three books, 1^st & 2^nd Timothy and Titus.

The epistles -letters- contain a few songs and hymns from the early church, some confessions of faith, even what might have been an early “creed.”

They are three letters that demonstrate the kinds of issues that brother Paul dealt with when he was giving instructions to those whom he mentored as they were leading the churches that Paul and others planted.

Even though they are addressed to pastors, we include them in the whole canon of Scripture because they reveal spiritual principles, expectations and practices of the early church.

Jesus told us that although the good news will always be true and never change, He made it clear that the Church would always continue to evolve and change. In John chapter 14, verse 12 we read this: ¹²Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. Indeed, Jesus was talking about how they would change the world. And He also tells them that throughout the process they will need and receive the promise and help of the Holy Spirit. Listen to John 16: 12-13a ¹²“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. ¹³When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth;

So, Jesus tells them that big changes will come, it will be so much that they can’t get it all into their heads at once, so trust the Holy Spirit to lead them.

God’s Spirit will lead us and She will lead us to more than what Jesus and His disciples were already doing. I wonder if they knew that they were going to change the world.

And we can trust the scriptures. They promise that the Holy Spirit will continue to reveal new and greater things to us, the Church.

And there are instructions for guidelines and parameters around that evolution contained in these three epistles. And, they are pretty open minded when you look at them in context.

One of the biggest ones might be from the end of the 2^nd Epistle, Chapter 4, verses 3,4:³For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, ⁴and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths.

Often, especially when drastic geo or political events happen, there is often a lot of talk that the outcome might mean the end of times. I remember people thinking that the second coming of Christ was imminent when the current President was elected. And I heard people refer to this passage and using it as a basis to criticize a perceived loosening of our morals because of what is purported as their agenda. There is always rhetoric and we need to remember to keep our faith in the kingdom of God. Dear family members who love Jesus were genuinely afraid.

But whenever I hear that the end is near because of a specific event, I always want to cringe. Mainly because when the end doesn’t happen, I have to defend my brothers and sisters in the faith, because they are.

And most of it comes from a fear of change.

But God has not given us a Spirit of fear. And today, we are looking at the values of tradition as they are experienced in the symbols.

There is another, more plausible explanation to the prophecy that people will flock to the preachers that tell them only what they want to hear.

I wanted to say to people who said “they flock to the person who will tell them what they want to hear, not what they need to hear.”

And I want to say to them, so then, the biggest churches are the ones that are getting it wrong?

Please, I am not saying that.

But, here is what I submit people do not want to hear:

They don’t want to hear that every time an American Drone strikes an innocent, we as a people are all to blame. I watched a TV preacher several years ago begin a sermon with “The Muslim religions preaches peace and over 90% are peaceful.” And then, he went on to preach a sermon about how we need to fear the other 10%. Maybe people want to hear that it is okay to be afraid, even though we know that God has not given us a Spirit of fear. They don’t want to hear that economic policies protect cheap gas so that we continue to burn through the fossil fuel reserves millions of times faster than they can be replaced is a sinful way for us to treat our children. Let alone what it does to the planet in regards to emissions and global warming. They don’t want to hear the rest of the scripture Jesus quoted when He said “The poor you will always have with you… Jesus then clearly says: SHOW KINDNESS TO THEM.”

A Christianity that calls everyone, especially those who live in such a prosperous land as ours, to live sacrificial lives for others is not easy to hear. It is easier to hear: “Be afraid of the other, they might be evil… ...resist those sinners, they are degrading the faith...” than it is to hear Jesus’ words: “take up your cross and follow Me” or “sell all you have and give it to the poor.”

And yet, some people are told that by resisting those other sinners and being criticized for it is persecution for their faith and that qualifies them as people living sacrificially, even though it doesn’t really cost them anything. As a matter of fact, in their own circles, it is used as a badge of honor.

And that keeps bringing me back to the power of the symbol of the Love Feast.

It focuses on Jesus and His sacrifice for all of humanity.

So, it brings us to the question of what traditions mean?, why we hang on to traditions? and the power of tradition.

• What do the traditions mean?
  • Verse 5: ⁵I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you.
    • Timothy has the blessing of godly heritage of faithful women who have lead him to Christ.
    • Now, I always heard this passage repeated to me about how his mother and his grandmother taught him scripture.
    • Scripture is important, but that isn’t what the text actually says.
    • They passed on this faith to him.
    • But I want to focus on the power of the traditions, the power of the symbols as those are the things that communicated the faith.
    • The Jewish people are good at the power of the story, and just like us at Christmas and Easter, they retell the story of God’s love and deliverance several times during the year.
    • That shared story, that shared experience is important.
    • Jesus commanded us to continue the practice “In Remembrance of Him.”
    • Again, Jesus promised us the Holy Spirit to lead us all the way till the end of the ages.
    • The symbols that mean the most to us in our tradition, the love feast with the agape meal, the foot washing and the bread and cup is a powerful way to keep us focused on Jesus.
• Why we hang on to traditions?
  • Verse 6:⁶For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands;
  • Rekindles the gift, the faith.
  • I go back to how these traditions, especially these highly symbolic ones have passed on the faith.
  • Remember, it wasn’t like the pastor at their synagogue ever said, “okay, if you have your bibles, please turn to Psalms 119, verse 18.”
  • Only the very wealthy and highly educated had a copy of scripture.
  • They learned and studied the scriptures and lessons of faith together in community.
  • The symbols become living embodiments of what they needed to remember.
  • And that leads us to the 3^rd area to consider:
• The Power of Traditions.
  • They center back through the experience of what is symbolized.
  • And that is powerful because once we begin to experience, either vicariously, or in a real fashion, it begins to form us.
  • Again: Verse 7:⁷for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.
  • Our faith forms us. We are reminded and rekindled by these acts.
  • It is not really the act, but the faith that is behind it.
  • However, the tradition, the symbol embodies that faith, it makes it tangible in a way that we can relate.
  • We relate more than with just cognition and mental assent, for some, at times, something spiritual and real is felt as it grows within us.
  • I think it has to do with the way that we do it together in community. As we participate together, we reinforce together the values that we embrace from the life, death and teachings of Jesus.