Archive for March 10th, 2009

Sermon March 8, 2009

March 10, 2009

On the Journey We Make A Deal

Lent 2, Year B ~ Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16

Kenwood UMC ~ March 8, 2009

PRAY!

I have not had a good week with contracts. Those folks who are in Disciple Bible Study with me on Thursday nights know this, because I had encountered the last straw just before I arrived to facilitate Bible study. It had started last weekend with a bad customer service experience with a damaged product which needed to be returned to the store. We had entered into a contract—we paid money, the product should work. We had made a deal, and the provider wasn’t holding up their end of it. My experience with broken deals and contracts continued throughout the week with the cable television provider, the cell phone provider, and the company from which we lease the copier here at Kenwood. At every turn, I found myself thinking, wait a minute, we had an agreement here, and you are not living up to your end of it.

We have a lot of contracts in life. Each week one of my kids has a spelling contract. We enter into a contract when we purchase or rent a home, or buy or lease a car. We enter into a contract when we get married. We understand contracts.

But did you know we have a contract with God? Yes, that’s right a contract with God. Actually, the Biblical word is not contract, but covenant. A covenant is similar to a contract—an agreement between two parties to each perform certain duties. But a covenant—at least a covenant with God–is also a little different.

The difference with a covenant with God is that God, thankfully, has a better customer service record than Comcast or AT&T or even Ukrops. God always keeps God’s end of the bargain—and that is to love us unconditionally and fully. For Abraham and Sarah, that live took the form of promising them a great family—a seemingly impossible promise to fulfill. So impossible that it makes Abraham and Sarah laugh.

Can you identify with them? Can you think of a time when you have behaved in such a way that it was laughable to you that God might still love you? I think we can all identify with that. We’ve all had times when we’ve acted in ways that are so out of step with God’s desires for us that we think, “whoa, I’ve really messed up. No way God can love me now.” I have to be honest and say that I had a couple of conversations this week with customer service departments when I was not exactly nice and pleasant and, well, “Christian” in how I was speaking to people. I was angry.

But does that mean God breaks God’s end of the bargain? When we get angry, when we stop coming to worship, when we pull away from God, when we do things we KNOW are not in keeping with a Christian lifestyle, does that mean God forsakes us, or stops loving us? No. That’s what’s so amazing about this covenant God makes—he keeps it no matter what.

And even though God never breaks his end of the deal, we certainly do. And the sad thing is, when we break our end of the deal, the only people we are hurting is ourselves. We are driving ourselves farther and farther away from the One who loves us with an everlasting love. His love doesn’t stop—we just stop being able to feel it. And that, my friends, is why the practice of keeping our end of the covenant is one of the ways we can draw closer to God this Lenten season.

And that leads us to the inevitable question—what is our end of the covenant? Well in our scripture today, God lets Abraham know what his end of the covenant is. When Abraham is ninety-nine years old, God appears before him and says this, according to Eugene Peterson’s translation of the Bible called The Message: “I am The Strong God, live entirely before me, live to the hilt! I’ll make a covenant between us and I’ll give you a huge family (Genesis 17:1-2).”

There it is, our end of the covenant. Life entirely before me. Live to the hilt.

OK, that’s a contract a lot heftier than agreeing to two years of a particular cell phone service, or even heavier than agreeing to a 30 year mortgage. Live entirely before me. Live to the hilt.

Matthew Henry, an English clergyman living in the late 16 and early 1700’s, comments on this scripture and invites us to observe that “to be religious is to walk before God in our integrity; it is to set God always before us, and to think, and speak, and act, in every thing, as those that are always under his eye…. If we neglect him, or dissemble with him, we forfeit the benefit and comfort of our relation to him.”[1]

What exactly does that mean? When we live entirely before God, we give ourselves wholly to God. We understand that our lives are lived not out of what we desire or want, but what God lovingly desires for us. And we try to live our lives listening to God’s deepest desires for us. When we do not listen—well, we find ourselves distant and absent from God. And that distance and absence is usually painful.

Now, friends, this living entirely before God is not something that happens overnight. It is a process, a process lived out over our entire lives. There will be seasons when we feel very good about our life before God. And seasons when we feel not very good at all. But God always invites us back into the process, back into the relationship, back into the covenant. God never closes the door on God’s love for us.

And so this second week of Lent, I want to invite you to participate in the practice of covenant, of living your life more wholly and completely before God. And to begin, I want to invite you to turn with me to page 607 in your hymnals, where you will find a covenant prayer modeled after the one which John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, used in his life. I want to invite us into a time of silent centering, and then to all say the prayer together.

[1] Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, Volume 1, Genesis to Deuteronomy. Genesis XVII. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/henry/mhc1.Gen.xviii.html

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Sermon March 1, 2009

March 10, 2009

As The Journey Begins We Gather to the Promise of the Rainbow

Lent 1, Year B ~ Genesis 9:8-17

Kenwood UMC ~ March 1, 2009

Each summer our family vacations at the same beach. We’ve gone there since 2003, and so it is a place our kids, who are 8 and 5, have grown up with. The journey there is always very exciting, but also very tedious, as journeys can sometimes be. And as we get near the end the anticipation is building. We have learned that it is helpful to have a sign, some sort of a marker so that everyone ones we are about to embark on the vacation journey, we are about to reach the beach. For us, that sign has become the bridge going over to the island. It’s a lot like the bridge going over to Nags Head which many of you may be familiar with. And when we reach that bridge, we put down whatever book we are reading, or whatever movie is on the DVD player, we turn down the radio, we open the windows and smell the beach air, and together as a family we experience that sign that tells us our vacation journey is about to begin.

Friends, our journey of Lent is about to begin—in fact, it has already begun. It started on Ash Wednesday, last Wednesday night, when we gathered here in the sanctuary to begin to come to terms with how we are separated from God. And this journey that we will share together, over the next 6 weeks, will be an experience of moving—sometimes forward, sometimes, backward, sometimes round in circles. But as we learn about ourselves and our relationship right now with God, we will not stay the same. And it is our hope that by the time Easter rolls around, we will be transformed.

But in order to be transformed, we are going to have to allow ourselves to change—to be different. So to accomplish that we are going to be looking at practices each week which can shape or transform us as disciples of Jesus. We don’t assume that transformation happens—that you just say, OK, God, transform me, and there you are. We assume that we have to do some things—change some behaviors—in order to open ourselves to transformation.

Now, I want to be clear that no one is going to force you into these practices. This journey is something you have to want to embark on. You have to feel the tug of God on your heart, inviting you to go closer. But I hope you will take the risk, I hope you’ll take the first step because I believe that the invitation is coming from God to all of us.

So, today, we begin by looking at the practice of gathering. Gathering, you say? The scripture was about the aftermath of the flood. There was no one left to gather with. Yes, there were. There were those on the boat. Noah and his family. The animals, two of every kind God had created. There was, in fact, quite a group to gather together—quite a noisy, smelly, raucous group.

But I think it is significant that they gathered before God before they went running willy-nilly off the boat. You know they had to have been excited. Dry land. Finally. After 40 days and 40 nights. The possibility was ahead of them that they might get more than 3 feet of distance between themselves and another creature. But before they begin to spread out, they get off the boat and build an altar, in Genesis chapter 8. And here in chapter 9 we see that God has been pleased by this, and that God makes a promise to them never again to destroy the earth. And God gives them a sign—not only for their hope, but for God to remember. It is the sign of the rainbow.

It was really important that they all received that sign together. It wasn’t one person telling the others about it, or the giraffes filling the elephants in on the news. They all saw it—they heard God say: this is the sign of the covenant—this rainbow is a sign of my promise. There was not going to be a mix up, because they had heard it together.

There is something about gathering, gathering with our community of believers, that strengthens our discipleship. We are not created to relate to God all by ourselves, but to relate to God within the context of a community of believers. And as we gather, as we worship, as we seek God together, we find strengthen in our relationships. And we are able to affirm for each other when and how we see God working in our community and in the world.

We gather at this table for another sign, not a rainbow, but a meal. And once again, something ordinary, something God has already created, takes on new meaning when we gather to receive it. In our gathering we invite God to be present, we invite God’s grace to be known to each of us and to the community.

As we begin this season of Lent, let us gather together. Let us be with one another as companions on the journey. Let us hold one another accountable, confess to one another, move forward with one another in faith. May God’s mercy and grace wash over us, and may we draw closer to God through the power of drawing closer to one another. Amen.

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