This is the sermon delivered by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen at Ashiya Christian Church on Sunday, Sunday, June 18, 2023, drawing from Genesis 18:1-15, and Matthew 9:35-10:23.
So, we've just taken a properly big bite out of the scripture today, haven't we? I mean, these are two looooong readings! Now, I don't know about you, but when I'm sitting in worship and the scripture reading for the day gets to be that long, I kinda start to tune out a little bit.
It's ok, we can admit it! That happens!
Because it's so much easier when we're given our scripture in bite-sized format, isn’t it? It's so much easier when we can just cut the whole thing down, piece by piece, until it’s been reduced to some little snippet of wisdom, just a quick word or two that gives us a boost of inspiration or motivation for the coming week; a snapshot of God's love, suspended in a perfect moment in time.
But that's the funny thing about time; it isn’t static. Time goes on. Time moves forward, but when we look to the scripture we’re not seeing the ebb and flow of time, we’re seeing that same frozen snapshot that our parents did, and their parents before them. Abraham and Sarah, Jesus and the apostles, from where we’re sitting their entire lives are locked into the handful of moments we see on the page, and because we don’t see their lives as fluid, changing, and just as much in motion as our won, we tend to immediately assume that the lessons that their lives have painted into their scripture are just as static and unchanging.
Honestly, this is one of the reasons that the Christian message has become so muddled, so distorted, and so broken in America over the last century or so. We can't help but look at the scripture just like this, as snapshots frozen in time. Take any teaching, any of the words of Christ Jesus, any part of the scripture at all, and we've been told our entire lives to expect these things as a universal. A constant.
Unchanging, immutable truths, things which mean precisely the same thing today as they did yesterday. So it has been said, so it forevermore shall be.
But really, isn’t this exactly how a child, and infant looks at the world? It’s kinda like the spiritual and theological equivalent of lacking objet permanence! We think that as soon as these bible characters move off the page, as soon as this one moment in time that we’re focusing on this very second ends, their lives freeze in place like they’re playing hide-and-seek with eternity.
In the moment when we read the scripture, when we’re confronted with God’s word as it is presented it makes sense, but the absolute second it moves beyond the boundaries of the very specific conditions of the text, we just can’t imagine it even remotely making sense, can we?
Because our perspective isn’t just so much narrower than God’s perspective; it’s often even narrower than we realize ourselves.
This is exactly what happened with Sarah, of course, when the men came out of the desert with a surprising message for her from God.
She saw her life, in that exact moment in time and space when she in all her years came face-to-face with a promise from God, and jumped - quite understandably, as it turns out - to the conclusion that what she was being told from God was impossible. The facts of her life in that moment precluded any other possibility. So she laughed. Ruefully, sadly, and even a bit sarcastically, she laughed because the word of God came to her in that moment, and she could not see past the harsh truths of the here and now.
She wasn’t foolish, to be sure. I’m certain that she understood that blessed, cursed fact that the one true constant in the universe is change. But even when we know that some change is possible, even we embrace the idea that with God all things are possible, we still find ourselves like Sarah thinking that some things are unchangeable, fundamental constants of the universe.
Whether it’s the laws of physics, the laws of attraction, or the natural laws that govern our own lives, some things are so ingrained that we lack the ability to conceive of a world where they might be different, where those rules could be upended, broken, and result in the creation of something wondrous.
Like Sarah, we lack vision.
Like Sarah, we lack the ability to see the world with God’s eyes.
And lacking that perspective, God’s message can sometimes seem like mockery, like a message of terror from a despotic madman rather than a gospel of love from the source of all that is good, and right, and true.
And when we turn our eyes to the Matthew text, and hear how Jesus is talking to the disciples, we start to find that same, unsettling feeling rising up within us once again.
Listening to this, it almost seems as though the way in which we are asked to operate as servants of Christ isn’t setting us up for success at all; it kinda seems like we’re being set up for failure, doesn’t it? We're told, by Jesus himself, that we should expect difficulties, that suffering for Christ is a built-in part of the journey, that what is expected of us is not comfort and joy and happiness, but intentional sacrifice, privation, and even death for the mission and ministry of the resurrected Lord.
What kind of purposeless, gibbering lunacy is that? Who would sign up to follow a messiah who’s telling his followers to give all and gain nothing, accomplish nothing?
We hear about the challenges, difficulties, and suffering that comes, and because we lack that divine perspective, because we can’t conceive of a future beyond the sacrifice we’re called to make, we immediately finding ourselves thinking that the sacrifice is the whole of the thing itself. We start thinking that the meaning of the Christian faith is the act of sacrifice itself, and not the thing we offered ourselves for in the first place.
The road ahead turns dark, and because we can’t see where we’re going we start to imagine other destinations, other purposes that seem more logical to our limited, human minds; something more sensible to be placed before a single set of eyes which can only see but through a glass, and darkly at that.
Perhaps we start to think that the sacrifice itself is the goal, competing in our sufferings as though determined to win a gold-medal in a spiritual Olympics which has but one event; suffering. Or perhaps we start to imagine that the suffering is a distraction, something to be taken in moderation, something meant to keep us humble but never to get in the way of more practical, sensible ways to grow and maintain the work of God in the world.
And eventually, we build these more rational ideas into our discernment process, dismissing the more potent acts of change and love we could introduce into the world because they seem to us irresponsible. Sure, it might make us feel good and righteous to stand boldly for liberation, to feed and clothe and love and care, to sell all that we have and give the money to the poor, but what could we actually do with that when whatever good we might doo is just pushed down by the world anyways?
So we choose a more sensible road, a more measured approach. We temper our calling for justice in the waters of our own fear, because how could it be possible to really go as hard as Jesus truly commands, to do ministry in that way, and endure, survive, or even thrive, long-term, in the service of Christ?
We just can’t see it.
We can’t see the purpose of our efforts, our lives being spent for this way, throwing ourselves before these great establishments of rigid hearts and unyielding steel, crushing ourselves beneath grinding gears of gold which continue unscathed and unscratched long after we’ve expended the fullness of our efforts against them.
What then, is the point? Where then, is the purpose?
This suffering we're meant to endure when we ride for the true message of the gospel, the story of liberation from the oppressor, of the hungry being fed while the rich are sent away empty, the gospel of tables overturned and social orders set right in the name of the source of all that is good and compassionate and true; that suffering that we well and truly earn when we place ourselves opposite the powers and principalities that oppress and destroy.
It serves a purpose, just not necessarily the one we expect. Not necessarily the one that we can easily see with our own eyes, grasp with our own minds, or even share in any real way ourselves.
Every time we get shouted down when we stand up for LGBTQIA+ rights against a bigot online, every time we feed the hungry and run afoul of the law, every time we stand with a minority in the face of police violence, every time we tell the wealthy and the powerful that unless they're somehow elastic enough to fit through the eye of that needle then they better get helping or get bent - every time we stand up for the gospel, it may well seem like nothing changes, and our lives are the worst for the effort.
It might seem useless. Worse than useless; a waste of potential. Possibilities flushed down the drain.
But God's possibilities aren’t always our possibilities.
God's calling is full of possibilities we can't see, since we are just as connected to reality as Sarah was. We're so firmly rooted in the true, the definite, and the real, that we can't see that God isn't bound by the pesky constraints of logic. God fundamentally fails to be constrained by the crushing grasp of probability, and so easily sheds the restrictive chains of what is considered sane, normal, or reasonable. God's hope is as insane as God's love is impossible. But in order to connect with God in this way, we have to put ourselves in the path of the steamroller of logic, and allow ourselves to get run over. To meet God in this space we're asked to take that leap of faith, and give of ourselves that which it seems we cannot give, to make a sacrifice of our safety and security, and to set aside our desires for comfort and stability.
This is the challenge; we're never told that we'll be able to see what, or how God works with what we bring to the table. There's no promise that we will see the effect we have on the world.
But if we all do it? If we come together as a community, and stand in the face of hatred, cruelty, and fear and say NO. How could we not see something, even if it isn’t at all what we expect? And what amazing things we could see if we tried! Not by being practical or sensible, not by being careful or moderate, not by sacrificing a little so we can still hold on to a lot.
But by giving it all up to God, and letting God work through the possibilities we can't see, to bring about things we never could have imagined.
So we stand up for the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community, and we get beaten up. We lose our status, our pride, and perhaps even more. We put ourselves in harms way with the law and the police, run the risk of violence towards our person and loss for ourselves, and yet the oppressor trudges blithely along, our suffering and loss not but a small grease stain beneath the rumbling treads of oppression.
But I can guarantee you that when you stand up to that bigot or that homophobe and get ripped apart, there's a silent child struggling with their identity somewhere who sees it. And what you have sacrificed in the moment was taken up by them in silence, wrapped around their heart like a comforting blanket which tells them that not everybody out there loathes them, hates them, or wants them dead. And when the law comes down on you for feeding the hungry and the homeless sure, you're going to have some woes to deal with, but you can walk into the courtroom singing alleluia with your head held high because each person you helped will be singing the refrain in the silent streets behind you. And yes, standing up to the violence of the police will likely result in you experiencing some violence yourself, but what great power there is in a face like ours suffering with faces that have so long suffered alone.
And yes, as every adult in my life has told me since I was very young, you’re never going to get anywhere in life if you alienate the rich and the connected and the powerful, but the truth is that wealth and prosperity are a trap anyways, shackles and chains that hold us back from sitting with the struggling, and helping those who most need help; handcuffs holding us back from changing the world in the ways that really, truly matter.
Well this sounds great and all, but toiling away and suffering for a harvest we never get to see doesn't sound all that personally appealing, does it?
But that's the real catch here - no one ever said you would never get to see the harvest. Only that the harvest would be of an impossible sort, the kind of irrational harvest that only takes shape when we let go of our preconceived notions of what can be, and embrace what God decrees must be.
Sarah laughed because she was told of an impossible future she could never imagine seeing. Even if she could be pregnant at her age, the work of trying would - so far as she knew - likely kill her. Even if the child survived, even if that new life was possible, there was no way she knew of that she could ever see it for herself. It was just fundamentally impossible.
And yet, it happened.
And when Jesus issues the same impossible command to the disciples in Matthew, instructing them to endure what we could well call the labor pains of a just and loving world, can you imagine the sarcastic laughter they might have had? The doubt? The incredulity?
The fear?
And don't we feel the same, faced today with these same challenges, and this same calling?
And yet, it can still happen.
With God there are always, possibilities. Possibilities that we may not see at first, possibilities we may not understand, and possibilities that reach out into the world in ways we cannot even begin to imagine. But when we all embrace the calling of Christ Jesus to go out into the world with determined, disruptive love, those possibilities start to become visible to us all, echoing around the world in a feedback loop of care and compassion that grows and changes, flowing through the world like the deluge of an overflowing river, a great tsunami, devastating all that is hateful and hurtful in its path and leaving only the new growth of love and mercy in its wake.
So let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream, and let us all ride the rapids together.
Amen.
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