Think And Let Think

Genesis 1.1-5 I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. There’s a reason we affirm the Creed week after week. It tells the story that gives meaning to all of our stories. For, we worship the Almighty God for whom nothing is impossible. The maker of all things, even us. And chaos, even the empty void, is no match for the One in whom we live and move and have our being. As the old hymn says: Summer and winter, and spring time and harvest, sun, moon and starts in their courses above, join with all nature in manifold witness to Thy great faithfulness, mercy, and love.

Exodus 17.1-7 We are saved not by our excellent decision making, nor by our decisive dogmatics, nor by our presumptive power. We are saved not by our degrees, or our progeny, or our bank accounts. Only God can do what we cannot. The Good News of the Gospel is that when our abilities fail us, our knowledge, minds, patience, health, career, family, sanity, there is always a source of water in the dry and parched land of our lives. In other words, when we have the fortitude to admit that all sorts of goodness has come our way even though we’re not really that good, when we can admit that we’re sinners saved by the amazing grace of God, then things start to change...

The opposite of faith isn’t doubt, it’s control. The story of the manna is also the story of learning how to be out of control. Which might be why faith is such a challenge. For, from the time we are little children, we are fed a different story - that we have to be in control, that we have to be masters of our own destiny, that we have to make a way where there is no way. In short, we think we have to be God. But God is God, and we are not. God is the one who saves us, because we cannot save ourselves. Left to our own devices we can’t see beyond what we had in Egypt. We fall prey to the myth of empire and the foolishness of our own control. But here, in the wilderness, God says to the Israelites and to all of us, "You can let go. Open up your clenched fists of self-righteousness. Stretch out your hands and receive the gift. I have what you need, and what you need is far more important than what you want..."

Exodus 14.19-31 The salvation made possible by the Good News means being saved from something, and for something. Just as the Israelites were saved from Egypt, they were also saved for a new kind of radical living witness to the power of God. Just like we have been saved from the powers of sin and death, we have also been saved for a new kind of living that calls into question the powers and principalities in this life...

The great and wondrous news from scripture is that death is not the end. Which means that whatever mess we make in this life, it is no match for the only One who can do anything about it. Just as God delivered God’s people out of their bondage to slavery in Egypt through the sacrifice of the Passover Lamb, so too God delivers us out of our bondage to death through the sacrifice of Jesus, our Passover Lamb. Perhaps that’s why its important to remember what the word Exodus means. Exodus is not a journey or a vacation. Exodus literally means, “the way out.” Therefore, whatever we can say about Passover, of it’s many strange and bewildering requirements and details, we can say this: on that night, God’s people were saved by the blood. They were given a way out. And so are we...

God calls all of us like God calls Moses. God has plans and desires and hopes for all of us, all of you. Some big, some small, but vital all. And here’s the Good News - you don’t have to be carrying saints to be part of God’s mission in the world. You don’t have to have all the right scriptures memorized, or pray the perfect prayers, or read all the important theology. If you need anything, it’s just a little imagination, a delight in wonder, and the capacity to be surprised by what God is up to, and what God might be up to with you. So kick off your shoes. Open your eyes and open your ears. The burning bush is calling for you...

Romans 12.1-8 "Paul is addressing Roman Christians as people who have been released from the captivity to Sin by God’s action in Jesus Christ. Having been set free from this oppression, Paul empowers them to act, to respond, to do something. Present yourselves to God. And it all hinges on the therefore. Any time we encounter a therefore, whether in scripture or in life, we need to know what the therefore is there for. The word signals that what comes next depends on what came before. Everything that has come before the therefore has been about God’s doing. God gets all the good verbs. Despite our culture’s constant emphasis on making our own destinies or picking ourselves up by our own bootstraps, Romans (and all of scripture for that matter) proclaims quite the opposite..."

Romans 11.1-2a, 29-32 Paul, as the church moves and grows, is rattling the cages of our prisons to disobedience with the Gospel. It’s as if he is saying that God makes sure we all experience what it means to be on the outside, so that God can be the one to open the door and welcome us back in. God, like the prodigal father, comes to find us in the streets of life with mercy before we even have a chance to say we’re sorry. God, like the prodigal father, is willing to throw a party on our behalf because we are lost and we are found. God has imprisoned all in disobedience, that God may be merciful to all.

I’m not sure why Jesus left it up to preachers to share this news. For preachers, one and all, are a bunch of nobodies, sinners with no hope of their own, scoundrels most of the time. But then again, preaching isn’t something that preachers do, it’s what God does through us. The word of faith that draws near to you even right now in this very moment is not because of anything you have done, and certainly not because of what I bring to the table, but, as Paul says, only because it pleases God through the foolishness of what we preach to save those who believe.

The church has always been a place for truth, but that doesn’t mean we’ve always liked it. When push comes to shove we’d rather consider and contemplate our successes than our sins. And yet, the knowledge and confession that each of us is a sinner in need of God’s mercy can be weirdly and wonderfully comforting. For, it gives us the freedom from pretending to be people we aren’t. The writer Anne Lamott puts it this way, 'Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it most together. They are much more like you than you would believe. So try not to compare your insides to other people’s outsides. It will only make you worse than you already are.'

Baptism, like communion, is not something to be mastered, comprehended, or understood. We can’t wrap our heads around it any more than we can figure out why certain songs give us goosebumps, or why sometimes our laughter leads to tears. Some things, in fact some of the very best things, are mysterious. Maybe that’s what makes them great. The challenge comes with resting in the mystery while the world values nothing but certainty.

Paul is begging us to see that the key to our salvation isn’t positive thinking or more morality or healthier habits. The key to our salvation is Jesus! Our salvation is God’s grace made manifest in the One who frees us from the delusion that we have to save ourselves. The church isn’t in the religion business. Instead, the church is in the Gospel-proclaiming business. All of this, the scriptures, prayers, songs, preaching, it’s not about bringing the bad news that God will only look kindly upon us when we finally get our acts together. Instead, everything we do here is about bringing the great Good News that while we were sinners, Christ died for the ungodly. In the midst of our faults and failures, Jesus rescues us.

Over the years, Paul’s writings and teachings have been often summarized as, “Become what you already are!” And for good reason. In baptism we are deadened with Christ that we might rise with Christ. In communion we put God inside of us that we might be more like Christ and less like ourselves. We are already defined by the grace of God, and nothing can ever take that away. Nothing.

Paul says the Law brings wrath, but the Gospel sets free. Doing all of the right things, and knowing the right people, and making the right choices, sounds wonderful in principal, but turns out to be impossible. We can’t make ourselves righteous, we can’t rectify ourselves, we can’t redeem ourselves. Thankfully, God is completely caught up in the work of doing things we could never do ourselves by giving life to the dead and calling into existence the things that do no exist. No matter what we do or leave undone God continues to hand over the Good News through letters, songs, preachers, and pulpits until our hearts are strangely warmed and we know, deep in the marrow of our souls, that Christ has taken away our sins, even ours, and has saved us from the law of sin and death.

Pentecost is the promise that we don't have to build a tower into the sky to get close to God; God has come to us. The arrival of the Holy Spirit means we are no longer defined by our mistakes, but only by God’s grace.

The movement that Jesus begins, the adventure of faith we call church, is constituted by people who know we have all the time in the world, made possible by God’s patience, to challenge the world’s impatience, by cross and resurrection. The gift of the Ascension, of Christ’s ruling at the right hand of God, is the reminder that we can wait and pray. It’s a gift!

Paul writes to the church in Rome that faith comes from what is heard and what it heard comes through the preaching of Christ. The story has the power to change everything. It changed everything for Paul! The man who agreed to the stoning of Stephen now stands surrounded by stones that invoke his proclamation. He is compelled to preach in order to set the people free and bring about the end of religion. That’s an odd way to put it. But Christianity isn’t a religion. Or, at least, it’s not supposed to be. Religion, properly understood, is a set of habits, practices, or tradition that are done in order to achieve something, usually from the divine. Basically, if you do x then your god will do y. Christianity, however, is the Good News. It is something told to us about what is already finished. Christianity frees us from all the shoulds and musts that we might turn to the Lord who first turned toward us in Jesus Christ.

The story of the Gospel is a promise that no one is outside the realm of God’s mercy, that the worst thing is never the last thing, that grace is greater than our sin.

Living for other people is a completely radical and bonkers idea. Getting rid of possessions so that others can benefit is a wild and far cry from how things are supposed to work. Holding all things in common isn’t normal. It’s therefore not surprising that the disciples in Acts constantly find themselves in trouble - the kind of conflicts that John Lewis called good trouble. It’s good trouble because the church is, was, and always will be counter-cultural. All of these things described in Acts sound like the beginnings of a political revolution. We just have another word for it: Gospel.

The Gospel has a way of digging itself in, commingling with all of our thoughts about how things are supposed to be. The Good News declares that God has changed everything, we only need to act accordingly. In short - the people are moved to move upon hearing the story. That’s what the word “repent” means after all, it’s a turning or a returning to something. And that something has a name: Jesus.