Www.oursaviorhawaii.com



In grade school we’d play Musical Chairs. If I wasn’t the first one to get out - I was always the second. I always got caught up in the music. When the music stopped I was like, “hey - what happened to the music?” And the other kids would laugh and say, “ha ha - you’re out!” And I’d stand off to the side listening to Mr Sanipietro’s choice of 60’s music and tap my toes to the beat. When the game was over I knew I had my own chair at my desk - and it didn’t matter whether the music was playing or not - it was always my chair.Give me an enemy I can see and I will chase him to the gates of hell and cast him into the abyss. But when my enemy cannot be seen - fear sets in because I do not know who my enemy is.Fear lives in our mind but love lives is in our heart. That may or may not be true - but it is what we say. For the past four months my heart and mind have been at war with one another. My mind wants to crawl into a blanket fort, eat cherry PopTarts and stay hidden until there is a vaccine. My heart wants to go around hugging everyone and shaking everyone’s hands and saying, “don’t worry, be happy!” And there have been times when the tension threatened to tear me apart.In his first letter, St John wrote, “There is no fear in love; instead, perfect love drives out fear, because fear involves punishment. So the one who fears has not reached perfection in love.” That sums up the tension I feel. I know I’m not even close to reaching perfection in love - but if it will drive the fear from my life - I won’t stop trying until I get there. There could be no greater gift than to be filled with love to the point that fear is cast out.Way back on March 29th, our first online Sunday worship service, I read some of Martin Luther’s response to the bubonic plague that attacked the world 500 years ago. He said:“Therefore I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine, and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance infect and pollute others, and so cause their death as a result of my negligence. If God should wish to take me, he will surely find me and I have done what he has expected of me and so I am not responsible for either my own death or the death of others. If my neighbor needs me, however, I shall not avoid place or person but will go freely, as stated above. See, this is such a God-fearing faith because it is neither brash nor foolhardy and does not tempt God.”I revisited Luther’s “whether one might flee from a deadly plague” last week. Four months ago I had hoped, even assumed we would be back to normal by now. Today I am uncertain when that will be - and the promise of “perfect love casting out fear” becomes even more important. In our Epistle lesson today, St. Paul says, “I consider the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is going to be revealed in us” and then a little later, “we also groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.”You don’t hear it too many places, but we in the church we say things like, “I have a heart for children’s ministry or homeless ministry or the elderly or stacking chairs.” And when we say we have a “heart for something” - it’s shorthand for “we have a love for these things that cannot be easily be explained.” The reason I know this is love is - the only way to conquer fear and get beyond its tentacles that try to convince us there isn’t enough time, enough money, enough respect, power or authority - is love. No one in their “right mind” would give their precious money, time or talent to a church - unless the love in their heart was bigger than the fear in their mind.I had a funeral at sea this past week and spent time looking through the Gospels for just the right verse. I searched for “heart” - which just so you know occurs 692 times in the Bible - and was scanning those verses when I came across Matthew 15 where Jesus says, “out of the human heart comes evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness and slander.” I think it must be a translation error - out of the heart comes puppy dogs and rainbows and warm fuzzy feelings - not bad things. It seems Jesus has a different view of the heart than we do. We associate those bad things with the brain - not the heart. The heart is love - the brain is reason - why would anyone, especially Jesus, say the heart is filled with terrible things?Luke 12 says, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also...” - perhaps a better translation is, “everyone knows what you love by watching how you spend your money or how you treat people or how and where you choose to spend your time.”The Pharisees were always yelling at Jesus because His disciples were breaking their Talmudic laws by not washing their hands or eating the wrong kind of food or hanging out with sinners or healing people on the Sabbath. The Pharisees would have loved Twitter - they could denounce everyone in the world before lunch and then sit around patting themselves on the back the rest of the day while thinking up especially nasty but totally holy tweets for tomorrow.The Pharisees thought getting right with God was about following rules and doing good stuff and never, ever hanging out with sinners - unless you did it at night and no one saw you. The Pharisees thought they were purer of heart because - well, just because. And that’s kind of what you see in our Psalm today, where the Psalmist talks about how he loves God and does everything He says and is trying to be even better so God will love Him more. And lets face it - there’s a part of us that wants to believe that’s what we have to do - just try really, really hard and God will love us because even if we aren’t perfect - we’re better than other people and we’re at least trying.In Matthew 15 Jesus says, “it’s not what goes into you that makes you a bad person - it’s what comes out of you.” That’s really, really good news. Besides all the junk food and preservatives and carbs - think about all the language and stories and lies and anger and hatred we see every day. And we’ve gotten so used to the stuff on TV - especially all those shows on Netflix and Hulu that have no rules - that if what went into us made us a bad person - we would all be very, very bad people. It does beg the question: how much of the world can I take into myself before it changes me enough that it pushes me away from God? How much of the world can I have inside me before God can’t love me anymore because I’ve made myself unlovable?How badly do you want to be healed? What are you willing to pay - how much will you sacrifice to find love? What would you do to be accepted? How far are you willing to go to find what you are looking for? You are walking in circles around a bunch of chairs - you know the music could stop at any moment - how important is it for you to be the one who gets a chair?In our Epistle lesson Paul says, “the Spirit also joins us to help in our weakness, because we do not know what to pray for as we should...” “Dear God, thank you that I am not like those people who claim to be believers but then let their mask slide down below their nose or use too much hand sanitizer or touch the bananas and then put them back or only stand 5 feet 3 inches away from people!” This is what it looks like when we justify ourselves before God by pointing out all the bad things other people do - which just so happen to not be the things we do. And if any of those people point out our sins - we know they’re just jealous that God loves us more than He loves them. This is what the Gospel lesson is warning us about. We have this crazy, unBiblical notion that heaven is actually a spiritual game of musical chairs where God keeps removing chairs and we have to work extra hard to make sure we aren’t the one left standing when the music stops.Fear tells us there are only so many spots in heaven and God randomly removes a few now and then - so it’s a game of Survivor and we have to make sure God knows the other people don’t deserve to go to heaven as much as we do! What we really want is a chair reserved with our name on it that no one else can sit in - and we want everyone else to know it’s our chair, not theirs.But Jesus tells us very plainly life is not a game. His death on the cross assured us that there are the perfect number of chairs for those who believe and no extras for those who do not. Those who do not will not be able to shove those who do aside - they won’t be able to leap into the empty chair or even share it with a believer. It’s God’s job to decide who believes and who doesn’t - whose sins are forgiven and whose sins aren’t - and because He’s God there won’t be any mistakes. In Luke 18 there’s this story of a rich snob who walks proudly to the front of the sanctuary and throws a bunch of money in the offering plate and tells God, “aren’t you glad I’m not like that sinner back there who can’t even muster the courage to get past the last row because he’s afraid of You - I deserve Your love because I’m such a great guy - and then he takes back some of the money he put in the offering plate because God owes him for being so good.”Contrast that with Matthew 15 where this Canaanite woman - who culture said shouldn’t have even been near Jesus, let alone try to get His attention - runs after Jesus demanding He heal her daughter. And when Jesus says, “I can’t give the children’s food to the dogs” - she doesn’t hesitate for a minute. She says, “woof” - if that’s what it takes to get my daughter healed I’ll be a dog or a pig or a camel or donkey - whatever it takes - just tell me Jesus because I love my daughter that much!” And Jesus says, “you are a woman of great faith - run home, your daughter has been healed and wants to spend time with her mommy.”This woman was not worried about low self-esteem or labels or anything else. She accepted the truth - the Messiah was the Jewish Messiah - not the Canaanite Messiah and He didn’t have to help her. Whereas the rest of the world just laughs when you admit the truth - God knows the truth spoken in love is a beautiful act of faith - and we are saved by faith - not our works. It’s peculiar that I can’t find a single place in the Bible that says, “Jesus came into the world to save the rich and the powerful and the practically perfect in every way.” I did find a place that said, “Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners” - and then a guy we often hold up as one of the best models of being a Christian added, “of which I am the worst!”Why the church has problems remembering Jesus came to cure the sick and open the eyes of the blind and heal Peter’s mother-in-law and forgive sinners and cast out demons and hold the hands of lepers and even be friends with IRS agents, prostitutes and foreigners - I don’t know. It also drives me crazy that so many people think Christianity is about being better than everyone else - and pushing them out of the way so when the music stops they wind up standing because there isn’t a chair for them.Jesus didn’t have anything against the rich and famous or practically perfect in everyway - but many of them did have something against Him - which is why Jesus so often wound up eating with sinners and social misfits - turns out their calendars tend to be more wide open and they are often more accepting.Give me an enemy I can see and I will chase him to the gates of hell and cast him into the abyss. Why do I make other people into my enemy who is trying to steal my chair? Why can’t I trust that when Jesus says there will be enough chairs for everyone who believes that there will be enough chairs? Why do I feel like it’s my job to point out everyone who isn’t following all the laws? What do I think it’s going to get me?When my enemy cannot be seen - fear sets in and everyone and everything becomes suspect and I begin to distrust everyone because I don’t know who my enemy really is. But you aren’t paranoid if someone really is out to get you - and in this case that “someone” is me. St. Paul says, “we do not know what to pray for as we should...” The Bible is the truth of God - but sometimes it really hits me between the eyes. How badly do you want to be healed? What are you willing to pay - how much will you sacrifice to find love? What would you do to be accepted? How far would you go to find what you are looking for?The Gospel lesson says there will be enough chairs for everyone who believes. I don’t need to point out all your sins so I can score some points with God. I don’t need to go around pretending to be better than you. It’s not a competition - or if it is, we’re all losers and without God’s grace and mercy there wouldn’t be a single chair for us to fight over - we’d all be left standing. St. Paul says, if you’ve got a heart that is sometimes full of dark and selfish things. If you’re heart leads to a treasure of lies and anger and hatred and pain and dirt and ugliness. Then lay it all down - and he means all of it - before the cross. Don’t hide it, defend it, argue for it, explain it or ignore it. And when you lay it before the cross - the craziest thing will happen. Jesus will take it from you. All of it. And in its place He will begin to fill you up with love and peace and joy and trust and faith. It will take a while - your whole life to be exact - but each day you will be just a little bit different than you were the day before.“While we were yet sinners - when we were still losers but didn’t get it or wouldn’t accept it or decided it was good enough to be better than anyone else”- God sent His Son to save us and “us” means everyone. The only way that there isn’t a chair with your name on it - is if you reject Jesus. You can’t chose someone who has already chosen you - but you can reject Him. You can scrape your name off the chair and put it in the storage room and just march in circles waiting for the music to stop and then push people out of the way or turn the chairs over or block them - creating as much chaos as you can. That’s what this world does best - work hard at keeping us from both seeing and believing the truth and promise of God. But it doesn’t change anything - there is still a chair with our name on it - a chair that cannot be taken away. “The Spirit intercedes for us in groans too deep to understand” and when He’s done searching our hearts - “He intercedes for us according to God’s Will.” He points to a seat and says, “that one is reserved just for you and it will be waiting for you when this life is over. Until that time - live and love and laugh. When the times comes - step into the presence of God without fear - your chair will be waiting - and now that your earthly life is over your heavenly one begins and the angel choir never stops so enjoy the music - tap your toes and just be in the presence of God.” In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download