Looking for Isaac

Genesis 18:1-15; 21:1-7
Click Here For Sermon Audio

Catheryn was one of the most famous residents of The Hermitage, a retirement community in Richmond, VA for members of the United Methodist Church.  In the summer of 1994, when Randy met her while doing an internship, she was a very spry 104 years old.  Catheryn spent her days going downstairs to the Hermitage’s craft room and making little clay animals.  She called this daily trek “going to work”.  Her magnum opus was an entire orchestra of well over 50 finely dressed little critters holding musical instruments.

Every year the Hermitage had a Bazaar and by means of family members visiting residents and denominational publications the word of Catheryn’s artistic ability spread.  For some odd reason people could not resist purchasing Catheryn’s little clay figurines. You just wouldn’t believe it.  Randy remembers being there one day chatting in the craft room and a woman was visiting Richmond from North Carolina came in and said she just had come to the Hermitage to buy a set of Catheryn’s pieces.  She had driven about 3 hours.  For some reason Catheryn’s work resonating with people. 

Amazingly, Catheryn had never done anything with clay until she was in her 90’s and not until she had lived a few months at The Hermitage.  She was by no means a master of the medium.  Her artistic ability was…well…if you saw one of her pieces you would think it was made by a talented grade schooler.  But, there was just something about it.  Her work had a voice of its own.  It struck a cord with people, a cord of hope.  People would not have been buying Catheryn’s work if it didn’t mean something to them personally.  

Catheryn’s work and her story spoke to people, particularly those going through life’s changes…especially the changes that aging brings on.  Her figurines reminded people that we must be willing to adapt to life’s changes and find something new to do when we can no longer do the things we used to do.  We must let go, move one, and continue to be creative.  When we experience a loss we must look for something else, create something new in our lives. 

Catheryn had all the problems that go along with old age - the aches and pains, failing eyesight, failing memory.  She couldn’t think and talk as fast as she used to.  She was widowed.  She’d outlived her friends and family.  In her 90’s she had to sort through a life’s worth of stuff and leave her home to go to the Hermitage.  She’d literally lost everything except for a few pictures and a couple pieces of furniture, small reminders of the life she once had.  But still, in the wake of all that loss, Catheryn kept moving on and moving forward.  At The Hermitage she created something new for herself.  Found a new purpose, found something new to do, something that was distinctively Catheryn.  Indeed, she grieved her losses, but she did not give into them.  She didn’t give into loneliness.  She didn’t grow bitter.  She didn’t complain.  She didn’t go looking for pity.  Instead, she got out of bed and went to the craft room to work each day, doing something she had never tried until she was in her late 90’s.

Catheryn’s figurines were for her kind of like what Isaac was for Sarah and Abraham.  If you would have told Catheryn when she was in her 80’s that when she was 104 people would be coming from all over to buy little clay animals that she had made, she would have laughed and said, “I’ll probably and hopefully be dead by then.”  She never expected the joy she would find nor the joy others would find simply because she took the risk of letting go and doing something new. 

In Hebrew the name Isaac means “Laughter”.  As you recall from our reading today Sarah laughed at the impossibility of her ever bearing a child with Abraham due to her old age, a child of the promise.  God had promised Abraham that his descendants would be many and that they would be a great nation.  But Sarah, her womb wasn’t cooperating.  As she grew older she tried to make the promise come true by letting her servant Hagar be Abraham’s concubine.  Hagar conceived and gave birth to Ishmael, but Ishmael was not the child of the promise.  The child of the promise was to be born of Sarah.  Then, when these three strangers came Sarah was no longer able to bear children.  She was probably 90 years old.  After a lifetime of an unfulfilled promise, she laughed at what the strangers said.

This laughter was a bitter kind of laughter.  It’s a laughter that comes from pain and is meant to hide the pain in a sarcastic kind of way.  Sarah had longed to bear children.  Childless women in that culture were stigmatized.  Sarah suffered that.  Being childless was seen as a curse.  For years she believed God’s promise to Abraham that she would bear him a son, but years, lots of years, came and went and it just never happened.  The God of Abraham seemed to have let her down.  He hadn’t lived up to Sarah’s hopes and expectations.  He hadn’t kept his word.  He left her barren.  Sarah’s laughter masked a lot of pain and bitterness.  Yet, God turned the laughter of bitterness into the laughter of joy when Isaac was born and so they named him “Laughter.”  Moreover, those three visitors were actually God in disguise.  God came personally to deliver this seemingly impossible message to Sarah.  God didn’t forget or abandon Sarah.

That’s the way God works.  We often find it impossible to believe that God seeks out each one of us as a friend as he did Abraham, that God cares for and will always be with us, that God has a purpose for our lives that will fill us with joyful laughter.  So often, the contrariness of “Reality” makes these things hard to believe.  But when we see these promises being fulfilled it fills us with the laughter of joy.  God does indeed turn our mourning into joy.  As the Psalmist said, “Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy.”  Between the time of sewing and the time of reaping, there is the time of waiting in ambiguity, the time of wondering what God is up to, the time of wondering “Why”, the time to lose faith or to find it.  But then the harvest of hope and joy comes. 

The lesson this morning is simply that we should spend a little time looking for Isaac, that God-given source of laugh-worthy joy that God has placed and will place in our lives even in the midst of grief and shattered hopes.  Sometimes it is a good thing to do to take a moment and look back on the past year or so of your life and see how God’s promise to always be with you, to care for you, and to be on your side has come true.  Now I know that some of us have not had the best of years this year.  But its times like those that God can be the most real to us, times like these that we truly do see God working things to the good even in the worst of circumstances.  I can think of no greater comfort than simply finding that God has really been there for me.  Take some time to look for Isaac, look for what God has done in your life in the past year or so or longer and note the things that God has done to give you joy.  Think especially of how in those most difficult of times that God himself has come to you and restored your hope and given you joy.  Amen.

We Got Transferred

Colossians1:1-14

Click Here For Sermon Audio

To transfer something means to move that something literally and effectually from one place to another.  To transfer money from a checking account into a savings account may seem like nothing more than an electronic reclassification of numbers on a computer, but the money has really been moved and is effectually not readily available for buying stuff.  To transfer buses means you have to get off of one bus and then get onto another completely different bus.  You are going someplace completely different than if you had stayed on the other bus.  In the world of the corporation, a person will get word that they are being transferred to another corporate location and if the employee wants to stay employed with that company and/or move up in the company and/or make more money, they will take the transfer.  The transfer will entail a physical change in location, a change in work responsibilities, new faces in a new office, and a new way of “this is the way we do things around here.”  In short, a job transfer means you and your little dog too are not in Kansas anymore and things are very different. To get transferred means to be moved literally and effectually from one place to another. 

Literally and effectually moved from one place to another; bear that in mind as we think about what Paul means here in Colossians when he says that God has “rescued us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us into the Kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”  Paul is saying that here in the present, here in the right now God has done a saving act that has transferred us literally and effectually from one jurisdiction into another.  We were under the jurisdiction of darkness where we were willing slaves to dark powers that demeaned and destroyed us, but God did a saving act and transferred us literally and effectually and right now into the Kingdom of his beloved Son where we are literally and effectually his adopted beloved children who share that Beloved Son’s inheritance.  We got transferred.  God has moved us to a different account.  We are now on a different bus.  We got transferred to work in a different city.

You may ask “How did this transfer happen?”  Paul had a very narrowly focused understanding of what is going on in history.  For him it is that in, through, and as Jesus Christ the Beloved Son of God entered his Creation and defeated the powers of darkness primarily Sin, Death, and Evil.  Jesus, the Beloved Son of God became human as the Jewish Messiah, took Sin, Death, and Evil into his fully divine and fully human self and destroyed them in death when he was wrongly crucified.  Then, God the Father vindicated Jesus when by the power of the Holy Spirit God raised him from death and set in motion a New Creation that will ultimately be free of Sin, Death, and Evil.  For now, God the Father and God the Son in the power of God the Holy Spirit are dispelling the unseen spiritual powers of darkness and the result is that the Kingdom of this Beloved Son, the Reign of the Beloved Son is bursting forth all over the place as the Gospel of this Good News of what God has done is being proclaimed all over the world and Christian communities are forming as people find themselves believing this Good News and are living according to the grace and love they have been shown. 

Through the power, presence, and indwelling of the Holy Spirit, God’s victory over the dark powers and his reign are being manifest in people whom God has transferred literally and effectually from the jurisdiction of darkness into the reign of the beloved Son.  We are among those people whom God has transferred, in whom this change in jurisdiction is literally and effectually taking place right now in the present.  

Transfers come with better benefits. Paul says that one of the benefits of this transfer is that in Christ Jesus we have redemption.  Redemption does not mean that we got a book of coupons to trade in for discounts on stuff.  Redemption is a term from the slave trade and means to pay to buy another human being out of slavery and give them their freedom and dignity.  By the price of Jesus’ life God bought us out of slavery to the dark powers in which we so often willingly served.  In turn, God has set us free to live for the purpose he created us for: to be that part of God’s creation that bears the image of God in and as loving community.  God has given us our true human dignity back.

We also have the benefit of the forgiveness sins.  God is not holding a ledger against us for when we have willingly participated in that slavery to the dark power.  Our sin was nailed to the cross with Jesus and died with him.  Yet, it was not also raised to new life with him.  The old life truly is gone and a new one has begun in Christ.  Now we must live a life worthy of Jesus that brings honour to him. 

This transfer took effect in us when we heard this Good News.  There came a time when we heard this Good News of what God has done for us in, through, and as Jesus Christ and by the touch of the Holy Spirit it got hold of us and gave us the assurance that we are God’s beloved children.  Karl Barth, probably the greatest theologian of the 20^th Century, was once asked if he could sum up the Gospel in one sentence and he answered, “Jesus loves me, this I know.”  Notice that he left out the part of the verse that says, “for the Bible tells me so.”  For Barth the only way you can know and understand God’s love is to experience it by encountering the Holy Spirit.  From that moment on the love and grace of God begins to grow in us and we find ourselves beginning to share in the work of Christ due to abiding presence of the Holy Spirit with us so that we begin to care about people in a way we never thought possible.  And the next thing you know we have the very real and certain hope that God is saving his creation and that nothing can separate us from his love.

It begins with God’s confronting us with the truth of our slavery to darkness.  In Jesus we see who we should be – beloved children of God bearing God’s image of loving communion in this.  Yet, Jesus death on the cross reveals to us that we are hopelessly alienated from God in our sin diseased state in which our deepest desire is to serve our own inordinate desires.  But, by his death and resurrection God has recreated humanity anew and by the gift of the Holy Spirit coming to dwell in us God redirects our desires towards himself and makes this New Creation evident.

Teresa of Avila was a Cistercian nun back in the 1700’s.  She wrote quite a bit on our relationship to God.  One of the things she is most famous for saying is “I don’t love God.  I don’t want to love God.  I want to want to love God.”  This desire to want to want to love God is usually awakened in us as we encounter Jesus followers who walk according to the Jesus Way of unconditional, sacrificial love and oddly we want to be like them.  Have you folks ever met somebody at church and said to yourself, “That person is a genuine, godly, Jesus-like person.  I wish I could be more like her”?   That’s how you know you’ve been transferred.  Go and live accordingly.  Amen.

The Harvest's Waiting

Luke 10:1-20
Click Here For Sermon Audio

A serious problem that most smaller and rural communities are facing is a shortage of skilled tradespeople – welders, electricians, mechanics, plumbers, carpenters, heavy equipment operators, groundskeepers, farmhands, and the list could go own – people who do stuff.  At present, people of the Baby Boomer generation are doing most of these skilled trades.  They are beginning to retire in droves and there are few trained younger people to step into their places.  A shortage of people who do stuff means that it will become more expensive to build and renovate homes, build and maintain automobiles, plant and harvest crops.  Need I scare you more?  This is a problem of apocalyptic proportion. Young people who would like to make a career of dependable, good paying would be wise to consider a learning a trade.  The harvest is waiting, but the labourers are few.

Another shortage we have is in the area of volunteers.  In another ten years there is likely to be no one to help us find our way around our local hospital, no civic clubs raising funds for necessary projects, and there will be fewer community events like Summer Folk.  Younger people (50’s and younger) are not volunteering or joining service groups anymore.  The basic need for people just to simply help each other is a ripe field and the workers are very few.

Then there is the shortages the world has always had; the shortage of peace, the shortage of justice, the shortage of health, the shortage of everybody having enough, the shortage of humanity yielding to the abundance of God’s love.  Ourselves, we have it quite comfortable.  On a whole we as a nation are in that top 20% of the global population that has plenty, that has more than enough.  Yet and likely as a result, we suffer the ills of apathy, isolation, and rampant individualism that is rapidly turning into narcissism.  Our need to reconnect with the land, with community, with neighbour, with God is a huge harvest waiting to be reaped.  Yet, the workers are few and they – US – we are tired.  The need that all of humanity has for the Kingdom of God to come is the ripest field anyone has ever seen, but who will go and bear the scythe to reap.

Jesus offers a solution to the labour shortage. He tells his motley crew, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few; therefore, ask the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest.”  Could it really be that easy? Have a prayer meeting?  It’s worked in the past.  The disciples were gathered together in Jerusalem praying when Pentecost happened.  Ever since, every great revival, renewal, or mission sending movement in the history of Christianity has begun with people gathering to pray.  Could it really be that easy?

Well, we won’t know unless we try, but be warned: look at whom Jesus sends.  He called forth the labourers from among the little crowd of people gathered around him and sent them.  This means that if we are going to pray to the Lord for the purpose of sending out workers into his harvest, then each and every one of us needs to accept that it might be “me” that he wants to send.  Are we each prepared to say, “Yes”?

Another thing we need to note is that he sends these folks out, OUT, out into the world ahead of himself like lambs among wolves.  He doesn’t say go into the crowd here and come up with creative ways to make the crowd look more friendly and welcoming and alive.  He doesn’t tell them to polish the rocks the people are sitting on and add pillows, or to plant more shade trees along the road for air conditioning, or to sing catchy camp-fire songs, or to play fun games so even children will want to come and be a part of the crowd making that arduous walk to Jerusalem (in cardboard shoes).  Jesus doesn’t send the workers to do Attractional Ministry. Rather, he’s got in mind what’s come to be known as Missional Ministry or Incarnational Ministry – the ministry of going about out there doing the things that he does or says.

Jesus does Sending Out Ministry.  Do you remember what Jesus said to his disciples when he appeared to them on Easter evening as they cowered in fear behind locked doors? He said, “Peace be with you.  As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”  This is ministry that happens as we about our way – as we go visiting with friends and family, as we go to work, as we go to the places we go and from the sound of it, it seems require that we be good guests in the lives of others rather than us requiring people to be good guests when they come here. 

Jesus tells his disciples to travel light and to accept the hospitality of others as they welcome us into their lives.  We seem to instinctively prefer that people come to us, and become like us, so that we don’t have to change.  Yet, the ministry Jesus calls us to requires we leave behind our security blanket of the expectations we have that people be just like us.  Yet, if we travel without those expectations, we are less likely to judge and more likely to listen and learn from others.

Jesus sends his disciples out to bring peace to people along the way.  Jesus said to his disciples in John’s Gospel, “Peace I leave you; my peace I give to you.  I do not give to you as the world gives.  Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”  Jesus’ peace is his presence, the Holy Spirit, with us.  Because the Holy Spirit abides with us we have a peace that the world does not have and so we can give peace and make peace.  One way that we can give peace is that we can be a non-anxious presence in the lives of others.  Sometimes people step into the lives of others and cause worry, create conflict, or make problems seem bigger than they are.  But, by the peace that Jesus has given to us we can step into the lives of others and listen, and encourage and help others to forgive and to mend broken relationships.  We can step into the lives of others and bring hope rather than further despair.

Similar to bringing peace Jesus sends his disciples to cure the sick.  A ministry of healing is something all churches should have.  This looks like designated worship services that people can come to and be prayed for.  This looks like visiting your neighbours when they are ill and praying for their healing.  Healing ministries take a lot of courage to make happen, but healing does happen whether it be in the form of tumours disappearing or people simply becoming able to accept the inevitable because God is with them.  

Finally, Jesus sends his disciples out to be living testimonies to the reality that the Kingdom of God is at hand.  This was the Gospel that Jesus himself proclaimed.  Everywhere he went in everything that he did and said the Kingdom of God, the Reigning power of God, shown forth and took effect.  And so it is that he sends us forth. 

We are the labourers who have to go and reap the harvest.  The harvest waits wherever we go.  We cannot expect that people today are just simply going to out of the blue up and decide to come to church to find Jesus and his Kingdom.  The harvest is out there.  We are the workers.  Jesus sends us.  He sends us with nothing more than what he has given us: peace and prayers of healing.  Let us go.  Amen.