Drink from the Fountain of Living Water

Jeremiah 2:1-13

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A few years ago Dana conducted a wedding for the daughter of an elder in her church.  Though the bride’s parents were quite active in the congregation, this bride (in her mid-20”s) was not.  The bride’s parents were pretty adamant that Dana should come to the wedding reception and should bring me. They liked Dana and wanted her to be a part of their family’s special day like a friend of the family, and, of course, have some fun.

Well, guess where our assigned seats were?...a table off in a corner right under an always blaring speaker.  Our tablemates were the photographer, who was up and down and up and down, and the two barmaids who were half our age.  I felt sorry for them.  It was difficult to talk to two ministers without it feeling like God is asking you “what are you doing with your life?” and “what do you want to be when you grow up?”  

I do not wish to sound obnoxious or self-important, but in my experience as a minister, I was usually seated with out-of-town family or friends of the parents.  This wedding was the first time I had ever seen the minister get seated with (and forgive my terminology) the “hired help”.  Just to be clear, if it were a matter of me myself choosing where I sat and the choice was to take a seat that prevented family or friends who haven’t seen each other for years from catching up or to sit with the “hired help”, I would sit with the “hired help” every time.  But, to be seated by the hosts with those who were just there to provide services…hmmm.

Well, I won’t speak for Dana, but this seating arrangement said a lot to me.  It reflected the disesteem of clergy that inhabits our society these days.  We clergy are not as welcomed into community life as we once were.  It’s not that we are anything special.  A few obsequious jerks aside, we are just normal people with a calling on our lives to lead others by example in becoming more Christ-like in love and service.  But the thing is, in a complicated way clergy represent God and the way people regard clergy is so often indicative of how they regard God.  If you tuck the minister away in a corner at your wedding, maybe that is what you do with God.  I am surprised that people still ask clergy to conduct their wedding, but they do and not because they believe God has anything to do with life and marriage, but because they are looking for an officiant.

In our reading from Jeremiah, God brings a pretty graphic case against his people in ancient Israel that just might ring true today.  God’s case has two charges: His people have forsaken him and exchanged him for worthless things.  He starts making his case by reflecting on the loyal devotion they once had for him as they followed him in the wilderness like a betrothed bride as he provided for them in impossible situations.  But once they entered the Land and experienced prosperity their ancestors, for no wrong done by God, turned and went far from him.  The priests, the rulers, the prophets, they all turned to the Canaanite god Baal and became worthless.  He says no other nation has done what they did; exchanged their gods for the gods of others.  But Israel had exchanged their glory, God’s presence with them, for gods that are not gods but just worthless things.  He tells the heavens to be appalled and to shutter in terror and to be in utter ruins because of what Israel had done. 

God had brought this people into existence, the descendants of Abraham.  They were to be his people among the nations.  He loved them preferentially and was faithful to them preferentially.  It was his hope that from this relationship peaceful, fair, just, and compassionate community would arise among them that would reveal his love for humanity and prove him to be God alone.  But, here they had turned away from him and made themselves worthless by devoting themselves to worthless things.  If it is true that we become like that which we worship, then ancient Israel’s pursuit of worthless gods had in turn created worthless community among themselves.  The rich and powerful in Israel were taking advantage of, abusing, and enslaving the poor, the widowed, the orphaned, the immigrant in their midst.  The rulers and the wealthy were even sacrificing their own children believing it would make them more powerful. 

Back to the reception, I remember sitting under the speaker trying to make small talk with the rest of the “hired help”. The reception was turning into a fest of drunken selfie-takers; loud, shallow music; painfully embarrassing speeches; a decent meal; men growing ever-more inebriated; a bride and a groom – will they someday seek a more worth-filled life than the cracked cistern of the shallow community endemic to our society that has grown brackish with consumerism, materialism, and narcissism; a society that keeps God far off at a corner table.

Back to Jeremiah, God said that to his people he was a fountain of living water, but they had forsaken him for cracked cisterns that they had dug for themselves.  My great-grandmother got her water from a cistern that collected rain that fell on her tin roof.  It was good water, but whatever was on her roof was also in the water and you had to make sure you didn’t drink what was in the bottom of the glass.  There might be something living in it.  On the other hand, when I lived in West Virginia there were places alongside the road where a pipe was sticking out of a rock face with water running out of it.  At some point somebody had tapped a spring in the rock and made it so that people could come and get water…and people did.  There was one in particular that it seemed every time I drove by it somebody was filling a few jugs.  I even did it a time or two.  There’s nothing like water from a mountain spring.  

I don’t know about you, but speaking for myself I am pretty familiar with life in my self-dug, cracked cistern.  Yet, I have also drunk from the Fountain of Living Water.  I have sat in the presence of God and been renewed, refreshed, restored and walked away assured that I was his beloved child.  Among God ‘s people I have found friends whom I can trust to accept me and to be for me even when I cannot accept myself and I’m being my own worst enemy.  I have friends in Christ who give me living water to drink rather than just shove a drink in my hand.  Among his people God has given me work that has purpose, work that makes a difference.  My life has value.  

It is not my intent to sound spiritually snobbish or be judgemental with respect to my experience at that wedding.  I can and do quite often keep God sitting far off at a corner table as one of the hired hands who make my life the way I think it ought to be possible.  But he has taught me to realize when I’m thirsty and that when I’m thirsty I need to seek him.  When I feel worthless, I find the Fountain among my friends in Christ.  I’ve got a couple of discipling groups going (Bible study and prayer groups).  Meeting with them helps quench the thirst.  Taking time to read Scripture and to pray on a daily basis helps quench the thirst.  Visiting people and doing kind things helps quench the thirst.  Taking time to sit and ask questions, “Who are you, Lord Jesus?” and “What are you up to with me?” can be staggeringly good time taken.  

Lastly, Friends, drink from the Fountain of Living Water.  I make that invitation to you not just for your own sake.  You will find that the more you drink of the Fountain, the more you become like the Fountain.  God will change you and make you a channel of his presence and like a roadside mountain stream people will seek you out to help them drink from the Fountain.  Amen.

Stand up Straight and Praise God

Luke13:10-17

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I have sketchy memories of being a child of about four or five and going to church.  I had to dress up in a nice button-up shirt, nice socks, shiny black shoes, and a clip-on tie.  Sometimes, I got my hair slicked back.  I can remember being outside the church and mom spit-shining me.  Y’all know how that works.  Mom looks.  Mom frowns.  Mom digs Kleenex out of Juicy-Fruit smelling purse.  She moistens that Juicy-Fruit smelling Kleenex by dabbing it to her tongue.  Then, she rather aggressively scrubbed away whatever residual food or dirt was on my face.  After the spit-shining, Mom dropped me at my Sunday School class with a nickel or dime to put in the little white church bank.  There I would hear a story about Jesus or King David or Samson or Jonah, cut and paste and colour a picture, and it was time to wait to get picked up to go up to the worship service.  Time flies when your having fun.

The worship service sometimes involved getting spit-shined again.  We had to sit-up straight and be still on those hard pews, feet dangling.  We had to stand up straight during the hymns.  We had to endure squirminess during the sermon.  If my brother was there, we were likely to do something you weren’t supposed to do in church like make faces at each other and try not to get caught.  If it was a hot day, the blessed gift of nodding off was inevitable. 

Well, that was going to church nearly fifty years ago.  It was something everybody had to do.  It was a duty, a duty of gratitude maybe, to God who provides for us and keep us safe.  It was something you had to do to be a good person or at least be seen as one.  As I child I can’t say I understood all that or anything other than at church you had to be on your best and hopefully that would spill over into the rest of life…oh, and Jesus loves me—but his dad will get me, if I’m not good.

The title of this pontification is “Stand up Straight and Praise God”.  It is an intentionally misleading title about what I would like to think that coming to church is about.  At first glance “Stand up Straight and Praise God” sounds like a command.  As child I would have heard it as “Stand up straight and show respect to God.”  I wouldn’t have understood what “Praising God” was about other than it was the rote act of the things we did at church.  We stood up straight and sang hymns and we sat up straight as the minister said prayers, read from the Bible, and preached.  Participating in the praise of God required being “upright”. 

But, I don’t mean for “Stand up Straight and Praise God” to be heard as a commandment.  I’ll admit that fifty years ago it would have been entirely likely that message of this sermon would have been that we are commanded by God to live upright lives that bring him glory so that we can enjoy his blessing…or else!  Consequently, we have all noticed that such a sermon doesn’t go over very well and the judgemental attitude and bad theology behind it is one of the major contributing reasons as to why hardly anybody comes to church any more.  As a nation we are starting on a third generation now of children who have no idea at all what a church is or even who Jesus is or even that there is a God.  “Stand up straight and praise God because you’re supposed to or else” hasn’t panned out over time.  So, please don’t hear “Stand up Straight and Praise God” as a commandment but yet still think of it as holding the reason for why church and congregational worship is a good place to come. 

The title comes from our reading here in Luke in which a woman actually did stand up straight and praise God because Jesus healed her.  She had what Luke call’s “a spirit of weakness” from whom which Jesus set her free.  This spirit had her bent over so that she couldn’t stand up straight.  This woman was bent over.  Imagine never being able to look up or people always looking down at you. She must have been in considerable pain and that pain affects your outlook.  Chronic pain is debilitating in every way – emotionally, psychologically, even spiritually.  It takes your joy away.  It can even turn you from God. 

I imagine this woman’s story as being a bit like the story of Job.  She was faithful, so Satan decided to send a crippling spirit to cripple her in spirit.  But, it didn’t work.  After eighteen long years she was still coming to synagogue on the Sabbath.  That particular Sabbath she didn’t come to synagogue because she knew Jesus was there and she believed he could heal her.  Rather, I believe she was there because faith in God was a core component to how she lived with the pain.  That particular Sabbath she didn’t come looking for Jesus to heal her.  Rather, it’s Jesus who saw her and took the initiative and healed her.  She stood up straight for the first time in eighteen years, pain free for the first time in eighteen years.  She began to praise God so exuberantly that it was a disturbance. 

Eventually, her praising infected the whole congregation.  Luke said they were rejoicing because of “all the wonderful things that Jesus was doing”.  Our English translations just do not do that phrase justice. In the Greek it says that they were praising because of “all the glory-things that Jesus was birthing.”  Here was Jesus, the Lord God incarnate, doing glorious New Creation-things on the Sabbath the day of the week on which the Lord God was supposed to be resting, reposing and enjoying the beauty of the works of his hands and praise from his people.  To the Synagogue leader it probably seemed that by this healing Jesus had made God work on the Sabbath and that troubled him greatly.

Jesus redefined Sabbath with this healing.  Sabbath isn’t simply to be a day where God and everybody lazes about and eats leftovers…or else.  Sabbath is the day we enjoy the works of God’s hands and praise God.  Yet, for many, to most, to all of us we are burdened, worried, and even suffering.  We are weak in spirit and unable to stand up straight and praise God.  We need to come to the gathering of God’s people and experience God’s uplifting presence so that we can stand upright and from deep within ourselves praise God.  God can’t and won’t rest when things are such that his people have reason not to worship him.

We come to worship God on Sunday not because it’s a duty, but because God is with us and faithfully helps us deal with everything life throws at us.  It is here in worship on Sunday morning that we grab a sense of the glory-thing of new birth in Jesus that God is doing by the presence and work of the Holy Spirit.  It is when people are gathered in Jesus name for worship that Jesus calls us to himself and sets us free from the things that bind us so that can’t help but stand up straight and from deep within ourselves praise God.  God doesn’t rest until we are healed and whole and can sing his praise.

Congregational worship—no matter when it happens, whether it’s a Sunday morning, Friday night, or Wednesday lunch—is time for Jesus to birth glory things in our midst that cause us to praise God.  Spiritual and physical healing is why we are gathered here.  If we are of the mindset that worship is the duty of upright people, then we run the risk of the hypocrisy of that congregational leader in this story.  Worship is when God births the glory things of new life in Christ.  He is a loving God who will not rest while his people are suffering.  Amen.

A Bit about Prayer

Luke 11:1-13
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There was once a class of young students who were given the assignment to divide into two groups and go find out everything they could about oranges.  One group decided to go to the library and research them.  They found books, films, and encyclopaedias and compiled a grand report on oranges that included everything you ever wanted to know about oranges and even who invented orange juice.  The teacher gave them an A.

The other group went to the grocery store and bought a bag of oranges.  They touched the oranges, smelled them, peeled them, tasted them, and discussed them.  They ate the whole bag and went back to school with nothing to show for their work.  The teacher asked them what they had learned about oranges.  They overwhelmingly said, “Oranges are good.”  The teacher said “OooKay,” and asked, “what does an orange look like?”  They said, “Well, like an orange…round, dimply, and orange.”  The teacher asked, “can you tell me anything else about oranges?”  They began to describe how some were sour and some sweet, how they shoot juice when you peel them, how they smell and taste like an orange, how they are divided into sections by fibrous skins and that its good to peel back these skins so that you can eat just the juicy little bulbs of Orange.  The teacher gave them an A also.

Now, who do you think learned more about oranges: the students who went to the library to gather facts or the students who went to the grocery store to buy oranges and eat them?  I’m inclined to think that the group that bought the bag of oranges and ate them actually learned more about oranges than the library crew.  Though there was so much about the orange that they couldn’t quite put into words, they experienced “orange-ness”.  The other group could say a lot about oranges, but never experienced “orange-ness”.  There’s a huge difference there.

Let me ask a similar question.  Who do you think would be more apt to know what prayer is; those who have studied theology and the Bible or those who actually pray?  Well, both are necessary but either extreme is flawed.  There is nothing more pathetic than someone who knows everything about prayer but does not actually pray.  So also is someone who prays all the time but has no guidance in what they are doing.  Jesus’ disciples asked him, “Teach us how to pray.”  Prayer is something we must be taught to do and more so something we must then actually do.

Prayer is important.  It is at the heart of living the new life we have in Christ Jesus.  It is the wellspring of eternal life in the here and now.  Prayer is time in which we intentionally meet with God; time to “Be still and know that I am God”; time to be open before God with the heartfelt lyric, “Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.”  Prayer is time for us to let the Holy Spirit do his work of transforming us to be more like Jesus.  It is time for us to absorb the experience of knowing ourselves to be the beloved children of God the Father just like Jesus.  It is time that God gives us to truly rest and to breathe the air of the assurance of God’s love for us.  

Standing on that basis it goes to say that prayer is the most important thing we do in this life.  For us Christians in particular, in prayer is where we will find the source of an on-going experience of salvation, of the new life God promised to us in Jesus Christ.  In prayer is where we are transformed to become the new creation.  If we do not pray, life eventually goes empty—loses its sense of life for the simple reason that we lose our foundation.  Prayer keeps life from becoming the entrapment of death.  Without it our relationships get empty.  In prayer is where we find God’s love, where we discover our sense of mission. As I said, prayer is the most important thing we do in this life.

Now, let me say a little bit about what is happening when we pray.  2 Corinthians 5:17-20 reads: “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away: see, everything has become new!  All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ…; that is in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.”  Basically what this means is that in Jesus Christ when he was walking the earth and in us now who are made into his body by the Holy Spirit living in us God is restoring the relationship between Himself and us that is broken by sin.  Having an relationship with God in which we communicate with him and experience his presence is the uniqueness of the Christian faith. Jesus has made it possible for us to have an intimate relationship with God, to know God.  No other religion can or does make this claim.

Hebrews 4:16 after explaining that Jesus is both the sacrifice for our sins and the High Priest who intercedes for us before the Father invites us saying: “Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”  Because of Jesus we can boldly approach God and ask for his healing mercy—healing mercy like what the Samaritan did for that wounded and robbed traveler on the roadside.  We can boldly ask God for help when we are helpless.

Even more special when we are so broken we do not know what to pray or how to pray the Holy Spirit prays for us.  Romans 8:26-27 reads, “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.  And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.”  When we are lost in this life God prays within himself for us that his desire will be done for us.  Have you ever gone to the Lord in prayer and just felt like you could do little more than groan?  Then you know what Paul is talking about the Spirit interceding for us with sighs too deep for words. 

Well, I guess that you are noticing that prayer as I am talking about it is a bit more involved than just placing needs before God.  Prayer is more than talking to God.  Prayer is even more than sitting silently listening to God.  Prayer is more than meditating on passages of Scripture.  Prayer is when and where God the Father by the power and in the presence of the Holy Spirit makes us into the image of Christ.

Well, enough about prayer.  Let me give you some homework so that you can buy the proverbial ag of oranges and learn what prayer is.  Take some time this week and sit in silence and pray these words repeatedly and slowly, “Our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name.  Thy Kingdom come the will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.”  Pray this not just with your mouth or your internal voice but with your mind and heart also.  Think about what you are saying.  Stop and ponder on every word.  Pray it so that you feel God’s Fatherliness. Pray it truly desiring his will be done here on earth as it is in heaven.  Let God’s fatherly love and your desire for his will to be done be the context from which you pray lift up your concerns.  Try this.  It will change you.  Amen.