Where Are You?

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-10
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If someone asked you the question, “Where are you?” what would be your answer?  Our inclination would be to pull out our phones, open the map app, and look for the flashing blue dot.  Here in Genesis it’s not a literal question.  God is not asking Adam and Eve to give him their GPS coordinates so he could locate them on a map.  He is asking what I would call a “profound question”, a question that gets to the heart of us.  In this case, “Where are you?” is THE question that gets at the heart of our relationship with God.  Therefore, it is a very loaded question. 

It’s like when you have a grandchild who used to just love coming to your house, spending time with you, raiding your fringe, sneaking cookies from the jar, walking down to the 7-11 to buy your cigarettes for you because there’s some nickel candy in the deal (sorry that was a flashback to a day long ago.).  But lately, she’s all grown up now and hasn’t been coming around.  And, it’s not because she’s been away to school or far off working somewhere.  She’s still in the area, but she just hasn’t been around for months, maybe years.  And so, the day comes that she does show up and you naturally ask the question, “Where you been?”  Well, everybody knows there’s more to that question than where you’ve been spending your time.  It’s loaded with other little questions like “Are you ok?” “Is there something wrong between us?” “Is our relationship ok?”  “Do you need something?” And naturally, that question invokes quite a bit of shame, guilt and fear in the wee lassie.  “Profound questions” probe deeper than simply what they ask at face value and they dig up some deep feelings.

So, God asks Adam and Eve a “profound question” – “Where are you?”  We can imagine what God is thinking about Adam and Eve’s not being there at the time of day they knew he usually came around.  Are they playing hide and seek with me?  Is somebody hurt?  Have they lost track of the time?  One thing we must avoid doing is reading our ideas of God being all-knowing into the story.  There’s nothing here to indicate that God knows they have eaten from the Tree that he told Adam not to eat, the Tree of the Knowledge of God and Evil.  There is nothing in the story to indicate that God has any idea of what they have done.  He was just doing what he did every day.  In the cool of the day, God customarily strolled into the Garden to visit with Adam and Eve.  It appears they had a solid friendship.  He was somewhat parental in nature towards them for he made them.  He loved them.  In my imagination I think he was coming with excitement to hear what they had discovered in the Garden that day like a parent whose child is discovering so much those first years of life.

God came to the Garden and could not find Adam and Eve.  “Where are you?” he calls out.  Adam answered, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked: and I hid myself.”  Stunned, God asks, “Who told you that you were naked?  Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”  And then the blaming started. Apparently, Adam and Eve had changed that day.  Eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil changed them.  Their self-perception changed.  Their perception of God changed.

With respect to the way they understood themselves, Adam and Eve have become aware that they are naked and being naked means more than they just realized they weren’t wearing any clothes and are self-conscious of their bodies.  They’ve realized that they are exposed and vulnerable.  No longer can they explore the Garden fearlessly and full of wonder.  They have a sense that it is a dangerous place.  You know, crafty serpents can trick you.  Now, they’re afraid of death.  They know they’ve done what the LORD God in love had told them not to do.  They feel guilty.  They feel the shame you feel when you betray someone.  They are self-aware and not in a good way.  Nakedness is a profound sense that there is something wrong with “me” that makes “me” vulnerable to others and so I must hide...especially from God who made me, knows me, and loves me.

 For some reason, their perception of God also changed.  Instead of knowing God to be their loving Creator, a parent-type of friend, who enjoyed spending time with them and seeing their wonder and joy at his good creation, they are now afraid of God…afraid for the lives.  In their minds, the God who in love made them and enjoys them has now suddenly become the most dangerous thing they can imagine so they hide from him in fear of their lives. 

Be advised, it wasn’t God who changed.  God is still the same God who loves them. God is not out to get them for their disobedience.  How would you feel if you were God here in this story?  Heartbroken is at the top of my list.  As we would expect God would be angry.  But, his anger seems as much stirred by Adam and Eve not owning up to what they had done and instead passing the blame to someone else than his being angry at them for not heeding him.  God is still the same God who loves them.  It is Adam and Eve’s newly twisted perception of him that is making him out to be the hanging Judge so easily offended by moral disobedience that Christian Tradition (primarily Medieval Christian Tradition) has made him out to be.  Yes, that’s a punny way of saying that understanding of God is from the Dark Ages.

This is the first Sunday in Lent.  Traditionally, the topic is Temptation.  A generic sermon on temptation from this passage would rather naively focus on the conversation between Eve and the Serpent and preach that though something may appear good and pleasing if God told you not to do it, then don’t do it.  In my humble opinion, that kind of a Temptation sermon is skewed by that skewed perception of God that we have inherited from the Dark Ages that God is out to get us. 

A greater temptation we must resist is giving in to the flawed perceptions of self and of God that this story describes to us.  We do not have to fear God in such a way as to be afraid for our lives.  We don’t have to give in to the temptation to understand ourselves as naked, that we are vulnerable because there is something wrong with us, nor be afraid of death.  Those flawed perceptions are fruit we do well to avoid.

These false perceptions of loathing ourselves and thinking God to be an ogre are indeed what befall us when we do as Adam and Eve did by trying to be gods too.  The crafty serpent led Eve to believe that God was petty, jealous, and lying and that they could be like God if they eat the forbidden fruit.  These false perceptions lead us into a vicious cycle that goes like this.  We perceive ourselves as naked, so we play God by doing things that make us feel all the more naked, ashamed, and afraid and so we hide a little deeper in the forest.  While hiding we get all the more fearful that God or somebody else might see us for who we “really” are and then its back to trying to be God again.  The cycle progresses and we become so well hidden that no one, not even we ourselves, know who we are…and so the question, “Where are you?”

Friends, God is not out to get us.  He’s out to get those false perceptions we have of God and of ourselves that are causing us to die spiritually and physically.  In his love for us God has made it so that that we can have the free gift of new life in Jesus Christ.  We don’t have to hide from the presence of God.  We just have to entertain the Truth that God loves us, likes us, and wants to hear about our days.  We don’t have to hide from God.  We are his beloved children in Christ to whom he has given his Spirit.  Run from the temptation to believe those old perceptions of yourself and God and look to Jesus, who died to put all that stinking thinking to death.  Come to the Tree of Life.  Amen.

Taking Time to Wait on God

Exodus 24:12-18

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So, God says to Moses, “Come up the mountain to me and hang out there and I’ll give you the stone tablets with the Law and the commandment that I’ve written down for my people to live by.”  But Moses, being the type of person who would rather hang out on his couch surfing the web playing games on his phone decided he didn’t want to walk all the way up that mountain and wait for God to be God.  Seriously, nobody likes to wait.  He decides it would be easier pull out his trusty iPhone 8 and ask Siri.  He says, “Siri”.  Siri answers, “I’m listening.”  Moses thought to himself if only prayer were this easy and then he asks, “Can you give me the tablets of stone, with the Law and the commandment, which God wrote for our instruction.”  Siri says, “I found this on the web.”  Answers in hand, Moses foregoes taking time to wait on God to get around to being God and give him the stone tablets and starts swiping his way through the sites that Siri gave him and sharing a few with his friends and twenty minutes later he’s back to his games and never had to leave the couch. 

Well, I don’t think it went done like that but in this culture of immediacy in which we live, move, and have our being there are more than a few people who call that relationship with their phone being spiritual but not religious.  This thing where I can find get on the web and find my answers and believe what I want to believe but not have to commit to being part of anything. 

On the web you can find answers – sure, many answers; information, yes, lot’s of information.  It’s a tremendous resource.  I could hardly do my job anymore without all that reference material so readily available.  But we can’t find God on the net.  To find God we actually have to take the time to be with God, to wait on God and unfortunately God takes his time.  If we’re looking for answers to questions like “God are you real?”  “God, can I trust you?”  “What are you up to with me?”  “Why are you letting these terrible things happen?”  “Why don’t you answer my prayers?”  For those kinds of answers we just have to go to the source and take the time to be face to face with God not expecting instant results.  God takes time.  Faith takes time growing in Christ takes time.

That’s something we see here in the Exodus passage with Moses there on the mountain.  He went up to be with God.  God was there (albeit in a cloud of fog on a mountain where there shouldn’t be any fog) and, of course, God took his time to start getting to the point.  Moses simply had to wait.  Six whole days he sat in the fog and waited before God got around to delivering the goods.  What Moses did up there those six days?  Who knows?  There is no book on the shelves of the pop-spirituality section at Chapters entitled, Mountain Morsels: The Spiritual Exercises of Moses; and on the back cover is the promise; practice these spiritual disciplines for six days and like Moses on day seven God will come to you with a life changing revelation that’ll take you forty days to get.    

It took six days for God to get started and yes, that time span of six days is pregnant with imagery.  We’re supposed to think about Genesis 1, the great hymn of creation about how God took six days to build creation as his temple, as his place to come and dwell; and how he filled it with life and crowned it with humans whom he made to be his own image in the temple of creation.  These humans would be both the priests who praise God and caretakers who steward God’s creation. 

It took forty days altogether for God to teach Moses this new way of living and yes, that is another time span pregnant with imagery.  We are supposed to think of the forty days that Noah was on the ark riding out the flood that God used to cleanse his creation of humanity’s wickedness.  By these two references we are supposed to clue in that this new way of life that God was giving to his people would be as momentous as creation itself, as the flood itself.  This new way of life would help to cleanse God’s people and restore his image in the creation and bring humans back to doing what God created us to do: worship him and care for his creation.  For this new act of re-creative restoration to happen Moses just had to go and take the time needed to wait on God to be God. 

Well, maybe “wait” isn’t the word to use here.  Waiting is the inconvenient thing we do at the doctor’s office and grocery store checkouts.  God doesn’t call us to purposeless inconvenience.  The Hebrew literally says, “God told Moses, ‘Come up the mountain to me and be there’.”  God invited Moses to come into his presence and just be with him. 

It’s like that thing that teenagers do; going to your friend’s house to hang out.  It doesn’t matter what you do.  What matters is that you’re together.  You’re a part of a friendship and just being in that friendship shapes who you are.  So it is with time spent with God.  The simple effect on us of just being away from everything else for the sole purpose of simply being in God’s presence shapes and reshapes who we are.  What God and Moses did those first six days on the mountain, like I said, we don’t know.  They could have been eating pizza and playing video games for all we know.  Yet, somehow in that span of time they spent together, just being together shaped Moses to be who he was, the most influential leader of ancient Israel. 

I have to point out that this time spent with God had a scary side to it.  The mountains of the Sinai Peninsula are sheer granite walls with steep drop-offs.  Just climbing them, finding a way up and down is dangerous.  I’ve been up that mountain.  Jebel Musa they call it today.  It’s over 9,000ft at the summit.  The last 1,800ft are nearly straight up.  When Moses went up the mountain the glory of the Lord settled on it as a cloud.  The Sinai Peninsula is very dry.  Clouds do not come around very often, especially not one that’s going to linger for more than a month.  Have you ever been on the top of a steep mountain when a cloud comes over?  Clouds can be so thick that you cannot see more than a foot in front of you.  It’s dangerous.  Then there’s how it looked to people below.  They looked up and saw a fire consuming the mountain.  We’ve seen a lot of news footage the last few years of wildfires consuming everything in their path.  That’s what they saw…but there was no vegetation to burn, just a consuming fire.  That should make you scratch your head. 

Coming into the presence of the Lord is like being in a dense fog where we’ve only got our self and our own fears to deal with and it’s to dangerous to try to run from them because we might fall of the edge.  When other people see the Lord at work on us, to them the change happening in us is as obvious as a fire consuming a mountain.

There are times in our lives when God calls us up the mountain into the fog, into the consuming fire to be face to face with him so that he might change us, heal us, make someone new of us.  I wish I could recommend some spiritual disciple for this.  You know, pray this way, meditate on these scriptures, journal, maybe try fasting – the things we’re supposed to do the 40 days of Lent.  But, not everybody is wired for spiritual disciplines.  If there is anything I’ve learned the 35 years about relating to God, it is that we can’t be conjure up God by doing this or doing that.  But, there are times God does indeed call us to come up the mountain to him.  If God has called you to a point where you are in a fog about your life, about him, about faith, then he is calling you to come up the mountain to him and just be there with him.  It is best that when this happens we take the time to go. 

I find it enormously helpful in these foggy, fiery periods of life (and they will pass but we still have to go through them) I find it helpful to just sit and to make a place for God to sit too, like an actual chair, something to make me consciously aware that God is with me whether I feel it or not.  Do that and sit face to face with God and get it off your chest – your angers, your fears, your questions, your WTF’s with respect to God.  In time, God will show up and make things new and you’ll come down the mountain with something as certain as stone tablets in your hands.  Take the time to wait on God.  Amen.

Honesty? Honestly?!

Matthew 5:17-37

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We have a problem with honesty these days.  I remember a story when I was a kid, which in itself was a lie, that they taught us down in the States to try to instil in us that honesty was an American virtue.  I’m sure you folks heard it up here.  It was about a young George Washington, the first PROTUS, owning up to chopping down his father’s cherry tree.  Let’s see, how did it go.  Little George got an axe and gave that tree forty whacks.  When his father discovered the butchered tree, he asked George who cut it down.  And let me see how’d that story end. George replies, “I did nothing wrong.  It was a perfect conversation with the tree.  Just read the transcript I gave you.”  No?  How about, “I cannot tell a lie, I did not have a chopping relationship with that tree.”  No?  Maybe it was, “I am not a chopper.”  No? Hmmm.  Hold on.  “I cannot say. I was out of the loop.”  No?  Oh, now I remember.  He bullied his cronies and wouldn’t let the ones who saw him do it talk to his father.  No? Well, who would have thought he said, “I cannot tell a lie.  I cut it down.”  Honesty?  Honestly!”

Well, honesty is very important.  That George Washington story was taught to me as a child down in the States to instil in me what sort of people Americans are.  We are honest people; so honest that our consciences simply will not allow us to tell a lie.  But times have obviously changed.  Truth no longer seems to matter.  If I still lived in the States and was raising my children there I would be livid that my government by example was teaching my children that there are no consequences to lying, that the truth does not have to be told particularly the higher up you get on the power, wealth, and status ladder.  But, government lies matter.  They come at a cost – the corrosion of national community.

Well, believe it or not things today are not all that different than they were in Jesus’ time with respect to telling the truth.  Back then lying was commonplace.  People were not expected to tell the truth.  In fact the only time that it was necessary to tell the truth was when someone higher up the social ladder required a lesser to be honest for some official reason.  Not unlike today, back then if you were a person of position or status you had the power to decide to whom you would tell the truth.  You were entitled to tell no one the truth.  It had to have been a very difficult time in which to live.  You could not count on anyone really being honest.  So, people tried to create a false sense of honesty by swearing oaths when they wanted someone else to know they were most likely telling the truth.  They would say, “I swear by Heaven.”  “I swear on my life.”  “I swear on my honour.”   Taking an oath was necessary to guarantee that a person was being honest.

At the heart of Jesus’ teaching here on oath taking is, I think, his fundamental dislike for the way people could so easily lie.  In matters of faith there was a law in the Old Testament that Hebrews observed about keeping the vows they made to the Lord.  If you say you are going to do something for the Lord, then do it.  But in our passage today, Jesus indicates that he expects his followers not only to keep their word when it comes to the activities of their faith but we are to go further and be honest in every matter. There is an underlying and continuous message running through the Sermon on the Mount that Jesus’ expects his followers to be of higher moral character than just simply being good folk who stay out of trouble or worse, who are religious legalists.  His disciples should be of such high moral character that they should not have to swear an oath to guarantee to others that they are telling the truth.  Jesus’ disciples are to be known for their honesty, honestly!

Honest is not an easy thing to be.  We lie in so many ways.  There are times when telling a little lie seems to be almost necessary to keep from hurting someone’s feelings.  Those types of lies are what we call white lies because supposedly no one gets hurt.  Then there are those people whom we would call pathological liars.  They simply cannot tell the truth about anything and make up story after story to make themselves appear grand.  And then there are the flat out lies that we tell.  We simply decide for whatever reason not to tell the truth when asked.  Usually it’s because we don’t want to take the time to explain things.  Here lately it seems that it is acceptable to tell lies about other people, particularly your enemies or people you think are undesirable to have in your great community, in order to motivate other people to join your self-destructive circle of hate.

There is another type of lying that we do which we simply call living a lie, living a life that at the core is oriented towards self.  We will do anything to make ourselves feel like we are somebody more than who we are.  Instead of being honest and accepting that we need the care and support of other people we try to appear strong and self-sufficient.  We build up walls of power and intimidation and compete with others.  Whenever there is a mountain of debt, be it personal or national, there is a lie being lived.

Being honest is difficult.  We lie as a way to protect and preserve our self-image.  But Jesus shows us a better way.  This morning we will be partaking of the Lord’s Supper.  We eat the bread and drink the juice remembering how Jesus gave his life for us simply because he honestly loves us.  That’s the Truth.  Jesus shows us the truth about ourselves.  That we crucified the Son of God who came to heal us is the truest word of truth about who and how we humans are that was ever spoken. 

This meal is an invitation to live the honest life.  It is the invitation to live our lives fundamentally oriented to doing what God in his great love for us expects of us which is to love God with all our heart, soul, strength and mind and to love our neighbours as we love ourselves; by love we keep Jesus great commandment for us to love as he loved us by giving his life for us.  In so doing we will come face to face with the reality of God’s love for everybody.  True, we will feel great discomfort as we discover the self-destructive and community-destroying lies we believe about ourselves and others; but that Truth will set us free.  We are to live our lives not to serve ourselves but in service of others because we care about more than looking out for number one.  As we come to the table let us remember that being honest begins with saying yes, I will keep my word to follow Jesus faithfully.  Yes, I will allow myself to be weak and broken so that I and others might experience God’s love and be healed.  Indeed, the one honest thing in this world that we can count on to be true is how much God loves us.  Come.  Amen.

            

A Community of Salt and Light

Matthew 5:13-19

Several years ago when my family still lived in Caledon, my son and I (he was about two) were checking out at a Home Depot and the cashier who seemed to be of Hispanic background just went on about how cute William was.  Then, in the middle of her praises she said, “God bless you”.  You don’t hear “God bless you” too often except from politicians so I found this blessing quite touching.  So, I said, “And you too.” 

Just days after that happened I was down at Toronto area mall donating blood.  It is procedure that when you’re done they walk you over to the cookie table for a snack.  I remember the volunteer at the table that day was an elderly woman of Indian background.  She didn’t say much.  When I finished my snack, she said, “Thank you” and made sure I knew to pull the straw out of my juice box so the box could be recycled.  After I garbaged my trash I turned to her and told her bye and she then unexpectedly and quite loudly and in a tone of seriousness exclaimed, “God bless you.”  Once again quite touched, I said, “And you too.” 

Though several years ago those two blessings stick out to me as powerful examples of what we the followers of Jesus are about in this world – to be a blessing; to bless people.  Oddly, words of blessing are not what we are typically known for.  Most of what people hear publicly from Christians are complaints about how secular our society has become and how nobody comes to church anymore.  They hear rants from us about immorality and so forth.  But rarely, do they have a Christian just out of the blue say, “God bless you.”  Yet, that simple desire and, indeed, prayer and the act of saying “God bless you” in my opinion is the heart of what Christian presence in a community needs to be; indeed, what we Christians need to be.  We are those who Jesus has blessed with his presence and his favour so that we might bless and be a blessing to this world.  God blesses people so that they might be a blessing to others. God’s blessing does not end simply with the well-being of an individual.  The blessing comes to a person and through that person to others.  Therefore, blessings are meant to be shared. 

The call of Abraham is particularly clear on this.  God blessed Abraham with numerous descendents and a land saying, “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.  I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed (Gen. 12:2, 3).”  So, when we say God bless you we are really saying “God make you to be a blessing”.  This should make us think about what we mean when we say we have been blessed with wealth, a home, family, friends, or health.  For those things to truly be a blessing we must share them with others that they might be blessed.  Maybe God means for wealth to be shared with the poor, our homes with the homeless, our families with the widowed and orphaned, our friendships with the friendless, and our health with the disabled. 

Today’s passage comes immediately following the Beatitudes, which are Jesus’ “God bless you” to his disciples.  They are Jesus saying to his disciples, “You are blessed by my Father, our presence and favour are upon you, so that we, through you, may bless others”.  This is behind what Jesus meant when he said to his disciples, “You are the salt of the earth” and “You are the light of the world.

How? It is through the working of the Holy Spirit who makes us hear God’s calls us to be Jesus’ disciples, who awakens in us the awareness that we need God’s grace, who reveals God’s very self to us as present loving-kindness, and sends us forth to be peacemaking Kingdom-bringers manifesting Jesus’ reign even if it means persecution.  God’s movement among his people is a blessing imparting a great reward to those who receive it.  Indeed, the actual content of the blessing is our truly coming to know God personally in himself and this in turn makes us able to serve him fruitfully. 

But, we need to also not be naïve, this blessing is also a gut-wrenching revelation of ourselves as sinners and moreover the result of living in God’s blessing is so often persecution. (I wonder how long it will be before both of those women are told by their employers to stop blessing people.)  Nevertheless, the intent behind the blessing that Jesus gives to us, his disciples, is that since we are being blessed with coming to know God the Father through the Son in the presence and working of the Holy Spirit and are being changed by him, we will and must in turn become a blessing to others.  We must live to reveal God’s loving-kindness and mercy to others not only as individuals who show the love of God, but also as an authentic community of humanity made new in Jesus Christ.  Our life together will and must be a blessing to others. 

Let’s look briefly at being the salt of the earth.  Most commentators will define what it is to be the salt of the earth by describing how we use salt: seasoning, preservative, cleansing agent, or medicinally.  I found some interesting things when I looked at how salt is used in the Bible.  Salt was a required ingredient in the incense that they burned in the temple to represent the prayers of the people in every sacrifice offered to God as an anti-corrupting agent.  We are what God has given his creation to keep it a pure and pleasantly good offering of praise in God’s eyes.  Our prayers in the name of Jesus are the salt mingled with the pleasant aroma of the prayers of all peoples.  There was also a “covenant of salt.”  Two friends when making an agreement would eat salt together as a symbolic gesture of the desire that nothing would corrupt the friendship and nullify the agreement.  That in mind, as the salt of the earth we are the anti-corrupting agent God has given to keep the bonds of human community authentic.  What makes us salty is our relationship with God through Christ in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. 

Moving on to light, in the Bible you will find that more often than not that light means something more than just plain light.  Light is what makes God and his actions see-able.  Light is knowledge of and also the knowing of God.  In the Psalms, the psalmists often speak of the light of God’s countenance, the felt brightness of his smiling upon us.  In other places, light is God’s salvation shinning out to those who live in darkness.  In the Gospel of John Jesus refers to himself as the light of the world.  The light we share in our fellowship is Jesus himself abiding in our midst in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.  Jesus is the light of the world in and through us.  Those who live in the darkness of this sin-broken world should be able to look into our community in this congregation and see the communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who has blessed us with his own loving kindness.  They should be able to look at us and see an authentic human community that shines forth the forthcoming of the new heaven and new earth that Jesus is bringing with him.  This world needs precisely what God has blessed us with. 

            God is blessing us.  He is blessing us to be a blessing to others.  Let’s take this God-given community forth and give it to the world around us, unselfishly, expecting nothing in return.  This will require that we stand in faith on the knowledge that God is moving here.  This will also require patience and the expectation that the results maybe quite different than what we expect, hope for, or even dream of.  God is moving here and he will produce fruits from us.  Let’s take the risk of letting our little light shine.  After all, it’s God’s light and it is brighter than the sun.  Finally, let’s not be so timid and make it a point to say “God bless you” to people.  Amen.