Lent 2007 Blessed Hunger, Holy Feast

Lent 4, March 18^th

Title: You embrace us

Speaker: Linda

Worship Leader: Carey

Music leader: Ernie

Confession response: Joyce

Texts: Joshua 5:9-12, Psalm 32, 2 Corinthians 5:16-21; Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

Joshua 5:9 The LORD said to Joshua, "Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt." And so that place is called Gilgal to this day. 5:10 While the Israelites were camped in Gilgal they kept the passover in the evening on the fourteenth day of the month in the plains of Jericho. 5:11 On the day after the passover, on that very day, they ate the produce of the land, unleavened cakes and parched grain. 5:12 The manna ceased on the day they ate the produce of the land, and the Israelites no longer had manna; they ate the crops of the land of Canaan that year.

Psalm 32:1 Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. 32:2 Happy are those to whom the LORD imputes no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit. 32:3 While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. 32:4 For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Selah 32:5 Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, "I will confess my transgressions to the LORD," and you forgave the guilt of my sin. Selah 32:6 Therefore let all who are faithful offer prayer to you; at a time of distress, the rush of mighty waters shall not reach them. 32:7 You are a hiding place for me; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with glad cries of deliverance. Selah 32:8 I will instruct you and teach you the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you. 32:9 Do not be like a horse or a mule, without understanding, whose temper must be curbed with bit and bridle, else it will not stay near you. 32:10 Many are the torments of the wicked, but steadfast love surrounds those who trust in the LORD. 32:11 Be glad in the LORD and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart.

2 Corinthians 5:16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. 5:17 So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! 5:18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; 5:19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. 5:20 So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. 5:21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Luke 15:1-3, Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. 15:2 And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, "This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them." 15:3 So he told them this parable…."There was a man who had two sons. 15:12 The younger of them said to his father, 'Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.' So he divided his property between them. 15:13 A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living. 15:14 When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. 15:15 So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. 15:16 He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything. 15:17 But when he came to himself he said, 'How many of my father's hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! 15:18 I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; 15:19 I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands."' 15:20 So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. 15:21 Then the son said to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.' 15:22 But the father said to his slaves, 'Quickly, bring out a robe--the best one--and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. 15:23 And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; 15:24 for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!' And they began to celebrate. 15:25 "Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. 15:26 He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. 15:27 He replied, 'Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.' 15:28 Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. 15:29 But he answered his father, 'Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. 15:30 But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!' 15:31 Then the father said to him, 'Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. 15:32 But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.'"

Contemporary quote: a story to follow Vashti’s offertory song and Leonard’s sharing last Sunday

A little boy, about 10 years old, was looking through a shoe store window. He was barefoot and shivering with cold.

A elderly woman noticed the boy. "My, but you're in such deep thought staring in that window!" she said.

"I was asking God to give me a pair of shoes," said the child.

“Come,” said the woman. She took him by the hand, went into the store. “Get me a good pair of shoes in his size,” she said to the clerk. “And half a dozen pairs of socks. But first I want a basin of warm water and a towel.”

Removing her gloves, she knelt down, washed his little feet, and dried them with the towel.

Then she put a pair of the socks on the boy's feet, and a new pair of shoes.

She tucked remaining pairs of socks into his pocket, and gently kissed the child on the forehead, and stood to leave.

The astonished child caught her by the hand. "Are you God?" he asked.

(from Rumors, 11/26/06)

Sermon in a sentence: God’s arms are always open to us in every possible situation. Sometimes God’s caring arms take different forms: sometimes we experience them as manna, sometimes as the manure that was hurled at the fig tree in last week’s lections; sometimes we sense them in abundance of life, sometimes in the processes of dying. But God’s arms are always there, through all we might identify as good or bad, “in every frame” for us.

Introduction:

I’ll start this morning with one of my favorite stories…

One Sunday morning, the pastor of a large mainline church noticed little Alex staring up at the large plaque that hung in the foyer of the church. The seven-year-old had been staring at it for some time, so the pastor walked up beside the boy, placed a gentle hand on his shoulder and said quietly, “Good morning, Alex.”

“Good morning, pastor,” the child replied, still focused on the plaque. “Pastor, what is this?” he asked.

“Well, son, these are all the people who have died in the service,” replied the older man, and they stood there soberly together, looking at the plaque.

Little Alex’s voice barely broke the silence when he asked quietly, “Which one, the 9:00 or the 10:30 service?”

Death in the service, death in the arms of God:

God’s arms are always wide open in love and care for us but sometimes we experience that care, that hug differently….

The Old Testament text today from the book of Joshua, describes the momentous first step of moving into the Promised Land. On one day, the Israelites were still eating the manna of the wilderness; on the next day, they ate the produce of the land and manna no longer fell each night.

And yet God’s loving concern for their needs remained constant;

as it still does for us today.

And the form of God’s provision may change for us too:

sometimes it’s manna;

sometimes, as we saw in the gospel last week,

it’s the manure that is flung at the unfruitful fig tree!

There are times in our lives when God feeds us manna out in the wilderness; and sometimes God has us use the manure in our lives to grow our own food….

And sometimes, the little guy Alex had it right; people do “die in the service.”

In fact….

our Christian hope is that we all will eventually do just that.

Another story:

A pastor, Timothy Brown, remembers making a trip to a hospital a few years ago. He says,

I was there to visit a beautiful young man from Spring Lake, Michigan, whose life was being robbed one blood cell at a time by leukemia. Because he was so weak, I knelt next to his bed to look at him eye to eye. I said quietly, “Hi, Tim” and he responded also with a weak “Hi, Tim.” There followed a long awkward pause because I didn’t know what to say. The long dark shadow of death cuts right through meaningless chitchat.

Finally, Tim broke the deafening silence by saying gently, “I have learned something.” I said, “Tell me, what have you learned?”

He said, again very faintly, “I have learned that life isn’t like a VCR.”

Perplexed, I said, “I don’t get it, Tim. What do you mean?”

He said, drawing in a painful breath, “Life isn’t like a VCR—you don’t get to fast-forward the bad parts.”

As I knelt there, fighting tears, he interrupted my awkward silence again by asking, “You know what else I’ve learned?”

I said, “No, I really don’t. Please tell me.”

“I’ve learned,” he whispered, “that Jesus Christ is in every frame, and right now, that is just enough.” [Timothy Brown,“God is in every frame;” Perspectives, May 1997, 24]

We Mennonites really enjoy the idea of living a life in service;

Right now we are gearing up for the Mennonite Relief Sale, raising support for Mennonite Central Committee,

the relief and service arm of the Mennonite Church.

But the texts during Lent ask us to broaden how we look at service, as this young man was doing…

He was learning the trust and the surrender necessary to “die in the service….”

a much harder and more painful idea with which to engage.

And yet, as I pondered these texts, it seems clear to me that God’s arms are around us in both.....

In all our acts of service to God and to others,

growing out of the abundance of our lives

and in those acts of trust and surrender when life is overwhelming,

when we face mortality or disability or despair….

Atonement and reconciliation:

The epistle for this morning is one of the most succinct statements Paul makes about the atonement. What is significant about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ?

Here Paul tells us that the purpose of Jesus’ life—His service--

is to reconnect the broken pieces of the world.

It is to take those broken pieces

and fit them back together:

to restore them to friendship, compatibility or harmony.

Atonement simply means “at-one-ment;”

to bring disparate pieces back into a unified wholeness—

reconciliation.

Atonement is God is wrapping arms around all of the broken pieces—

and around all of us broken people…

In Paul’s words:

…in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us…

It is worth noting as I have here many times before

that in this text the word translated “world” is kosmos,

which in Greek as in the English “cosmos”

means the entire created order,

the natural world as well as the human world.

So God is making an appeal for unity,

for us to work at bringing about reconciliation

with the whole created order,

precisely as ambassadors work at

bringing about reconciliation between conflicted nation-states….

I rarely find myself wanting to quote Margaret Thatcher,

but she did say something profound on this subject

in spite of the odd ways in which she otherwise lived out

her “green” thoughts;

she said: No generation has a freehold on this earth,

all we have is a life tenancy, with a full repairing lease.

--Margaret Thatcher, quoted in Times Literary Supplement, March 7, 1997, 13

Part of our ministry of reconciliation, our ambassadorship,

is to heal the rift between humanity and the earth,

between humanity and the other creatures

with whom we share the cosmos.

So, we are to be ambassadors for Christ,

representing and interpreting God to each other,

to the natural world (cosmos),

and to the rest of humanity thus bringing about reconciliation,

at-one-ment.

God’s arms, our arms:

It is worth remembering that in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5:48), Jesus tells us very bluntly: Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Countless sermons have been preached on this text,

most of them—in my humble opinion—

completely missing the point.

The context tells us in what way God is perfect and how we are to be like God:

Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be children of your father in heaven; for [God] makes [the] sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous….Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect—

In reaching across enemy lines,

in healing rifts and broken places,

in praying for those who harm us,

in doing good to all of Creation around us………

this is how we reflect the perfection of our loving God;

this is how we express the ministry of reconciliation

which has been entrusted to us…

So if we take these texts in our teeth and run with them, where will they take us? The context for the 2^nd Corinthians text is as blunt as Jesus’ words: In 5:14, Paul says, “the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have_____.”

What do you think should go in that blank? A quick pat response usually is “Christ died that we might live…” But what Paul really says here is that “one has died for all; therefore all have died.”

And he goes on to say, “And he died for all,

so that those who live might live no longer for themselves,

but for him who died and was raised for them.”

Ohhhhhhh, this hurts, doesn’t it? We tend to miss the texts that remind us that dying in the service is part of the package…..

This doesn’t just mean the final death at the end of our lives.

It means the continual giving up of ego, of self,

the many little acts of selfless love,

the random acts of kindness we’ve been talking about throughout Lent.

This is what brings broken things back together.

This is how we live no longer for ourselves—but instead,

how we live in the service of the one who died

to heal the wounds of the world.

When we have the really difficult times of dying to our own preferences, our own way, when those inevitable tough times of hurt and crisis hit us

we sometimes forget that those loving arms are there

in what we see as bad times, dying times,

It’s easier perhaps to see them, feel them in the good times,

abundant living times….

But we must not forget that “God is in every frame…..”

The easy, happy frames,

The painful, difficult frames…..

And the whole point is not the frame itself, not the event that delights us or troubles us….

but how we respond.

Do we respond with surrender and trust and confidence in those loving arms regardless of what is happening around us?

Do we remember that the purpose of Jesus’ life—

and in our lives, now held in the Atonement, as well--

the purpose of our lives

is to reconnect the broken pieces of the world?

We aren’t meant to live for ourselves any longer;

we are meant to be God’s open loving arms

wrapped around the wounded cosmos…

The prodigiously excessively loving father:

The Gospel today, the story of the prodigal son, is said to be the most preached on text in the Bible. And it is all about God’s open arms.

Jesus tells it as part of a trio of stories about lost things and parties

in response to the grumbling of the religious establishment

who can’t believe that any self-respecting rabbi

would welcome social rejects like the “tax collectors and sinners”

who were crowding around Jesus to hear him speak.

But Jesus, far from knuckling under the criticism from his professional peers, seizes on the opportunity to do some basic God-education.

First, he tells the story of the good shepherd who leaves his whole flock to go look for the one lost sheep and throws a party when he finds it.

Next is the story of the woman who has lost a coin. She lights a lamp and sweeps her whole house—and when she finds it, she too calls in the neighbors to celebrate.

And then finally comes the big one: the story of a doting, ridiculously loving father of two lost sons.

Both sons show incredible disrespect to their father; both could legitimately have been stoned under the Mosaic Law.

Both sons go a long distance—the younger son in actually traveling to a foreign country, the oldest in his heart….

even though he has stayed on his father’s estate

and dutifully continued to work in his father’s fields,

he is not “dying in the service;”

he is already dead

to the relationships that have given him life and identity:

This is clear from the angry phrase he hurls at his father, “this son of yours!” breaking himself off from both father and brother…

So it is evident that the father really has not had just one, but two lost sons.

Challenge:

And Jesus leaves the story hanging; there is no resolution.

Does the oldest leave his jealousy and bitterness behind

and join the party?

Will he “die in the service,”

die to his own self-righteousness and anger

and help to put the broken pieces of his family—

his world—

back together?

Will we?