Psalm 19:1-6
John 11:25-26
Ezekiel 37:1-14

Sermon:

I know some people from church have asked why we gave our son such a weird Bible name.  There are a few reasons.  First of all, (CLICK) we wanted a biblical name for our son.  As I’ve talked about many times, I always loved hearing the stories of King David when I was a kid, because I found kinship with this Bible character, just by having the same name.  Before Carissa and I knew anything else about our child, we knew we wanted a biblical name. (CLICK)

Second, we’re big dorks.  This is probably not a surprise to anyone, but while we didn’t know what our child’s name was going to be, we had the first initial picked out.  Carissa’s parents are Art and Barb.  So, when Carissa was born, her family’s initials were “ABC.”  (CLICK) My parents are Bob and Cathy, so when I was born, our family initials were “BCD.”  (CLICK) To continue the tradition of consecutive letters, since “Carissa” and “David” have the C and D, we knew we wanted an “E.” (CLICK)

Now, that actually leaves a couple of good boy names (and a bunch of weird ones).  For example, Elijah would be a good one.  He was an Old Testament prophet who famously never died.  He simply ascended into heaven at the end of his ministry.  He performed many miracles and was very wise.

Personally, I always like the name Ezekiel, though.  It’s a good name – your lawyer, your banker, your doctor, some famous author – he could have a name like Ezekiel – a name with some gravitas, some heft, some authority.  On the other hand, I always thought “Zeke” sounded like a fun guy you would want to hang out with.  You get a serious name, and a fun goofy name.

But more important than how the name sounds is the character himself in the Bible.  (CLICK) Ezekiel was a prophet in the Old Testament, right around the time of Jeremiah.  Both Jeremiah and Ezekiel were around during the Divided Kingdom – that is, the time when Israel in the North and Judah in the South were separate.  They both lived to see the Exile to Babylon (CLICK) – when the Babylonian Empire finally took Judah and its capital Jerusalem, kidnapping all the wealthy and influential people and removing them to Babylon.

This meant that both of them had remarkably difficult jobs to do.  Jeremiah spent his time trying to influence powerful people, using the power of speech and persuasion to get people.  Ezekiel had a much more… shall we say, “colorful” approach to prophecy.

Ezekiel was renowned for his “sign-acts.”  (CLICK) A sign-act is when a prophet does something physical to signify the meaning of his prophecy.  For example, in chapter 4 of Ezekiel, he lay on his side for over a year.  First, on his left side for 390 days, then on his right for 40 days.  This was one day on each side for each year that first Israel, and then Judah, would be without a king; they years they would be in Exile.  Can you imagine, just lying on one side for so long?  The bed sores he must’ve had!  But that’s the whole point:  he was showing people physical signs of the emotional pain they were going through to help drive his message home.

Later, he cooks food over cow dung.  This was prohibited by Jewish law, but he does it to show that, while the people of Judah are in Exile, they’re not going to be in the comfortable bubble of Jerusalem.  They’re going to be around people with different ideas of what is acceptable, including what to eat and how to prepare it.  Jeremiah might’ve been more inclined to tell people that; Ezekiel was inclined to show people.  He wanted them, not just to have an intellectual understanding of what was coming, but for them to have a real, physical, visceral understanding of what lay ahead.

There are other things:  in chapter 12, Ezekiel physically packs up his stuff to demonstrate that the Exile is coming; when his wife dies in chapter 24, he refuses to cry, to symbolize to people that God is not going to cry over the loss of the King and the Temple; after all, God has new things in store.  Ezekiel has a way of making his whole life about what God is doing.  Yes, it’s eccentric; it’s a little batty.  Sometimes, it’s goofy or funny.  But more than anything else, it’s inspiring that someone would take God’s message so to heart that his whole life, the way he conducts himself, the habits and routines of his life, everything – would be about God.  That’s a big thing to live up to, but it’s exactly what any believer should aspire to.  Not cooking your food over cow dung; I mean that devotion to God in your life.

(CLICK) And Ezekiel’s very name means, “God strengthens.”  How else do you describe the physical skill toll this took on him, yet the perseverance he showed in his ministry?  God strengthened him where so many others failed.

But Ezekiel was more than just some weirdo who acted out to show people God’s message.  He was also a deeply spiritual man who received some of the great visions of Scripture.  And in today’s reading, we see perhaps the most famous vision in the whole Bible, as Ezekiel sees the dry bones come to life. (CLICK)

In this vision, Ezekiel is placed in the middle of a valley that’s filled with dry bones.  Incidentally, I love the detail that these are dry bones.  Somehow, it just sounds wrong to call this “the story of Ezekiel and the bones.”  It has to be the dry bones.  That little detail helps us know that the life went out of these bones long ago.  This passage is rich in sensory detail, and it’s important to pay attention to something like that.  God asks if the bones can live, and, skeptically, Ezekiel responds, “Only you know, God.”  God tells Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones.

Ezekiel starts talking, and we hear our second great sensory detail:  the rattling of the bones.  Just imagine a valley full of bones; I have the picture up there to help you visualize it.  If they started to move, surely there would be a rattling.  And as Ezekiel speaks, that rattling continues.  The bones come together in skeletons, and on those skeletons, muscles and tendons and ligaments and skin start to form.  The dry bones have turned into living people!  Surely, this would be a sight unlike anything anyone had ever seen before.

This is to be understood as a message of hope during the Exile.  Much like what we read from Jeremiah last week, this was a message that this Exile would not be permanent, but rather that God would bring back hope from the pit of despair.  The Exile was a critical moment in the history of the Jewish people, because it seemed that all of God’s promises had gone away.  The promised Davidic King?  Gone.  The promise of the Temple, where God would dwell and they would worship forever?  Destroyed.  The promised land they were supposed to enjoy forever?  Distant, thousands of miles away.

Yet, Ezekiel’s vision is about the impossible coming to pass.  It’s about something that not only seems dead coming back, but something that is dead teeming with life.  And while we heard such things in Jeremiah last week, this prophecy from Ezekiel means more to me, because unlike Jeremiah’s specific prophecy about hope for restoration in a particular time and place, Ezekiel’s prophecy is forever.

Today, as you may know, is All Saints’ Sunday.  That’s the first Sunday in November, during which we remember All Saints’ Day.  All Saints’ Day is when the church universal recognizes those who have died; those saints who now rest with their heavenly creator.  And on this day, we remember that Ezekiel’s prophecy is not just about the Israelites 2500 years ago, but it’s about us today, as well.

God is in the business of resurrection.  We see in this passage a vision of Ezekiel that’s more than a vision.  We see that our deaths will come, but that God still has plans for us.  We are never dead to God, though our bones may dry up; though our names may be forgotten by history, God still wishes for us to live.  And in God, we do live.  God raises us up.  And while this doesn’t happen in a way that others can see, it is nonetheless God’s sure promise.  We know it, just as God was able to restore the people of Judah to their rightful home when it seemed impossible, this, too, is something God can, will, and does accomplish for us.

Brothers and sisters, we know that our resurrection comes, because we’ve seen it already.  We have seen it foretold by Ezekiel.  But more importantly, we have seen that Jesus was raised from the dead, the firstfruits of God’s planned harvest.  One day, we may all feast at God’s heavenly banquet table with the redeemed from throughout history, because we have seen the risen Christ, who broke bread with his disciples.

Today, we remember and honor those saints who have gone before us.  And today in worship, we break bread.  As we break bread and share the cup, remember that these are not mere symbols of one meal a long time ago; they are a promise.  They are a promise that the resurrection that met Christ Jesus is our destiny, too.  This meal is not just remembrance, because it is also a foretaste of the feast that awaits us when we meet God again.

Brothers and sisters, we know that death awaits us all.  And therefore we are right to mourn those who have gone before us.  But we are also right to rejoice, knowing that those who have left us already sit at God’s banquet table, awaiting out presence in good time.

And know that today, in this life, whatever troubles you face, whatever exile you find yourself in, God is there to free you from it.  No obstacle is too great for God to overcome, for even death is subject to God.  Amen.

Psalm 25:1-7
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Jeremiah 29:1, 4-14

Sermon:

I remember starting in a new school district in 6^th grade.  I was the new kid, didn’t really have any friends in my class.  I only vaguely knew a couple of kids from playing youth sports in the area, but I had been open-enrolled in another district for elementary school (basically, my parents and I moved, but I kept going to the same school; now, I was finally starting in the district I actually lived in).

Middle school can be an awkward time for any kid, but if you really don’t know where you fit in, and middle school is a time to reinvent yourself, anyway.  In that sixth-grade year, I went from being probably the quietest kid in class at my old school, to someone who was constantly sent to the corner of the classroom for talking too much in class.  But that was the year I remember really starting on group work for the first time in a classroom; it was the first time I remember being encouraged to talk in class.  I learned to rein it in eventually, but that year I was talking all the time.  I had a change in circumstance, and it really made a lot of things different.

Similarly, last week, we talked about Jeremiah.  Today, we return to him.  Last week, we talked about Jeremiah’s early life as a prophet.  He lived during the time when Israel (the northern kingdom) and Judah (the southern kingdom) were split, so the whole people of Israel was not united.  Jeremiah lived and prophesied in Jerusalem.  Specifically, the main part of his job was to give people this warning:  “Just because you live in Jerusalem, where God’s Temple is, that doesn’t mean that nothing bad will ever happen here; I know God chose this city to be special, but we have to keep following God!”  Of course, no one listened and the Babylonian army came roaring through town, destroying the Temple and getting rid of the king.

Now, that level of destruction would’ve been enough to prove the Babylonians’ power, I think, except they had other ideas.  They believed the best way to make some changes was to beat the culture out of people.  And the best way to do that was to remove the most cultured people from a place.  So the Babylonians took the educated elite – the upper class, even most of the middle class – and all the “influential” people, and removed them.  They just took them from their homes, and marched them across the desert to Babylon.  They had to leave all their belongings, they had to leave their homes, their land, and they had to make a new start somewhere else.

Now, I’m going to jump ahead a little more than 2000 years.  Today is Reformation Sunday.  That’s the Sunday on which we remember the day Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to a church door, protesting injustices in the church.  Luther (and our Presbyterian forefather, John Calvin) saw that things in the church needed to be changed.  The church, as an institution, held too much power, and it was being taken from the people who were trying to lead faithful lives.

For example, the church had largely decided to stop serving Communion to the people in the pews.  There was a fear that people might spill the body and blood of Christ.  And since there was a fear that the body and blood of Christ were too sacred for being spilled, they decided the only way to be safe about it was to take them away.  Not only that but the preachers had mostly stopped preaching.  Not only that, but the messages they did give were in Latin, which meant that the majority of people in churches couldn’t understand what was going on, then they watched someone else take Communion, and then they went home.  That was church.

Some brave men saw that this was a time for change.  They started preaching that people needed to have Communion.  They talked about how people needed to see, read, and hear the Bible in their own language.  They talked about how important it was to have preaching in the service, not just Communion, so that people could hear a message that would bring them closer to God.

They had to have a message that was appropriate to their times.  In the time of the Reformation, the message that was needed was about greater access for people.  The feeling of the Reformers was that God was being kept away from the people, to the benefit of the hierarchy of the church.  So they preached a message of openness; a message of a theology that better explained how God was present in the lives of everyone – not just in the pews at church, but out in the world.  It was a message of God’s love, and God’s will that we live godly lives everywhere.  Just like Jeremiah, their message had to be tailored to the time in which they lived.

Jeremiah’s first message to the Judeans had been a message of warning.  He was the doom-and-gloom prophet for a time of abundance.  Last week, I mentioned a particular quote about the Gospel, that says that a true Gospel message should “afflict the comfortable, and comfort the afflicted.”  Well, in Jeremiah’s early ministry, the people of Jerusalem were definitely the comfortable, so he afflicted them, warning of the danger on the horizon.  Now that they’ve been met with that, it was time for the “I told you so” to come from Jeremiah, right?

Wrong!  That’s not what prophets do; they don’t rub it in, they speak the word of God.  And, in this moment, Jeremiah was no longer to be in the business of afflicting the comfortable.  Now, the Babylonians were the comfortable, and the Judeans dragged across the desert were the afflicted, living in a foreign land, away from Jerusalem.  What the afflicted need, is comfort.

So what does Jeremiah preach?  Well, he does two things.  One of those is to say, “You guys should get married, have kids, build a life.  You’re in it for the long haul, so live.”  That’s pretty good advice for anyone in distress, isn’t it?  Live with hope for tomorrow.  Jeremiah knew that God always has hope for tomorrow.  In the darkest, most tortured point in Israel’s history, Jeremiah’s message was a one of restoration.  That must surely have been a hard message to hear; yet, it was the message that was needed.

Jeremiah himself actually buys a field back in Judah, even while away in exile in Babylon.  He had been carted away with everyone else, and yet he buys a field.  He says, metaphorically with his purchase, that they will return.  It’s a powerful message.  The message of hope is one that we literally always need, because there’s always a reason to be afraid.  Yet, Jeremiah tells the people that God will get them through it.  Unsurprisingly, that’s exactly what happens.

Of course, there’s a lot of trouble first.  Some people live and die in Babylon, only knowing that world.  It’s not like everything’s perfect.  And I say that so that the harsh truth of reality is not blunted.  It is often true that the greatest moments of joy and triumph we receive in this life follow periods of prolonged difficulty and sadness.  That’s not to say that we should seek out difficulty and sadness, and it’s not to say that the joy we feel removes all the bad feeling.  Those feelings are very real, and they hurt.  It’s just to say that, even for the Judeans, even in a hopeful story, there was still pain and loss.  Even the Resurrection of Jesus, the most hope-filled moment in the history of the world, only came about after the suffering of the cross, and the pain and separation of death.

Yet it is that moment, that moment of the empty tomb is the one we need to look to when we’re feeling like the Judeans who were carried away to Babylon.  Personally, I think that it’s of the utmost importance that we always keep both messages of Jeremiah in our minds.  We live lives of great comfort, relatively speaking.  Even the least comfortable American lives better than more than half the world’s population.  I just read this morning that if you make $34,000 per year, you are in the top 10% of earners globally.  The average American in 2015 (last available year of data) made $55,775 – basically, the majority of our country is in that top tier.  So we have to live with the knowledge that we deserve a little affliction.  We are the comfortable.  Therefore, we must remember that our wealth, our prosperity, our possessions can’t save us from some of the things that will come.

On the other hand, no matter what happens, God is by our side.  God is there to keep, guide, and watch over us.  And in our moments of deepest pain – those moments of illness, loss, addiction, grief, suffering, family conflict, spiritual struggle – we must remember that the God of exile in Babylon was also the God of return from exile.  The purpose of Jeremiah’s prophecies was never just to depress people; it was to open their eyes to the world.  Similarly, Jeremiah wasn’t offering a false hope; he was offering eternal hope that lies only in the God who created the universe, who brought a people out of Egyptian slavery, returned them from exile, and brought forth from them the Savior of the world, God in human flesh, Jesus Christ, whom even death could not hold.

And that leads us to the final thought.  If Jeremiah preached disaster when things were going well, if he preached hope when things were bad; if the Protestant Reformers offered words when people had none, access when God seemed inaccessible; if the best preaching is about offering what people need to hear in their own time, what do we need to hear today?

That’s the tricky part.  We need a lot of messages.  We need to hear more about faith and devotion.  We need to hear about bringing our lives closer to God.  We need to be scolded for keeping our faith at arm’s length and treating it like something we trot out only on Sunday mornings.  We need to be convicted of that, and we need to learn to wear our faith proudly.  We need to grow closer to God, and let our lives be affected.

We also need to be convicted of what comes from faith.  Jesus tells us about how we are supposed to love the Lord with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.  But there is a second commandment like it:  to love our neighbors as ourselves.  We have to put ourselves in the shoes of the other.  We must put compassion and empathy first, and leave judgment to the side.  We have to wear our faith proudly in our lives, but we must also let it affect how we think about the things going on around us, and let our lives be better reflections of the way Jesus lived.

But if I had to narrow it down to one thing, I think what’s most important for us today is to hear and remember the story of Jesus.  While I’ve been preaching from the Old Testament, as a Christian, everything will always come back to Christ and what he means for the world, and for my life.  We too easily forget that he was a servant, who lived to serve others and to serve God.  We too easily forget that he was the one at the bottom of the social ladder, not the top.  We too easily forget that he was born out of wedlock, fled to a foreign country as a refugee, that he worked with his hands, that he was homeless, that he was dirty all the time, that he was smart, that he was not at all “respectable.”  And yet, he drew followers to him, and that was the form God chose to take on earth.  We would do well to remember that when dealing with many of the people we can so easily look down upon.

Brothers and sisters, hearing a message for our own day is to hear a message that confronts us with the reality that we may be wrong; our culture, our society, may be wrong.  It’s the reality that God, more often than not, has something in store for us that we can’t remotely see.  And that message means that, in plenty or in want, we have only one course of action:  that’s to stand by God’s side.  We must follow, because that is the only path through good times and bad.  And in the end, we must live the lives God is calling us to lead by seeking God, following God, and putting God first.  Amen.

Psalm 105:1-6
Jeremiah 1:4-10
Jeremiah 7:1-11

Sermon:

I’m going to start with a blanket statement that I hope makes sense.  It’s easy to be critical of biblical characters for not following the voice of God in their own lives; yet we so easily fail to listen to the voice of God in our own lives.  If we give it a half-second’s thought, we would realize that, most of the time, we don’t just hear a message and then immediately put in into practice.  We have to hear it over, and over, and over again.  It’s why people come to church more than once in their lives.  It’s part of the reason, I think, that preachers tend to have only a few favorite topics that everything else ties back to:  we need to hear certain messages more than once.

I would include, by the way, that I need to sometimes preach certain messages more than once before they finally sink in, even for me as the person speaking.  Yet, at the same time, we have a belief that people in the Bible should’ve somehow “known better.”  We get the sense that, if God were talking right to us, we’d be better at listening.  But here’s the thing:  how many times has God tried to get our attention, and we’ve failed to listen?  And how many more times have we heard, understood, and simply failed to act?

This is what makes the initial chapter of Jeremiah so interesting, I think.  It begins with God talking to Jeremiah about how God has known Jeremiah from before he was even born.  It’s an inspiring message for all of us, actually:  God knew us from before we were even formed in the womb.  Yet, when God tells Jeremiah these facts, Jeremiah objects.  “I don’t know what to say, God, for I’m only a boy!” Jeremiah says to the Creator of the universe.

“No excuses,” replies God.  “I’m putting my words in your mouth, and those words will have power to do remarkable things; power enough to change the world.”

So, let’s talk about Jeremiah a bit.  Jeremiah was a prophet.  When we think of the word “prophet” today, we most often think of someone predicting the future.  Really, though, that’s not the job of a prophet in the Bible.  His or her job is not about the future; it’s about the present.  Sometimes, that means reading the signs of what’s going on in the present that will determine the future; we actually see that in one of today’s readings.  But even more often, it’s about what’s happening rightnow.  It’s like being a religious news service, providing commentary on what God sees going on in the world.

Because we have this association of prophecy with telling the future, we most often think of prophets having a special connection with God that gives them these insights.  That’s actually a really good way of looking at it; though, again, it’s not that God is giving them knowledge about the future.  Rather, God is allowing the prophet to see with God’s eyes, rather than with the prophet’s own eyes.

Well, Jeremiah lived in an interesting historical period.  The Kingdom of Israel was, as we discussed last week, divided.  Israel was in the north with its capital in Samaria, and Judah (with its capital in Jerusalem) was in the south.  Jeremiah lived in Judah, which was prosperous.  Israel, on the other hand, was not so lucky.

Over a hundred years earlier (think about this:  as distant as we are to the Civil War, basically) the Assyrian Empire came through and attacked Israel.  The Assyrians won.  Then, they headed south to Judah.  The Judeans, though, in spite of their smaller army, defeated the mighty Assyrians, then the most powerful nation in the region.  The Judeans took this to mean that, 200 years earlier, they had made the right decision by sticking with the king from the line of David and keeping their worship at the Temple in Jerusalem, unlike the Israelites who wandered away.  They figured, as long as they had a Davidic king and the Temple, what could possibly go wrong?

Well, Jeremiah was appointed the prophet to begin challenging that assumption.  Jeremiah’s calling was, as we learned in chapter one, “to pluck up and pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.”  In other words, Jeremiah’s prophecies were going to have a profound impact on the world, and people would be wise to listen to him.

People know that a war is likely coming, because this time, it’s the Babylonians, and they intend to succeed where the Assyrians failed.  There are a bunch of people out there who are saying, “Don’t worry so much about it; we have the Temple of the Lord!  What could happen?”  Jeremiah mocks this position by caricaturing them as saying, “The Temple of the Lord! The Temple of the Lord!”  Jeremiah knows, though, that know building can save you.

There’s a great quote out there that God’s message is meant to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”  In other words, if you’re having a hard time, a true Gospel message will pick you up; if you’re having too easy a time of life, the true message of God is going to shake up your world!  In the case of the Judeans in Jeremiah’s time, they were far too comfortable.  They got so comfortable, in fact, that they stopped worrying about following God’s laws – like, at all.

We actually see Christians today who often have similar attitudes.  There was just a group last month that claimed the world was going to end in September.  It’s a great out, that belief that God is going to fix it all in a neat little bow, isn’t it?  I mean, it means that our actions don’t have to be focused on the world at all.  We only have to worry about our relationship to God.  Don’t get me wrong – our relationship to God is what’s most important.  But God asks for a part of that relationship to include our treatment of our fellow humans.  We’re not allowed to just say, “Well, it’s all gonna end soon anyway, so who cares?”  That’s not a Christian response; the Christian response is to say, “I don’t know when it’s all going to end, but until it does, I’m going to do all I can to love the Lord with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love my neighbor as myself.”

Jeremiah sense this same streak in people:  “Our actions don’t matter, because, hey, God’s going to protect us.”  Yeah… well, here’s the deal.  Jeremiah accuses the Judeans of “oppress(ing) the alien, the orphan, and the widow,” and “shed(ding) innocent blood . . . [and] go(ing) after other gods.”  Those are big charges.  In other words, they have not protected the most vulnerable, they have hurt people without a second thought, and they have ignored God in favor of other gods.  They have forsaken their essential goodness.  And then, according to Jeremiah, they have the audacity to retreat to “The Temple of the Lord! The Temple of the Lord!” for safe-haven.

Jeremiah cries foul.  It’s what his ministry is about, at this juncture.  This is his time to afflict the comfortable.  He is there to show them that being a believer in God is about more than empty words and actions; it’s about making time in your life to listen to what God is telling you to do.  As it turns out, the people of Judah aren’t going to amend their ways.  The Babylonians come in and ransack Jerusalem.  They cart away the wealthiest people from Jerusalem and forcibly relocate them.  They remove the king from power, so there was no more promised king from the line of David.  And, as a final show of power, the Temple that Solomon had built nearly three hundred years earlier, the Temple built so God would dwell there, the symbol of peace and God’s blessing and righteous worship – in short, the “Temple of the Lord” they were so comforted by –was destroyed completely, leaving only a pile of rubble.  There was now no Temple to save them.

It would be so easy to read this passage and say, “Those stupid Judeans.  They should’ve just listened.”  But, as I’ve been saying throughout this Old Testament sermon series, the Old Testament is not the story of “them;” it’s not someone else’s story.  It’s our story.  When we hear this story, we have to think, not of where someone else went wrong, but of where we continue to go wrong.  If we are the Judeans, what are the messages God is sending us?  What are we failing to hear?  What are we hearing, but not responding to?

Jeremiah’s unique ministry is one in which people are asked to see what their lives have become, and to amend their ways.  Unsurprisingly, they are not able (or perhaps willing) to do so.  If we’re being honest, that has a lot more to do with our lives than we’d like to admit.  How many, “I’ll get around to that later”s do we have in our faith lives?  How many times have we made God an afterthought?  How often have we committed in our hearts and our minds to doing something as we sit in the pew, only to waver once we feel the comfort of our couch?

Jeremiah delivers a message that’s uncomfortable.  It’s the message, “We are sinners.  We’ve screwed this whole thing up.”  He gives steps to escape that cycle of sin, but the people of his own time respond just the way we do when we hear about our own sin:  it’s just plain easier to keep pedaling along the same way we were going.  Changing direction is what’s hard.

In his preaching, Jeremiah asks people to act justly, and says that God will save them from the coming war.  I don’t know exactly how effective that strategy can be; I figure, when a war comes, it comes.  And maybe completely changing their actions could’ve changed the outcome; maybe faithfulness and obedience to God would’ve somehow altogether prevented the Babylonian army from entering Jerusalem.  Maybe, with the right show of faith, God would’ve come down and  stopped the approaching army.  But instead, I like to think that Jeremiah is offering the Judeans a different type of salvation:  the type wherein you learn to live God’s way, whatever the world around you is doing.  You can experience a little slice of God’s salvation right here on earth, simply by refusing to be part of the systems that prop up evil, even if it’s easier to just go along with the thing that’s popular.  If they had managed to live as God told them to, maybe they wouldn’t have had their city, their country, their Temple destroyed; but even if they did, they would know that they were going to be okay, because God would guide them through it.  They would know that, whatever comes, they were living in a way that would make God take notice.

Jeremiah talks about protecting the most vulnerable; he says that the orphan, the widow, and the immigrant have been forgotten, when God has explicitly asked for those specific groups to be protected.  In our own culture, we take economic advantage of groups that can’t fight for or protect themselves.  Jeremiah asks people to avoid the taking of vengeance and the sin of putting idols before God.  Frequently, in our culture, we confuse “justice” with “revenge,” and we believe that “getting even” is our right, forgetting Jesus’ words about forgiveness.  We also regularly put our own comfort, our own pleasure, our own economic pursuits, first in our lives, rather than putting God’s will first.  There’s nothing wrong with comfort, pleasure, or economic security – but those things are, so often, our very own version of the refrain “the Temple of the Lord! the Temple of the Lord!” They are things that promise safety and security, but ultimately can’t deliver.

So let us truly hear the words of Jeremiah for us today.  Let us honor God, not just with our lips, but with how we conduct ourselves every day, and thereby experience a little bit of salvation right here on earth, and learning to trust in God, who knew us before we were even born.  We have been called, like Jeremiah, to share words that pluck up and pull down, that destroy and overthrow, that build and plant.  Let us use those words, let us use this calling on our lives, to afflict the comfortable, even when it’s us; to comfort the afflicted, even when it’s our enemy; and ever and always to speak the truth of God.  Amen.

Psalm 149
2 Samuel 11:1-6, 14-17, 26-27
2 Samuel 12:1-19

Sermon:

This year marks the 500^th anniversary of the founding of Protestantism – that is, the churches of which the Presbyterian Church is a part.  We will celebrate and talk more about that in the final Sunday of October (known as Reformation Sunday), but for now, I’ve been thinking about it.  One of the central figures of the Reformation, Martin Luther, contributed one of the most helpful pieces of Christian theology in a short statement.

In Latin, Luther said that all Christians are simul justus et peccator.  In English, that means, “simultaneously saint and sinner.”  That is to say, every single Christian is, in his or her own way, a saint.  We have been inspired by God, we attempt to do the work of God, and in our best moments, we let Christ shine in our lives.  That makes us saints.  At the same time, we are still human beings; we are just as fallible as anyone else, and we continue to sin.  We seek to be justified in God’s eyes by doing right, yet we find that we always fall short and continue to be imperfect.

Which leads me to this:  let me tell you one thing about a pastor.  You know you’re going to mess up, because you know you’re a person.  You know that you’re simultaneously saint and sinner, and yet people are always going to expect you to be the “saint,” and would rather you leave out the “sinner” part out of your life.  Every time you mess up, it feels like you should quit – after all, who can do it?  Who can live up to that standard?  The thing is, I know that being an elder in the church can feel the same way – burdened with the leadership of the church, feeling like you can’t ever make a mistake.  But church isn’t alone in this feeling.  Being married can feel this way.  Being a coach, a volunteer, a mentor, a politician, a boss, even a parent – any position where your choices affect someone else – when you mess up, it stings extra hard.

And so today, we arrive at the story of King David.  David, as you’ll recall, was a very special boy.  He was handsome, a good athlete (killing bears and saving sheep and whatnot), and played the harp beautifully.  The youngest of 8 boys, he was somehow always forgotten in his family – but never by God.  The prophet Samuel anointed him to become the next king after Saul, an inept ruler.  David killed the giant Goliath and earned the praise of the other Israelites, while at the same time causing Saul to hate David and try to kill him.  David’s best friend, Jonathan – the son of Saul – saved David’s life.  But eventually, Saul died and David did, in fact, become king.

He was a pretty stellar king, too.  He succeeded in battle, united all twelve tribes of Israel (Saul never managed that in his time as king), and he was beloved of the people.  David had it all.  Well, he thought he did.  Until one day, when he saw a beautiful woman bathing on a roof.  Her name was Bathsheba, and David had to have her.

Now, there have been interpretations through the years that she seduced him; that’s not in the text at all, so it doesn’t make sense to me; in fact, as we hear later from Nathan, it’s actually not a very good interpretation of this story at all.  Instead, David treats Bathsheba more like an object than a person.  He wants her, and he’s the king… so he takes her.  He even knows that she’s married to one of his soldiers, a man named Uriah.  As it turns out, their encounter together results in her becoming pregnant.  She tells David, because this is going to be particularly because her husband was off fighting in David’s name.

So David develops a plan; he tells Uriah’s commander to send the troops out into battle, with the order that when they get to a certain point, they’ll pull back.  Only, David tells the commander, Joab, not to tell Uriah about this.  They charge into battle; some of the men die; Uriah is one of them – no surprise there.  The whole thing was set up so that Uriah would die.  It was murder by proxy; David wanted Uriah dead, and he made sure that it happened.

This is a universally awful act.  First of all, one of the things Saul was criticized for as a king was that he often let his soldiers fight for him; he didn’t ride out into battle himself.  David was different.  Only now, having been king for a while, he was starting to rest on his laurels and just let things happen, just like Saul did.  So his actions are shameful as a king.

David was already married to two wives, and didn’t need another.  He had children, which kings are always under such pressure to produce.  And yet, he ends up impregnating a woman whom we’re not even sure had a choice in the matter, so his actions are shameful as a man.

And to top it all off, David commits murder to get away with his crime, now being able to take Bathsheba as his wife, letting her bear his child without anyone raising an eyebrow, and not having a problem with it.  So his actions are shameful as a human being.

All in all, it’s truly despicable.  And this is the man whom God has chosen as king!  Not only is he a king, he goes down as the best king (or one of the top-4, anyway) in the nearly 500 year history of Israel and Judah as a kingdom!  Not only is he special, even among kings, but he is the one king given a covenant by God.  A covenant is a promise; a covenant from God means that God makes a promise that can never be broken.  God’s promise to David is that there will always be someone from his line on the throne in Jerusalem.  So David is given an eternal legacy, just four chapters before this moment, and yet David still finds a way to screw up so much that it calls into question whether or not he was ever a righteous king in the first place.

David is the “chosen one,” God’s special servant – yet, he messes up.  And like all of us, he needs someone else’s help to see just how messed up he is.  Now, he is the king, so you have to come at him with a little bit of tact, and that’s just what Nathan, the prophet, does.  He tells a story about a wealthy man with everything who takes a beloved sheep from a poor man who has nothing else.  David’s first reaction is like what most of ours would be – get mad, want revenge.

But then Nathan says to him, in no uncertain terms, “You are that man; you have everything, and yet you felt the need to take the wife – and the life – of Uriah.”  Nathan takes the bold step of calling out the king for his actions.  That may not seem like a huge deal.  After all, we live in a country in which you can call or write to your representatives in the government and criticize them all you want, and they have no recourse against you; you’re allowed, even encouraged to do that.  In ancient days, though, such a thing could be sentencing yourself to death.

So David is stunned – not because he’s called out, but because he realizes that Nathan is right.  Some leaders – Saul, the king before David, for example – would dismiss someone who said something so bold to them.  But David, for his part, possesses more wisdom than that.

David realizes that Nathan is right.  He knows that he has done something wrong.  But what David learns here is not that you have to be perfect.  In fact, David immediately realizes that he must confess his sins to God.  These are great sins, grave sins.  The kinds of sins you’d think could never be gotten over.  I think, if we knew him in real life, most of us would be unable or unwilling to forgive David his sins.  How could we be asked to forgive something that big?

But that’s what’s convenient about our ultimate fate being in God’s hands.  Many, perhaps most, and potentially even all of us have done (or will yet do) something that would easy to think of as utterly unforgivable, even if we didn’t do something so extreme as David’s actions.  Yet, God is able to forgive.  And what good news that is for us!

We are never beyond God’s reach; never.  Never, ever.  The story we know so well, the story at the heart of our faith, the story of the resurrection of Jesus, is a story about the place we are most separate from the world, most unreachable.  And yet, God can bring Jesus back.  Even in David’s state of depravity, God never gives up, God absolutely always looks for us, and calls us closer.  There is no boundary too big for God to cross – even death, even sin.  God can do it.

This is a story in which David, the saintly king, is revealed as a lowly sinner.  And as his sins are laid bare for everyone to see, he needs to hear a story to understand.  Brothers and sisters, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:  we read the stories of the Old Testament because they are our stories.  They teach us about ourselves.  They are our Nathan the prophet.  These are the stories that we use to teach us about ourselves and our actions; they are the parables we need to hear.  Just as Jesus taught in parables, we need stories.  Yes, we have the stories of Jesus, and yes, these stories are different than those, but the point remains:  we hear this story because God needs us to hear it – and the stories like it.  Like David, we are sinners; like David, we need to hear it; like David, we are forgiven by God who, across even the border of sin, loves us:  unreasonably, irrationally, and infinitely.  Amen.

Psalm 26:1-7
1 Timothy 6:13-15
1 Samuel 18:1-16

Sermon:

Sermon:

1 Samuel 17:1-58

Sermon:

Chaminade.  Buster Douglas.  Texas Western.  Appalachian State.  David Tyree.  Rulon Gardner.  Maybe some of those names sounded familiar to you; maybe none of them did.  I realize not everyone will know these names, but for those who follow sports closely, most of those will have brought to mind a single moment, game, or event.

Chaminade, for example, is a tiny college of about 2000 people in Honolulu.  In December of 1982, they hosted a game against the University of Virginia, who were the undefeated and top-ranked team in college basketball.  The Virginia squad was led by Ralph Sampson, the National Player of the Year all three of his years as a varsity basketball player, and considered by many the greatest basketball player in college history.

Of course, you know the story – unlikely though it was, the tiny little college beat the superpower in one of the great upsets in the history of American sports.  Buster Douglas defeated the previously-unbeaten Mike Tyson in Japan to claim the heavyweight championship of the world, Texas Western was a small school that played Adolph Rupp’s famous Kentucky, and defeated them for the national championship when no one gave them a chance.  Appalachian State is a tiny school, at the time not even in major college football, who traveled to the University of Michigan and shocked them in one of the biggest college football upsets of all-time.  David Tyree made the phenomenal, one-handed, helmet-trap catch that kept the New York Giants’ season alive in the Super Bowl against the undefeated New England Patriots and eventually led to a Giants’ victory.  Rulon Gardner was a heavyweight wrestler who won Olympic gold in 1996 by defeating Aleksandr Karelin of Russia, who hadn’t lost a match in over 15 years of international competition.

Inevitably, stories like these are always compared to “David and Goliath.”  This one Bible story is so well-known that it crosses into the popular consciousness.  Many people who’ve never set foot in a church in their lives know the basic outline – little boy kills a giant.  You almost have to know it in order to understand such a common phrase.  So let’s talk about the story a little bit.

As most of you know by now, I’ve been preaching through the Old Testament this summer, beginning in creation.  Last week, we got all the way up to Ruth, which took place in the time of the Judges, who were special people called by God to lead Israel.  Well, eventually, the Israelites got sick of not having an official king.  I think when most of us read this, we can very smugly argue how silly it is of them; after all, they were following religious leaders who were very close to God.  Isn’t following God better than following a king?  Well, yes, it is.  Of course following God is better than following after human leaders.  However, it’s also understandable that when a foreign king wants to work out a treaty, or a trade deal, or you need to raise an army, having a king would be helpful.  So eventually the last of the Judges, Samuel, prays about it, and God agrees to help Samuel find a king.

He finds a young man named Saul.  Saul was tall, handsome, smart, and skilled at battle.  He seemed like a good choice, and Samuel anointed him king.  Israel was now in the “modern” world, just like everyone else.  Of course, as anyone who’s been around for a long time knows, being “modern” means having all the new problems that you never had to deal with before.  I mean, for example, new cars have a lot of fancy computer parts; so much so that some of them can park themselves, or slam the brakes for you when you’re in danger.  On the other hand, with each innovation comes something new that can (and will) break, and now it’s harder to fix than ever before.  Likewise, having a king meant new problems.  I don’t want to get into all of Saul’s issues right now – I’ll pick up with more of that in a couple weeks – but we need to know the situation.

Anyway, David, as some of you know, was the youngest of eight brothers.  His three oldest brothers were all old enough for war, but he was still at home working, tending the sheep.  He is, after all, a very famous shepherd – a job which will later prepare him to be the “shepherd” of all the Israelite people.  These older brothers serving in the army were bound to want a care package from home, so his father Jesse had an idea:  David should go take them some food.  And, while he’s at it, why not take some to King Saul, too?  So David did that.  He dropped the food off with the guy in charge of watching over everyone’s stuff, and he went to talk to his brothers.

But as he got there, he saw a giant of a man come out.  This was Goliath of Gath, one of the Philistines, with whom the Israelites fought.  I had a teacher in high school who first opened my eyes to the word “Philistine,” which can be pronounced as “PHIL-iss-teen” or a “PHIL-iss-tyne.”  That second pronunciation sounds an awful lot like “Palestine,” doesn’t it?  Well, that’s because the Israelites and the Palestinians have been fighting over the land of Israel for a long time.

Anyway, Goliath comes out, and David hears for the first time that Goliath is taunting the army.  With good reason, too; Goliath is listed as being six cubits and a span tall.  Those are ancient measurements, but they’re really easy to understand.  A cubit is the length from a man’s elbow to the tip of his middle finger; people estimate that to be about 18 inches.  A span is from the tip of a man’s thumb to the tip of his pinky, when he spreads his fingers apart; people estimate that to be about nine inches.  In other words, they estimate Goliath to have been 9’9”.  That means he was very nearly the height of a basketball hoop!  Well, it’s understandable why people were intimidated, isn’t it?  He has a whole bunch of armor on, all of it described as being very heavy.  He’s carrying weaponry basically as big as a man.  He is truly a giant.  And if you have a guy like that on your side, I guess it’s no surprise what the Philistine army does next.

They let Goliath taunt their opponents.  But not only that, they put the entire war on him.  The Israelites and Philistines were fighting over land that they each felt rightfully belonged to them, which is the same as now in the Holy Land, if you pay attention to that sort of news.  Anyway, the Philistines decide that the best and quickest way to get this over with is to have Goliath challenge anyone who will take him on in single combat.  This was actually a fairly common way of attempting to resolve warfare in the ancient world, as the thought is that it would cause a lot less bloodshed.  That sounds really good in theory; problem was, most of the time, the losing side didn’t take it so well, and the battle would happen anyway.

So David listens to these taunts from this giant, and he wonders why no one is accepting the challenge.  This is a really important part of the story, because I think it goes to show us something we can all learn from children.  Remember, David is just a boy.  He has four older brothers who are also too young for battle, and 15- or 16-year-olds would’ve probably been considered battle-ready.  Therefore, David must be early-elementary age.

He sees the giant, and his reaction isn’t fear, it isn’t distress, it isn’t worry about his older brothers.  His reaction is that God can obviously help win that fight.  Goliath is taunting the Israelites, which by extension means he’s making fun of God.  David won’t stand for that.  He asks what will happen to whoever beats Goliath, and he’s told that such a person would marry into the royal family, and be made rich, and the last thing probably means that they won’t have to pay taxes anymore, either.  So David is like, “What’s the catch?  We serve God, so we’ll obviously win – so why isn’t anyone going out there and doing something?”

Like I said, there’s something for us adults to learn from David.  He doesn’t see the size of the obstacle.  I mean, he sees it, but he doesn’t let it phase him.  He’s too young to know how hard things can really be.

Of course, David points out later that he has killed lions and bears.  Sure, but they’re not as smart as a human.  And besides, no one from Israel would want to put their whole army at risk of losing, just because they took on this giant.  So the armies just sit and look at each other while Goliath goes on taunting.  David doesn’t see those things, though; he has the faith of a child, the certainty that God will provide.  It’s a good thing to keep in mind.

So often, we let ourselves be limited by what we can imagine.  And let’s face it – our imaginations as adults are colored by experiences that limit our vision.  Children have nearly unlimited imagination, so they can see things clearly that we lose over time, including an understanding of what a big obstacle is.

David is reprimanded by his older brothers, who haven’t seen their food yet and think he’s there just to gawk at the war.  They think he’s being childish – and he is.  But in this case, it’s that childishness that’s going to save.  He decides that, if no one else will stand up for God, he has to do it.  So he decides to do volunteer to fight Goliath.  Saul, sensing that this will at least make something happen, lets him.  Again, if we want to talk about why Saul’s not a good king later, we can.  But sending an elementary-school-age kid to fight a giant is not a decision a good king makes, even though it happens to work out in this instance.

And again, Saul fails the test of seeing like a child, even when he agrees to let David go into battle.  He outfits him with heavy armor.  He does it because… well, Goliath’s in heavy armor, so David had better be, too, right?  But that’s silly; if someone’s going to hit you with a sledgehammer, you don’t notice the wooden handle and say, “Ooh, I’d better get a wooden handle, too.”  You need the tools that will help you do your best work.  I mean, obviously, David is never going to beat Goliath by fighting the way Goliath would choose to fight.

So David does what he knows, and uses the gifts God has given him.  God has given him an abundance of faith, so that’s his first weapon.  And let’s face it – faith is what’s carried the Israelites for so long – so it’s probably time to remember that, even if it’s hard to keep in mind.  But second, he’s gotten rid of lions and bears with his slingshot.  So he strips off the trappings that the world thinks he needs, and he uses what he knows.  He doesn’t need heavy armor that won’t fit and probably won’t protect him, anyway.

David outfits himself with no armor at all, because that’s what gives him the best chance of winning.  God gave him this ability with a slingshot; God gave him faith to slay giants.  So David uses those things.  We so often trust in ourselves and the things of this world, rather than trusting in God.  We trust in our money, in our families, in our standing in society; we trust in the people around us, we trust in what we’ve been taught.  We trust in so many things, but we don’t always look first to God.

The story of David is a story about how even the weakest, the smallest, the unlikeliest can succeed when they do God’s will, rather than believing in what the world sees.  David has confidence.  Some of that is self-confidence.  But note; there’s a difference between believing that he can do it, and believing that God can do it through him.  And it’s the latter that David believes.  For us adults, especially, we tend to see obstacles as being too big, and we tend to fall back on what’s worked in the past instead of finding our spiritual imagination.  For the kids out there today, as you get older, you’re going to have a tendency to forget what it’s like to be a kid and feel pressure to grow up.  But let’s be honest:  sometimes, grown-ups need to remember to think like you.  So always remember to have faith in God, no matter how old you are.  Let your imagination open up to believe that God can do remarkable things.  And let your faith be your guide.  Amen.

Psalm 85:8-13
Mark 3:33-35
Ruth 1:1-17

Sermon:

I’ve always felt like I grew up the best way there was to grow up.  I know not everyone likes being an only child, but I loved it.  But maybe the reason I loved it so much was that I was never alone.  I had five really good friends in my neighborhood, who were all about the same age as me.  We all liked playing sports, and we liked the same TV shows, and we liked the same kinds of games.  So life was good with friends.

My parents were around as much as they could be, but you know… parents work.  So in the summer especially, I didn’t see them all the time.  But I never had to go to day care or to a babysitter or anything, because we lived with my dad’s parents.  There are about a million stories I could tell you about growing up with my grandparents in the home, but it really taught me a lot.  I enjoyed it so much that I really have to believe that having grandparents in the home is just the best thing that can happen to a kid.

Now, my grandparents both lived under the Soviet regime in what was then the USSR, and they were both illegal Christians.  Their faith wasn’t permitted, but they practiced, anyway.  You don’t wish hardship on anyone, but at the same time their situation is enviable, because they clung to their faith like a lifeline, and they came to appreciate God’s presence in their lives so much more than many of us who are comfortable all the time, living with a faith that is not only legal, but the overwhelming majority faith of the country we live in.

Anyway, because they had so much appreciation for their faith, they also knew the stories of Scripture very well.  I remember one time, shortly after getting my third-grade Bible, talking to my grandma about wanting to read a whole book of the Bible.  The first one she told me to read was Jonah.  It’s short, fun, and relatively well-known.  I would recommend the same, by the way; if you want to just sit down and feel that sense of accomplishment of having read a whole book of the Bible, Jonah’s your place to start.  But if you want a second one after that, my recommendation would be a little more unorthodox – it would be the book from which we read today – Ruth.

Now, as you all know, we’ve been working our way through the Old Testament.  We just finished with Moses and the giving of the Ten Commandments last week, and we’re skipping to Ruth now.  So, what happens in the middle?  Well, Moses dies, just on the border of the Promised Land God had asked him to lead the people to.  His assistant, Joshua, takes over.  But after that, there’s a bit of a crisis of how the people are to be led.  Moses just kind of became the leader; no one elected him or anything.  Joshua was his natural successor.  But, after Joshua died, how exactly were things supposed to work now?

Well, a system arose called the Judges (as explained in the book of Judges) wherein the people would find someone who was shown by God to be a special leader, and they would sort of “elect” that person as leader, not through a formal vote, but more the way that if you think of your group of closest friends, there’s probably a “leader” of the group, even if you never voted on it.

Well, the story of Ruth takes place in the time of the Judges.  The nation of Israel is living in the Promised Land, and they are doing well.  They’re not quite a power in the region yet – we’ll get to that next week.  But they’re making it work.

Now, the story of Ruth starts, oddly, with her father-in-law Elimelech and her mother-in-law Naomi.  They settled in the land of Moab, east of Israel.  There, they had two sons, Mahlon and Chilion, who each married Moabite women; one marrying a woman named Orpah and the other named Ruth.  All three men die, though, and the women are left destitute.

Now, at the time, women were basically non-citizens.  They had no rights independent of their husbands or fathers.  If a woman’s husband died, she was supposed to marry his brother.  In fact, the brother was legally required to marry her.  Now, this may sound cruel or strange, but it’s actually an act of mercy; it means that no woman will go uncared for.  However, Elimelech was old and had no brothers.  And Orpah and Ruth were both Moabite women.  They had shunned their own people, and had no legal standing at home.  Naomi had no sons, and even if she were to have another, it would take years for them to grow into men, and what are Ruth and Orpah supposed to do in the meantime?  So Naomi tells them to go home to Moab, and try to make a life there.  They don’t want to, but Orpah gives in and gives it another try at home.  Ruth, however, steadfastly refuses.  She tells Naomi one of the best lines in all the Scriptures, in my opinion:  “Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”  Ruth so loves her mother-in-law that she will follow.  Her mother-in-law has converted her to faith in God, and she won’t turn her back on that faith.

Now, that’s as much as we read, but there’s a lot more to the story.  Naomi, the mother-in-law gives in and lets Ruth stay with her.  They work their way to Bethlehem, and arrive right during harvest.  Of course, as you would expect, there was a lot of work to do during the harvest.  Naomi knows that her husband had a wealthy cousin named Boaz, so they head thataway to find work.  Ruth offers to work in the field, which will earn them some money.  She also points out that, hey – maybe she’ll find a single guy out there somewhere whom she can marry.

In fact, the fella who takes notice of her is none other than Boaz, her father-in-law’s cousin!  After noticing this hard-working woman, he asks about her background.  He finds out that she’s been taking care of her mother-in-law and scraping by with her, insisting on remaining with her, even though it made Ruth’s own life more difficult.

So Boaz does as he can as her employer, and protects her; he makes sure she is taken care of.  He ensures that she stays in the field with the other women, so the other men can’t harass her.  Eventually, she approaches him privately and indicates that she’s interested in him.  Now, because of the laws of the day, the sort of “twist” in the story is that it turns out Boaz doesn’t have the right to marry Ruth.  Boaz has to sit down with the actual man who is obligated to marry Ruth, and he has to sit down with the elders.  He has to request special permission to marry Ruth, meaning the man who’s supposed to marry Ruth to give up his right to do so.

He ends up sort of tricking the man to do so.  He says that Naomi, who has a parcel of land that had belonged to Elimelech.  He says that it’s this other guy’s to take, if he wants it, and the other guy says, “Yeah, sure.”  But then he says, “Of course, you’ll have to marry Ruth if you want.”

And this is where we get to a complication.  As it turns out, if a man marries the wife of a deceased person, any children she bears will not be considered his; they will be considered her husband’s children.  This guy seems to believe that there’s no point in marrying Ruth, potentially having children with her, and then being forced to care for land that won’t ever really be “his,” because the land would belong to any sons he’d bear with Ruth.  So he gives up his rights to the land, and to Ruth.  Thus, Boaz is able to keep the land and marry the woman he’d fallen in love with.

So, what is this all about?  Well, it’s about people doing their duty, for one thing.  More importantly, it’s about love and the families we create.  We have the family we’re born into, of course.  But just as important is the fact that God gives us love in our lives, and we have to embrace those relationships well.  Huge amounts of meaning in our lives come from the people around us, and God so often puts those people there.

That’s the other really important thing here:  our institutions are valuable, but only when God blesses them.  Inherently, there are things in our world that we rely on, but the things in themselves cannot function.  For example, we all know people who have gotten into bad relationships, and even some who have chosen to marry.  Inevitably, those marriages fall apart.  But it’s not that the institution of marriage is broken; it’s that, sometimes, people make bad choices.  Sometimes people change, sometimes people can’t make it work, sometimes personalities are just too different.  “Marriage,” in and of itself, is not magical; it will not make a bad relationship work.

“Marriage” can’t fix or save anything, because while it is a serious institution that God gives us to increase our happiness, our actions, attitudes, and choices matter.  God won’t just magically let one thing fix everything for all-time.  The Presbyterian perspective on Baptism is similar:  it’s really important, and it’s a welcoming into the community, but it doesn’t guarantee salvation, nor does it guarantee faith, nor anything else.  Our institutions, our relationships, our ties to others – they are meant to bring us joy and make our lives better.  But in and of themselves, they have no power.  It’s our relationship with God, which makes these things flourish.  Our culture can’t write the checks; it can only cash the checks that God writes.

In this story, we see a lot of cultural trappings about who belongs in what role, and what people are supposed to do.  Sometimes, those things work out, and sometimes they don’t.  It’s not a comment on whether those things are good or bad.  Instead, this whole story is a comment on following where God leads you.  Ruth was led to Naomi, and she clung to her fiercely.  She wanted to be part of Naomi’s life and follow Naomi’s God, because she realized the truth of God.  Even though some parts of her life we more difficult, others were easier.  And, all things said and done, she made the right choice – sometimes by following the customs of her culture, sometimes by sidestepping them.

Our culture, by itself, is no more perfect than any individual person.  Following where God leads, on the other hand, is good.  And just to see where these things lead, almost as justification for this whole story, Ruth gives birth to a son (who is fathered by Boaz, but is technically considered her first husband’s son, as I mentioned earlier).  She names him Obed.  Obed later has a son, whom he names Jesse.  Jesse has sons of his own, and the youngest he names David, who becomes the king of all Israel, and an ancestor of Jesus.

Ruth is a foreigner who doesn’t fit in; she’s a woman in a man’s world; she’s a convert to faith in God rather than someone born into it; she’s outspoken when she should be quiet.  Ruth is not a typical hero.  Yet, it’s her name in the genealogy of Jesus found in Matthew’s Gospel.  She’s preserved there, the outsider who was mother to the men who led to Jesus.

God uses us, in all our brokenness, in all the ways we don’t fit.  God sees us, not as the world does, but with the sacred worth inherent to us by being God’s children.  It’s remarkable that this story would ever be told at all, since Jews in ancient days were often very skeptical of intermarriage with people of other tribes; yet Ruth is the great-grandmother of the greatest king Israel ever knew.

We may never “fit” exactly the way the world wants us to; but God has a special place for everyone.  When we feel a bit like Ruth, like someone out of their depth, God still calls us to something.  May you have the fortune of figuring out where God is leading you today!  Amen.

Psalm 17:1-7
Matthew 5:17
Exodus 20:1-17

Sermon:

As most of you know by now, I’ve been preaching through the Old Testament during this season of the Christian year called “Ordinary Time,” the time between Pentecost and the start of Advent.  When I sat down to plan which texts I was going to preach, I began by writing down a list of passages, then cross-checking those with some other lists of things in books and online, and then checking what I’ve already preached on.  I smooshed some together to see if I could cram two passages into one day, I made cuts, I added things back – all in all, it was a difficult process.  Not backbreaking labor, I’ll admit.  It was a challenge – though a fun one.

Anyway, many passages came and went, but there were a few that were on the tip of my pen when I started the initial list that survived every draft and revision.  As you might have been able to guess, this passage, from Exodus 20, was one of those passages.  It seems awfully hard to preach the Old Testament without preaching on the Ten Commandments, doesn’t it?  It’s a central passage, it’s something we all know about, and it’s representative of something more.

Now, the very first assignment in my preaching class in seminary was the Ten Commandments, so I’m no stranger to covering it.  In an ideal world, with unlimited Sundays and nothing else I wanted to accomplish, I might’ve actually split it up into discreet chunks, so we could spend a little more time in each commandment, or in groups of just a couple, because there is a challenge in trying to summarize all ten into one cohesive message.  That’s particularly difficult on a day like today, when I’m trying to communicate not only the words of Scripture, but also the context of the story of God’s people in which the Ten Commandments happen.  It’s really important to understanding God’s relationship with humanity that we know that part.

Thankfully, many of us here have seen The Ten Commandments.  I don’t mean a statue of them, or the physical words; I mean the movie, with Charlton Heston.  It’s a beautiful dramatization of God’s gift of these commandments.  But what I think is often hardest for us to accept is just the very fact that these commandments are supposed to be seen as a gift.

For so many of us as kids, rules are something meant to kill fun, or to stifle our ability to enjoy ourselves.  Rules are in place to make things worse, it seems, rather than better.  That’s often true as adults, too.  Lines are frustrating, so wouldn’t it be easier just to skip them?  Speed limits can be an irritant when we’re in a rush, so why not exceed them?  Of course, some rules are unjust and merit our disobedience.  Most of the time, though, rules are a minor annoyance that we’re willing to live with, sure.  Still most of us also don’t go around looking to add rules to life.

But think about it; that’s what the Ten Commandments passage is about.  As you’ll remember from the last couple weeks, we’ve been following Moses.  Moses was a boy who was very nearly killed by Pharaoh, only to be rescued by Pharaoh’s own daughter, raised in Pharaoh’s own house, who committed murder, who fled Egypt, who came back, who freed his people, and who led them out of their slavery in Egypt.  Before we even get to the Ten Commandments, Moses’ journey has been more exciting than most of our lives.  And even at this point already, we have about as much information about Moses’ life as we do about any other person in the Bible, including Jesus.  When you consider we’re only halfway through the first of four long books of the Bible devoted to the story of Moses, it really puts things in perspective.

Anyway, Moses has been leading the people, who are wandering toward the promised land.  It will, in the end, take them 40 years to get there.  Now, this has been made fun of in many comic strips and sermons.  Even walking, even with a lot to carry, this shouldn’t be more than a year’s journey.  So, presumably, every once in a while, the Hebrew people just set up long-term camp.

I like to imagine that this story takes place in one of those times of settlement.  The Hebrews are stopped on their journey, and Moses is called up the mountain by God for instruction.  Now, let’s think from the perspective of the people.  They had, previously, lived under Egypt and its laws.  Now, they were free – which sounds great.  But with that newfound freedom came, quite literally, lawlessness.  There weren’t any laws or rules to govern their behavior.  Without laws, and on a looooong road trip, tempers would flare up – it’s inevitable.  In spite of the inevitability of those tempers flaring up, the only law they had was common sense – and, as we all know, once people start fighting, common sense stops being common.

So God has called Moses up the mountain to give a gift.  Now, keep in mind that no one has done anything for God yet.  There isn’t a worship service to thank God, there hasn’t been a hymn written, there hasn’t been anything formal to this point.  God has freed the people from slavery, ended the Egyptian chase, saved their children and livestock, even when the Egyptians’ were killed.  God has given, and given, and given.  And after all that giving… God gives again.  Only this time, God doesn’t give a miracle or a political movement – instead, God gives rules.  God’s gift, in this instance, is order.  Rules bring order out of chaos. Parents create rules for kids, not to punish, but to give structure, to help, to save.  And God is always interested in saving us.

So, like a loving parent, God chooses to give these rules:  I alone am God, and you should honor me; don’t make up new gods to replace me in your hearts; use my name well; rest to protect yourselves and honor me; honor your father and mother; don’t murder; don’t break faith with your spouse; don’t steal; don’t tell lies; don’t desire what belongs to someone else.  There are many other laws that God gives, but these ten are a system.  They’re a lot easier to remember than the total 613 of them, and they cover the basics.

These ten are rules for behavior.  The Greatest Commandment, to love God and neighbor, is what’s most important; at the same time, though, it’s hardly a system of law for a people in a lawless state; it’s just not enough information for them.  And as Moses descends from the mountain 12 chapters later, he finds that lawless state.

Moses has gotten these rules, and comes down to find that the people have been breaking these laws Moses was just given.  The people have melted their gold jewelry to make a Golden Calf, an idol they could worship in place of the true and living God who saved them.  Now, on the one hand, they were breaking a law against idols, but on the other, they hadn’t heard that law yet.  And while I think history proves them wrong, to some extent, you can empathize with them.  It certainly seemed like God had abandoned them.  God called Moses up the mountain days ago, and nothing had been heard since.

Similarly for us today, we find our faith challenged when God is silent.  But even when God is silent, we make a mistake if we seek our meaning in other things.  The Hebrews make a mistake here; they aren’t finding God, so they decide to worship something else.  Only, God isn’t a set of car keys; you don’t just go grab the spare when you can’t find God.  God has gotten us through rough times before, and will again!  In fact, so often, like the Hebrews, we give up on God right when God is trying desperately to reach out to us.

Think about the story again.  Literally the moment God is giving the people a gift, they are turning their backs on God.  How often have we been guilty of the same?  We ask where God is, instead of being secure in the knowledge that God is with us, even if we can’t see it.  As followers of Jesus, we must remember that God is here with us, even when God far away.  Sometimes, the times we feel abandoned are the times God is closest to us, even though we may not realize it at the time.

Part of the reason that happens is that we don’t usually know what we need.  We usually think we need one thing, only to find that what we really needed was something else entirely.  In this story, the Hebrew people are sure that what they need is someone to worship whom they can see, so that a god can be part of their lives every day.  In fact, they need the God whom no one can see, because the true God alone is the one giving them the rules to live by; rules that do make God a part of their lives every day.

For me, this story resonates because we do need rules to govern us, even if we know that Christ forgives sins.  That conundrum of how to deal with forgiveness has been debated by Christians for millenia.  But I would say this:  knowing that we are forgiven also means knowing when we commit sin; only with the Law do we know that.  At the same time, the Law gives us something to shoot for.  While these Ten Commandments are just ten of the 613 Laws in the first five books of the Old Testament, in many ways, they stand for all the rest by being the foundation of so many others.

We need to know when we do wrong.  We need to shoot for something to keep.  Even if we keep all ten of these, there are ways we let God down, with our thoughts, with our actions, with our treatment of others.  The point is not to be perfect; the point is that God wants us to have a target, and we should be shooting for that, correcting each other when we mess up, and thanking God for not giving up on us, even when we can’t be as faithful.

So this day, let us remember that God is here for us; sometimes by giving us rules that are hard (or even impossible) to follow; that even when we don’t like those rules, they are here to help us.  Let us remember that God is ever there for us; sometimes it seems God is silent, yet when things settle down, God is always right there to help us again.  Brothers and sisters, God is here for us.  We are God’s, and God loves us.  Amen.