13 The LORD rises to accuse; he stands to judge the peoples.
14The LORD will enter into judgment with the elders and princes of his people: You yourselves have devoured the vineyard; the goods stolen from the poor are in your houses.
15 How dare you crush my people and grind the faces of the poor? says the LORD God of heavenly forces. (CEB)
“How
Much is Enough? Hungering for God in an
Affluent Culture,” Week One
I
realize this is a time when many of you want to hear about what is happening
here, but I want us to begin by going halfway across the country to my hometown
of Kansas City, because it has vaulted to prominence in the national news over
the last 72 or so hours. First, it was
because one of the winning Powerball tickets—one of only two that promised the
riches of the widely-publicized $587.5 million jackpot—was bought by a family
in one of Kansas City’s Northland suburbs.
Of course, the national press descended, especially after the family’s
identity was revealed, and the sports world even got involved, with one of the
newspaper’s sports columnists writing a half-serious, half-joking column asking
the family to donate some of its proceeds to increase the payroll of our woeful
Major League Baseball team, the Kansas City Royals.
But
just a couple of days later, the headlines on the papers were very, very
different, as a four-year member of the Kansas City Chiefs football team shot
and killed his 22-year-old girlfriend early in the morning in a domestic
dispute before driving to the team’s practice facility and, in full view of his
head coach and general manager, shot and killed himself. He was younger than me—only 25 years old—and
left behind a three-month-old infant daughter.
Both
stories centered around people of no longer ordinary means. The husband and wife of the Northland family
who won the Powerball have both already given notice at their jobs. And the athlete who committed a
murder-suicide had made millions playing a sport that many children happily
play for free on playgrounds across the country.
And
in both stories—ranging from celebration to sorrow in great extremes—a common
theme has already emerged: the importance of having something to live for,
rather than something merely to destroy…a theme that, perhaps more than ever,
applies to this church today.
This
is a new sermon series for us as a church, as well as a new year. This Sunday marks the first Sunday of the new
church year, which doesn’t quite adhere to our January-through-December
calendar—it usually runs November-through-November, and it begins with this
first season that we call Advent. It is
a time of, as John the Baptist preached to us, preparing the way for the Lord
who is to come to us on Christmas Day.
And we’ll be doing so this Christmas season by reading together one of
the great forerunners in the Old Testament to Jesus, the prophet Isaiah. He is the one who prophesied the coming of a
virgin who would give birth to a child called Emmanuel, but Isaiah has so much
more to share with us than that. And
we’ll be looking at what he had to say early in his prophetic career in light
of the book “How Much is Enough?
Hungering for God in an Affluent Culture,” by Arthur Simon, who founded
the Christian nonprofit organization Bread for the World. We’ll be juxtaposing a passage from Isaiah
with a chapter from “How Much Is Enough?” beginning with the chapter entitled,
“Fat Wallets, Empty Lives.”
I’m
not going to pretend that discovering the devastation to the sanctuary provided
any sort of epiphany, that I was overcome with emotion, or forgiveness, or even
with God’s presence. It was a void of
numbness. I felt nothing. I could do nothing, say nothing, think
nothing.
But
that’s the sort of pain that others feel every single day by the abuse and
misery that is heaped upon them in their own lives, the result of all sorts of
evil—abuse, violence, homelessness, poverty.
The all-consuming nothingness that I felt, that you may well have felt
as well, is a daily experience for many of God’s children.
And
that is what necessitates Isaiah’s prophecy here. It is what necessitates a God who will go to
the mat for us, who will, as Isaiah says, “rise to argue His case,” who
challenges those who do wrong by saying “What do you mean by crushing MY
people?”
If
nothing else, that is what I hope God is asking the people who broke into our
sanctuary, who violated God’s house, and who personally affected each and every
one of us, that God is asking them, “What do you mean by hurting my people so?”
Because
I have already given up on asking that question myself. I have received no answers.
I
imagine that is probably how it is meant to be.
I may not know why someone did this, but I do need to know how to
forgive them. We may not know why people
do things to one another, but what we do need to know is how to respond with
grace, and with compassion, and with love.
It
is something that is perhaps easier this time of the year, to respond to
destruction with reconciliation. It’s
perhaps a bit more natural during the holidays to be nicer. It shouldn’t be that way, but if we are
honest with ourselves, it is probably that way.
And it is that way precisely because of what we have grown to value, and
what, in turn, we have grown to neglect.
As
Arthur Simon puts it, there “lies a
widespread myth that God and life in God are nice but largely irrelevant—mere
superstition to some, for others a bit of religion we tack on to the rest of
life. The natural world, on the other
hand, is real. What matters in life is
what we can get and enjoy for ourselves…(so) the problem is not that we’ve
tried faith and found it wanting, but that we’ve tried mammon and found it
addictive, and as a result find following Christ inconvenient.”
Make
no mistake, this is one such time in which we might decide that following
Christ is inconvenient. This is the
Messiah who is loopy enough to, when asked, “How many times do I forgive my
neighbor? As many as seven times?”
respond by saying, “Not seven times, but seventy times seven.” This is the Savior who is radical enough to
dare to say to us, “You judge by human standards, but I judge no person.” And this is the Christ who is so connected
with what God wants that He can actually say to us, “Forgive, and I tell you,
you shall be forgiven.”
If
anything, what has happened to us puts to lie the notion that Arthur Simon
writes about here: that the natural world is real. It may be real, but it is also finite. It’s tangible. Limited.
And, as we’ve learned and re-learned this week, ultimately destructible.
Your
faith, and your capacity to forgive, does not have to be that way. It does not have to be so easily destroyed as
an altar flower arrangement, or so easily burnt as a paper hymnal. And I think that God would not want our faith
to be that way either. He wants us to
have faith that when we are hurt, when our vineyards have been devoured, when
our spoils are taken from us, that He will rise to argue His case for us. He wants us to have faith that He will go to
bat for us.
And
that is what we have to live for, as people of faith—a God who loves us so much
that He actually tells us to knock it off in Romans—He says, “Vengeance is
mine, I will repay.” This is a God who
has got our backs, even if it doesn’t feel like it at the time. And I know it may not feel like that now for
you. But it is still so.
It
is so because, in the end, we cannot be expected to keep up with every extreme,
every ebb and flow, of this wild, painful, incredible, sinful, life-giving
world that God has left to us. Someday,
the things that happen this week will be replaced in our short-term memories by
the things that happen next week—things good, bad, and indifferent alike. The identities of the Powerball winners will
no longer be the topic of converastion, the horror of a murder-suicide will no
longer be at the forefront of our minds, and the damage done to our sacred
space will be erased by all of the love that this sanctuary holds.
Which
is, in the end, probably for the best. This
isn’t forgetting. This is
catharsis. This is a form of
healing. After all, to catalog every
wrong, every grievance, and to file it away deep in the recesses of our anger
and our rage serves no one.
Unless
we actually do something about it.
Which
is the ENTIRE point of Isaiah. We can do
something—we can turn to the God who does not just politely request, or gently
ask, or calmly inquire, for peace and justice for His children. He demands it. He commands it. And He is willing to do whatever it takes to
ensure that there will, in the end, be peace—including sending His own Son to
us. The proof of God’s commitment to us
and to our wellbeing will be lying in the manger, gurgling and crying, just a
few short weeks from now.
This
is the church season of Advent—a time of waiting and of preparing for the Lord’s
coming. This is a time when we are
called by John the Baptist to make straight the paths of the Lord. And these aren’t just literal paths, the
paths that our feet trod on by the lake or on the street. These are the paths into our very selves
where we can carry the hurt and anger that has been building up for an entire
year—anger that maybe we thought would be temporary, but that has solidified
like stone into something far more permanent.
My own anger this week is one such thing that I pray is temporary, and
that I pray will not become a fixture in my soul. Which is why this sermon is for me as
well. It is why John the Baptist’s
command is for me as well.
Make
straight the path of the Lord into your own heart.
Make
straight the path of the Lord into your own soul.
And
I promise you, you will be amazed at the ways God wants to work in your life.
By
the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
December
2, 2012
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