CUPC
August 18, 2013
Sermon
Here's the audio link and the full text is below.
Do you ever get lost? When I’m driving around, trying to find an
address or someone’s house, I have faith in my GPS navigator. Unfortunately I’m not real good at updating
the maps, and so I still manage to get lost even when I follow the directions
that it’s trying to convince me are right.
The interesting thing is that I have so much faith in the GPS that even
when I know – either intuitively or factually – that it can’t possibly be
right, I’ll follow it through to the bitter end.
I’ve gotten lost in Marshall
several times in the 4 months that I’ve been here. Most recently I went to visit someone and of
course I didn’t ask for directions. You
may have even heard me say: “No. That’s
okay. I’ll find it.”
About ten days ago I went in
search of a member’s house. I was on the
right street, but the GPS kept telling me that the address was on the north
side of the street. Well, I drove up and
down and couldn’t see it. I parked the
car and walked around and quickly discovered that the number I was looking for
was definitely NOT on the north side of the street. I was so convinced that the GPS had to be
right that I was ready to give up and drive away. Just by accident, as I was driving away I
glanced across to the south side of the street and there in big numbers –
numbers that I had passed at least three times – was the number that I was
searching for. I had so much faith in
the GPS that I almost drove away convinced that the address had to be the wrong
one.
That’s what faith can do to
you!
Most recently the computer
world has asked me to have faith in something called “the cloud.” They want me to have such faith in “the
cloud” that I should be willing to use it as the repository of everything that
exists on my computer. I have faith in
lots of things that probably don’t deserve my faith: my alarm clock, banks, the stock market, the
equity value of my house, Congress.
I think that I probably have
more faith in some of our technological gadgets than I do in human
institutions. I still trust the
GPS. I trust the tires on my car. The fact is that I have to have faith in a
lot of things just to get through the day.
How about you? Have you ever gotten lost because you had
faith in the directions that someone had given you? Or maybe like me you had faith in your GPS to
get you precisely where you wanted to go?
I’m sure that most of you have
gotten lost at one time or another. I’m
sure that most of you have discovered at one time or another that you had
placed faith in something that didn’t quite work out.
In our daily lives we have
faith in things, and that to a great
extent determines how to live out each day.
That’s what faith is for. It provides
the underpinning for our lives. It’s not
simply an intellectual exercise. It’s
not just a matter of saying “I believe my GPS.” If we believe in our GPS – or
our bank, or our home value, or “the cloud,” or even our alarm clock – then
that belief, that faith, shapes how that part of our life will be lived.
We say that we have faith in
God. We say that God is our creator, our
redeemer, our sustainer, and that God touches every aspect of our lives. But somehow, for many of us saying that we
have faith in God or faith in Jesus is something that we lock up in some secure
compartment of our hearts. Or maybe we
lock it up in a secure part of our minds and never take the chance that it
might contaminate our hearts.
In the epistle lesson, the
writer gives us examples of people who had such faith in God that they changed
everything about their comfortable lives.
The Israelites walked into the Red Sea believing that God had told them
to do it. Scripture gives us lots of
examples of people who triumphed because of their faith in God. But as the lesson tells us there were also
others who lived their lives in faithful obedience to God and they suffered or
died.
Faith drove their obedience
to the will of God. Faith revealed to
them that following God’s will was of greater importance to them than
surrendering to the doubts and cynicism of the world. Faith in God revealed to them that putting
their faith in the powers and the politicians, in wealth and military might, in
gadgets and man-made technology would surely fail them one day.
Their faith in God determined
how they lived and how they died. Their
faith in God defined their lives.
Scripture never says that
faith in God will guarantee us a safe or easy life. In fact the reading in Hebrews makes it
pretty clear that we have the examples of all these faithful people who came
before us – that great cloud of witnesses – so that we will allow our faith in
God to shape our lives. It says
“therefore let us persevere.”
Perseverance requires stubborn courage, and you don’t need “stubborn
courage” to get through an easy life.
Let me make something
clear. Prayer is meant primarily to help
us determine how to serve God. We bring
God our praise and our gratitude, and we say, “Your will be done on
earth.” When we say those words we are
pledging our desire to find and become the agents of fulfilling God’s will
here, on earth. You can only say those
words honestly if you have faith in the power, the plans and the grace of God.
And you can’t lock that faith
up in some airtight compartment. Faith
in God demands that our lives are committed to carrying out God’s will for us
and for the world that God created.
Just as faith in our GPS
determines the direction that we follow to find an address, so our faith in God
– if it truly is faith in God – determines the direction of our lives as we
seek out the address of God’s Kingdom.
This wonderful congregation
has lived through diminishing membership over the past decade. It doesn’t matter if it’s because of some
problems within this congregation or if it’s just part of the overall loss of
membership that churches all over the country have experienced. But you’re still here. And you.
And you. And you. I haven’t found the place in scripture where
God has said clearly to us: when your
pews are filled and your accounts are overflowing then you can follow my
Word.
Whether this congregation has
100 members or 1000 members or 25 members its primary reason for existence is
the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ through word and deed. Our primary reason for existence still is to
love God and love our neighbor and do both in ways that impact the rest of
God’s creation. Living that is having
faith.
Membership can become an
idol. It goes without saying that money
can become an idol. Yes, we need to
repair and maintain this building, but only as a resource for our ministry.
There are many wounded and
broken people in this community. There
are hungry people in this community.
There are people in this community for whom the English language
represents a barrier to fuller participation in the community. There are lonely people in this community. There are people who because of their age or
some illness or just the circumstances that their lives have experienced feel
isolated and need the comfort of a visit and the hope that comes to us through
the promises of the Gospel.
What would Marshall look like
if we – as a congregation – started to address some of those issues aggressively? What if we as a congregation used our
resources – our time, our skills, our money – to address the brokenness that
surrounds us every day? Not as a
marketing strategy meant to bring more people into our membership, but simply
because faith in God means being the agents of God’s will here in
Marshall.
We can’t isolate faith in the
singular adoration of Jesus as an inanimate idol and try to call it faith. He lives, and having faith in Him means
following Him with our lives. How many
times have we have sung, “Take my life and let it be, consecrated Lord to
Thee.” Maybe that “it” is too
impersonal. We should sing it “Take my
life and let ME be, consecrated Lord to Thee.”
What would this congregation
look like if we put those words into action?
What would Marshall look like if we carried the Gospel out onto the
streets and into the homes and nursing homes of this community?
We would look like the people
of God. People with faith in God. People whose faith leads them to follow the
path toward God’s Kingdom even when factually or instinctively we question the
logic or the safety of what we believe God is calling us to do.
What would we look like if
day in and day out we had as much faith in God as I have in my GPS?
We would look like the
church, the body of Jesus Christ still and continually ministering to the
people of God’s creation.
Let us pray:
Take, O Lord, and receive our
lives, committed to You and consecrated by our service to You. All that we are and
all that we possess You have given us: We surrender it all to You to be
disposed of according to Your will. Give us only Your love and Your grace;
with these we will be rich enough, and will desire nothing more.
Amen.
with these we will be rich enough, and will desire nothing more.
Amen.
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