conjectural navel gazing; jesus in lint form

sermon: proper 14 (19) year c 2007

Sermon: Proper 14 (19)
Worship at the Beach – Gillson Park
Community Church of Wilmette and Wilmette Lutheran Church
August 12, 2007

“...That There is Need of Patience”

Faith is an ever-widening circle of what is known and what is unknown.

Work with me for a minute here. If you can, imagine your glass on the table. The base of your glass is what you know. The edges of that glass point you to all the things that you might know. This is your “growing edge.” For the Christian, this is the place of spiritual growth, expansion, experience, study, and prayer. Now, imagine that the base of your glass is larger. Now you know more. You have more information at your disposal. This is the fruit of prayer, experience, study and compassionate action. But the edges are greater, too. Now you are even more aware of what you do not know. You are now aware that there is more to know than you had ever imagined. Thus, the old adage, “The more I learn, the less I know.”

This is the kind of thinking that Paul is engaging in his letter to the Hebrews. They know and yet they do not see. They have faith but they want the end result of faith at the same time. They are being persecuted and are stumbling. They want the beginning and the end of the process in one swift moment. Paul pities them. He has compassion for them. But, in the end, his response is this – “have patience.”

We are looking to a future place, a way of being that is not yet here. It is promised to us but it is not yet present with us...not in its fullness. Jesus also understands that there is something else at work. He wants people to be ready.

***

“You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour."

***

You know...When Robin and I first started talking about this shared worship service, I was enjoying some of the stereotypes that our two traditions like to toss around. And when it came around that I would preach, I thought that, perhaps just for fun, I would preach a forty-five minute sermon on the dangers of Hell. That would be fun! What a glorious stereotype! A little ecumenical humor can go a long way. And then I read the lectionary. “Oh,” I said. “Hey, God, I was just kidding!”

So often we see this passage from Luke as a threat. So often it has been interpreted as a threat. I have visions of Robin Williams in my head. “This time God is coming back and he's not gonna look like Ted Nugent!” It breeds so much fear. But brothers and sisters this is not a threat. It is, instead, a promise.
It is a promise like the one given to Abraham.
It is a promise like that given to all those who follow Abraham.
I will be with you, says Jesus, until the end of the age.
It is the promised presence of the Love of God.
And in this we must have faith.

Paul goes on to list other who exemplify this kind of faithfulness.

Abraham Isaac Jacob Esau Joseph, the youngest son and interpreter of dreams of Technicolor Dreamcoat fame Moses The people of Israel as they walked out of Egypt into the wilderness Rahab the prostitute Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephtha, David, Samuel, all the prophets...martyrs of the past and martyrs of Paul's own time. None of them received what was promised. But they received the promise, and they lived into the promise.

They took that first step on the journey and did not leave it even when all seemed to come to an end.

We must ask ourselves if we are expecting a different result...and if this is wise. Are we expecting the promise to have a different impact on our lives...a different claim than it did on the Hebrews or on those to whom Jesus was speaking?

Perhaps we hope that things have changed. But I am not sure they have.
Martin Luther King
Jack Fox
The South Korean missionaries held hostage in Afghanistan
Any of us who wish for more of God's reign in the world and are making sacrifices to that end...

Our world's needs have not changed. The dangers have not gone away. People still suffer oppression, violence, extreme poverty, and are burdened with relationships that do not sustain love.

The needs have not changed. Thus, the promises remain.

Abraham made a life out of his journey. He left what he knew, the people who loved him, all to follow some God to some promised land in order to be the father to nations...And he never saw it fulfilled. The same is true for Moses and all those who wandered in the desert for forty years.

We are all such wanderers.

Abraham did not live to see the fruition of the promise. But Abraham had faith. Abraham lived into the promise. He lived into that growing edge, into what he did not know, what he could not experience, what he could only proclaim from faith, from hope. This is true for each of these heroes of the faith. This is true for each Christian that has passed before us. They have received glimpses of promises fulfilled. They see the first steps of a journey.
But as the journey does not belong to simply one of us, the individual, but to all of us, we only see our part of the shared journey and not the entirety of it. That, scripture says, comes later.

We are a wilderness people, a pilgrim people. We cannot deny this truth about our faith. Christianity is a strange religion because it is not about certainty of what is felt, touched, or even as we Baptists love to proclaim, what is experienced. Faith is about what is promised and what will be fulfilled beyond our knowing. It is about what is uncertain. To seek certainty may be to seek something that is not possible for the Christian.

There is no secret knowledge.
There is no hidden truth.
There is only the promise of God.

It is the nature of Christian faith to live in this paradox. We know that we do not know. And yet we have faith.

This morning I am aware that we have much to teach one another. Baptist and Lutheran understandings of the Gospel differ. This should come as no surprise. The bases of our glasses, however, are similar, our circles of knowledge overlap a great deal. This is true. And they expand out in different directions revealing uncommon experience and knowledge. We can share this with one another through shared prayer and worship, by sharing the table with one another, and by this sharing come to encounter more of the Unknowable God.

I hope that this may not be a cause of frustration for us.
It must be a cause of celebration.
For the more we understand, the more we encounter God in what is unknown.
Our differences, brothers and sisters, are opportunities for growth.

Our God is a God of history...not simply of what has passed and what is known, but a God of the unknown, of the promised but not yet fulfilled. God cannot be contained, boxed in, or reigned in. Why? Because the God who stands with us, who upholds the poor, and who cries out for justice in our present time, who asks us to sell all that we have and give it to the poor, is also the God who stands in the unknown, the future...

...beyond our capacity for knowledge, but not our capacity for faith...

...not our capacity for hope.

If we want to stand with those who are preparing for the thief in the night as Luke proclaims...If we want to stand with those who prepare the way of the Lord, if we care to be prophetic, to seek justice, to proclaim mercy, to be peace-givers, light-bearers, if we care to be a part of a Kingdom that will turn the world on it's ears, then we have to stand in the unknown. We have to hold to promises that we may not see fulfilled. We have to stand on the promises.

This is our growing edge....Faith is an ever-widening circle of what is known and what is unknown. Thus we can proclaim in faith, “God is here! Prepare ye the way of the Lord!”

Amen.

Posted by tripp at August 11, 2007 05:35 PM