Sermon delivered on Sunday, October 10, 2010 at St. Andrew’s Anglican Church, Lewis Center, OH. If you would like to hear the audio version of this sermon, usually somewhat different from the text below, click here.
Lectionary texts: Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7; Psalm 66:1-11; 2 Timothy 2:8-15; Luke 17:11-19.
In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
What is the Human Condition?
Good morning, St. Andrew’s! I have some questions to ask you this morning. We have turned off the surveillance cameras and I am not taking notes so you can feel free to answer honestly. 🙂 How many of you love the Lord? How many of you consider yourselves to be essentially faithful Christians? How many of you have been perfectly faithful to the Lord? It’s almost impossible to be perfectly faithful, isn’t it? We are that broken and scattered. We claim to love the Lord and want to serve him but we often miss the mark. There are several reasons for this, three of which I will mention.
First, the pace of our lives makes it very easy for us to get distracted. We get our news instantaneously and most of it is not good. We worry about our health, about our economic situation, about aging and infirmity. Some of us have loved ones who are desperately sick or dying. Others of us worry about our kids and how they are turning out. And for people my age, it seems that more often than not we have parents and kids to worry about! Whatever it is, life seems to keep throwing us curveballs and our ability to hit them hasn’t really improved. We hear this reflected in today’s psalm as the psalmist laments that God tests and tries us and we don’t understand why. All of this can get us terribly distracted and rob us of hope and joy, and when we lose our hope we tend to give up and fall into despair. Just this past week, several people in our Life Group, myself included, asked for prayers to receive a renewed sense of our Christian hope because we are being bombarded by several things that have beaten us down. It’s easy to get distracted in our hectic and interconnected world.
Second, we live in a culture today that is increasingly hostile to the Christian faith. Various enemies of the cross have attempted, and rather successfully I might add, to depict those of us who hold traditional Christian values as ignorant, narrow-minded, and intolerant bigots–and those are some of the nicer things being said about us! Just this past week, for example, the artist of a piece of artwork of Jesus that some considered to be obscene appealed to all “free-thinking people” after a woman took a crowbar to it and damaged it. Instead of heeding Paul’s advice to “look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Philippians 2:4), the artist simply could not understand why his provocative portrayal of the sacred might incite some to violence and implied that any who were opposed to his painting were simply not “free thinkers.” Indeed, no Christian should resort to violence in a dispute with others nor should we condone the woman’s behavior any more than we should condone the artist’s painting. But the point remains that displays of potentially obscene artwork usually reflect values that are hostile to traditional Christian values and a culture that is increasingly hostile to the Christian faith and Christians, all in the name of individual rights and freedom. This makes it harder for Christians to speak out in favor of Christian values because after all, who wants to be labeled as a narrow-minded and intolerant bigot?
Third, we Americans tend to raise up and glorify the self-made individual and we are all about self-help. Now in many cases this is a perfectly good and acceptable thing, especially when we are dealing with things that we can control and fix in our lives. But the brokenness of the human condition and the inability of humans to rid themselves of sin makes self-help in this area desperately and utterly futile. Don’t believe me? Just think of how many bad habits you have been able to break on your own. In my own life, for example, I bet I have lost close to 600 pounds. Every time I lost weight, I vowed never again to regain it because it was so hard to lose in the first place. But sooner or later I do my best to imitate the Goodyear blimp and find it is remarkably easy to do, despite my best intentions and determination to keep the weight off. Your mileage and issues may vary but we all have them. If we cannot break the little things that bedevil us, how much less can we break the bigger things that cause the bad habits in the first place?
All of this can leave us terribly frustrated and robbed of hope. Try as we may to be faithful Christians we seem to keep missing the mark more often than we like. If you are a person who is in despair over your life or the state of your faith, take heart and hope because Paul has some good news for you this morning.
Where is God’s Grace?
Paul knew what it is like to face hardships and to suffer for Christ. He wrote 2 Timothy from prison as he awaited his execution. It is his last Epistle and it was addressed to his protégé who was facing his own hardships in dealing with an increasingly apostate church and chaotic situation in Ephesus. We should therefore read it as a letter of encouragement and the good news is that its lessons pertain just as much to us as they did to Timothy in his day.
Paul, of course, reminded Timothy of his destiny, of the inheritance that was his in Christ Jesus. Paul knew that being faithful was very hard and he talks about his own terrible sufferings for Christ. So what kept Paul going? He tells us today. Remember the Gospel. Remember Jesus Christ raised from the dead, a descendant of David. In other words, Paul is telling us to believe the promises of God about our future with him in the New Creation because Jesus is the promised Messiah from the Israel’s past.
Where is the Application?
So what does that look like for us today? First, it is a reminder for us to have a real basis for hope. If we put our ultimate hope in the things of the world, we will be inevitably disappointed because the things of this world are transitory and finite. Even if we are successful all the time and accumulate all the goodies this world has to offer, we will die one day and leave it all behind. So here Paul reminds us to put our hope in the eternal and permanent. It is critical that we understand what Paul is talking about when he speaks of the resurrection. Paul is not talking about dying and going to heaven. Paul is talking about the New Creation where we will get our new resurrection bodies and live forever directly in God’s Presence in his New Creation, the new heaven and earth that will be eternal and without any kind of sickness, sorrow, hurt, or death.
Why is this important? Because the New Creation reminds us that the old, fallen creation, of which we are a part, is important to God, that he intends to redeem it and restore it the way he originally created it to be (see Genesis 1-2) before human sin corrupted it (see e.g., Genesis 3; Romans 8). What Paul was telling Timothy and us was essentially this. You have a future hope of New Creation, a hope guaranteed by the blood of Christ and not of your own doing. Because you have the hope of New Creation, this should remind you that if you love God and want to be faithful to him, you must roll up your sleeves, get busy, and do your part to help God in his redemptive work in his current creation here on earth.
How do you do this, you ask? Paul tells us. We must act like we are members of the community of the redeemed, the Church. We must live the Kingdom values and it starts by dying to ourselves so that Christ can live with us. In other words, we have to die in order to live. In addition to pursuing the classical spiritual disciplines of Bible study, prayer, worship, and fellowship to enable the Spirit to help us become like Christ, dying to live means that we live for Christ and not ourselves. It means that we work to establish God’s justice by looking out for the poor and the most helpless in society. It means that we love mercy by being ready and eager to forgive others when they wrong or hurt us, by praying for our enemies when they breathe hatred against us, and by looking out for the needs of others as readily as we do our own and acting accordingly. It means that we acknowledge God is God and we are not so that we seek to do his will over our own because we love him and trust him. Doing this gives us real meaning and purpose here and now in addition to giving us the hope of an eternal future. It means that our discipleship is important now, that we can make a difference now. It reminds us that our Christian faith is not only about some future hope but about having a relationship with the Source and Author of all life starting right now. God calls each of us to use the gifts he has given us to help him build his Kingdom on earth. I don’t know what God is calling each of you to do but he is calling you to do something. And if we are to take our faith seriously we must seek to find out what that is and then obey his calling to us, both as individuals and as his Body the Church.
And as Paul reminds us, we can expect to meet resistance, hostility, and anger when we commit to becoming like Christ because God’s values and wisdom are not the world’s. As we have already seen, we can expect to face ridicule and scorn from a culture that is becoming increasingly hostile to Christ and his truth. This is where our future hope is important because it will help us to endure patiently the scorn of those who hate us for being Christ’s. But as our Lord himself reminds us in his Sermon on the Mount, we can rejoice in our suffering for his Name’s sake because we will find ourselves blessed by him and following in his very footsteps. That is why Paul is so adamant that we remember and that we remind each other about our future hope of glory living with Christ in his New Creation forever and ever. Paul knew how fragile and distracted we are. He knew how much we need to be reminded of our hope to help us endure our sufferings for Christ’s sake. He realized that when we do, our patient endurance is itself helping advance the Kingdom of God in God’s fallen creation.
But what happens when we fail to act like Christ on occasion? What happens when we become so distracted in our lives that we forget from time to time Whose we are? What happens when we are faithless despite our best intentions and desires? Here is where Paul offers us more words of hope and encouragement. He reminds us that even when we act like we don’t believe God’s promises, Christ is still faithful to us. God’s promises are not contingent on our merits but on who God is and his faithfulness to us. Paul is not talking about those who do not believe or who have fallen away permanently. God will treat them in kind. Instead, Paul seems to be offering Timothy and us a gentle reminder that when we fail on occasion to be the people God calls us to be, we can still count on God to be true to his promises to us. Amazing grace indeed!
We see this poignantly illustrated in today’s OT lesson. Apostate Israel has found herself in exile in Babylon, apparently abandoned by God. But God tells them to make the best of their situation because they are going to be there for awhile. He tells the exiles to seek the welfare of their captors because in doing so they will ensure their own. Notice carefully that God is effectively telling Israel to behave as he called them to behave in the first place. And then a few verses later, God makes this astounding promise to the desperate and hopeless people in exile. “For surely I know my plans for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not your harm, to give you a future and a hope” (Jeremiah 29:11). Despite Israel’s apostasy, God reminded them that he was going to be faithful to his promises to them. I have often tried to imagine the mixture of disbelief and hope the exiles must have felt when they heard these gracious words. But God was good to his promises and a remnant did return to their land. Likewise, God is faithful to us even when we stumble and fall on occasion.
But there is also an implicit warning in Paul’s encouragement and we must heed it. We dare not let our failures accumulate to the extent they become a pattern of living so that we will have effectively fallen away from the faith. If that happens, we have little reason for hope.
Summary
We live in a world that is increasingly hostile to the Christian faith and we get easily distracted so that we suffer discouragement and despair. But we are Christians and have no reason to become discouraged. We remember that we have died to Christ so that we can live. Because we have died to Christ, we remember that we have the promise of resurrection and New Creation to sustain us as we use our gifts to help God redeem his fallen creation by advancing the Kingdom values of justice, mercy, love, and humility. We can expect resistance and persecution as we do, but we take heart because Jesus reminds us that he has overcome the world (John 16:33). Therefore we can count on his help and Presence to sustain us in any and every situation. Even when we fail him on occasion he will never fail us. And because we are so easily distracted we know that we must remind each other of our hope in Christ so that we will not lose or forget it. And to the extent we do that, folks, we will find that we really do have Good News, now and for all eternity.
In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen.