Neill Morgan
Sermon Dated March 4, 2007
15After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, “Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.”
2But Abram said, “O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?” 3And Abram said, “You have given me no offspring, and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir.” 4But the word of the Lord came to him, “This man shall not be your heir; no one but your very own issue shall be your heir.” 5He brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your descendants be.” 6And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.
7Then he said to him, “I am the Lord who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess.” 8But he said, “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” 9He said to him, “Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” 10He brought him all these and cut them in two, laying each half over against the other; but he did not cut the birds in two. 11And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away.
12As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him. 13Then the Lord said to Abram, “Know this for certain, that your offspring shall be aliens in a land that is not theirs, and shall be slaves there, and they shall be oppressed for four hundred years; 14but I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. 15As for yourself, you shall go to your ancestors in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. 16And they shall come back here in the fourth generation; for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”
17When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. 18On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants I give this land. . . .”
17Brothers and sisters, join in imitating me, and observe those who live according to the example you have in us. 18For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears. 19Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things. 20But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. 21He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself.
4Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved.
31At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” 32He said to them, “Go and tell that fox for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. 33Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.’ 34Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! 35See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’”
The Lament
I have set my home page to a news channel. Whenever I open the internet to get my email and join a discussion of this week’s Bible readings with other preachers, the first thing that is supposed to pop up is the day’s news from around the world. Usually, it is real news, what’s going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, the world economy, natural disasters such as the storm in Alabama.
The past two weeks, however, the ordinarily staid news channel pops up with different kinds of disasters: Anna Nicole Smith and Britney Spears.
It has been a surreal experience to go to the internet to study the Lenten biblical texts and be greeted by a picture of Britney Spears shearing her head or whacking a car with an umbrella; or, a picture of Anna Nicole Smith in clown make-up in an apparently drug-induced stupor.
The first day it happened, I just clicked through it, hardly thinking about it. What, after all, do these tragic lives have to do with Genesis or Paul’s letter to the Philippians or the Gospel according to Luke?
But when it continued to happen, day after day, it occurred to me. The news channel wouldn’t put this on day after day if it wasn’t getting people to click on the story to read it. This is entertainment, disguised as news in our popular culture, watching the rich and famous fall into destruction.
As I lamented this, and, to tell you the truth, watched it unfold in typical pastoral self-righteous disgust, I began to see the connection. From Abram in Genesis to Paul in the Philippians to Jesus in the Gospel, the common theme is a lament over the world around them.
“How can God be in control of such a world?” Abram asks. “You promised me descendants, God, but I’m old now and the only heir I have is the son of a slave.”
And Paul, to the Philippians, laments the influence of those who live as “enemies of the cross.” “Their end is destruction,” he warns the Philippians, and if the Philippians were anything like us, they replied, “Oh good, can we watch?”
And Jesus, as he looks over Jerusalem, laments the Holy City’s unholy tendency to kill the messenger:
34Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!
Biblical texts are so far removed from our popular culture, separated by a wall of language, culture, and time, that it is tempting sometimes to compartmentalize our lives. We put our spiritual life in a little box over here, and we put our relationship to our culture over here, and our politics and personal relationships over there. Ancient texts are so, well, ancient, that it’s easy to separate them completely from this contemporary world, a world Abram, Paul, and Luke could not have imagined in their wildest dreams.
These ancient texts, however, speak to something deeper than the content of our culture. They speak to our human nature. It is human nature as much now as it was for Abram to doubt that God is able or willing to act in the world. Oh, maybe here and there, such as George Mason University making the final four in March madness last year, but most of the time, we live as if we are on our own.
And, if the “enemies of the cross” of whom Paul writes, whose “god is their belly,” are the libertines who live only for their immediate gratification, then we might be able to relate to living in such a culture, living as we do in a culture whose favorite TV show is based on choosing our next idol.
So, as disciples of Jesus Christ, uninterested in such things, it’s tempting to develop a Lenten discipline of lament and judgment, looking over it all and shaking our head, “Ain’t it awful?”
“Ain’t it awful how everyone else has their priorities all messed up?”
It is striking, however, how Paul takes us in a different direction. He does not tell the Philippians to run from their culture, to hunker down and hide from it, to ignore it and pretend it isn’t there, or to stand over it in judgment.
Instead, he says, “Stand firm.” He doesn’t say, “Attack the culture and transform it.” Instead, he says, “Stand firm in the Lord,” and join in imitating those who live in obedience to Christ.
The transformation, he says, comes from Christ himself.
He will transform the body of our humility; (I know the NRSV says “humiliation,” but many scholars argue that Paul’s Greek word is more about being humble than about being shamed or humiliated.)
Our citizenship, our commonwealth, our membership, is in heaven.
Here is the very difficult part of all this. How do we live in our world as citizens of a different world? How do we stand firm in our discipleship while living surrounded by this earthly culture? On the one hand, we tend to get caught up in the idolatry all around us; on the other hand, we may stand in such self-righteous judgment over it that we alienate ourselves from the very people Christ calls us to love, the very people for whom Christ died.
Stand firm, Paul says. Any transformation of our culture, and the transformation of ourselves, is a transformation wrought by Christ, not by us. Our job is to live faithfully in our own lives, not only setting an example for others, but setting a tone, setting an emotional and spiritual tenor to the environment, simply refusing to participate in things that are ugly.
Like Abram waiting for an heir, our job is to trust that God will do God’s job.
As our culture and our denomination fall into a downward spiral of conflict over who is more holy than whom, our job is clear, from a biblical standpoint.
Our job is to follow Christ with such complete energy, intelligence, imagination, and love that we have no time or energy left for the human competition for the victim badge. We have discipleship to do. We have ministry to do with fellow Christians here in our community with Habitat for Humanity and Great Days of Service, building relationships with fellow Christians and people in need. We have ministry to do with fellow Christians in New Orleans, building relationships and helping in the recovery with people whose lives have been devastated by natural disaster. We have friends in our congregation and in our circle of friends to care for in their illness, in their grief, or in their family tragedies. We have the worship of God to attend to, we have a prayer life to nurture, we have so much left to learn about the Bible and the continuing work of the Holy Spirit.
If we attend to all that discipleship of Jesus entails, will we transform our culture? Will we change the world?
No, we won’t. That’s not what the Bible says, anyway.
But God will.
And God will do it on God’s timetable, not ours. It’s not easy to stand firm in the Lord, to live as a disciple when, like Abram, we live for decades and decades without seeing the results we think we ought to see.
But, there is a freedom, too, about living as citizens of heaven. There’s a freedom knowing that God calls us to faithfulness, not success.
A friend of mine, a pastor of a congregation in Colorado, told me that his largest frustration with his congregation was that they did not seem to be interested in anything but coming to worship and fellowship events. They had no time for serving the community or the world in mission.
The leader of our leadership conference asked him, “How do you spend your time?”
As he answered, it became clear that the pastor spent almost all of his time planning and leading worship and fellowship events and trying to get other people to do service projects.
Our leader said, “Why don’t you quit trying to get other people to do service projects and start doing them yourself? Give a couple of days a month to Habitat for Humanity. Go on a mission trip through your denomination. Get out there and serve, stop trying to get other people to do it.”
He was rather taken aback, but when we met again the next year, he reported that not only was he finding more joy in his ministry, but people from his congregation had begun to join him building houses for Habitat and traveling with him on short-term mission trips with other churches.
That’s a hard thing for those of us who believe that other people’s faithfulness is our responsibility – to pay attention first of all to our own faithfulness, to lead instead of push. Whether it’s mission or prayer or caring or ethical living, the word to us is this, Stand firm in the Lord; leave the transformation of hearts, our own and that of others, to the only One who is capable of transforming us: Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God. Amen.