February 9 - Three Lessons and Sermon

Isaiah 58:1-12
Shout out, do not hold back! Lift up your voice like a trumpet! Announce to my people their rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins. Yet day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God; they ask of me righteous judgments, they delight to draw near to God. “Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?” Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers. Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high. Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the LORD? Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am. If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. The LORD will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail. Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.

1 Corinthians 2:1-16

When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words of wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God. Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish. But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him” - these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within? So also no one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. And we speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual. Those who are unspiritual do not receive the gifts of God’s Spirit, for they are foolishness to them, and they are unable to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. Those who are spiritual discern all things, and they are themselves subject to no one else’s scrutiny. “For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.

Matthew 5:13-20

“You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? Is it no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled underfoot. You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under a bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

When I was on Internship, and you might get a few more of these stories later on, I was the first female Intern they had in quite a while, and I was bright and shiny and bubbly, and even though I was the vicar I was treated by many as the granddaughter. Which irritated me to no end, because I was supposed to have this authority about me, by virtue of my role. I was supposed to be taken seriously. And I think I was, it just didn’t feel like it a lot of the time. I didn’t fit into my image of what it should be to be a vicar. I wasn’t a man, for one. I wasn’t incredibly well read and couldn’t just quote Hebrew and Greek and the church fathers and the latest theologians. So I struggled that year to make myself fit into the role that I had grown up seeing in one particular way. I fought against being bright and shiny and bubbly when I thought it would help me follow this call God had set in front of me. And it turned out to be disaster. 

This probably isn’t the best story to introduce myself with, now that you’ve elected me to be your pastor, but it’s an important one, and I think it reflects a lot of what Paul was saying to the Corinthians, especially in today’s lesson. 

Because I was trying to present myself as a person of authority, who could handle tough issues, and I had mostly experienced folks like that early on who were older men of serious conversations, I made it a point to choose to preach on a difficult text, and to make it serious. I didn’t know what that meant, exactly, but I missed the Gospel entirely when I preached it, and felt absolutely lousy afterward. Turns out, when you make ministry all about your own reputation, it just doesn’t work. 

If Paul had gone about preaching how good a Christian he had become since his conversion, his ministry would have fallen flat on its face. Because of his experience with the living Christ, Paul could speak plainly about what a Pharisee he was before meeting Jesus, how much death he carried in his wake before he was blinded by the light that made him see. Because of his experience with the living Christ, Paul knew he was not the center of the universe and didn’t have to stake any sort of claim on power or authority, because the creator of the cosmos had staked a claim on him.

Pharisees in Jesus’ day were just as stuck on their own reputation as any of us. The laws and rules they kept were given for good and for life, but they held on so tightly that they forgot the one who had given them those laws had done so in order to set them free from the worry they wrapped themselves in. They had to look a certain way, eat a certain way, bathe a certain way, pray a certain way, in order to be acceptable to God, in order to be considered in right relationship with God, to be ‘righteous.’ But they missed the Kingdom of God. Rob Bell, a Christian teacher and author, compares it to buying flowers for his wife. He could buy her flowers because he loves her and they made him think of her. Or he could buy her flowers because it was expected that the husband buys the wife flowers and he didn’t want to be shamed at work for being ‘that guy’ who doesn’t get his wife flowers. Which sort of relationship do you think he and his wife would prefer? And with Valentine’s Day fast approaching, think carefully about your answer.

When we are loved, truly known and loved and safely so, we don’t have to worry that if we don’t get everything right we suddenly won’t be loved any more. When we are loved, truly and deeply and forever, by someone who knows us inside and out and even before we were born, that love doesn’t shrink just because we forgot a holiday or weren’t able to afford the ‘right’ church shoes for Sunday morning. With human relationships, which are complicated and sometimes confusing and quite possibly the most frustratingly beautiful thing on earth, there is give and take, growth and drifting. But with God, no amount of love is lost on God’s side of the relationship.

Which is what the prophet Isaiah has to remind the people of his day when they returned from exile. Don’t just follow the law and forget your neighbors! Don’t use the rituals and practices of your day to put up a wall between you and the world around you. Don’t forget how much God loves you, or that when God loves you God loves all of you, no matter who you consider inside or outside. The people of Isaiah’s day, when this third portion of Isaiah was written, had just come home from years of exile. In the first books of Isaiah, it looks about the same, with the threat of exile on the horizon, in the second part of Isaiah the people are scattered and exiled, and in this last section they have returned home after being away for so long some of them only know who they are by the rituals they keep. They have tried to remain pure when they were taken to a foreign land with other gods. They have done all they can to remember and celebrate their God while their captors mock them. And now they have been reunited, after all of that struggle, after all of that pain, and I imagine it might feel a bit like the current state of Israel, with some afraid of their new neighbors, and others trying their best to reimagine their home as it was in the old days before the war. But the neighborhood has changed, as neighborhoods tend to do, and the prophet Isaiah calls them back to remember who they are - a light to the nations. Salt for the earth...

Or, wait, that’s Jesus. Same basic message, more inclusive crowd. The poor and the hungry are there. Those who mourn, the meek, the merciful... Great crowds from Galilee and Decapolis (that’s a cluster of ten cities) and Jerusalem and Judea and from beyond the Jordan.  It’s not the insiders only that he’s talking to. Jesus isn’t talking about the outsiders to the insiders. Jesus is talking to everybody. Or, grammatically, he could be talking only to his disciples, sure, but they’re also a pretty motley crew of mixed-up folk. And Jesus launches into this speech, this sermon on the mount, about how they’re all blessed, and how they’re all salt and light, and how he’s the fulfillment of the law. Jesus doesn’t tell them to straighten up and fly right or else, not really. He tells them they are the salt of the earth and the light of the world and a city on a hill. They just are. It’s not an ‘if this, then that’ sort of statement, it’s more of a ‘here it is.’ You. Salt. You. Light. Ok? Even if salt is trod underfoot, it still paves a road for safe travel. And if you put an open flame under a wicker basket, just wait and see what sort of blaze you’ll start when that basket catches fire.

Because God doesn’t wait for us to be ‘good enough,’ to love us and to love the world through us. God doesn’t expect us to be what we expect us to be. God has given us the Spirit of life, which is the same Spirit by which the world was created. God hasn’t waited for us to get our lives in order and prove ourselves worthy to bring the kingdom of heaven into our midst, God just shows up and does it. Even when we mess up royally, God has ways of bringing new life in the midst of death - it’s kind of the way God works. In Jesus Christ all of the law and the prophets are fulfilled, all of the righteousness is poured out upon us and the Kingdom of heaven is right here among us.

So what do we do with this final word that our righteousness needs to exceed that of the Pharisees? We fall into the righteousness of God in Christ. We depend on the one who gave us the law and the prophets, who gives us himself in Jesus the Christ. Because that is right relationship with God, to let God be God and to know we are humans who sometimes do stupid things for any number of reasons. Whether it makes us laugh or cry, it does not change how deeply, how madly, God loves us. Whatever we think of ourselves, God is the one who alone is judge, and God is the one who pours out grace upon grace and loves us despite of it all.

Brothers and sisters, none of us has anything to prove. Not here, not anywhere. Your place in God’s heart is secure. Thanks be to God.