GIFTED BY GOD

Have you ever considered that the Lone Ranger was not really alone? He had his loyal Indian, Tonto with him all the time. Robinson Caruso had his man Friday. Tom Hanks in the movie Castaway had a volley ball he named Wilson who became his trusty companion. The point being that God does not ever ask us to do things, ‘all on our own’. When it comes to the work of the church, God gathers us in community so that we are not alone, so we don’t have to do it all. If we follow the edicts of God, there are no ‘Lone Rangers’ when it comes to doing God’s work.
From the beginnings of the stories of God’s people it becomes obvious that God intends for us to be ‘part’ of the community of faith. Adam was not alone for very long when God realized he needed a companion - the actual Hebrew word means ‘help mate’. Noah had a family to help him, Abraham and Sarah had a myriad of servants to work with him, Jacob had 12 sons who did his work, Jeremiah had Baruch - we could continue on with every one of the ‘heroes’ we read about in scripture and all had people who traveled with them and who helped them in the work God gave them to do. None were ever asked to do it all by themselves.
In the scripture passage we read this morning from the book of Numbers, we read about
Moses. Moses was the leader God called to shepherd the Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt. We have heard this story of Moses quite a bit because it is an important story in understanding what it means to be the church of Jesus Christ. As you read through the stories of Moses and the Hebrews as they begin their journey into the wilderness to ‘the promised land’ - a land God would give them for their very own where they could live together in peace as God’s people. But it was an arduous journey - these Hebrews had never lived in the desert before, they didn’t know how to survive on their own, they had never traveled and so this was all new for them. And whether it be in ancient times or now, it is hard to find yourself in a new situation where things don’t look like they did before.
It is a lot like the state of the church today. How many times did the Hebrews say they wanted to go back to the way it was? It wasn’t that they wanted to go back to the hard times or the slavery, but they wanted something that was familiar. Even though that familiar was not a good situation.
And we often find ourselves thinking the same thing - we want a return to the familiar. How many times do we say ‘If only the church would be like it was’? And just like the Hebrews couldn’t go back to the what life was like in Egypt, we are never going to be able to go back to the church we remember as children; as young adults; or even as the church 2 or 3 years ago.
After all these Hebrews are just people, everyday people put into a new and often difficult situations. We are just people. Everyday people put into this new and difficult picture of the church.
Now I want you to think about a couple things as we talk about this Old Testament account this morning - and as we continue through this season between the birth of Jesus and the beginning of Lent - a season we are talking about the idea of call. The important concept in our theology that we are not here by accident or even by our own choice. The concept of call doesn’t just apply to individuals who are followers of Jesus, but it applies to those of us who are here in the church - in this church. God not only calls people - but he also calls the church, this collective group of people. It is not just happenstance that we are here - that this group of specific people are here at this time. God assembles us in this church just as he assembled all those who were part of that massive crowd of Hebrews who left Egypt and began the journey to the promised land. Each person in that large group of people was there because it was determined by God they should be there. And keep in mind, there wasn’t a lot of choice in the matter. Moses goes through the Hebrew camp one day after the plagues are over and tells everyone to pack up and get ready to go on this journey together. He didn’t go and say ‘Hey, how would you like to go with me to the promised land? Here is the brochure of all the wonderful things that will be there and here’s an itinerary of the trip and the amenities we will


have along the way - Moses just said, “Pack up and let’s go!” And they did. So if you want to compare this to us here in this church and the journey we have in front of us as Bethany, think of it in the same way. God has brought us here together and has said, ‘Get ready - for we are going on a journey together.” And just like the Hebrews - it will not be a journey we are familiar with.
At one point during the trip, the Israelites set up camp and find themselves camped close to where Moses’ father in law, Jethro, lived. So Jethro came over to visit Moses and spend some time with
him. Very quickly Jethro sees all that Moses is trying to get done in leading and providing for these Hebrews and says to him, “Moses, you can’t continue to do all this by yourself. You need some help.
You have all these capable people around you who aren’t doing anything - let them help you.” And Moses’ answer was sort of something along the lines of “This is just the way it has always been and I really hadn’t ever considered any other way!” So Jethro came up with a plan for Moses to choose leaders from the people and have the leaders be in charge of a certain number of people. Those leaders would then take care of ‘their’ people and would give the people in their tribe responsibilities. By dividing up the work load, more people became involved in this journey and no one had to do it all themselves.
And so we again have the church. God has gathered us here together and tries to help us see that the work of the church is a group effort. Everyone is involved; everyone has an important part to play; and we should never think that the church is the responsibility of a single person or even of a few. If we as a church are to really do what God has set out for us to do - it will take everyone working together; everyone taking a part; everyone getting involved; in order for us to become a cohesive group moving forward on the journey God has set before us.
This model of everyone taking a part and everyone working together came to be used as God continued to work with his people throughout the accounts of scripture. When it comes time to build the Tabernacle, God’s mobile church, they gather people with different talents and different gifts and different abilities and together the Tabernacle gets done. When it comes to build the second Temple, the one after the original one was destroyed, God gathered workers from within the Hebrew people with various gifts and abilities and talents to do the work - and together the Temple was built. On and on through the story of the people of God we see God assemble people together of various gifts and together they accomplish what God needs done.
We even see this same pattern as Jesus gathers his disciples. Andrew had a gift for bringing people to Jesus, Peter had a gift for leadership, John was the spiritual one, Matthew was a writer, Judas was the money keeper....... Each had different gifts and abilities that benefited the whole group. And it was God who brought them together so that they could accomplish the job God intended for them to do - to learn and become the leaders of this new life of living as followers of Jesus. So each contributed to the group as they were able - each used their own gifts for the benefit of the whole.
And also notice, there is never a line anywhere where God says, “I need volunteers to do this work. Who would like to sign up?” No, God says, “You and you and you and you are going to be the ones who do what I need done.” Pay specific attention to the call of the disciples, they were all sought out by Jesus - it was not the other way around.
Look around. We are a particular community of faith in this particular location in this particular time. We are the church of Jesus Christ. We are all different. We come from different places and different backgrounds and different traditions. We have different experiences and different things we have learned. But yet we all fit here together. God has gathered us here because we are all different. And by bringing our different perspectives and our different histories and our different abilities together, we are able to accomplish the work God puts before us - together. We are not here by choice, but one way or another God got us here. And God looks at us and says, “You and you and you and you are going to be the ones who do what I need done.”


The Apostle Paul probably puts it the best when he has us remember that we are called the ‘body’ of Christ. And we are just like a body - the body has ears and eyes and feet and hands and a mouth and a heart and a stomach and all those other body parts. Each body part is different, each has a different job. The ears hear and the eyes see and the feet walk and stand and the mouth talks and the skin feels and it is only because we have all these different body parts that we can truly function and do anything. Paul says “What would happen if all we were was an ear, or an eye or skin? What could we accomplish? Nothing....”
And so it is with the church - the body of Christ. We are all different, we all have different gifts and we all have different abilities and because each of us uses our particular gifts for a common purpose, we are able to carry out what we need to do.
Look around - we all take a part, we all contribute, no one has to ‘go it alone’, no one has to feel like a Lone Ranger, no one has to feel the pressure of ‘doing it all’ because just like Jethro when to Moses and said, “Let some other people help you!”, God says to us - “I gathered you together as my church, as my people. I collected those whom I knew could do my work. I gave you the gifts and talents and abilities you would need, and I gave you a purpose to fulfill in this community. I gave you each other - to work and live and love together. Each doing what they are able to do”
And it is together that we live out God’s will for us and this church. And as we each step up and do what God has called each of us to do, we will be able to succeed at what God has set out for us as we journey together as Bethany Presbyterian.
Never forget, God is in charge - we may have to do the work - but God is in charge and God will never let us fail as long as we put our trust in him and each stand up and do our part.

Amen!

Do We Respond to God like Jonah or the Disciples?

The very first words of Jesus when he met Simon Peter and his brother Andrew on the shores of the Sea of Galilee were "Follow me, and I will make you a fisher of men." You heard those words read today from the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark. But how many of you know what the last words of Jesus to Simon Peter were? Words also spoken down by the waters of the sea of Galilee - just before Jesus was taken up into heaven?
Jesus’ very last words to Peter, words spoken just before Jesus ascended into heaven, words spoken after Peter and the others had been his daily companions for three years, were virtually the same as the first: "Feed my sheep, Follow me.” Our calling - the calling of every single person here - and the call that is extended to all of God's children is the same as that of Peter.
“Follow me and I will make you fishers of men. Follow me and feed my sheep.” We all have that twofold calling - everyone of us…..
Jesus uses two terms to describe his followers - disciples and apostles. Disciples are those who follow and learn and apostles are those who are sent out. We are called to be both disciples and apostles. Disciples - to be ones who walk with Jesus and who learn from him and we are called to be apostles - to be ones who are sent out and in the particular way that God gifts us to act as Christ's ambassadors in the world; to be ones who allow Jesus to speak through us; to be ones who minister God's love to the world; to be one's who bring God's word of forgiveness and of hope; to share God’s life giving word to all who need it.
We each have a twofold calling. The first aspect of our calling is to enter into a relationship with Jesus that is one of complete and utter trust.To come to him as he asks us to come - and to give to him our weariness, our burdens, our anxieties - and to receive from him those things he wants to give us - peace, hope, joy, truth, love, strength, wisdom….
But also to come to him - and to follow him where-ever he leads us. To come to him and to learn from him. To come to him and have him live in us. To come to him and to be made new by him and then to go out and tell others about this transforming work of Jesus.
This is not easy. It is not easy not because Christ is unable to bear our burdens and to give us rest, nor because Jesus does not have the power to make us new and turn us into the salt of the earth and the light of the world It is not easy because it demands of us more than most people are willing to give. It demands discipline, single-mindedness, a determination to indeed make Christ the centre of our lives. It demands that we give up ourselves and put all of our trust in him instead of in ourselves. It is not easy because we have to put aside our logical, orderly way of living and live in the supernatural power of God; allowing ourselves to admit that in God things don’t always make sense and we can’t always explain the things that happen and we have to be OK with that. That is probably the hardest thing Jesus asks us to do. It demands of us the resolve to do those things that our Lord asks us to do, to go where-ever our Lord leads us - even if that involves leaving behind things precious and dear to us; even if that involves doing things we think we can't do or wish that we would not have to do.
It demands that we might have to give up things we enjoy and that make us comfortable. It demands that we might have to give up family and friends and the comforts of home. Because that is what the disciples did. Jesus came by their jobs and said, “drop what you are doing and follow me. You are going to have to give up your income, your livelihood, your homes your family … you are going to have to live on the road for the next 3 years and who knows what that will bring?” And that is what the disciples did - ‘immediately’ Mark says. And don’t fall into that trap of ‘well, things were different then.” No different. These people were absolutely no different than you or me…..
But then there was Jonah. Jonah, too, was just an average guy when God says to Jonah exactly what Jesus said to the disciples. “Come and do what I want and I will make you fishers of men.” was the equivalent of God’s words to Jonah - “come and do what I want and you will bring salvation to a whole city of people.” We hear these words from God and we have very good and what we think are very legitimate reasons why we can’t listen to God’s words. The Ninevites to whom God is sending Jonah are nasty people. For years, the Ninevites country - Assyria - had been attacking Israel, burning their villages, killing the men and capturing the women and children and taking them back to Assyria. Jonah had a very good reason for not wanting to share the Gospel with these people. Can you blame Jonah for not wanting to go into a country where he was the enemy and was very likely to be killed or taken into slavery? Can you blame him for not wanting to take ‘good news’ to the people who have tormented his people? We can justify Jonah’s lack of desire to do what God wants - we can justify not doing what God wants us to do. And we think God doesn’t know these special circumstances we have…..
Jonah, instead of trusting in God to keep him safe; or trusting in God’s rationale for wanting something good for these evil people; or thinking that he would even consider sharing his God with these foreigners; Jonah decides to run away. An important point here - the people of Jonah’s time believed that God was bound geographically to the nation of Israel. That is why Jonah thought that if he got on a boat and went to Spain he would be free of responsibility because God obviously could not follow him. Jonah gets on the boat and feels like he is free and clear……
My question has always been - why did God not just let him go and find someone else who was willing to do what God wanted? Aren’t we taught that if we don’t do what God wants God will just find someone else - that want happens is if we don’t do what God wants then we just don’t get the blessing from doing what God wanted us to do? That would make sense don’t you think? But that is not what this story teaches. Obviously God felt that Jonah was the only one who could do what needed to be done because God goes to an awful lot of effort to ensure that Jonah is the one to do this work. God sends a great storm and then Jonah has to spend a three days in the belly of a great fish to convince Jonah that maybe he should do what God wanted him to do. Then Jonah ends up doing God’s work, less than enthusiastically, and God is able, through Jonah, to bring Nineveh to salvation.
So do you see the contrast? Jesus calls the disciples and they drop everything and immediately (the gospels emphasize this immediate response to Jesus) leave everything behind - family, friends, jobs, homes, what they know, what they are comfortable with - and they follow Jesus which lasts for the rest of their lives and is never easy.
God calls Jonah and Jonah tries to run away and God does everything in his power to make sure that Jonah does what God wants him too…. God goes to extreme measures to get Jonah to do what God wants him to do…. It appears that Jonah is the only person that God feels is the one to do this particular job. And Jonah isn’t particularly good at what he is to do but yet God is able to use simply the fact that Jonah eventually did do what God wanted him to do. And as far as we know, Jonah eventually went back to his normal life.
So where are we in these stories? Are we willing to enthusiastically put aside our own picture of how our life should be - our families, our friends, our homes, our responsibilities, our play - to do the things of God? Or do we think that we can ignore God or run away from God or even say “no” to God….. because as we hear this story God is just going to pursue us until we do what he wants us to do. The misery of being in the belly of a fish for three days is surely worse than what God asks us to do.
So are you like James and John and Peter and Andrew and the other disciples who immediately responded to God, or like Jonah, who fights God every step of the way.
Consider whatever is blocking your willingness to believe that God has chosen you as his; to believe that you are important to God; to know that God thinks that you have an important part in God’s work in this world today and that God will provide everything you need if you just hear and respond to his voice….. Amen!

THE AUTHORITY OF JESUS

Aristotle declared that the heavier an object was, the faster it would fall to earth and for centuries people believed that he was right. Aristotle was regarded as the greatest thinker of all time and surely he could not be wrong. And interestingly enough, no one ever checked to see if Aristotle was correct. Anyone, of course, could have taken two objects, one heavy and one light, and dropped them from a great height to see whether or not the heavier object landed first. But no one did until nearly 2,000 years after Aristotle’s death. Up until that time everyone just assumed Aristotle knew what he was talking about. But in 1589, Galileo summoned the learned professors of the time - the really ‘smart’ people who influenced the thinking of others- to the base of the leaning tower of Pisa. Galileo then went to the top of the tower and pushed off a ten-pound and a one-pound weight. Both landed on the ground below at the exact same instant. But the great thinkers, those who were considered the ‘experts’ of their day, these really smart guys denied what they had seen. They had ‘thought’ Aristotle was correct for so long that they were not willing to believe what they had seen with their own eyes. So even though Galileo had physically proven Aristotle wrong, Aristotle was still considered right because Aristotle’s idea had been around for a longer time. Even with the authority of obvious visible proof - the two weights reached the ground a the same time, the most highly respected minds of the time still did not believe. The problem here is obvious. Most people are going to believe what they have always believed regardless of the facts.
We are in a short period of the church year, a piece of time that is part of the season known as Ordinary Time. This short period, between Baptism of the Lord Sunday and the beginning of Lent, is traditionally a time to talk about Jesus’ ministry. Last Sunday as we talked about his Baptism, we learned that event was the beginning of Jesus’ ministry and we participate in Lent, which is the end of Jesus ministry. So during this time we look at significant events in Jesus’ life that help us understand exactly what Jesus was trying to do during those 3 years of his ministry.
Much of what Jesus taught had to do with the idea of ‘call’ - of being called in to the service of Jesus Christ. What Jesus wanted us to know is that call didn’t have to do just with being ‘called’ into specific ministries of the church - whether as a minister or CRE or elder - but call as it applies to everyone who is a part of the church. We need to start thinking of ourselves as being here because we were all called to be disciples of the church. Everyone. All of you are called to be disciples - a disciple is one who follows in order to learn and we are all called to be called to be apostles - an apostle is one who is sent out to do what they learned as a disciple. We are struggling with how God is calling each and every one of us - and he is calling all of us. We struggle with what that means as we live our lives - our lives away from here in the church. Today we are going to deviate a little from the idea of call itself, to being reminded that this call we have to follow and learn and to go out and serve needs to be one that is grounded in a single authority - the authority of Jesus Christ. It is essential that we come to understand that we cannot do what God wants us to do unless we are willing to admit that the final authority in our life is Jesus - not what we think or what someone else has told us about Jesus or what the popular people around us tell us or what sounds good - but in the actual teachings of Christ recorded in our Holy Scripture.
We sometimes have the same problem that the great thinkers had with Galileo. We learned something in Sunday School or heard something on TV or someone told us something a long time ago and we have believed it for so long that when we hear the actual words of Jesus from the Gospels, we just can’t bring ourselves to start thinking in a new way. Or we hear the words of Jesus and we don’t like what he says, so we just decide to believe what we think cause it fits better into the way we want things to be.
In Deuteronomy, we read an account of the Moses as he addresses the people. Moses has become the authority for God’s people as they journeyed through the wilderness. Admittedly it took a while for him to achieve that authority, but after so many years with Moses leading them, they finally have come to people that Moses really is a man of God and that they can trust what God is doing through Moses. But Moses knows that even though they now believe and trust him, Moses is not going to be around forever and that they will have to put their faith and trust in someone new. Moses now says to them that God is promising them they will have a new leader, a new prophet, and they are to heed this new prophet and do all he says because what he says comes from the Lord. But Moses also warns against false prophets - of those who speak in the name of other gods than the one true God - and of prophets who presume to speak in the name of the one true God. These followers of God, the people who have been with Moses for a long time now, who have come to trust Moses as truly speaking for God, are warned about listening to people who sound good but who, in addition to teaching what God has taught, teach a lot of other ungodly ideas that may sound just close enough to what God teaches that people will listen and believe them.
We have extreme examples in scripture and in the history of our lives about people like this. False prophets who start off teaching just enough truth that they are easy to believe and then lead people astray….. Remember Jim Jones who began the People’s Temple in Indiana, moving to California and then moving all of his followers to Guyana where the followers were eventually all killed - including 300 children and a congressmen who had come to try and rescue the people. He started by teaching the things Jesus said and he taught with such authority that as his message got a little crazy people didn’t think anything odd about it…. The same with David Koresh who founded the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. He was a born again Christian whose message became skewed and more about his relationship with young girls than about Jesus - but again, he had developed such authority with the people that they just fell right in with what he told them to do without really thinking about it.
Now we can look at these examples and say without hesitation that we would be smarter than to fall into something like this - we are intelligent, thinking, rational people and we would have never been taken in by these people.
Yet in our day of pervasive media; of being inundated with voices that try and influence us; our whole life is dominated with marketing, even in the things of Jesus and the church; We are overwhelmed with voices that sound good; that make sense; that agree with what we already think; voices we have always ‘thought’ were right - it is hard to understand who really has the ‘authority’; it is hard to discern who we should be listening to. If a person has developed a huge following does that necessarily mean they are right?
In our Gospel lesson today, Jesus shows us what we need to look to as the true authority of our lives. Jesus comes to the disciple Peter’s home town - the town of Capernaum. It was a fishing town that Jesus sort of made his headquarters. In the town, Peter’s home, where Jesus stayed, was right across the street from the synagogue. Jesus, perhaps through the influence of Peter, has been asked to teach at the synagogue. As he began to teach, Mark tells us, the people were amazed at what Jesus said. Makes you wonder what they have been taught up to this point and what kind of teachers the priests in that synagogue must have been like! Mark says, “He taught with authority, not like the teachers who were there.”
In the middle of his teaching, a man enters the synagogue who we are told was filled with a ‘demon’. Be careful with that image before you automatically shut down because of all the preconceived ideas this term ‘demon’ may bring to us. Look at this man as simply a voice from the status quo - a voice of the ‘this is the way it has always been’ or the ‘this is how we have always thought’ . This ‘demon’ is simply the voice that says in our head, “This is what I have always thought and I am not about to let the actual words of Jesus change that.”
The ‘demon’ that enters that synagogue is saying, “Jesus, are you here to shake things up? We have lived and worshipped and thought like we think for so long and it is comfortable and we don’t want to hear you say something new and different because it may cause us to have to have to change. We put our authority in what we already think we know”. And notice that in the story this ‘demon’ even recognizes that Jesus is the final authority - they just don’t want to have to change anything - even wrong they would rather stay as they were. Just like the great thinkers when Galileo showed them they were wrong about the concept of gravity, figured it was just easier to continue to think wrong than to think in a new way….
Jesus cast out the demon - in other words - Jesus taught the people something new. Jesus gave them something new to put their trust in - Jesus became for them the authority over what they had always thought and what they had always done and what they had always been taught….
If we are going to truly be a disciple of Jesus Christ; if we are going to be sent out as his apostles then our authority must be in what Jesus teaches - not in what we think, not in what someone else taught us, not even what makes sense. And the only way to learn what Jesus taught is to listen to him. To get out our dusty Bibles, to say a prayer for Jesus to teach us, and to read what he actually says. And then to allow him to chase out the false prophets that have been in our lives, the misconceptions we have, to disregard the outside influences we hear from the media, and to hear what he actually says to us and just like the people in that synagogue to be amazed at what Jesus actually says to us - and then to give him the final authority in our lives and allow us to realize something new.
Amen!