Wednesday, April 01, 2009

How Can We Keep From Serving?

[This, the last of a series of midweek Lenten sermons for 2009, was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier this evening.]

Ephesians 2:1-10
Each year, Jewish believers celebrate something called the Feast of the Tabernacles or the Festival of the Booths.

It remembers the forty-year period during which the ancient Hebrews, freed by God from slavery in Egypt, wandered in the wilderness before finally arriving in the land that God had long ago promised their ancestors.

During those forty years in the wilderness, they mostly lived in temporary booths or huts. (Another word for these structures is tabernacle, which basically means tent.) The purpose of the annual Festival of the Booths is to remind modern believers that God cares about aliens and strangers and that for people of faith, our only home is with God. To this day, many Jewish believers erect tents or huts in their yards to celebrate the Festival of the Tabernacles.

A prominent German scholar of the New Testament, Joachim Jeremias, once visited a Jewish friend in Israel during this festival. The friend led Jeremias to his backyard to show off the family’s festival tent. There was nothing distinctive about it except for two signs, one posted on the left and the other on the right side, of the opening. One sign said, “From God.” The other read, “To God.”

Those two signs, with just four words, describe the wilderness wanderings in which you and I and everyone we know are living right now. The Bible says that we were formed by God in our mother’s wombs. It also tells us that one day, every one of us will stand before God. We move from God to God.

The Bible affirms that you and I are on that same journey. That could fill us with fear. The New Testament book of Hebrews affirms that, “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” Even those certain of their places in eternity and of God’s love would agree that only a fool or a misinformed person wouldn’t be a bit weak in the knee about coming face to face with the omnipotent, perfect God of the universe.

Yet, fear need not have the last word in our relationship with God.

In our Bible lesson for tonight, the apostle Paul writes to the first century church in the Asia Minor city of Ephesus. Before coming to faith in God, many of the Ephesian Christians had little notion that they were on this journey from God to God. Ephesus was a place with lots of idol worship and especially heavy-duty worship of the world's favorite god, the almighty buck.

At the beginning of our lesson, Paul reminds them of their former life, when they were mired in sin, ignorant of God, and going nowhere.

But Christ changed all that. When they’d heard the Good News of new and everlasting life for all who renounce their sin and entrust their lives to Jesus, God enacted a midcourse correction in their eternal journey, turning their lives around, back to God and eternity with God.

“By grace you have been saved through faith,” Paul reminds the Ephesians, “and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.”

Christians should never be blasé about God’s passionate desire to change the courses of our lives and eternal destinies. We always have reason to celebrate and to wonder!

Just this afternoon, I got a telephone call from a woman who was a member of the first parish we served in northwest Ohio. I’m presiding at the wedding of one of her daughters this summer and she asked if, at the rehearsal, I could also baptize her two grandchildren.

We also chatted. “You know,” she told me, “God is hard to understand sometimes. I never considered myself a great Christian. I believed and I tried my best. But I always thought my husband was the committed one and I was sort of along for the ride. If you had told me seven years ago that I’d start and own a Christian bookstore, I would have told you that you were crazy. Yet God led me every step and opened every door.”

And then she said, “But sometimes, I ask God, ‘Why?’”

You see, God’s grace and the way of life he made for this woman beforehand were things she never would have guessed. Now she's walking in the life that God had in mind for her, a gift more fulfilling than she could have ever imagined. And all she can do is offer back a life of service in Christ’s Name.

And this is where servanthood, the topic of our Lenten midweek services begins and ends: In the God from Whom we first received life and in the God Who gives us new life in Jesus Christ.

I don’t know why God loves me. I find myself much less lovable than God apparently does. And yet, God does love me and you.

Once our lives were going nowhere. But, in Christ, God claims us as His own and changes us for all eternity. As Paul writes later in Ephesians, “now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.”

In the face of such undeserved love, grace, and favor, how can we not be servants?

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