Sermon at Jesus People USA

I had the privilege of giving the sermon at Jesus People USA last Sunday. It contains the poems, Understanding Life, Computer Adam, and I'm going to scare you to death.

What's It All About?

May I share with you a story poem
about a fellow named Melvin.
It is the story of his life,
Of all our lives
how we achieve a comfortable place
by avoiding the dangers that lurk,
and then as we grow older
We begin to wonder
Was there another way?
Could I have done better?
It is an everyman story
About what life is all about
because we want to ask that question today
What's it all about
The story is entitled,

Understanding Life

Being born gave Melvin
the mandate
to understand life
It was his daily chore,
This mundane every minute duty
Seemed easy enough

But he was asea,
as if the whole world were ocean
And he a head bobbing barely above the waves
Like a fishing cork
Line hanging down into the depths
Bouncing up and down
Signaling the interests
Of unimagined creatures below

Now at 60 he has collected
A little flotsam island
Old billboards, boxes, all sizes
Full of clippings, magazines
Sayings, sound bites, slogans
All rising and falling
With the waves and the tides
Satisfied and proud
That he was able to rise up
Out of the primal soup


But recently he's heard
About a solid place
Called The Promised Land
It flows with milk and honey
Figs and grapes grow there
And he has taken to
watching the horizon

Hoping the waves and tides
Might take him near.


We can ask of this story
What we ask of poems in general
What's it all about?

In the story,
Being born gave Melvin
the mandate
to understand life

We are born with an inquisitive nature.
A baby looks at his hand and says, what's this?
Who are these big people?
How can I get what I want from them?
Life seems simple.
Cry / get. Cry / get.
his needs are met. Everything is done for him.
The child is coming to understand life and it seems easy enough.

But in the story Melvin was asea,
as if the whole world were ocean

Right about the time we learn to walk we are that same way.
Other forces like big dogs and tables complicate our world.
We only want to go to bed if there is a light on.
There are things to be feared.
There are unimagined creatures under the bed.

At 60 Melvin has collected
A little flotsam island

During our life we make what we can with what we are given.
We don't spend too much time trying to pull scary things
up from the bottom.
We ignore what we can’t explain.
Like Melvin we just grab what is floating by and create our own little island,
collecting whatever makes us comfortable.
Melvin is a collector of clippings, sound bites, slogans and billboard ads.
We surround ourselves with our own interests.
Opinions come and go. Games are won and lost
Prices rise and fall.
Life is like the rising and the falling of the waves.
But we are happy because our world is small.
And look at all the stuff we’ve collected.

In the story Melvin heard
About a solid place

The message comes to every man.
God makes sure of that.
Maybe a friend on a ferryboat named "The Good News"
floats by and shouts the message.
We begin to think again about those creatures
that inhabit the sea
on which our life floats.
Our comfortable little island has made us forget.
We are tossed by every wave that passes
We could easily fall in
and we begin to long for something more solid,
more sure than the paraphernalia we has collected.
We begin to wonder, "What's it all about?



What's it all about? What's it all about?

One of the best answers given in scripture
was given by the prophet Micah

Micah 6:8

8 He has showed you, O man, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
But to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

In this verse we can hear God saying, "I've told you and I've told you"
When? - At Sinai when I gave you the 10 commandments.
Is it so hard?
He has showed you, O man, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
But to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.
It ought to be easy.
When God gave the law back in Deuteronomy 30 he said"
"11 For this commandment which I command you today is not too difficult for you,
nor is it out of reach.
12"It is not in heaven, that you should say,
`Who will go up to heaven for us to get it for us and make us hear it,
that we may observe it?' 13
"Nor is it beyond the sea, that you should say,
`Who will cross the sea for us to get it for us and make us hear it,
that we may observe it?'
14 "But the word is very near you, in your mouth and in your heart,
that you may observe it.

Micah 6:8 is one of several shortened forms of the Law given in the Bible.
I think the one who really boiled it down was Jesus in Matthew 22: 37
"'Love the Lord your God with all your heart
and with all your soul and with all your mind.'
38 This is the first and greatest commandment.
39 And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'
40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

All these condensations summarize the Ten Comandments.
There were two tablets given to Moses
Theologians divide them into two subjects
Generally speaking the first tablet contained the commandments that cover man's relation to God
and the second tablet man's relations to man.

Jesus’ phrase'Love the Lord your God with all your heart
and with all your soul and with all your mind.
is a short version of the first tablet and
'Love your neighbor as yourself.' the second.

In Micah 6 the order is reversed to make a point.
Micah’s first phrase "act justly" refers to the second tablet of the 10 Commandments
and the second phrase, "walk humbly with your God." summarizes the first tablet.

Micah’s order is one of time
Jesus’ order is one of importance

Micah’s point being made is that first in time,
God asks you to have right relationship with the rest of His creation,
then as you try, you realize the powerful nature of sin,
that you cannot consistently do what He says,
you cannot maintain a right relationship with other men and women.

Like Paul says in Romans 7:15 I do not understand my own actions.
For I do not do what I want but
I do the very thing I hate.
Our failure to carry out what the word of God asks
leads us to see so clearly our need for mercy
and brings us deeper in and further up
to the need for a relationship with Christ.
In this same context Paul also said
The law is our tutor to bring us to Christ.
The law teaches us like a tutor
That we cannot keep its tenets
Therefore teaching us that we need Christ.

Now, how can I illustrate this?
I know!

Is there anyone here that does not work daily on a computer.
Let me explain to you something that the rest of us know.
Computers lose their faculties, just like people do
Computers get alzheimers
The more they get used the gummier they get
They get slower and slower
No one knows why. They begin to do strange things.
They disobey. We bang on the key again and they still won't perform.
Re boot!! It is the only power we have left
It is like knocking them unconscious in hopes that when they wake up
They will have forgotten why they were disobeying.

Computer Adam

One place, one time
There was a computer named Adam
Who ate of the tree of data bases
And as he crunched on that Apple
He dreamed that he might become
A super-computer, God like
In his power and understanding.
that's when God pulled the plug.
So computers would not
Go the way of Man


That's how we are with God, we get slow,
we get sluggish, we disobey.
Even we don't know why. Its just our nature.
Only He loves us too much to reboot or pull the plug.

This is part of what it's all about. We cannot do what He said was easy to do.
We are captives; we are slaves that need to be set free - to be redeemed.

This slavery is not how we understand slavery in general
The slaves in Africa were taken by force
They were locked in cubicles
And transported far from their land and families
To a life and language they did not understand

But this slavery to sin
That we are talking about here
You and I freely chose
In fact, We cherish our freedom to choose
It is a god given right

BUT

I'm going to scare you to death
You cherish your freedom
You may not even know
how great your freedom is.
The God of the universe
lets you eat whatever you want
As often as you want
As much as you want
Buy some cigarettes
Have a smoke
Pack a day
Three packs
Take a drink
Get drunk
Stay drunk
And God doesn't send lightening!

On even a serial killer
Although one did leave a note
In his victim's blood,
"Please make me stop."

The popular media presents God
as being ready to strike us down
for any and every infraction of His law.
Like rebooting
or pulling the plug.

The real danger is how deep our own free will,
will take us into sin.
How far might we go
Some of us know

Oooh . . . how much we need Micah's second recommendation: Love Mercy

Pure justice can be scary
Someone has said: "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth
leaves everybody toothless blindmen in the end."

There is a midrash (That is a rabbinic commentary on the Torah.)
that when God started creating the
world, the ministering angels argued about how to do it.
Create it with justice, said one.
No, with mercy, said another.
God thought long and hard. God said,
“If I create the world with justice alone,
it will be fair but alas, cruel.
If I create it with mercy alone,
it will be kind, but lawless.
So I will create it with both,
and I pray it will endure.”
http://216.17.23.215/zion/PDFs/Do%20Justice%20Love%20Kindness%20Erev%20RH%202005%20EA.pdf

Even the Law of Deuteronomy had mercy plugged in.
The Torah teaches: (Exodus 22)
“If you take your neighbor's cloak in pawn,
you shall restore it before the sun goes down,
for it may be your neighbor's only clothing to use as cover.
On what else shall that person sleep?
And if your neighbor cries out to me,
I will listen, for I am compassionate.”

Technically, it would be fair to keep the cloak;
it would be just -
but it would not be right.

There are two ways we misinterpret mercy.

First we might be like Micah's audience.
They had completely given up on trying.
Their only concern was how to get God to look the other way.

Instead of worrying about obeying the Ten Commandments
they just skipped to the second step
Sacrifice for not obeying.

Here is how they said it in Micah 6, 6 and 7.

With what shall I come before the Lord
and bow down before the exalted God?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
7 Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

Did you catch the whining?
After disobedience to the original command
They have the gall to complain that
Obtaining mercy is just too hard for them.

Perhaps justice was no longer of concern to them.
Injustice was a way of life.
All they were concerned with was getting God to be pleased with them.
Was forgiveness an easy out for them,
an excuse for disobedience?
Why worry when you can be forgiven?

The second way we misinterpret mercy
is kind of the opposite of the first.
We devalue mercy.
We don't need it because,
By God, we are going to do justice or die.
We don't really mean the "By God" part -
if only we did it would mean that finally we got it.

No we mean we are going to white knuckle righteousness no matter the result.
You gotta love these folks - they really want to be god-like
but as God names things their good deeds are like filthy rags.

Why did Micah say "love mercy" rather than "be merciful" or "do mercy."
The self righteous person can hate mercy,
not wanting to have to be forgiven.
He will tend to justify his actions,
to explain how really he was just and righteous
so as to avoid repentance.

To love mercy is to be always ready
to embrace repentance,
to be humbly willing to be wrong,
to love forgiveness,
to take a bath in the Jordan like John's baptizees and come up clean.

But never, never presuming in the process
that the falling short does not matter
because forgiveness is so easy.
It matters the broken body and shed blood of Jesus Christ.


The third recommendation Micah offers
is "walk humbly with your God."
Enoch's walking with God is interpreted
(Hebrews 11:5) as pleasing God.

It was God and a man in partnership.

Isaiah revealed that God in his glory is both high and low.
Listen Isa 57:15 For thus says the high and exalted One
Who lives forever, whose name is Holy,
"I dwell on a high and holy place,
And also with the contrite and lowly of spirit
In order to revive the spirit of the lowly
And to revive the heart of the contrite.

We cannot partner with God on His high and holy mountain top
But he comes to us in our lowly, humble, contrite place
That is the partnership

Augustine talked about this partnership when he said:
http://www.wfn.org/1999/01/msg00035.html

We, without God, cannot; God without us, will not."


"We, without God, cannot -
says exactly what we have been talking about

God without us, will not -
What's that all about?
He goes on to explain:

"The omnipotent becomes impotent and weak;
the infinite becomes the restrained, the limited,
waiting for our fish, our bread,
before God can accomplish whatever miracle God would want to perform."

That bears repeating:

"The omnipotent becomes impotent and weak;
the infinite becomes the restrained, the limited,
waiting for our fish, our bread,
before God can accomplish whatever miracle God would want to perform."

We without God, cannot
God without us, will not.

That is the partnership

Paul brings up this partnership in Galatians 2:20,
He says, "I am crucified with Christ.
He is on the cross - dying for the sins of all men and women
I am on the cross. I am dying to myself, choosing His will instead of my own.
Paul said it in Romans this way:

Rom. 6:11 . . . count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.

This partnership thing is all over the New Testament

Jesus prayed in John 17 for it to happen:
"I in them and thou in me,
that they may become perfectly one,
so that the world may know that thou hast sent me...."

The partnership was initiated when Jesus breathed on them and said,
"Receive ye the Holy Spirit."

It was confirmed on the day of Penticost
When they were all "filled with the Holy Ghost."

Colossians has it central: Might be called The charter of our partnership with God

1:27God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

3:3 for you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God
Getting back to Galatians 2:20 we get more detail on the partnership:
"It is no longer I who live but Christ lives in me"
This is you and me in our bodies
going to work, eating lunch, praying together, doing dishes
This is where the partnership is
This is God coming from His high and holy place
To the humble, the contrite.
And living His life in us.




We and God are eternally bonded to one another
in a mutual partnership.
Partnerships don’t always go smoothly,
they involve anger and frustration as much as friendship and joy.
But the key in this relationship is
that we continue to walk together, we work it out, we don’t give up.

So here is the message of Micah: Here is the solid ground: Here is what it’s all about.

In doing justice we quickly realize that we need mercy.
In loving mercy we realize we need a partnership with Jesus.
In partnership with Jesus we are better able to do justice.

It is a miracle circle that recognizes how weak we are
that always brings us back to the center so we can do better,
become better servants of God.

But don't forget how, little by little we become slowed down,
we become sluggish, we begin to disobey.
We can miss the miracle of partnership with God.

The sages tell a story about two Israelites, Reuben and Simon
who participated in the crossing of the Red Sea.
Apparently the ground wasn’t totally dry.
When Reuben stepped forward, his feet got all muddy.
“What is this mud?” he whined.
Simon followed him. “Ughh! There’s mud everywhere!”
And so they went, with each step grumbling about the mud.
They never once looked up.
They didn't take their chance to help an elderly lady get her footing.
They never took the offered hand of a child.
And they never understood why,
when they finally arrived at the other shore,
covered in mud, everyone else was singing songs of praise and Miriam was dancing and singing along the shore.
The way the sages tell it, Reuben and Simon
were there, but for them, the miracle never happened.
http://216.17.23.215/zion/PDFs/Do%20Justice%20Love%20Kindness%20Erev%20RH%202005%20EA.pdf