Fr.
Robert R.M. Bagwell+
Proper
16 + C + 2016
The
Paradigm of Change
All
Saints’ Hampton, SC
21
August AD 2016
Isaiah 58:9b-14
Psalm 103:1-8
Hebrews
12:18-29
Luke 13:10-17
As you know, I work with the elderly in hospice as
well as younger people. Whether this story
is true or apocryphal, I do not know, but it is a bit funny. Three sisters of age 92, 94 and 96 live in a
house together. One night the 96 year
old draws a bath, puts her foot in and pauses. She yells down the stairs, "Was I getting
in or out of the bath?" The 94 year old yells back, "I don't
know, I'll come up and see." She
starts up the stairs and pauses, then she yells, "Was I going up the
stairs or coming down?" The 92 year
old was sitting at the kitchen table having tea listening to her sisters. She shakes her head and says, "I sure
hope I never get that forgetful." She knocks on wood for good measure. She then yells, "I'll come up and
help both of you as soon as I see who's at the door." And we have been told there is nothing new under
the sun ….
The prophet Isaiah reveals the mind of God toward his people
in a verse so significant that I have a calligraphy graphic of it over my desk
at work. Let me share these words from
the prophet this morning: See, I am doing
a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. (Isaiah 43:19) See,
I am doing a new thing! Does this text surprise us? There are many verses in scripture that speak
of the unchangeable nature of Our Father in heaven: Jesus Christ is the
same yesterday and today and forever.(Heb 13) “I the Lord do not change. So you, the descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed.
(Malachi 3:6) The counsel of
the LORD stands forever, The plans of His heart from generation to generation.(Psalm
33:11) and many,
many more. There is a certain comfort in
the unchangeableness of God. We tend not
to like change. We prefer the familiar,
the reliable, that with a proven record or at least what we are used to. It’s like the joke: How many Episcopalians
does it take to change a light bulb? The answer: change?
CHANGE? Who said anything about
CHANGE? Yet, in order even for
things to stay the same: thing have to change!
Our Bible is full of promises that all require an
element of change. The Jews of Jesus day, at least the hierarchy,
were repulsed by the very idea. Hence we
have the reading from the gospel of Luke this morning.
There is good change and not so good change. God’s unchanging character is from the fact
that He is perfect. In Romans chapter
one Paul writes: For since the creation of the
world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been
clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.
We however have
lost the perfect nature that God established in our parents at the beginning
and from that brokenness we inherited in the fall of the human race. Since that
moment, God has been planning: salvation, restoration and wholeness for those
who would be his people.
If we watch the
news, if we are even simply aware of all that goes on around us in our culture,
our town, our neighbors and even in ourselves, we realize that as Scott Peck
once wrote: Life is difficult. Worry
not! God has a plan.
We read from the
book of Hebrews of that first change with the children of Israel as they fled
from Egypt seeking the Promised Land. We
like they are also seeking OUR PROMISED LAND!
The moment that changes the paradigm for them here is Sinai: At Sinai they covenant with God. The law is given. God has been affirmed as
their God and they have been claimed as God’s people. Change!
Something new has been born! You
may remember however that that change was a bit of a painful process. God calls Moses to the Mountain, the people
are forbidden to so much as touch the mountain until Moses had come down. When he finally did, he and his companions
hear the sound of celebration in the camp.
Moses comes down
and finds a huge party with celebrating and dancing and a large golden statue
of a calf. The people may have left Egypt, but they also
brought Egypt with them. Change is bound
to have some bumps in the road. Moses is enraged and casts the newly hewn
tablets, written with the finger of God
to the ground and God judges the people with a plague until judgment has been
accomplished
That is enough
of the history, but then we come to the book of Hebrews. The writer says that God has done a new thing
in Christ. What the old covenant could
not accomplish through human will power, God has accomplished in the atoning
death of His Son.
We see the
beginnings of that in the gospel. Jesus
was teaching in the Synagogue on the Sabbath day (Saturday) and he sees a woman
who is apparently listening to him stooped over by an affliction to her
back. She does not reach out to him, but
he already knows her heart and his leaves his teaching for a moment for a touch
of the hand of God. There is no fanfare,
simply the touch of the Master in a very non theatric healing.
The theatrics
come from an official of the synagogue.
He accuses Jesus of violating the Law of the Sabbath; this was human
work according to this man. Jesus turns
the word work around. He points out the human hypocrisy in that if
one of the animals that the people owned was in need on the Sabbath, would they
not reach out and take care of it?
Jesus points out the necessity in this case is not to do no work on the
Sabbath, rather, it is to do the work of God. It is necessary that God work to
heal one of the descendants of Abraham on the Sabbath.
It is God’s work
the synagogue leader was rebuking, not the labors of a man! He was actually revealing the Lord God on the
Lord’s Day. He was counter punching what
the official thought he should do much as God did when he spoke through the
prophet Hosea saying:
I will not
carry out my fierce anger, nor will I devastate Ephraim again. For I am God,
and not a man— the
Holy One among you. (Hosea 11:9) When
we priests and prelates over the years have tried correcting a good deed, we
might remember this. God deals with each
of us according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus through His Spirit.
The official was
going to set Jesus straight, so to speak, but the Word of God set him straight.
Jesus was illustrating the actions of the covenant that God was about to
establish through Jesus. We read these
stories and know then how we are so to follow the Son of God in word and deed. The God who shows up in this
text does not even throw the synagogue official out of the kingdom. Jesus
instead gives a profound of object lesson. He does not lead us out of our
fellowship, but more deeply into it.
Jesus widens the circle of God’s healing love by affirming the God of
the Sabbath rather than making the Sabbath itself the point of it all. If we honor
the God of the law by loving obedience, is it not more glorious?
It is this of which Hebrews speaks. We have come through Jesus to a place of joy
and acceptance. Not to a mountain that
we must not touch but to Mt Zion, the City of the Living God. Not to the King whose subjects we are, but to
the sovereign who is Our Father: the heavenly Jerusalem.
This is a place that is not under the Law which demands
compliance and condemns, but the all things new creation under sovereign grace! Sometimes this simply scares us! We sometimes fear the freedom of grace. It’s not how our world works! This new relationship and new way of being in
relation to God should not give us reason to cease in our profound respect and
honor for God our Father, but should help us to live into the eternal now which
is ours in Christ Jesus.
Where does our strength and power come from in the Church of Jesus
Christ? It is Jesus by the Holy Spirit
who dwells in us. While we live out this life of heaven inside and the earth without,
let our work grow out of love and not fear, out of a desire to model Jesus, not
a fear of not measuring up.
The act of grace is superior to the law. Grace is a new paradigm, a new
way of thinking, a new pattern of living. It is all of grace. God plus you always makes a majority. So when
we are victorious or when we fail, let us trust ever more deeply in the
sovereign and unconditional love of the one who has won our souls by His cross
and resurrection. We are united as one under grace; let us honor that unity
that gives glory to our God.
We prayed in
the collect:
|
G
|
rant, O merciful God, that your
Church, being gathered together in unity by your Holy Spirit, may show forth
your power among all peoples, to the glory of your Name;...as we live out our
new citizenship, let our joy be full and our confidence be in the knowledge of
whom we represent and who we are. We are changed, being changed and are sent
forth as change agents in the Name of Our loving Christ. Episcopalians, let us learn to love CHANGE!
IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER AND OF THE SON
AND OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
AMEN
