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SERMONS

The Fourth Sunday in Lent
March 26, 2006

Lent 4B

Did you know that you are supposed to get what you deserve in life?

Do you realize that you are in the process of making a bed that you will one day have to lie in? Advice by sound-bite. We all do it you know; gather up our lives, and roll them into a little proverb or saying or maxim that just seems to sum it all up. We do it especially well when we are trying to make a point, usually disciplinary, to someone whom we believe needs a bit of enlightenment - like our children, or in other cases, our parents.

You will reap what you sow. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps . . . “uh, I don’t seem to be wearing boots.”

Usually they are bits of hard won worldly wisdom, common sense, that we have earned by experience. “This is just how things work in life,” we might find ourselves saying. I sometimes carry them around like a lucky penny, and rub them, whenever I feel confused about how things work in this life.

“Jedem das Seine . . . To Each His Own . . . often quoted as, “Everyone Gets What He Deserves.” It is inscribed on the gate of a place called Buchenwald concentration camp in Nazi Germany. And then there was, “Arbeit macht frei . . . Work Liberates . . . advice found of the gates of Dachau and Auschwitz.

Perhaps, sometimes, we can have too great a desire to have life summed up, especially other people’s lives, summed up, in a sound-bite of our own choosing. Perhaps we like to have our puzzle pieces fit together a little too much. Perhaps we can desire too greatly for everyone to get what they deserve; especially when it just so happens that we deserve more. Sometimes we can seem to know too much about how this old world works. We may find things a bit too predictable.

We are reasonable people. We live in a world where common sense rules, where people are getting what they deserves, where work liberates, where our destinies are in our hands. Isn’t it frustrating when God slips in the back door? God: our old fried and nemesis, always bending the rules, slipping in the back door.

At the end of the book of Chronicles, at the end of what we might think of as one of Israel’s national history books, something like from Valley Forge to Philadelphia, the writer is trying to explain how this once great nation of Israel came to live as subjects of a foreign king, Cyrus of Persia. A very important piece of this story, Israel - the mini series, is the building of its first Temple in Jerusalem by the great and mythic kings David and Solomon. This first and great Temple is ultimately destroyed by God, due to the unfaithfulness of the people. Their great national symbol of pride and transcendence is taken from them because they have taken their hearts and souls from God. They have made a bed, and now . . .

Over time they have forgotten to call upon God. Although they are physically present at the Temple, their hearts and mind are worshiping elsewhere; they give their hearts, minds, and imagination to the little nature and folk deities of the lands surrounding them. They are drinking the kool-aid, we might say.

God sends prophets like Jeremiah who say, “my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.” God is giving warning, God is calling them back; but to no avail.

But the people are lost, they cannot hear God; they do not attend to the presence. And if they cannot hear a prophet, God sends upon them something they can hear, another voice, the king of the Chaldeans, who lays waste the Temple, Jerusalem, and carries a majority of the Israelites into Exile for seventy years.

Now, I am sure that Jews in parts of the surrounding countryside, that someone, had to be saying, “they have just made their bed and now they have to lie in it; worshiping other gods. Serves them right, getting what they deserve, everyone gets what he deserves you know . . . Hurumph . . . Hurumph.”

However, if we actually lived in a world that was so simple, where everyone gets what they deserve, then we would not be telling this story this morning. If that were the case, there would be no story “Israel - The Miniseries.” There would be no more story of God’s people. We tell this story about the forgetfulness and fall of Israel because in it we see our own story. We see that our stories are with God even when it seems they should come to an end.

“Thus says King Cyrus of Persia - the Lord has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem.”

You see, God is always exploding the wisdom of the world. God is always coming in the backdoor of human failures and human expectations, especially when people are getting what “they deserve.” The story of God’s people is dearer to God than it is to God’s people themselves. He steps into the muck of our assumptions and expectations to do for us, to give us, what we cannot give ourselves or imagine for ourselves. King Cyrus, a foreigner, a Gentile, will do for God’s people what they have not been able to do for themselves; a second chance.

This is precisely what Jesus is up to this morning. In his own day Jesus becomes the hands and feet of this God, who is constantly among human beings as one who gives. The crowds are hungry, not just for food to put in their bellies, but for food that will fill the heart and soul. They follow Jesus because He gives them something that they need, a food that satisfies an appetite that no amount of worldly wisdom, no amount of good advice, no amount cleverness will ever touch.

Jesus comes to feed them the truth of themselves, the truth of God, and God’s love, upon which the human heart is created to feast. In his teaching and preaching, Jesus is doing for the people what they cannot do for themselves. He gives them a doorway, a second way, through which to know God.

Taking, Blessing, Breaking, giving the loaves and fish, is not a bit of magic to dazzle and mesmerize the people. There were plenty of magicians in the land. The deep, deep significance of feeding the 5000 is that God means to feed his people when they forget to feed themselves.

In this feeding of the 5000, Jesus is showing his disciples that it is in the places where we assume we have too little, when we assume that there is no chance, when we are apt to say, “there is not enough,” or even “they are getting what they deserve,” God is coming in through the back door. Jesus is showing us that when we would fold up the world and roll it into a bit of common sense, or draw our own conclusions, God is coming in through the backdoor and giving us something that is literally beyond our imaginations.

This is what Paul is trying to say to the Ephesians; people who seem busy about doing for themselves only what God is able to do. People busy about the task of making sure that they get what they think they deserve. Paul is exploding the simple duality of such logic.

“For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God - not the result of works, so that none may boast.”

Really hits us where we live - “so that none may boast.” “I am the king of all I survey . . . I have built this with my own hands.” Nothing renders us more helpless than having to receive a free gift, unearned, unjustified, and God knows this, and this is what God desires.

A heart no longer busy about itself, but busy with Him. And there is no surer way to reduce the human mind and heart to humility, than to do for it what it cannot do for itself. God means to conquer us with gifts. Giving us love and life, when perhaps we deserve something else altogether.

She seems so small at the podium. She is so small in the great city of the greatest power the world has known. She is surrounded by the power brokers and their temples at Georgetown University in Washington. She is here to receive an honor from the best and the brightest, from those who are most capable of building the world in their image. This is what little Mother Teresa told these capable, ambitious, and hungry graduates.

“Don’t be afraid. God loves you. You are precious to Him. He says, “I called you by name. You are mine. Water cannot drown you. Fire will not burn you. I will give up nations for you. You are precious to me. I love you.”

My friends, God is doing for us what we cannot do for ourselves