Monday, April 6, 2020

Sermon #2 during the Coved Crisis April 05, 2020 Palm Sunday


Sermon #2 during the Coved Crisis April 05, 2020 Palm Sunday
On this Palm Sunday, we continue with our Lenten sermon series on Spiritual Disciplines (all are posted on our N-CV Blog site with links to our facebook page as well ) The main resources used for this series have been the Reformed Worship Resources for Planning & Leading Worship Dec 18 edition and BB Taylor’s book An Alter in the World - A Geography of Faith   Today we focus on the Practice of Waking Up To God – Vision (Chapter 1).
Let us Pray: God of all wisdom and knowledge, in the reading and hearing of your Word, help us know you more clearly so that we may love you more dearly. In loving you more dearly, help us follow you more nearly, day by day.  Speak to us now your message on this holy Palm Sunday, a day we had planned to come to your holy table in the sacrament of Holy Communion, but we come to you in other ways this morning, our hearts open to your presence our lives in need of your grace, speak to us now and may these thoughts and words speak your truth in love. In Jesus name we pray.
The people who shouted “Hosanna” at the gate of Jerusalem had very clear – and very wrong- ideas about who Jesus was and what he had come to accomplish. They wanted a Messiah who would put their Roman oppressors to flight; instead, Jesus was tortured by the Romans, offering the enemy forgiveness as He died on a cross.
Taylor says she grew up believing that people met God in church, not realizing that the whole world is the house of God. “The problem is, many of the people in need of saving are in the churches, and at least part of what they need saving from is the idea that God sees the world the same way they do.
We look for God in the predictable places in our predictable ways with our old self-serving expectations. To be truly saved, however, is to seek God beyond our confining expectations and to practice being  awake to God’s presence and power in surprising, even in ways contrary to our expectations ways.
Taylor describes an encounter with God in Hawaii as she walked on the lava rock, water splashing around her & at times over her, splashing against the rock, and after the crashing of the waves there was suddenly a sanctuary a still pool of water and it hit her with the sound of sheer silence. The calm water so green and cool calmed her too. When she walked around this still pool, with only the occasional ripple from the breeze off the ocean, she came to 3 upright stones near the edge where the water was deepest. The rocks were shaped like baguettes, the colour of humpback whales. This display of rocks, this alter, marked the spot of something significant that had happened there and it had affected a person in such a way that they marked it. When this happened to Jacob, with his encounter with God, in the rocky wilderness, where he saw something that changed his life forever, he named it Bethel.
Jacob was still a young man when he left running away from home, his family had become unraveled, his dad was dying, his twin elder brother Esau, who was entitled to their father’s blessing was cheated out of it because their mother and Jacob colluded together for Jacob to receive it instead. This enraged Esau so much that Jacob left with literally the cloths on his back fearing for his life. When he ran and walked as far as he could, he looked around for a stone to use for his pillow. When he laid down to sleep his head on the rock, the warmth of the sun was still in the stone.
As he lay sleeping this dream came to him, it was so vivid. A ladder was set up on the earth, with the top of the ladder reaching heaven where the angels of God were ascending and descending. Then suddenly God was there beside Jacob, there was no trumpet fanfare or warning, and God told Jacob of his offspring in the land and said to him, “I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”
Jacob awoke still feeling God’s breath stirring in the morning air, shaken by what he had just experienced, Jacob got up and…..16  he thought, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.” 17 He was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.”
18 Early the next morning Jacob took the stone he had placed under his head and set it up as a pillar and poured oil on top of it. 19 He called that place Bethel though the city used to be called Luz.
20 Then Jacob made a vow, saying, “If God will be with me and will watch over me on this journey I am taking and will give me food to eat and clothes to wear 21 so that I return safely to my father’s household, then the Lord will be my God 22
When those words came out of Jacob’s mouth, there was no temple in Jerusalem. Without one designated place to make their offerings, people were free to see the whole world as an altar. God’s presence could erupt anywhere, and when it did they marked the spot in any way they could, but people didn’t hang around for long, because God was always on the move.
For a long time God’s divine presence was content with a tent, a tent of meeting where God meant with people both inside and outside. But the tent was the face to face place, the place where the presence of God was so intense that Moses was the only one to stand it and when he left the tent he wore a veil over his face so as to not scare the young people.
 King David proposed giving God a dwelling place a permanent address, but God discouraged it, for God had been moving in a tent and a tabernacle. So David didn’t build a dwelling for God, but the next generation Solomon his son did, Mount Zion was the address in Jerusalem.  Still today, two ruined temples later, people from across the world travel to Mount Zion to leave their prayers in the foundation stones of God’s old address.
As important as it is to mark the places where we meet God, what happens when we build a house for God? A house on the corner, where people gather to say worship offer their prayers and praise God, because doing this together rather than alone reminds them of who they are, it offers a sense of belonging, community, shared values. They are special places, but it isn’t the only God resides.
Do we build God a house that we can choose when to go see God? Do we build a house so God doesn’t have to stay at our personal address? What do the four walls of God’s house do and say to the rest of the world? Are we trying to detain God? What about places such as the likes of the waterfalls, the mountains, the prairies, the trees, the desserts? What happens to the people who never show up in our houses of worship, can they still worship? What about all the other creatures that God has made, how do they offer their praises to their Creator? As it states in Isaiah 55:12  “You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.”
Francis of Assisi could not have told you the difference between the sacred and secular because he read the world as reverently as the Bible. For him a single bird was as much a messenger of God as a cloud full of angels. He made no discretion, there was no line between the church and the world & for this reason among many others, Francis is remembered as a saint.
Francis also built a church following a vision that was probably as vivid as Jacob’s ladder was to him. But the vision Francis had was to rebuild the church. Unsure what church God meant to rebuild, Francis chose a ruined one near where he lived. He recruited all kinds of people to help build and of course many people came just to watch and before long and before they realized it they were mixing cement. Even those unable to lift a single brick on their own meant and worked with others combining their efforts to work together, otherwise had they been individually stronger, they may never have meant. Through time building the church became more important than finishing it. Building it gave people who were formerly invisible, purpose and meaning and even friendship & worth. When the church that Francis had rebuilt was done, it did not stand as a shelter from the world; it stood as a reminder that the whole world was God’s House, God’s residence, God’s creation.
It is easy to forget that.// We often like to compartmentalize and envision our church, this particular place as God’s one and only holy place. But in fact the house of God stretches from one corner of the universe to the other. Sea creatures and ostriches, camels and butterflies live in it, right next to and along with people who pray and worship in languages and ways we do not speak or understand.
We are not in charge of this House of God, and we are not the judge of it, we were nowhere, when Almighty God laid the foundations of it, the earth, we are guests here, charged with serving other guests – even those we might call enemies. There is only one house and human beings must learn to live together in this dwelling place or time may run out on us all.
We need to use to wisdom to get along with others, it is a gift from God that is strengthened by practicing and discerning what is right and noticing what happens when it succeeds and when it doesn’t.
It is trusting that the practice of wisdom itself will teach you and me and guide us in what we need to know. Wisdom must be used or it loses its strength.  
As human beings we tend to separate things into many piles - separating spirit from flesh, sacred from secular, church from world, but we shouldn’t be surprised when God doesn’t recognize our distinctions.
Jacob in the wilderness, awoke to the presence of God even whom showed him a vision of heaven and of God’s presence even in the wilderness of the world. Maybe then Jacob began than to realize what David had written about in Psalm139 that reads  Where can I go from your Spirit?
    Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
    if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
    if I settle on the far side of the sea,
10 even there your hand will guide me,
    your right hand will hold me fast.
As Jesus rides into Jerusalem, people waved palms in praise to Him, they had seen Him raise Lazarus to life and they had their own expectations of who Jesus was and what HE could do for them. They based their praise on what they had seen and heard and their own self-serving expectations of who they wanted Him to be. There were many people, many powers that be, many who wanted  Jesus killed, there were His disciples who followed, confused about much, but faithful, there were beggars who sought food and miracles, there were children excited by the anticipation of the crowd and the celebration of a parade.
Jesus rode on, clip, clop, clip, clop he rode on knowing the cross was on the horizon, Jesus rode on for each and everyone. He didn’t compartmentalize, He didn’t show favoritism or mark any place as the holiest of holies, He rode on, clip, clop, clip, clop for each and every one, and for you and me too.
 The Son of God rode on. He rode on in majesty, rode on to die, many would not wake up to who Jesus was until after His resurrection. Many today do not know who He is yet, but He rode on for you and me, He rode on, rode on to die and rise again, defeating the gap between God and human kind. The witness of the suffering love and amazing grace of God in Christ Jesus, who is the way, the truth and the life.
"Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!! Hosanna in the highest heaven!"

Main source of content from Barbara Brown-Taylor An Alter in the World, A Geography of Faith
Reformed Worship Dec 18 Issue, Article entitled Everyday Jesus Spirituality – Customized Spiritual Disciplines submitted from Peter Schuurman who is director of Global Scholars Canada.
Bible refs NRSV & NIV








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