Sermon for October 11, 2009 Proper 23 Text: Mark 10:17-31 Title: "Addiction Affliction" A. Have you heard the story of the jeweler who happened to be seated on an airplane beside a woman wearing an enormous and brilliant diamond ring? After starring at it for a while, his curiosity got the better of him. He said to her, "I couldn't help but notice your beautiful diamond. I am an expert in precious stones. Please tell me about that stone." She replied, "This is the famous Klopman diamond, one of the largest in the world. But there is a strange curse that comes with it." Now the man was hooked. He asked, "What is the curse?" The woman frowned as she said, "Mr. Klopman." So it is with possessions. They can sparkle in the eyes of the possessor like a brilliant diamond. But one can discover that they just might come with a curse. Acquiring possessions can become a kind of addiction that can take a person's life over. Have you ever watched the show "Celebrity Rehab?" It's the story of 8 to 10 celebrities who have had their life taken over by one or more addictions: booze, drugs, whatever. They are under the care of Dr. Drew, a clinical psychiatrist and now TV star who runs a drug addiction center in Pasadena, California. It's easy to get addicted to the program; over a number of weeks, the viewer is drawn into the lives of these people like they were best friends, as they struggle to overcome the particular addiction that possesses them. It is horribly difficult for them, and some never make it. Well, a desire to have can be an addiction affliction itself. Possession obsession can cause us to live life in a way that places us at the center and God on the outskirts of existence. Case in point: the Rich Young Man, whom we meet in this morning's passage of Scripture. B. As the passage begins, Jesus and His disciples are continuing the long trip to Jerusalem, where the Master will acquire both the Cross and the Crown. But before they had even gotten started, an apparently very eager man places himself in Jesus' path.. Kneeling before Jesus in a humble position of respect, this man clearly recognizes both His goodness and wisdom. He addresses Jesus as "Good Teacher," showing that this man both respects and admires the Master. The young man asks Jesus what he must do to "inherit" the eternal life he desires. Here, eternal life is a synonym for being saved and part of the Kingdom of God. But instead of directly answering this man's question, Jesus first hones in on the man's reference to goodness: "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone." Jesus is not saying that He isn't good, but with these words He focuses the man's attention on the One who is the source of all goodness, His Heavenly Father. To find eternal life, one must look to the Father, and to the indescribable grace He offers to all humanity. The commandments quoted in verse 19 include, in order, numbers 6, 7, 8, 9 and 5. Although this story appears also in both Luke and Matthew, Mark is the only one who quotes Jesus as saying, "Do not defraud." This unique addition is believed by some Biblical scholars to be a restatement of commandment number 10 ("You shall not covet"), while others see it as an extension of number 8 ("You shall not steal"). Who knows? But this discussion is off the point of the story. After Jesus recites these commandments to the man, he swiftly insists, "Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth." Now, Jesus' eyes tell the whole story here. In verse 21, Jesus' eyes focus on this man with true compassion, and we get a sense of Jesus' regard for this man whose questions seem so sincere.. Later on in the story, in verse 23, Jesus' eyes become steely as He looks around to summon the other disciples to listen to Him with a single glance. And finally, in verse 27, Jesus once again looks at the disciples with both strength and compassion as He acknowledges that all things are possible with God. We can see by watching the eyes of the Master that He is filled with both compassion and a desire to help everyone grow spiritually. In light of Jesus' feelings of compassion for the young man, He states that the man lacks "one thing." But he actually gives him two commands. First, the man is to go, sell what he has and give it all to the poor. Second, he is to come and follow Jesus - a path that will lead him to the eternal life he seeks. Now everything comes crashing down. This man is no longer enthusiastic but "shocked and went away grieving for he had many possessions." Now, in Jesus' day, riches were generally assumed to be a sign of God's favor. To actually give up what God had blessed him with to find eternal life with God was illogical and incomprehensible, at least to the mindset of the day. The rich young man judged the cost of eternal life too high and sadly left. Once he had departed from the scene, Jesus and his disciples were left alone to discuss the matter further. Being saved and possessing an abundance of riches are in disturbing tension with each other. Author and historian Clovis Chappel wrote that when the Roman city of Pompeii was being excavated, the body of a woman was found mummified by the volcanic ashes of Mount Vesuvius. As you may know, this very famous volcanic eruption occurred in the 1st century, taking the resort city of Pompeii, built precariously on the side of the volcano, completely by surprise. Excavations have revealed much about Roman culture, because destruction came so fast that everything was preserved by the storm of volcanic ash that engulfed the city. This woman's position told a tragic story. Her feet pointed toward the city gate, but her outstretched arms and fingers were straining for something that lay behind her. The treasure for which she was grasping was a bag of pearls. Chappel said, "Though death was hard at her heels, and life was beckoning to her beyond the city gates, she could not shake off their spell...But it was not the eruption of Vesuvius that made her love pearls more than life. It only froze her in this attitude of desire." The rich young man was possessed by possessions. There was no room left for the grace of God in his life. He trusted in his own resources, and not the resources of the Almighty. But it wasn't just the young man who was puzzled; the disciples were "perplexed" at what Jesus was saying too. Jesus reiterates how difficult it is to enter the Kingdom. He offers the mind-sticking image of a camel passing through the eye of a needle. Such a statement has fascinating church scholars for generations, who find this saying hard to swallow, coming from the lips of the man who loves us enough to die for us. Some scholars have speculated that Jesus was referring to a certain gate near the outer wall of Jerusalem that was very narrow. This gate, known as the "Needle's Eye" in Jesus' day, would certainly have been hard for a camel to get through it. But Jesus' point is more radical than that. He is clear -- it is impossible for men and women to save themselves, whatever their financial state. Only through God is it possible to be saved. This section concludes with Mark's casting the disciples in an uncharacteristically positive light. Peter reminds Jesus that the disciples have already done exactly what Jesus had asked of the rich man - given up everything they had and followed him. In effect, Jesus agrees with Peter by promising that for all the things his disciples have given up for his sake, they will receive back "a hundredfold." C. Now what are we 21st century believers to make of this story? As always is true in Biblical study, there are certain contextual clues we should take note of before we apply what Jesus said to our own situations. First of all, we should notice that everything that occurs here occurs within the shadow of the Cross. Notice how the passage starts out: "After Jesus was setting out on a journey…" The journey was taking the Master to Jerusalem, and to His death and Resurrection. Mark wants us to keep the Cross on the front burner of our minds here, and interpret everything Jesus says in the light of this event.. The second clue we should notice is that the rich man asks what He must DO to inherit eternal life. Jesus immediately directs the man's attention to God, by whose grace salvation is available and only available. The man didn't have to do anything to gain salvation. Or perhaps more specifically, what He had done had not earned him eternal life. He had performed the Jewish Law to the best of his considerable ability, and had successfully kept all of the law. But he still knew something was missing; he still sought eternal life. What he never realized was that he could do all that is within his power to do and never improve his relationship with God. No one can earn his or her way into Heaven. The more one tries, the more one focuses on the self and the less one focuses on God. What the man had to do – and what we have to do – was to surrender something; namely, the riches that were keeping him from having a spiritual relationship with God Our last clue is a word clue. When Jesus addresses the disciples, He calls them "children." The astute reader remembers that a couple of chapters back, Jesus used a child as a sermon illustration, telling His followers that they must trust their Heavenly Father as a child trusts his or her earthly parents. By calling His disciples children, Jesus is reminding them (and us) that the childlike trust in God is pivotal in understanding what He is trying to teach. Now, about this young man; Jesus' eyes tell us that He loved this seeker. Jesus knew the fellow was sincere in his quest for eternal life. He was a model citizen, a promise keeper and a truth seeker. He didn't use his wealth to oppress the poor. He didn't go on a phony TV show and pick a wife out of a lineup of gold-diggers. He didn't squander his money on worldly trinkets or immoral pursuits. But Jesus knew that the man still had a problem. The Master tried to diagnose and treat that problem with His challenge: "Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me". Don't make the mistake that just because this fellow had to give up his wealth, that all Christians have to do the same. It's not the wealth that got in the way. It was the addiction.. Money, in and of itself, is not necessarily destructive, - in fact, a steady cash flow is essential for the work of the Church throughout the world. So it's hard to pinpoint money as a necessarily dangerous addictive substance. But clearly, there was something here that had the rich man hooked. The problem is not that he had wealth, it's that he trusted his wealth more than He trusted His Lord. Remember the context: Jesus is on the way to the Cross. God gave us His only Son so we might know eternal life. The man sought the Law to give him such eternal life, but it was a fruitless struggle. Salvation is only available by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. And we must trust the Lord as children trust their parents to know the saving and life-giving grace of God. The rich man had to give up the possessions that defined his life. Jesus challenged the man to make an exchange, to drop what limited him in exchange for what freed him so as to open up to a wider and more meaningful life. And so it is with us. What must we root out of our lives that may hinder us from following Jesus? Maybe it's an addiction to work. Maybe it's an attitude that says 'I can pull myself up by my own bootstraps.' Maybe it's an addiction to a bad attitude that never really loves others. The only addiction affliction we can have is addiction to God. That must be our first priority. In her book A Practical Guide to Prayer, Dorothy Haskins tells about a noted concert violinist who was asked the secret of her mastery of the instrument. The woman answered the question with two words: "Planned neglect." Then she explained. "There were many things that used to demand my time. When I went to my room after breakfast, I made my bed, straightened the room, dusted, and did whatever seemed necessary. When I finished my work, I turned to my violin practice. That system prevented me from accomplishing what I should on the violin. So I reversed things. I deliberately planned to neglect everything else until my practice period was complete. And that program of planned neglect is the secret of my success." May we begin the process today of defining what has us in chains, and releasing them to the Lord, so we might know His freedom and His peace. Amen. Keith Almond P.O. Box 4388 Leesburg, VA 20177 703-344-3569 |
Monday, October 12, 2009
Addiction Affliction
Monday, October 5, 2009
Men and From God, But So Are Women
Sermon for October 4, 2009 Proper 22 Text: Genesis 2:18-24 Title: Men are From God, But So Are Women! A. Gutzam Borglun liked to think big. He was the man responsible for designing and sculpting Mt. Rushmore, to honor the four presidents depicted there in solid granite. But he also sculpted on a much smaller scale. The lifelike head of Lincoln that prominently presides over the Capitol Rotunda in DC is also one of his creations. Borglun cut this particular work from a large, square block of stone in his studio. One day, when the face of Lincoln was just becoming recognizable out of the stone, a young girl was visiting the studio with her parents. She looked at the half-done face of Lincoln and her eyes registered wonder and astonishment. She stared at the piece for a moment then ran to the sculptor. "Is that Abraham Lincoln?" she asked. "Yes" he responded, kneeling over to talk to the girl. "Well," she answered, "How in the world did you know he was inside there?" The opening 2 chapters of the Book of Genesis present a theological view of what is inside us. Or, to be more precise, these chapters tell a story of how people are defined and shaped by their relationships -- the relationship between God and creation, humanity and nature, men and women, and husbands and wives. The careful reader will notice that chapter 1 relates an account of Creation from one perspective; chapter 2 relates the Creation story from quite a different perspective. Technically speaking, they represent different strands of tradition, each of them telling a different but related truth about God's sculpting of something-ness out of nothingness. We should read each chapter from the perspective of what they have to tell us about God's relationship with both nature and people. Chapter one teaches us that God creates and sustains all existence by His Creative Word. It teaches us that God chooses not to be alone, but wants to be intimately involved with the welfare of humanity. We learn from chapter 1 that God has created the Universe to be orderly (it was made in six days, or cycles), to be life-sustaining, to follow natural laws, and that this orderliness witnesses to a Creating and Sustaining God. And finally, God made humanity to be the pinnacle of Creation (the rest of Creation is "good", man is "very good"). God made man to be in His image, to be in relationship with all the rest of Creation. When the Gospel of John opens by declaring that Jesus is the Word of God, he is harkening back to Genesis 1, and is in effect saying that through the atoning death and Resurrection of the Lord, our proper created relationship with God, distorted by sin, lost through Adam and Eve, is restored. Chapter two tells us about ourselves. We are sculpted by a personal God out of the dust of the earth. But we are differentiated from the rest of Creation because we have the very Spirit of God breathed into us. We are able to relate to the Almighty Creator in a unique way. God created man to be in joyous, fulfilling relationship with His Father God. Such a relationship is like Paradise, and is allegorically called Eden. God desires us to have an intimate and satisfying relationship with Him. But then there is a problem. B. It is God who recognizes and defines the problem. "It is not good that the man should be alone." We should notice that in the first creation story, every time God finishes another day creating order out of chaos, He describes the creation by saying "it was good," When God finishes Creation, complete with man who is made in the image of God, the divine describes it all as being "very good." But here God says that something is "not good." The problem with this paradise is its emptiness - the man God created needs companionship. In verse 19 God seeks to remedy this through the outpouring of a series of new creative energies. God once again uses the "ground," as the raw material for creation. While these new creatures share with the human a basic commonness of being, these late arrivals do not receive the additional gift of God's "breath of life." Nevertheless, they all do receive the gift of life from God's own hand. As all these living things come together after their creation, God's first act is to establish them in relationship with the man. The man names each of the creatures brought to him, giving them both their character and their identity. In the OT, the name of a person or thing identifies a characteristic of the person or thing. For example, the name "Jacob", (he was quite a character whose story will come up later on in Genesis), means "cheater", and that is exactly what he did. He cheated his brother out of both his birthright and his father's blessing, both of which were his by tradition to have. In the Book of Exodus, we find out that God's name means "I Will Be With You!" The name tells you the character of the named. When a person names something, it also shows that this person has dominion over that thing. Man names all the animals, signifying that he is in charge over God's creation. But none of them fulfill the requirement of a "helper" or "partner" to the man. Now the use of "helper" is not meant to reflect any kind of subordinate role on the part of the woman. The word implies both equality and complimentarity in relationship. We should notice that since naming gives the man power and makes the other creatures subordinate to his will, his partner could never be named by the man, since to do so means they couldn't be in partnership. So rather than molding yet another separate creature out of the dust, God establishes that the man and this new creature will share a commonality of being. The woman is not created separately or given a separate name that would place her on a lower rung in the hierarchical ladder of creation. Physically she and the man are composed of the same stuff - they share the common elements of earthly dust and divine breath. The man is placed into a deep sleep before God removes the rib. This is not God hiding a mystery from the man; rather, it is to demonstrate that God is truly and creatively doing a new thing. The man himself reveals the equality of their relationship in verse 23. The integrally connected partnership of the man (Hebrew "ish") and the woman (Hebrew "ishshah") are reflected in their shared name. Little wonder the man exclaims "At last!" when God reveals the woman's presence to him. Adam exclaims, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh," a phrase which indicates kinship of character. The emphasis is, once again, on the "one flesh" concept - the basic sameness, the equality of these beings which were both divinely separated in order to be divinely joined as one in covenant with each other. The last verse, "Therefore, a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh," says in its own way that the relationship between husband and wife creates a new family identity, separate from that which they enjoyed as part of their former relationship as children with mom and dad. C. This passage makes three points that we should pay careful attention to: 1. First of all, we should notice that God bends over backwards for the sake of human fulfillment. Now if you have ever heard the notion that the OT is a testament of God's wrath and the NT is a testament of God's grace, then I am about to blow a hole in your theory! The simple fact of the matter is that God's grace and love towards people is painted large all over the pages of the OT. Did you notice how God related to the man in these verses: "God said, 'It is not that the man should be alone." (verse 18); "The Lord God formed every animal…and brought them to the man to see what he would call them, and whatever the man called every living creature, that was it's name." (verse 19); "The Lord God caused a deep sleep to come upon the man, and He took one of his ribs…and He made a woman (as a partner)" (verse 21). The tone of these verses is not that of a wrathful, vengeful, fear-inducing God. Our God cares about each one of us. He didn't want Adam to be lonely. And our God loves us so much that he shares with us His dominion over the earth. God allowed man to name and therefore define the character of each animal, even though Adam had nothing to do with their creation. And God wanted humanity to live in joy and harmony. That is why He created woman as a partner for man. God cares about us. He isn't distant and removed from us. He is as close as our very breathing, and He wants us to know joy and peace in relationship with Him and with His creation. There's a Spanish story of a father and son who had become estranged. The son ran away, and the father set off to find him. He searched for months to no avail. Finally, in a last desperate effort to find him, the father put an ad in a Madrid newspaper. The ad read: "Dear Paco, meet me in front of this newspaper office at noon on Saturday. All is forgiven. I love you.. Your Father." On Saturday, no less than 800 children named Paco showed up, looking for forgiveness and love from their fathers. Isn't it good to know that our Lord is there waiting for us like a loving Father, when we repent of our sin and come home, like the prodigal child? Isn't it good to know that God is on our side, and that nothing can change that? The Lord is in charge, even if it doesn't seem like it. And He wants the best for His children. He grieves when we grieve, and longs for relationship with each of us so He can bless us. 2. Secondly, this passage teaches us that marriage is a covenant between a man and a woman. Scripture is very clear on this. We don't condone same sex marriages or holy unions. The Anglican Church is a refuge for believers of every denominational stripe who believe that the Bible rejects the notion of blessing same sex relationships. My former church is still struggling with this notion. Now I don't have time today to open this can of worms. But I do want to be clear that it is important that we combine this point with the previous point, to be clear about who we must be as Church. We reject sinful behavior of any kind, whether it be in the context of same sex relationships or in the context of heterosexual relationships. We also reject the sinful behavior of lying, stealing, gossiping, defrauding, or otherwise hurting another person in violation of Scripture. But we never reject the sinner. Because all of us sin and fall short of the glory of God. And all of us are saved and transformed by the blood of Jesus. God loves even the sinner, and good thing, because that includes us all!! The church must never reject the sinner; we must only be clear about what is sinful. And we always must be clear that the grace of God can heal and transform. 3. And lastly, this passage teaches us that men and women are to relate as co-equal and complimentary partners within that covenant relationship. This has been made obvious in this morning's Scripture passage. It is a sad commentary to note that over the years, the Genesis account of the creation of woman has been used to put women down. But nothing could be a more inaccurate interpretation of the Scripture. Man and woman are created by God to be complimentary partners. Complimentary means we don't have to have the same gifts, but your strengths fill the gap left by my weaknesses, and vice versa. And partners mean we walk together through life, not one behind or ahead of the other. Actually, the Genesis passage gives pretty good advice for married couples. It makes clear that marriage is a covenant, where two partners join together because the whole is greater than the sum of the two. Being in covenant doesn't mean we don't have disagreements. But we do have an understanding of how we choose to relate to each other for the good of the relationship. And perhaps most importantly, a good marriage is one that has God in the middle. God created us to be in covenant together, and God will help us bind and nurture this marriage covenant for the sake of the spiritual growth of the couple. I can't think of the marriage covenant without thinking of marriage counseling. I remember on one occasion when the couple's conversation with me turned to a review of the marriage vows. I stressed to them that we enter into marriage of our own free will, and promise to love and to cherish one another. I asked them if they were entering into marriage of their own free will. The husband-to-be looked over at his fiancé, and she responded, "Go ahead and say 'yes'". God calls us to live in fulfilling relationship with Him and with each other. When things go wrong, God is there to bring healing and wholeness through the community of believers called the Church. When things go right, we find the "peace that passes understanding in Christ Jesus." Amen. Keith Almond P.O. Box 4388 Leesburg, VA 20177 703-344-3569 |
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Singposts of the Christian Life
Sermon for September 27, 2009 Proper 21 Text: James 4:7-5:6 Title: Signposts of the Christian Life A. In the days before the advent GPS systems, William Barclay, a British theologian, liked to tell the story about a young boy who thought it might be fun to change directional signs on the road. That is, at an intersection of the road where one sign pointed in the direction of the city of Seattle and another sign pointed in the direction of the city of Tacoma, he'd switch them around. The boy wondered how many people could he send down the wrong road with the switched around signs? The Book of James is also about switching signposts, only for James, they are the signposts of the Christian life. James was written to counterbalance certain misunderstandings that had arisen in the lives of some believers who had read Paul's Letter to the Romans. Paul makes it clear in Romans that we are saved by faith. Paul was well aware that no matter how hard one tried to live faithfully to the letter of the Law as expressed in the 10 Commandments and in the 613 additional religious laws that were laid upon the faithful of the 1st century, somewhere along the line, we're going to slip. We can't earn our way to Heaven. We are saved by grace, through faith in Jesus Christ, who died for us and who lives forever so we might have new life. Now some believers took this theological reality to the extreme, saying that if I am saved by faith, then it doesn't matter how I behave, as long as I believe in Jesus. Indeed, my faith doesn't necessarily have any influence whatsoever on how I interact with other people. This way of thinking happens all too often even today. I was in a small rural church one time that had a major dispute about where the pies should be placed in the kitchen prior to serving them for the annual turkey supper. One woman actually left the church community because several new comers to the church had convinced the rest of the women working in the kitchen that it would be more efficient to put the pies on the counter beside the sink instead of the counter next to the refrigerator. "It's not the right way to do it", she said. "We've never done it that way before, and I am not going to be part of doing it that way now. Those new people are going to ruin this church." I hardly think the ultimate fate of the Kingdom of God rested on the positioning of a cooling pie, but she was deadly serious. James addresses this issue by turning the signposts of the Christian life so they point the way to living faithful lives as disciples of the Lord. Being saved by faith is supposed to make a difference in the way we live. We are Christians in every aspect of life, not just on Sunday mornings. James expresses this theme most succinctly in chapter 1, verse 21, where he says. "Be doers of the Word, and not merely hearers." Live the life of Christ. Don't give being a Christian mere lip service, but mean it! B. James invites us to recognize that if we want to live as faithful servants of Jesus Christ, we have to live humbly before the Lord. Now be careful here. Humility is not self-deprecation, and it does not allowing people to run all over you. Rather, living humbly recognizes that God is ultimately in charge of my existence. It is in Him that we live and move and have our being. He has given me specific gifts. He has placed opportunities before me to use my gifts. I am a wonderful and unique creation of God. God has shaped the circumstances of my life such that I am where I am and who I am at this moment. Now of course I have free will, but somehow God can work within my free will to shape events so they come out as a blessing, for us and for others. Now I don't need to tell you that living humbly doesn't come naturally. Indeed, it is a complete reversal of the way we tend to live. The opposite of living humbly is living arrogantly. Arrogant living says that I am in complete and ultimate charge of my life. What I have I earned by my own efforts. Arrogant living doesn't even put God in the daily equation of life. It is self-centered, rather than God-centered or other-centered. Now I don't have any problems with persons who pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. But to say God has nothing to do with our lives at all is to deny that Christ is the Lord, and is ultimately in charge of both the world and our world. James starts out our passage by saying "Submit yourselves to God. Resist the Devil and he will flee. Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands…purify your hearts…lament and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy into dejection." Now believers are not being called to a sad-sack existence here. Rather, if we are living life arrogantly, without the Lord, then we are ensnared by the Devil. We have to recognize this, turn to God, repent of our sin by cleansing our hands, purifying our hearts, and mourning our loss of joy, life, and peace in living humbly with the Lord. "Humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will exalt you." Now as we have already mentioned, James will have nothing to do with private religion. To James, if you call yourself a Christian, you have to act like one. Faith and works are not opposites, but rather are intimately connected. Real faith leads to real conversion, and real conversion makes a difference in the way we treat others. In the rest of this morning's passage, James identifies three areas of arrogant, of which I want to look at just two of them. 1. First of all, in verses 11 and 12, he warns against judging or slandering another person. Slander always seeks to gain advantage at the expense of another. It is always an inner judging of another, because it reflects personal hatred and animosity. We judge others when we size up a person by his or her appearance; we judge others when we speak disparagingly against an ethnic group. Judging and slandering involves simultaneously lowering the neighbor and elevating the self. Therefore, when we judge, we forget the most basic commandment Jesus preached, namely, to love others as we love ourselves. James calls us to remember that, as the Psalmist says, only God can judge, and that we should only worry about doing the Will of God ourselves. Author H.A. Ironside relates an interesting incident in the life of a man named Bishop Potter. "He was sailing for Europe, and after he found his stateroom, he noticed that another passenger was to share the cabin with him. He chatted for a moment with his roommate, then after a while went to the purser's desk and inquired if he could leave his gold watch and other valuables in the ship's safe. He explained that ordinarily he never availed himself of that privilege, but he had been to his cabin and had met the man who shared the other berth. Mr. Potter didn't think he looked like a very trustworthy person. The purser accepted the responsibility for the valuables and remarked, 'It's all right, sir, I'll be very glad to take care of them for you. Your roommate has already been up here and left his valuables for the same reason!'" 2. Don't boast about our control over tomorrow. The form of arrogance, described in verses 13-17, is not subtle. "Come now, you who say 'Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money. Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring." In other words, with little or no notice, our life can completely change. We could have a car accident; we could get diagnosed with a terrible illness. We could lose a loved one. Many things happen outside our control. Now James is not saying never plan. But he does say that planning the future without God is a confidence falsely placed. It is the quality of the braggart, the boaster, or the foolish loudmouth. Again, such an attitude pushes God to the side. It assumes that nothing is outside our control, when in point of fact, many, many things are out of our control. We can rely fully and completely on our good fortune, or our business acumen. But James points out that such an attitude is eventually going to run into a brick wall. We can't even guarantee that tragedy won't happen tomorrow, much less a year from now. At its core, this attitude views the world as being run solely by us. But such is not the case. It is God who miraculously maneuvers life in such a way that His ultimate Will is done. He is in charge. We are not. To recognize that fact is to live humbly. To ignore that fact is to live arrogantly. In 1969, in Pass Christian, Mississippi, a number of folks were preparing to have a "hurricane party" in the face of a storm named Camille. The wind was howling outside the posh Richelieu Apartments when Police Chief Jerry Peralta pulled up sometime after dark. Facing the Beach less than 250 feet from the surf, the apartments were directly in the line of danger. Peralta yelled, "You all need to clear out of here as quickly as you can. The storm's getting worse." But they all just laughed at Peralta's order to leave. "This is my land," one of them yelled back. "If you want me off, you'll have to arrest me." Peralta didn't arrest anyone, but he wasn't able to persuade them to leave either. He wrote down the names of the next of kin of the twenty or so people who gathered there to party through the storm. They laughed as he took their names. They had been warned, but they had no intention of leaving. Well, you know what happened. Camille was one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes ever seen. At 10:15 p.m., scientists clocked Camille's wind speed at more than 205 mph. Raindrops hit with the force of bullets, and waves off the Gulf Coast crested between twenty-two and twenty-eight feet high. News reports later showed that the worst damage came at the little settlement of motels, go-go bars, and gambling houses known as Pass Christian, Mississippi. Nothing was left of that three-story structure but the foundation; C. Now we need to point out that James is not just giving us good advice, though he is certainly doing that. He is also giving us a recipe for successful Christian living. Here's the thing – not a single one of us has lived a perfect life. On one occasion when I was an Associate Pastor at a large church, I sat in on a Staff-Parish Relations Committee meeting (this is the Methodist equivalent of the Search Committee) when they were drawing up a description of what they wanted in a Senior Pastor. Some of the qualities included being a magnificent administrator, a powerful preacher, a skillful counselor, and a constant home visitor. Finally, after 20 or more qualities where written down, one of the committee members said "Shall we just say, 'Walks on water,' and ask the Bishop to send Jesus?" No one is perfect. There isn't a one of us who hasn't been kicked around by life. Some of us come out of an abusive childhood. Some of us come out of a history of drug or alcohol abuse. Some of us might never have gotten the breaks on our job that we thought we disserved. Some of us might be in trouble now. All of us need healing from some hurt. And living the way James spells out is the way to healing and wholeness in the Lord. Living humbly before God is far from being a dishrag. It is a way of being in fellowship with the Almighty, of acknowledging that sure, we can live without God, but not forever and not very well. Living humbly before God is living a life that admits it isn't perfect, but also admits that God doesn't care. He takes us as we are, forgives us, and brings us healing. It doesn't happen overnight. But over time we can know the peace that passes understanding through faith in Christ. And Church, we need to know that perfect people don't enter into our worship space each Sunday morning. But broken people do. Needy people do. Lonely people do. And we need to love them and accept them the way Christ loves and accepts us. In Chicago a few years ago a little boy attended a certain Sunday school. When his parents moved to another part of the city the little fellow still attended the same Sunday school, although it meant a long, tiresome walk each way.. A friend asked him why he went so far, and told him that there were plenty of others just as good nearer his home. "They may be as good for others, but not for me," was his reply. "Why not?" she asked. "Because they love a fellow over there," he replied. Jesus said "Come, all who are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." That is a promise we can take to the bank. Amen. Keith Almond P.O. Box 4388 Leesburg, VA 20177 703-344-3569 |
Sunday, September 20, 2009
True Status
Sermon for September 20, 2009 Proper 20 Text: Mark 9:30-37 Title: True Status A. Humorist Dave Barry, in his book Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway, writes: "When I got to Washington, I discovered that even among young people, being a good guy was not the key thing: The key thing was your position on the great Washington totem pole of status. Way up at the top of this pole is the president; way down at the bottom, below mildew, is the public". (I have a feeling that may be changing, especially since the march Saturday before last, but that's not his point anyway!) "In between is an extremely complex hierarchy of government officials, journalists, lobbyists, lawyers and other power players, holding thousands of minutely graduated status rankings differentiated by extremely subtle nuances that only Washingtonians are capable of grasping. For example, Washingtonians know whether a person whose title is 'Principal Assistant Deputy Undersecretary' is more or less important than a person whose title is 'Associate Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary,' or 'Principal Deputy to Deputy Assistant Secretary,' or 'Deputy to the Deputy Secretary,' or 'Principal Assistant Deputy Undersecretary,' or 'Chief of Staff to the Assistant Assistant Secretary.' (By the way, all of these are real federal job titles!) "Everybody in Washington always seems to know exactly how much status everybody else has." Status is not only important in government jobs; it's important in other aspects of life. Most private businesses are status driven. I know of one business where your status determines which floor of a 10-story building you work on; the higher the rank, the higher off the ground you work. Position in the company can often be determined by physical position in the office – we all know the importance of the "corner office". Status is even a factor in the church. We preachers judge other preachers by the size of the church, the number of worshippers on Sunday morning, and the enormity of the budget. Now as long as it doesn't get out of hand, status seeking can be a great motivator for excellence in the workplace. A little healthy competition is always a good thing. But the problem is, for some of us, the drive to succeed can be a kind of drug. It can take over our lives. It becomes the focus of everything we do. When we are caught up in the addiction of success above everything else, when we would do anything to succeed, and it doesn't matter how many lives are trampled over and ruined, then we are in trouble. Status seeking in its ultimate form is true idol worship. It is a false god who promises much but delivers little. Perhaps that is why Jesus redefines status in the Kingdom of God. In the God's Kingdom, "whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all". Let's be honest – this goes against the grain. Certainly it baffled those first disciples, who also sought after status, defined as power and position. In understanding Jesus' definition of status, we have to first understand the primary reason behind Jesus' definition, namely, that God is in charge and we are not'; therefore, what we do and accomplish in this life is by His Divine Will. But perhaps I am getting a little ahead of myself. B. The passage begins with Jesus and his disciples traveling through Galilee. Galilee is familiar country. It is symbolic of God's call on their life, since this is the place where they all heard the summons from the Master to "Follow Me." This is the second time Jesus had taught them about His death and Resurrection. On this occasion, however, Jesus puts pastoral care of His small flock above mission to the masses. In this passage He shuns the crowds, preferring to help His disciples understand the journey, namely, that "The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again." All humanity is both implicated and redeemed by this one act. As is often the case, the disciples don't get it. All this talk of death and resurrection doesn't fit into their idea of what Messiah-ship is all about. They just can't get over the notion that the Messiah must be a military leader, conquering the Romans and taking back the Kingdom of David from Latin hands. What Jesus is telling them is way over their heads, and they're afraid to ask him to clarify. After all, they don't want to look stupid! But that's exactly how they look in the next verses. It's important to remember that this chapter of Mark begins with the transfiguration, that glorious mountaintop experience in which Jesus' clothes become "dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them". There He enters into a conversation with Elijah and Moses, the two superstars of the Old Testament, and God's voice booms out of a cloud, "This is my Son, the Beloved, listen to Him!" Pretty heady stuff. Peter, James and John are shocked, terrified and totally impressed by this display of divine power. When Jesus and the disciples come down from the mountain, they run into an adoring crowd with a great need that the other disciples couldn't fix. Then Jesus strongly rebukes an unclean spirit causing the spirit to leave the boy, "crying out and convulsing him terribly." The boy seems dead at first, but Jesus lifts him up, and he is able to stand. Again, this had to have made an enormous impression on the twelve disciples. So given that religious tradition has taught them all their lives that the Messiah would one day come and set up God's Kingdom on earth, and given all the amazing things they had seen, I guess we can't blame them too much for their confusion. Nonetheless, Jesus still had to take pains to re-educate His followers on God's real plans for the salvation not just of the Jewish people, but all people. He predicts that His death is imminent, but it is also part of God's greater plan. Along the way, Jesus overhears a disturbing conversation between some of His disciples. Privately, inside the house, He asks them, "What were you arguing about on the way?" They were silent because they had been sparring with one another about who was the greatest in the coming Kingdom. Jesus' unexpected question catches them red-handed, and by shaming them, He exposes their pettiness and self-centeredness. The disparity couldn't be greater. Jesus is "the Son of Man" who comes "not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many." In contrast, the disciples are small-minded, self-interested souls whose primary concern is status. They want a seat next to the power or an honored place in the kingdom. When Jesus sits down, He is assuming the familiar posture of a Rabbi who is about to teach His followers. He calls the 12 disciples, and says to them, "Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all." To be first you must be last, he insists; to be a star you must be a servant. To have status in God's Kingdom you have to give up status in the eyes of the world. And to illustrate this counter-cultural career advice more clearly, Jesus takes a little child in his arms and says, "Whoever welcomes one such child in My name welcomes Me, and whoever welcomes Me welcomes not Me but the One who sent me." The jaws of the disciples really hit the floor at this point, because in the first century a child is a non-person, a non-entity, a nobody, better seen than heard, if you have to see them at all! There is no reason for a little child to be close to a great teacher such as Jesus, or in the middle of a group of men. Children are to stay with the women and keep themselves out of the way, until they grow up and can start exercising some adult responsibilities. Jesus is saying in effect, "When you welcome a nobody, you welcome me. And when you welcome me, you welcome God. So if you want to be first in the kingdom of God, then you had better get used to being a child-welcoming servant of all people." This is a really different way of looking at status. But when you get right down to it, fame as we all conceive it is a fleeting thing anyway. Today's hero is tomorrow's goat, and vice versa. The public approval polls seem to go up and down on a whim. Recognize any of these names: Owen D. Young, Hugh S. Johnson, James F. Byrnes, Harlow Curtis? You should; according to Time magazine, these are all people who have been designated as "Man of the Year" by Time, indicating they had the greatest impact in that year of all persons living on Earth. The celebrity of today is all but forgotten tomorrow. C. So what's the bottom line? Well, give me a minute. There's just one more thing we have to notice. In the very next story, the disciple John tells Jesus that on another occasion, they had chastised a Jewish exorcist who was not one of them, but who was casting out demons in Jesus' Name. Jesus tells them, "Don't stop him. No one who does a deed of power in My Name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of Me." In other words, just because this man is not like them doesn't mean he isn't a follower. Notice that the same phrase "In My Name," is used, connecting it with the story where Jesus uses the little child as a sermon illustration. Jesus follows this up by telling His disciples, "whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward." And finally, in verse 42, Jesus says, "If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea." This is hyperbolic, not literal, but that is typical of ancient Near Eastern teaching. Here too, the phrase "little one" is used, the same phrase Jesus used when He embraced the child before His disciples. What I am trying to say is that when Jesus says "Whoever welcomes one such child in My Name welcomes Me," He is not simply talking about the physically young, even though they have to be treated with special care in the Church. Jesus also includes those who are new in the faith, namely, spiritual children in the Lord. And He is telling us to welcome believers who don't look like us, or who don't have cultural traditions like us. He is inviting us to give a cup of water to the underprivileged. In short, Jesus is calling us to unity in the Spirit, patience with those who may not be as spiritually mature as we are, and service to those who need aid. Jesus is calling us to be on the side of the underprivileged, for that is the mark of true greatness. Jesus is calling us to flip our usual attitudes toward greatness and honor and fame completely upside down. Our normal perspective is to look at life from the top down, giving our greatest attention to the people who have competed with one another and come out on top. But Jesus is saying, "No — change your perspective." Instead, he says, look at life from the bottom up and give your greatest attention to the people who have no fame. Focus on children, on single mothers, on cab drivers, on dishwashers, on chambermaids, on the working poor, on the homeless. "Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me," He tells us. Christians are to live lives that are radically different from the way the world lives. Our priorities have to be different. Our attitudes have to be different. We focus on the welfare of others, not the welfare of ourselves. We don't rank people, because God sees us all as unique creations of His, and He has given us different gifts and different opportunities together to help bring in serve the Kingdom. We never look down on people; rather, we count people better than ourselves. In the final verses of this extended passage, Jesus says something that sounds very mysterious, but it really isn't, "Everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good, but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it?" Times will not be easy for believers. The world doesn't like people who don't conform to the ways of the culture. But Christians are supposed to be counter-culturalists. We are meant to have a salty edge, a sting, a sharpness like salt in a wound. We are called to be salty Christians! And with God's Spirit, we can be! One New Year's Day, in the Tournament of Roses parade, a beautiful float suddenly sputtered and quit. It was out of gas. The whole parade was held up until someone could get a can of gas. The amusing thing was this float represented the Standard Oil Company. With its vast oil resources, its truck was out of gas. Sometimes, we Christians forget that we are "clothed with power", and when we forget the Spirit, we find themselves out of gas. My friends, this is a call to saltiness. This is a call to service. This is a call to be great in God's Kingdom, by being the least of all and servant of all. Shall we answer?! Amen. Keith Almond P.O. Box 4388 Leesburg, VA 20177 703-344-3569 |
Monday, September 14, 2009
The Meaning of Messiah
Sermon for September 13, 2009 Proper 19 Text: Mark 8:27-38 Title: The Meaning of a Messiah A. You might remember comedian Yakov Smirnoff, who liked to joke that when he arrived in the US from Russia, he wasn't prepared for the incredible variety of instant products that he found in American grocery stores. "On my first shopping trip," he said, "I saw powdered milk; you just add water and you get milk. Then I saw powdered orange juice. You just add water and you get orange juice. Then I saw baby powder, and I thought, 'What a country!'" He does have a point, though. We all love to have everything we need instantly. We love our fast food. When we buy something that has to be ordered, we get a little miffed because we can't have it yesterday. When we see the doctor, we want to see him or her right now! All this is human nature, and it is as old as humanity. In Jesus' day, people wanted instant salvation. They wanted someone to come along, and free them from their Roman overlords. And they would follow just about anybody who seemed to be able to do that. Josephus, the 1st century Jewish historian, records any number of so-called leaders – dare we say "Messiahs" – who led a group of followers in rebellion against the foreign occupiers. They always came to a bad end. The people in those days believed Jesus was the instant salvation Messiah. They flocked around Him because they thought He was going to mount the white horse and knock the Romans off their high horse. For a time, His own disciples even thought they could be Cabinet members in His new regime. But as we shall see in today's passage of Scripture, this is not what true Messiah-ship is all about. B. This morning's passage has a lot going on in it. I think, though, that we can squeeze the most meaning out of it by realizing that these few verses address and answer three very basic questions, in this order: 1) Who is Jesus, 2) What does being the Christ (i.e. the Messiah) really mean, and 3) What does being a disciple really mean. When you get right down to it, these are also three of the most basic questions people of faith ever ponder. The answers to the first two critically affects our own answer to the third. It is obvious from the way Mark's Gospel is laid out that he thought this incident was a critical turning point in Jesus' ministry. Prior to this exchange, Jesus and His disciples were in ministry in and around the Sea of Galilee. After their visit to Caesaria Philipi, Jesus and His followers headed towards Jerusalem. Before the events of this passage transpired, Jesus concentrates on healing and teaching; He both proclaims and demonstrates that the Kingdom of God is coming in power through Him. But after these verses, Jesus starts to talk about His death and Resurrection. In addition, if you add up all the verses in Mark and divide by two, the exact center of the Gospel lands at this story. So what Mark is proclaiming here about Jesus is of critical importance. Now we also should notice a few things about the geography of the region, because they are also helpful in understanding the passage. Caesaria Philipi is located in the area we call the Golan Heights. Damascus is a mere 50 miles to the northeast. The Golan Heights are beautiful rolling green hills that overlook the Sea of Galilee. From this vantage point, Jesus and the 12 could see all the sites of their previous ministry stretching out below them. Caesaria Philipi was at that time also home to a magnificent temple to the god Pan; tourists came from all over to visit the site. So given all this as a backdrop, Jesus asks his followers, "Who do people say that I am?" What's the word on the street? What are people twittering about me? They answer, "Some say John the Baptist" (by this time he was dead, killed by King Herod – maybe he had come back to life!); "others say Elijah" (tradition had it that he would return immediately prior to the coming of the Messiah); "still others say one (of the more ordinary) of the prophets". But then Jesus gets straight to the heart of the matter: "But, you, who do you say that I am?" Peter gives both an honest and straightforward answer: "You are the Messiah," a term which means "anointed one," the divinely chosen leader of the people. So in answer to the first of our three questions – Who is Jesus – we see that Peter answers correctly. He is God's anointed one, anointed to perform a divinely mandated plan. But when we take up the second question – What does being the Messiah mean? – we find that Peter and the others are very confused. Over the course of the Galilean ministry, the disciples just hadn't gotten who Jesus was. When Jesus calms the storm in chapter 4, the disciples responded, "Who then is this, that even the wind and sea obey him?" He had been called a teacher, and had called himself the Son of Man, who has the authority to forgive sins. In short, none of the disciples had shown any comprehension of Jesus' identity until this point in the narrative. By now they have correctly figured out that He is the Messiah, but in the very next verses we find that their knowledge of real Messiah-ship is sorely lacking. As we discovered last week, this is why Jesus tells them to remain silent about the whole matter. No one could understand what kind of Messiah Jesus was until they view His Messiah-ship through the lens of the Cross. Jesus began to teach them that the Son of Man "must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again". To be the true Messiah, Jesus has to undergo suffering, death and resurrection — there's just no way around it. It is the only way God can accomplish the salvation of the world! Then and only then will Jesus be seen clearly as a divinely chosen leader. So the position of Messiah requires a cross before a crown. Until he completes these duties, Jesus doesn't want people talking about him. But Jesus is keenly aware that many people are looking for a military Messiah — God's Commander in Chief — to drive the Romans out of Jerusalem and restore the kingdom to Israel. When Jesus talks openly about his suffering and death, Peter takes him aside and begins to rebuke him. It's inconceivable to Peter that God's anointed leader would have to suffer a humiliating death! But Jesus quickly turns the tables and rebukes Peter, saying, "Get behind me, Satan! You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things". Peter began to "rebuke" Jesus, using the same verb Jesus used when he "sternly ordered them" to keep his identity as the Messiah a secret. The same word describes Jesus' actins to silence the demons he encountered or to describe His calming the wind and the waves of a violent storm at sea. It's a word that means to strongly correct a person's way of acting or thinking, much like a person might correct a naughty child. Peter's rebuke doesn't last long, however. He is rebuked, in turn, by Jesus, again using the same verb. When Jesus said, "Get behind me Satan!" to Peter, He wasn't actually calling Peter the Devil. But Satan can work through any of us if we don't understand the ways of the Lord, to resist those ways. The question is, who is in charge? If Satan is in charge, then Jesus doesn't have to suffer and die; Peter unknowingly reflected this when He rebuked Jesus about discussing His future death and Resurrection. Of course Satan, working through Peter, doesn't want God to effect a Crucifixion, because that is the only way Satan is finally and ultimately defeated. Satan is tempting Jesus to resist His God-necessitated death on the cross, much like the way He tempted Jesus in the Wilderness. Peter was deceived by the Master of Lies. But as we all know, God is in charge. Jesus rebuked Satan when He rebuked Peter. Now we know what being the Messiah really means. It means that Jesus/Messiah had to die, so all people might have eternal life. Jesus has to lead; His disciples have to follow after Him. He leads us to die on the cross, and to rise again in God's love. And like Him, we too have to journey right behind Him to the Cross. When Poland was still under communist rule, the government ordered crucifixes removed from classroom walls, just as they had been banned in factories, hospitals, and other public institutions. Catholic bishops attacked the ban that had stirred waves of anger and resentment all across Poland. Ultimately the government relented, insisting that the law remain on the books, but agreeing not to press for removal of the crucifixes, particularly in the schoolrooms. But a certain zealous Communist school administrator decided that the law was the law. So one evening he had seven large crucifixes removed from lecture halls where they had hung since the school's founding in the 1920's. Days later, a group of parents entered the school and hung more crosses. The administrator promptly took these down as well. The next day two-thirds of the school's six hundred students staged a sit-in. When heavily armed riot police arrived to eject the students from the building, they went into the streets. Then they marched, crucifixes held high, to a nearby church where 2500 other students from nearby schools joined them for a time of prayer in support of the protest. Soldiers surrounded the church. But the pictures from inside of students holding crosses high above their heads flashed around the world. And the priest who led the prayer service told a watching world that one should never doubt the power of the Cross. C. This leads us to the final question the passage addresses, the most important question of all: What does being a disciple mean? Here, my friends, is where the theological rubber hits the road of life. And with what has already been said, I bet you can figure out the answer. Jesus said to His disciples, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me." That's the key to being a disciple: one follows Jesus. But wait! But wait! I'm too young to die!, one might ask. Jesus doesn't ask us to literally climb up on the cross with Him. But what He does ask – indeed, He demands – is that we die to self. Jesus invites us to put Him on the throne of life, at the center, not out on the sidelines somewhere, only addressed when we have an emergency. Jesus invites us to kill our own self-will and self-love! And in its place, one puts love of God before all things in life. As He goes on to say in this morning's passage of Scripture, "Whoever loses his life for My sake and the Gospel's will save it!" In the original Greek, the word for "life" is better translated as "self". We die to self. We live for Christ. Now dying to self is not the same as hating myself. Rather, it's that we find our most authentic way to live when we walk with the Lord and follow His Will for our lives. This is not always easy to do. It takes a lifetime of practice. We keep taking our self-will back after it is surrendered and placing it on the throne of our existences again. Losing one's life for Christ's sake and the sake of the Gospel is not always an easy way to live. It requires us to sometimes take a stand that may be very unpopular. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German theologian whose faith led him to die at the hands of the Nazi's at the age of 39, expressed it this way: "When Christ calls a man, He bids Him come and die." In his case, it was a literal death. For all of us, it's a death of our old self-will and self-centeredness, and a life lived for the Lord. Now here's the crux of the matter. When we answer the question Who is Jesus and we answer the question What does being a Messiah mean, then we can answer for ourselves what does being a disciple mean. Who is Jesus? He is the Son of God, God incarnate, who came to earth as a man to die for us so we might know forgiveness of sins and relationship with the Father. What does being a Messiah mean? It means dying so others might live. What does being a disciple mean? It means following behind the One who died for me, and dying to self while living for God. Or, as the apostle Paul puts the matter, "I have been crucified with Christ; it is not I who live but Christ who lives in me." Being a disciple means dying daily to self, and living daily for Christ. It means learning about the Lord through being in Church and in Bible studies. It means praying throughout the day, talking to the Lord, and striving to follow His Will for our lives. And it means loving others as we love ourselves. You may know about the annual Ididerod dogsled race in Alaska; it is a grueling 1000-mile race over snow and ice, run for prize money and prestige. You may not know that the race commemorates an original race run to save lives. Back in January of 1926, six-year-old Richard Stanley showed symptoms of diphtheria, signaling the possibility of an outbreak in the small town of Nome. When the boy passed away a day later, Dr. Curtis Welch began immunizing children and adults with an experimental but effective anti-diphtheria serum. But it wasn't long before Dr. Welch's supply ran out, and the nearest serum was 1000 miles of frozen wilderness away. Amazingly, a group of trappers and prospectors volunteered to cover the distance with their dog teams! Operating in relays from trading post to trapping station and beyond, one sled started out from Nome while another, carrying the serum, started from Nenana. Oblivious to frostbite, fatigue, and exhaustion, the teamsters mushed relentlessly until, after 144 hours in minus 50-degree winds, the serum was delivered to Nome. As a result, only one other life was lost to the potential epidemic. Their sacrifice had given an entire town the gift of life. What kind of disciple are we? The question is answered by posing another question, namely, Who is Jesus Christ to me? A prophet. A good man. A remarkable teacher. Or is He the Son of God, who loved the likes of me so much that He died so we might live. This is the Jesus we need to follow. There is no other. Amen. Keith Almond P.O. Box 4388 Leesburg, VA 20177 703-344-3569 |