Steven Hovater

Tag: sermon

  • What Is a Sermon?

    “Sermon” is a common enough word, and it’s used in lots of different ways. We gain something by examining the word a little more clearly though.

    In my view, a sermon is a moment that occurs when a person leads a worshipping congregation in listening to the word of God. That definition excludes some things that we commonly call sermons, but puts a little more shape on the essence of the practice.

    First, note that what I’m calling the sermon refers to the moment itself; the moment in which the congregation receives the word of God. There is a distinction between the moment itself and a couple of things which we might commonly call a sermon, such as the manuscript that is used to prepare for the moment, or perhaps an audio recording of the moment. Those things are artifacts of the moment, but they are not the thing itself.

    The thing itself is the moment when the word is preached and received by a worshipping, gathered church. That context is the second critical feature, and it is at the heart of the difference between a sermon and an essay, or even a speech. A sermon is a moment shared by a group of believers who are worshipping—they’re engaging in the practice of submitting themselves to God. They are particularly primed to receive the word because of their worship posture, and the presence of the spirit in the congregation.

    This “moment” based description of the sermon’s essence also holds another way that sermon differs from other speech acts: because it is in the context of worship, it is given in a space in which all present—speaker and hearers—are subjecting themselves to God. The preacher is just as subject to the word proclaimed in the sermon as the hearers. The word is for the whole gathered church, including the preacher! Indeed, the same spirit which moves the preacher to preach is also moving the church to receive the word! As a part of the congregation, the preacher does not stand apart, delivering a word as an outsider. Rather, it is as a part of the body that the preacher speaks, and necessarily the preacher must receive the sermon along with the rest of the congregation.

    I know it’s quibbling, but If someone sends me a document, and says “Hey, read this sermon.”, in my own head I think it’s important to expand the shorthand a bit, because I don’t think that technically, I can read the sermon either before or after it’s moment. I can read the manuscript of the sermon, and I think maybe very usefully. But it’s not the same as the thing that happens when the church gathers together, and listens for a word from God.

  • Find Out

    A Sermon from Ephesians 5:3-20

    Central Church of Christ
    Little Rock, Arkansas
    March 22, 2026

    We’ve had a really full morning already, and my heart is full from this hearted morning in our worship together. Thank you so much for all of what we’ve already had: our family blessings, the reflections on Mike’s death, our shared communion—all these are part of what it means to be a community together, to share a life together. Highs and lows, everything in between, are part of what it means to live together and to be a people, to be a family. I’m grateful for everything that we feel together this morning.

    Let’s have a moment of prayer, and then I’ll get into the book of Ephesians. This practice, what we call a sermon, is not just a speech. It’s a moment that we create in our worship each week, holding space for the word of God amongst us, to listen to God together. We’ll do that here after we pray together.

    Lord God, Giver of all good things, we celebrate the great gifts from your hand today and all of these little ones. As we together as a community are about the work of trying to help raise these kids together, we pray that you would be with us. And God, we pray that you would honor yourself by training these kids to be men and women of God, followers of Jesus, and we pray that they and their parents would receive a lot of help around here. Lord, we need it, and so we pray that you would by your Spirit work through that.

    And Father, for those that are holding grief in their hearts today, we also pray that you would be with them, because today reminds them of their own struggles with parenting or infertility, or because they’re holding in their hearts the loss of somebody like Mike, who has been a part of so many of our lives.

    Oh God, we pray that you would be with us in our grief too, and so in the celebration and in the mourning that we all share together, in the lament that we cry out and in the songs of joy that come from our hearts, oh God, we pray that you would be with us in it all. And we pray that your name is honored by the way that we live through the mountaintops, in the valleys, and all the places in between. In the name of Jesus, we pray. Amen.

    The word of God that we’ve been listening to together for a while is the book of Ephesians. In Ephesians, Paul lays out in these magisterial first three chapters to tell us about what God has done in breaking through what is our sin, the things that are corrupted in our lives, to bring us back to himself, to rescue us. The great rescue mission of God in which God takes the initiative, not waiting on us, but God takes the initiative to come and bring salvation to us and give us new life, to tear down the things that are walls between different kinds of people, to break those things down so that we can really know what it is like to have peace with each other and peace with God. Ephesians is all about that great story of God’s invasion, God’s initiative to reset right what has been so wrong.

    But we would be wrong to say that just because God is taking the initiative that there is no part for us to play. And as Ephesians tells that story, as Paul writes about what it means to live out, to walk out the implications of those truths in our life, finally we come in chapters 4 and 5 to where we just need to deal with some realities of the way that we live.

    Chapter 5, in the first couple of verses we talked about last week, contains one of my favorite passages in all of the Bible: “Therefore be imitators of God as beloved children and live in love, walk in love, live a life of love”—your translation may say—”as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” And this is the orienting reality, the foundational truth on which everything else that comes after has to rest, has to be supported by. You can’t—if you don’t start with love, then none of the other stuff works.

    But Paul, as always, doesn’t just hold love as some abstracted ideal. It’s not just a word that we say, it’s not a feeling that we have, but it is something that changes how we live in the world, how we treat each other, and even how we think about each other in the world.

    And so verse three, the text goes on—and this is our text for today—”But fornication”—it means just any kind of sexual immorality, any kind of corrupted pursuit of sex purely for pleasure without any sense of what God’s intention for it is—”impurity of any kind, greed, must not even be mentioned among you”—shouldn’t even be talked about, it doesn’t have a place in our conversation—”as is proper among the saints.” It says “entirely out of place is obscene, silly, vulgar talk, but instead, let there be thanksgiving. Be sure of this: no fornicator or impure person, and no one who is greedy—that is, an idolater—has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God. Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes on those who are disobedient. Therefore do not be associated with them, for once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light, for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.”

    It’s one of those places that Paul speaks about the deep contrast of the world, and in the language that he uses here, it’s the language of light and of darkness.

    He’s really speaking of that in the sense of illumination. In darkness, you just can’t see well. You bump into things. You don’t know where you’re going. You can’t clearly see the realities of what is laid out, even if it is just right under your nose. In the light, things get shown to be what they truly are. You can really see where things are, the nature of things, the shape of things. You can find your place in the world. Darkness is disorienting; light is orienting. It helps you find out where you need to go, what you need to do next. But in the darkness, there is only confusion.

    Paul, right here in this space, talks about what it means to be children of light. I love what verse nine says. I think this is one of those verses that aren’t as well known as they should be, but he says, “For the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.” Everything that’s good and right and true has within it the seed—or it’s the fruit of being able to see well and being illuminated in our minds, in our spirits. Good things, good fruit, comes out of being able to see clearly, he’s saying. In contrast, nothing good comes out of everything being completely dark.

    Ironically, we only turned on half of the lights on the switches this morning, and I feel like even though it’s kind of disruptive to turn them on in the middle—I was like, I cannot in good faith preach this sermon with half of our lights out. So we may need to do some lightbulb work around here sometime this next week. Light matters.

    Just as Paul thinks that in the fruit of the light are all these good things and right things and true things, in the darkness is all illusion. The darkness doesn’t understand. It doesn’t really see things clearly. Darkness, for Paul, is where you’re bumping around and you don’t have any sense about life. You don’t have any clear understanding.

    You can’t really get a feel for what’s true or what’s not, and you’re kind of just playing guesswork with the realities of life. The biggest word that we use as a metaphor—this is one of those metaphors to talk about what it means to be separated from God, to be in the darkness—but the one that we use more than any other, of course, is that people who are separated from God are lost.

    Sometimes we use that almost to mean just like a technical description of being religiously out of bounds. A lost person is just simply somebody that doesn’t know God. But it’s a metaphor, right? Being lost is a metaphor, and it’s a painful one. To be lost is to not know where you’re going, to be confused about where you are in the world and where you’re supposed to be. Being lost doesn’t feel good to anybody, does it? Being lost feels disorienting. It doesn’t feel like you’re having a great time. It feels like you’re in panic mode because you don’t know how to get to the place that you’re supposed to be.

    That’s what darkness feels like for Paul. Darkness and lostness are about being in these places where you can’t get your bearings right because you don’t have the right ability to see clearly in the world. In the beginning of this little section here, we got some descriptions of kinds of behaviors that indicate that sort of thing for Paul. Just like he has a description of what living in the light looks like—good, right, true, living a life of love just as Christ loved us and gave himself for us—those are all images of light for Paul.

    The darkness is broken sexuality—sexuality just kind of run amuck, pursuing things for its own nature, for its own pleasure. Of course, Paul would, I think, be horrified to think about the way that our culture thinks about sexuality, but please don’t be naïve about it.

    The Roman world had its own distortions too, and the way that the Roman world thought about sexuality was something that was really truthfully oriented towards power and status in a lot of ways. It was just as corrupt as many of the forms of distorted sexuality that exist in our world. Paul would look around at that and say, “To bring that idea, to allow your sense of your body and your body’s desires to completely drive you so that you use it as a force to just satisfy yourself, but you aren’t thinking about what it means to be a gift to somebody else in the world—that doesn’t have any place in a community of life. That’s darkness. It’s bumping around without any sense or any understanding about the real truth of things.”

    Paul also mentions this: greed is something that does the same thing. You can be so consumed with your own desire to acquire and possess that it blinds you to the realities of the world. You don’t have any sense about the spirit of God because of your desire to hold on and possess. Out of proportion greed is—I mean, we don’t think about it as related to sexuality. Who would put those two things in the same corner? Well, Paul would.

    And then amazingly, he puts something else into the space, and he talks about just the way that we speak—vulgar, silly, obscene talk. He says it doesn’t have any place among you. And I gotta be honest, at this point, I’m like, “Come on, Paul, just a little silly talk, all right?”

    I don’t know. I do think there is something—now, I think the Bible in many places evidences what it means to take yourself not too seriously. I think a sense of humor is not a bad thing. But part of what Paul is talking about is the sort of speech that doesn’t know how to put serious things into serious language. Actually, it’s one of my favorite words here. It’s one of my favorite Greek words when he talks about silly talk here. This is a great Greek word that nobody knows, but we kinda do. You ready for it? Come on, guys, at least play along with me.

    Pretend you want to be as nerdy as I do. Sometimes you guys want to know this word—this Greek word. Yeah, all right, that’s what I’m talking about. It’s “morologia”—moron words. Okay, he’s saying, “Hey y’all, stop using your moron words.” By the way, if I hear somebody say that at some point this week at Central, you get extra bonus stars. Okay, I got some more words—you got some moron words, got some moron talk, right?

    What Paul is saying here is the kind of talk that doesn’t have wisdom associated with it. It’s not just making dumb jokes. Moron talk for Paul is the kind of words that underline a life of foolishness instead of wise talk that has some kind of sense about the way things work in the world. Moron words for Paul—I’m gonna keep saying that—moron words for Paul are the kind of words that urge you to not take life seriously, and they show up in all kinds of forms.

    Chad and Shannon and I were talking with a group of students earlier this week, and we talked about how racism often hides behind the phrase “I was just joking,” and how many other forms of evil do the same thing. Where they send to take something sinister that should be taken seriously, and then they just say, “Oh, I was just making a joke. Don’t take it. Don’t worry about it.” But to take some form of evil—racism or anything else—and then hide it and pretend that it’s okay because it was a joke, that’s moron words. That’s the kind of foolish talk that I think we’re speaking of here—words that really do affect the way that you think about yourself or the way you think about other people or the way that you think about the world. And when you treat those things flippantly, Paul would say that kind of language that distorts the truth—that’s like turning out the light switch in your room. That kind of language, that kind of foolish talk, makes things darker. It hides truth.

    It’s harder to understand or to have any sense in the world. And yeah, I think Paul would have a lot to say about the sexual distortions of our world. I think Paul would have a lot to say about the greed that’s so rampant in our world. Man, I’m telling you the truth—Paul would have a whole lot to say about the moral decay in our society too, and the way that we use language to hide the truth.

    All of this is a description of what darkness looks like for Paul, and he points out—I mean, what he’s probably partly saying is that all of this is living in obscurity. It’s living in a non-reality. It’s living in an illusion. It’s a way of living in a world without actually being able to see things truly. And Paul wants to invite people that are living in that sort of dark space—he wants to invite us into the light, to come into the light. And he says the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.

    And then we come to verse 10. There’s one of my favorite verses in Ephesians. He says, “Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord.” It goes on: “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what such people do secretly. But everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says, ‘Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.’”

    Paul says all of you that are living in darkness, that have these spaces—maybe you don’t think about living in darkness, a space of darkness in your life—Paul wants to encourage us to flip on all the light switches, to turn the light on, to rouse from our slumber, to wake up. Wake up and turn the lights on and see things for how they really are. And this phrase that he uses in verse 10 kind of sums all that up: “Try to find out what it is that pleases the Lord.”

    This is what we’re trying to do as a group, as a church, as a people. Our mission of following Jesus together—doesn’t that by necessity involve trying to walk with Jesus so that we see things well? To wake up and find out, Paul says, and it seems to me to be exactly the kind of thing that I want to dedicate my life to. I think we’re all called to pursue with dedication finding out what pleases God.

    And all of our discipline that we have right now—we marked off time where we sit in unbearable heat and listen to somebody talk about the scriptures. Right? OK, I can see where you’re coming from. What are we doing here? What in the world are you guys doing here today? You drove by who knows how many people out jogging and having happy times in parks, lots of houses where people are sleeping in on Sunday morning. What are you doing here, you crazy folk?

    Are we not all here together in part—I know there’s a lot of things that we’re doing together—but isn’t part of it the pursuit of finding out what God really wants? We come and we share bread and wine together. We listen to the word of God, and we’re trying—we’ve dedicated ourselves to understanding what it is that really pleases God. And that may mean shining light in some dark, hidden corners of our lives, and it may mean turning on light and trying to find ways of illuminating what has been hidden before. But in the end, it is for everything to come out into the light, for the truth to really be known. And I get that that’s scary, but it’s good. And at the end of the day, a life lived in the light of God’s truth is just better than a life hidden in the darkness of sin. Get up, wake up! That’s what Paul wants to do—not to waste our life.

    But the text goes on in verse 15 to say, “Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people, but as wise, making the most of the time, for the days are evil.”

    He says you have lived in this darkness with all these kinds of parts of your life that are just sort of hidden away. Come out, come out into the light! See things as they really are and live well. Make the most of the time, Paul says. He’s trying to help us not just to not throw away our lives, but to actually live them well—to live our lives in the fullness of the good things Paul here is calling important.

    Note that he’s not just saying this to people who are pagans outside of the church—he’s calling people who are already following Jesus, and he’s saying make sure you do it in the most awake way possible. Come out into the light and wake up.

    Now, you may not connect it so much, but when Paul goes on from that, he says, “So don’t be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.” And then he says, “Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

    I think what he does here at the end—he tells the people of the church who are thinking about what it means to live in the light, trying to live away from all of the distortions of life that are possible—Paul here comes to the end, and when he calls them to make the most of the time, it’s remarkable that he lands on precisely this thing that we’re doing together right here. It kind of ends in worship. Make the most of the time—not with drunken parties, but with songs with your brothers and sisters and with gratitude and thanksgiving. Paul, I think, is leading us toward a life that holds worship central.

    Worship is about calling truth out into the world. It’s about seeing things clearly, having these moments where we are aware of the presence of God, and we allow our attention to God to help us reflect on our lives and to think about what we need to do and living differently. And ultimately it comes to a place of gratitude—that’s where he ends here, right? Giving thanks for everything. Grateful, thankful worship. It’s a good ending place for this text.

    You know, life in the darkness where we are completely bumbling around and we’re lost and we have the despair of having to pretend like things aren’t really the way they are—that kind of life leads towards frustration and resentment. A lost life lived in the darkness means things are constantly being corrupted, bent out of their true purpose. So even the things that should have been good, that we thought were going to be great gifts, they end up being broken and they end up causing more pain than we ever could have imagined.

    But in the light—in the light—we receive the things that are meant to be gifts as good and righteous and true. In the light we end up being able to see things for what they really are, and at the end of the day, they’re gifts. They’re gifts. Everything in life is a gift.

    For a long time, my habit in prayer has been to call God “the giver of all good things,” and that’s not just flowery language. It’s a bit of theology to remind myself that when I speak to God, one of the most fundamental ways that I know God is that God is the one who has just given us everything. Everything good comes from God. And when the lights are on, you can see it. When the lights are on, you can receive it. When you’re living awake, you begin to know that the things that are good in your life—no matter how winding the road was that brought them to you—the good things in your life have come from God.

    The person who lives in the darkness doesn’t get that—they don’t notice that they can’t see it. But when God has taken the initiative and broken into our world, it’s like he races around turning on all the light switches in the house so that you can finally see it. And it might feel like the house is in disorder. There might be some stuff I gotta get picked up and moved back into place. There might be some stuff that’s gotta get changed in your life when God turns on the lights. At the end of the day, it’s not for your shame—it’s for your good. It’s so that you can receive and hold and know the good things that are the gift of God.

    For Paul, living life in the darkness isn’t some life of pleasure that it’s just a shame that you have to turn away when you turn to Jesus. For Paul, when you turn to the gospel, you turn to Jesus and you allow God to turn all the lights on in your life. It allows you to see all the gifts. It allows you to receive the good things that God wants to put in your life.

    When Paul says, “Find out what pleases the Lord,” find out the will of God—the will of God is to bless you. The will of God is to give the greatest gifts of life. I call God the giver of all good things, and I think for us, God knows that what he wants us to be in the end is just people who know how to receive the blessings.

    Listen, this is hard in some ways for us. In some ways, it causes us to live differently in the world. It’s not just harsh words—it’s an invitation. So my friends, I just want to say it with Paul today, and I want to invite you into the light. I want to invite you, and if that means that you need to let some of the light switches be turned on in your life and make some changes, my friends, repent. Repent and change. Do differently.

    Repentance—the call to repentance—is not meant to be one out of shame or anything like that. Repentance itself is a good gift from God. It’s an invitation that says, “Come and receive the good gifts of God.” And if you’ve been in a place where you’ve been hanging out with some Jesus folk, found yourself in church this morning, but haven’t quite taken those steps to go and be one of his people, come into the light. Come to Jesus. Receive what Jesus wants to give you, and it’s all the good things of life, my friend. So I can give that invitation to you, and the rest of the church with me too. We want you to join us in finding out what pleases God. Join us in this life of serving Jesus together. You’re invited to do that while we stand together and sing.

  • Imitators

    A Sermon on Ephesians 5:1-2
    Central Church of Christ,
    Little Rock, Arkansas
    March 15, 2026

    Ephesians 5:1-2 says “Walk in the way of love just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and a sacrifice to God.”

    Ephesians 5:1-2, the text that Christopher read for us just a moment ago, feels something like the punchline of the book. We’ve been hustling through this cascade of things that God has done for us and that he has changed about our lives in bringing about our salvation and bringing us together, breaking down the dividing walls that live between people and making us one. Then in the last chapter, in chapter 4, we really see this set of things that defines the contours of what a new life looks like in Jesus—what it means to turn away from certain behaviors that are harmful to other people and to turn towards God.

    And we finally get to this place, and it’s almost like we have rushed right up to this last space. If you remember, the very last verse of chapter four says, “Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander and all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ has forgiven you.” And really, that sets the stage for these first couple of verses. This is the windup for these two verses that I think are really enough for a sermon here: “Be imitators of God as beloved children and live in love. Live a life of love, walk in love”—this is one of the walking verses—”as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”

    It is good for us to spend a fair amount of time thinking about the different things that we turn away from as we come to follow God. Here is the great single summary of what it is that we are turning to, and for Paul, what we are turning to is above everything else—it is a life of love. It is walking in love. It is what it means to imitate Christ. At the end of the day, it is to love each other, to love our neighbors, to love strangers, even to love enemies.

    Love is a word that we have all the time in our society. It means a billion different things to everybody, and to be honest, it means something different to me thirty different times a day. And sometimes it’s hard to discern whether or not the life that I live really is a life of love or not. Is it a life of real love—in other words, dedicated to the good of other people that are around me—or is it the kind of love that is more interested in sort of putting on a good face for my own desires, just so that I can get what I want at the end of the day?

    In that magisterial chapter in First Corinthians 13, Paul puts some directions about what love looks like in the household of God, and it’s worth reading again—not just on your wedding day.

    Paul says, “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong, a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.”

    Can we hold up for just a second and remember that this isn’t just rhetoric? I mean, if you take the things that are on the front end of his “but have not,” it actually looks like a pretty doggone holy life, doesn’t it? I mean, notice all the things that make up his portrait of what could be on the other side of the scales. It’s miraculous gifts of tongues of angels, it is the prophetic power, the ability to speak with the voice of God, understanding of all mysteries, the kind of faith that literally moves mountains, the sort of sacrifice of giving away everything that you own, and even handing over your very body to martyrdom. I mean, that kind of feels like a lot. Does it feel like a lot to you?

    It’s remarkable how quickly the early church recognized—it’s absolutely remarkable how quickly they recognized—that you could get a lot of the religious forms down right and still have something hollowed out, missing from the middle. I mean, they’re just twenty years into the life of the church. Paul knows that it could be possible that you could have all of the things that happen in worship. And in their day, this is the space of the miraculous: speaking of tongues, the prophetic things that were happening in their worship, these incredible acts of the Spirit. Paul recognizes very early that you could do that but not have a heart of love. He recognizes that you could be a person who has incredible faith in God and even a great understanding of the ways of God. You could be an absolute scholar and yet have something missing in the heart, still have a space in your heart that’s devoid of love. And I mean, it’s crazy how quickly they recognize that you could live so sacrificially that you could literally give away everything that you had—give it to the poor. That you could even go so far as to become a martyr, and yet somewhere in your heart, in the space where it really matters, you failed to cultivate love. And Paul says all of those other things, and it’s his way of saying not just those specific things, not just these four categories. He’s saying everything—everything that you can imagine about the way that you construct whatever it is that Christianity could look like. All of it without love falls apart. All of the things that look right, that could be really impressive, without a heart of love, those things are worthless—like a noisy gong, like a clanging cymbal. They’re just not worth anything.

    It’s not just poetry for a wedding day. It’s a picture about what the most important part of discipleship is. So Paul goes on to say that love is patient, it is kind. It is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way. It’s not irritable. Love is not resentful. It does not rejoice in wrongdoing—it does not celebrate wrongdoing—but it rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. And the next thing, of course, he says is that love never ends. This is a vision about what it means to live as a person of faith.

    Now it’s not just a solo picture of love. Love is not the only thing, but it’s the foundational thing. In fact, if you pay attention to what he says on the other side, he says that love is the thing that produces all these things. But you can’t go from the outside, and you can’t start with being patient and then patient your way into love. You don’t start with just kindness and get to love. You don’t start with envy—or the lack of envy—or root out boastfulness or arrogance from your life, root out rudeness, and then somehow get to love. You can’t just stop insisting on your own way, and eventually that turns into love. It’s the other way around. Paul is giving us descriptions about what love is. Love is rooted in our hearts, and love is the anchor of our being. These are the sorts of things that come out—these kinds of things which sound a lot like the fruits of the Spirit, right? These sorts of things are what happens when our heart is given over to love.

    Now, in this passage, it’s a little unclear about what he means—what kind of love or who is the object. Paul doesn’t do any of that kind of defining work, and frankly, I’m not sure that he particularly would care about those distinctions in this context. It’s really about love as the definition of who we are, the definition of what it is that God is creating on earth through us—the kind of new community. That’s why it fits so well in our text in Ephesians, because for the community of faith, love is a starting point. It is a commitment that leads to all the other outgrowth.

    In fact, all the things that Paul is saying about the old life and the way that we used to live—those are things that ultimately find their remedy in love. Love from God, the way that God has loved us, and also the love that we in turn have for God. “Be imitators of God,” he says. This is what comes out of you when you’ve been loved. Be kind to each other, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Therefore, be imitators of God.

    Imitation is Paul’s ultimate way, his ultimate lens of thinking about what the difference between the old way and the new way is. He’s not saying to all the people in the church there in Ephesus, “Don’t you guys see how awesome you are? So love each other well.” He doesn’t say, “You’ve been so blessed to have a wonderful church family. Make sure that you love them well.” Instead, he roots his call to love not in any kind of human action whatsoever.

    He says this is the way that God sees you—that the gracious forgiveness of God is for you a sign of the great love of God. So imitate that. Start there. Start with the imitation of Christ. Start with the imitation of God, and then let that love spread out to the way that you treat the people around you.

    Imitation of the way of Jesus is right at the heart of what it means to be a people who follow Jesus together. That’s why we reserve time every year to make sure that we’re rooting ourselves in the gospel stories so that we understand how Jesus spoke, how Jesus acted, and we can get a picture of what his love for people really looks like in the story of Jesus.

    Even as we take it this morning, what we’ve done today in sharing communion together is imitating a story of Christ—really play-acting something that happened in the story of Jesus where Jesus himself, at the end of his life right before he’s crucified, holds bread up to his disciples and reminds them that he is sacrificing himself for them. And then he goes on and he says, “So do this in remembrance of me.”

    And you know what? I think most of the time we take it as meaning “do this in remembrance of me”—take bread and take juice or wine in remembrance, to practice communion or the Lord’s Supper. “Do this”—you know, this practice that you do on Sunday mornings together—”do that in remembrance of me.” But maybe what he means is, “Just as I have given up my body for you, do that in remembrance of me. Just as I have poured out my blood for the sake of you, don’t just take in remembrance of me, but maybe you do this for other people in remembrance of me.”

    You understand what I’m saying? It’s not just a ritual. It’s an ethic. It’s not just something that we receive—it’s a new way of life. When we practice this communion ritual, what we’re doing in this moment is we’re rehearsing the story of Jesus’s great sacrifice, of Jesus’s great act of love for us.

    We rehearse it and remember that that’s what it means to follow Jesus. To reflect on our other great ritual, this practice of baptism, where we come into the story, we’re doing the exact same thing. And baptism is not just a place where we are washed in the blood of Jesus and where we are therefore forgiven of our sins. It is that—it’s great and I love that it’s that—but just like communion, it’s also a space where we are giving ourselves over. We’re saying, “Just as Jesus died, was killed and buried and resurrected for the sake of other people, I take on that story for myself.” In other words, in places where it’s my life or somebody else’s, I choose to offer my life. Where it’s my simple preferences versus somebody else’s, I choose what’s good for the other person. When it’s my rights versus somebody else’s, I look to the way of Jesus and justice. Just as Jesus was killed and was resurrected, I’ve taken that story on for myself for the sake of other people. I don’t just benefit from the ritual—it’s not just something that I receive. Baptism isn’t just a ritual; it’s an ethic.

    Communion and baptism—really what we’re doing is we’re rehearsing the story of Jesus because we are called to imitate the story of Jesus in our lives. These are signs not just of the love of God, but of the love of God which goes through us to each other, into our neighbors and strangers and the enemies around us. This is what it means to be people who follow Jesus together. We follow him to the water. We follow him to the table and we follow him in love at every chance we get.

    They say that imitation is the greatest form of flattery, but of course what Paul is calling us to is not just to flatter God, but to worship God. And when we think about imitation in the sense of what it is that we are recognizing in God and that we are trying to follow and imitate God’s love in our own lives, we will often come to the limits of our own capacities. We will come to places where we know that love should look different, but we just kind of fall apart and we fail and we mess up and we let that selfishness that so corrupts our lives—we let it kind of come to the front again.

    When I think about the relationship between imitation and worship, what I think is both the ways that we are called to do what God has shown us—to imitate that story, to live it out in our own ways—and also we come back to the table and we go to the water and we recognize not just that this is just a teaching that we imitate, but it’s also something that demonstrates the difference between ours and God’s. In our attempts, in our broken attempts to imitate God as often as we can, we will often find ourselves brushing up against our own corruption, the sin of our own hearts.

    And you know what? There is an element when we are confronted by that—when we’re confronted by the guilt, we’re confronted by the bad feelings that come with guilt, we are confronted by sometimes shame, the embarrassment at the way that we treat other people in our own failure to live in love. And even though we have those feelings, and I hope that those feelings move us towards repentance and a desire for repentance, they should also move us most importantly to a recognition of the great love of God, which is so far more than we could muster on our own. So that our failures become a witness, even to the greatness of God. Even our failures, even our own limitations of love, ultimately show us and remind us of the incredible, unique love of God.

    Now we’re pursuing it. We want to imitate it. We want to live it out as well as we can in the world. But every time we fail to do that, even though in some sense you could say, “Well, that’s a failure in their witness to Christ,” and that’s true, but even as we fail, the unfailing love of God is still given witness in our lives. My own limitations ultimately serve to remind myself and everybody else around me that I’m not God.

    Imitation is not just flattery. Imitation in the Christian way is about worship. It’s about recognition of who God is, even as we fail, and even as we find our own hearts to need more grace to love well. When Paul says in Ephesians here to be imitators of God, to live a life of love, it’s a great calling. It’s a hard calling. It’s a difficult calling, because we will always find ourselves not living up to it. But as we stretch, as we reach, as we repent, and as God in His own grace teaches us and transforms us over and over again by the same story—by the same story over and over and over again in our lives—this is where God does His work of making something new.

    People don’t know how to love. As much as we talk about it, as much as it’s a word in the air, as many thousands of different ways that we use the language of love, we still don’t know how to do it. God is faithful, and God is bringing to us over and over again the story that defines love. And God has the audacity to pull us into His story of love and to give us a spirit that will teach us little faithful ways, bit by bit, inch by inch, about what it means to be people who imitate the love of God in our lives.

    This is, like I said, kind of the punchline of the story. But if you are paying attention, chapter 5 and chapter 6 are still there, right? The book’s not over yet. We’ll come back next week and we’ll talk about some of the rest of what’s in chapter 5, and then we have more to explore.

    We’re starting to be patient for a few more minutes, and that’s the way it is when you give yourself to this life of imitation and worship. Sometimes you find yourself right at the place where love is calling you, and it’s just hard. This is where I need to get back into the fundamentals—the fundamental calling of love. But then you also have to think about what love looks like in practice. You have to think about what love looks like in your home or in your business or in your school. What does love look like in the streets?

    So there’s a cycle, right? We recognize our limitations. We’re called into God’s story. We find ourselves repenting, and we lean into it a little bit more. Of course, we find ourselves called back into our limitations as we do this. Love is not a one-stop fix. It’s something that we’re working on, right? You know, that’s right at the heart of what I think we’re about here—right at the heart of what I think it means to be this gathered people who comes to tables, that passes bread and wine around on Sunday mornings, that sings songs of worship, recognizing the love of God. A community that has the audacity to share life with each other a little bit—laugh with each other’s kids, celebrate victories, mourn defeats, and lament tragedies. Just hold each other up a little bit to see each other and be known, to be willing to let other people know you. All of that together—it really is about learning to love, isn’t it? I mean, isn’t that what we’re doing?

    I don’t know how you think about it. I don’t know how you think about what it is that we’re doing here, but we’re kind of like a love training camp. We’re kind of a place where people—I think what we’re doing together is we’re coming and we’re diving into each other, just hoping that God—God who loves us through and through—that God will just give us the grace to learn what it means to love well. And you know what? I know I’m not done with it.

    I know that I have a lot of places that I still have to learn where that description of things that we read in First Corinthians shows me places that I still need to grow and still need to stretch in the way that I love people well. But by the grace of Jesus, I’m not where I used to be either, right? I mean, what about you? Has following Jesus made a difference for you? Has he taught you something about what it means to love well?

    There’s an old story—it’s an old Amish story about a man, and somebody asked him, “Are you a Christian? Are you a follower of Jesus?” And he responded, “Well, I don’t know. You’ll have to ask my neighbors.” Do the people with whom I share life—can they recognize that the love of God has grown within me? Can the people with whom I work and play and learn, and the people who live down the street from me, can they tell a difference that following Jesus has made a difference in how I love? And the answer is sometimes yes and sometimes no, and I want to be more yeses than I want to be nos. But I’m still learning, and I think we all are together. And I think that’s the heart of what we’re trying to do when we say we are people who follow Jesus together.

    I think what we mean is that we are a people being trained by Jesus to love well. It’s a pretty compelling vision, isn’t it? I don’t know why the church sometimes stops short of saying the message that way. There’s just so much extra stuff sometimes. Sometimes it seems that we’re selling all the things that Paul in First Corinthians says don’t matter without love.

    If you’re a person that hasn’t yet signed up for all this, I just want to say to you this morning, when we talk about coming and being baptized, being part of the church, we talk about giving your life to Jesus. This is what we mean by signing up for a different kind of life and recognition of the sacrifice that Jesus has made for you—signing up to be one of his apprentices, his trainees. Signing up for this, it’s not just an online course. Signing up for this course of following in his way happens in a moment and it happens over the course of your whole life.

    Today we have a moment of invitation, and I want to say if you’re in a place where you have been looking for something like that, you’ve been exploring this Jesus stuff for a while—man, sign up for it. Go for it. Give your life to Jesus, letting him teach you what it means to love well. Let him take all the things that make you broken and let him teach you what it means to be one of his people, one of the people who are in his school of love.

    And my friends, if you’ve been here for a while and you’ve just been going through one of those seasons where this stuff has faded into the background, repent. Come back to Jesus. Come back to the teacher. Give him again—put yourself back in the story and let him do some work.

    As we sing, if you’re in one of those places where you’re at a place where you need to come back to God, or if you’re in a place where it’s time to get started, you’re welcome to come while we stand and sing together.

  • Names—A Sermon on Hosea 1

    At the market, a man picks vegetables, tying to decide between the vegetables. He thumps a melon, scans the cucumbers, and inspects the onions. He notices a cute little girl playing with her brother near his basket and smiles at them. He turns to their parents who are standing nearby and, in the chatty way that people sometimes talk at the market, asks a normal question: “Your kids are beautiful. What are their names?”The parents expression darkens—the mother turns away, finding something else to do. The father’s eyes narrow, and he steps closer. Pointing straight at the little girl, he says, “We call her ‘unloved’. Unloved.” Not knowing how to respond, the man shuffles his feet a bit, and finally says, “And the boy?””Not mine.””Oh, I’m sorry, I thought…””No, that’s his name.  His name is ‘not-mine.’ “Hosea is a shocking story. It does not allow for passive bland reading, and I assure you it does not consist of passive, bland writing. It opens with the story of Hosea’s family—a family whose very existence could not but shock literally everyone who met them. The book of Hosea consists mostly prophetic poetry. Not the poetry which many of us have in mind—the dry tedious metered verses we labored to understand as school kids. This is the kind of poetry that Walter Brueggemann describes as “shattering, evocative speech that breaks fixed conclusions and presses us always toward new, dangerous, imaginative possibilities.” (Finally Comes the Poet, 6) Hosea is full of wrecking-ball language, the kind that comes to destroy the peace of the present for the sake of the future.The book opens with a narrative, but the story is just as disturbing as the poetry that follows. In fact, we might think of the story as a setting for three brief, super dense poems—the names of the children. After all, even within the story, it’s the word—the word from the Lord—that really matters. (more…)

  • Do Not Judge—A Sermon from Luke 6:35-42

    Do not judgeI told somebody this past week that the sermon for today could really only last a few seconds. Don’t get your hopes up, it’s going to be longer than that, but it seems like I should be able to just say something like, “Jesus says, ‘Do not judge.’  So, stop doing it. Amen, let’s stand and sing.”It’s not as though the command is unfamiliar to us.  The text we’re dealing with is in Luke 6:35-42.

    “But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive and you will be forgiven; give and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you.” And he also told them this parable:  ” Can a blind man lead a blind man? Will not they both fall into a pit? A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like his teacher. Why do you see the speck that is in your brothers eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the out the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye.”

    It’s one of the most popular passages in the Christian Bible, well known among Christians and nonbelievers alike.  In fact, I don’t know if there is any Christian ethic as respected by the outside world as “Do not judge.”  Of course, the world is also acutely aware of our failure in following this command, and knows that while Jesus tells us not to judge, we are quite practiced in the art.  Unfortunately, it comes quite easily to us.Judgement against our friends, family, neighbors and strangers simmers deep within our hearts.  Occasionally it might pop out as gossip or a sharp word, but we try to police ourselves about that, because we know it sounds bad.  We don’t want to be known as judgmental people, but truthfully, even when we don’t actually say what we’re thinking, it is just so easy to harbor our verdicts, the bitter condemnations of people around us, deep in our hearts.  We don’t want to judge.  We know we’re not supposed to, but it just comes so easily to us. One of the problems here is that we try to avoid judgmental behaviors without really working on judgmental attitudes. We try to catch that stuff before it gets out of our mouths, but really, by the time we get to that place we’ve really already lost the battle.  The mouth is just speaking out of the abundance of the heart, and it’s the fact that all that condemnation is in our heart that is really the issue.  Our morality begins with our identity, or at least our understanding of our identity.  The way we understand ourselves controls the way we interact with other people and perceive them in powerful ways.  That said, there are two significant things I have come to understand about myself that, the more I internalize them, the more they help me escape my tendency to judge.   I want to share and confess here in the hopes that they can help you out as well.1.  I am not God. I know, it’s a shocker. But, seriously, it’s helpful for me to get in touch with the fact that I am not the sovereign lord of the universe. I believe people are accountable for the good and evil things they do in the world—but most of them aren’t accountable to me. I didn’t create anybody, and I’m not supremely powerful.  Beyond that, my failure to be God also means that I have a limited amount of knowledge and insight into people.  I don’t understand the whole of anybody’s situation, don’t understand the different things in people’s backgrounds that make them act the way they do.  I don’t even understand why I do half the stuff I do, much less what’s going on in anybody else’s heart! So I will never the authority or information I need to pass judgment on anybody else.2.  Not only am I not God, but I also know that I am not perfect. Far from it, in fact.  Most people I know can confirm this, but of course I know it more truly than anybody else could possibly suspect.  After all, they can’t see what’s inside my heart.  I am, like the rest of you, a broken human being, a person whose heart has been twisted by sin and who is powerless to recover except for the grace of God.This is an important nuance to the world’s criticism of the church as being too judgmental.  It wants to believe everything is alright. It’s as if the world wants refuse our right to judge on the basis that everyone is basically equally good. But we refuse to judge on the opposite basis, because we know that everyone, including ourselves, is broken and sinful.I know, that because I’m not God and I’m not perfect, that I need grace from God. I need the grace of forgiveness and the grace that God gives to change and purify me. Truthfully, I need all the grace I can get.  And that self-awareness really heightens the shock of this text for me. How I give grace to people around me can actually affect how God gives grace to me? Whoa. That is an absolutely stunning idea, and as it becomes more firmly lodged in my mind, it has the power to really shape the kinds of things I harbor in my heart towards other people.Gratefully, though, I’m also aware that I receive grace from God! It’s not like I’m merely aware of my sin, awaiting some pending judgement and trying to butter God up before he makes his decision. I live in the joy and awareness that God has already acted decisively to extend grace to me.Many of us live fairly aware of those two things, our need for grace and how we receive it.  But, we stop there, not realizing that those who need and receive grace from God are also called to learn grace from God. I want God to teach me how to treat others like Jesus treats me.For our community of faith, that really is the critical turn. So much of our worship and conversation revolves around what we need and receive, and how valuable it is to us.  But how much value do we place on what we are called to become?  How much do we value a gracious spirit? May God help us to honor those among us who cultivate that spirit, who become people of heroic forgiveness, who turn back any effort to condemn others from taking root in their own hearts.  May we value those who work hard to become merciful, just as our father is merciful, and may we become a place of grace for those who—like us—need to receive it.Amen.(This is part three of a series on the Sermon on the Plain. A list of the sermons and the audio recordings are here.)

  • Powerless Preacher, Powerful Word

    I think every preacher worth more than his salt has a memory chest full of moments like mine from this past Sunday.  It had been a tight week, the sermon had puzzled me all week, and when it was finally together, I wasn’t particularly pleased with it. I never really came to a sermon structure I particularly liked, and the sermon teetered between being too simplistic and useless and overly dramatic and bullyish. It was a tricky sermon to get out, partly because the text (Luke 6:27-36) is so raw that it seemed to be defying me to do anything but read it slowly.  It didn’t want to be massaged or tweaked, it just wanted me to listen to it.Anyway, whatever the cases for my unease, I just didn’t feel like I had my A-game that day.  I just wasn’t feeling great about what I had put together.But nonetheless, people were, in that instance still able to hear the Word of God in the sermon moment.  I felt like I was at my least effective moment, but the effect of the word was clearly felt by many in the church.Look, count me among the people that gets a little gagged when I hear things like “God really showed up!” when we talk about stuff like this.  I usually don’t like it because it feels really trite and cutesy.  I’m not a robot, but I just don’t like that kind of emotional stuff.  It’s probably because I really value intentionality and control.But this past week was one in which I really did feel as though the power of the word of God was functioning in a powerful way in our community, regardless of my performance.  For someone that flirts with hubris, that’s a good thing.  (I have a website with my name in the domain, people.  I’m more vain than I should be. If I didn’t realize I had arrogance issues, that would be an issue.) It’s a good thing to realize that preaching, even when I am practicing my craft well, isn’t really about how well I perform.  Preaching is about how honest I am with the word, and how well people hear the word. So, this week I want to do the best I can, but I know that the best part of the sermon won’t be some cute saying I made up with or any smoking hot exegesis.  It’ll be in the moments with the Word, when we simply listen together to the Word.That’s where the power is.  That’s where the power has always been.

  • The Call – A Sermon from Exodus 3

    (This is part two of the Exodus Sermon Series.  The Sermon audio for the series is here.)Today, we move in our series on Exodus to a well known section, the appearance of God to Moses in a burning bush.Exodus opens with the birth of Moses, and the stories of his early life are full of promise, perhaps even destiny.  His mother defies her oppressors in the act of saving his life.  She claims the opportunity to raise as her own, but shrewdly creates the opportunity for him to live and learn as part of the Egyptian aristocracy.  Early on he rejects the safety of his social situation to identify with his oppressed people. He interjects himself to fight injustice against them and between them, but is forced to flee when his own people reject his authority and reveal his vigilante actions.As our story this week opens, Moses has been living in Midian as a fugitive from a crime committed forty years ago in Egypt.  He’s started a new family, gotten a new job, a new life. He still lives in a measure of fear, fear that his past will catch up with him.  Instead, in this story, Moses is forced not to confront his past, but his future.Here, at the burning bush, God beckons Moses to join him in an outlandish mission.  God shares his own mind with Moses, the Lord reveals his plans and vision of the future, and even his very name.It is profound that God’s identity is revealed in this story of calling. It is in the context of this story, where God calls Moses to join him in plan of redemption and deliverance, that the Lord reveals his personal name. It is when God acts that we discover what he is to be called, who he is.  This is a story about identity.But it’s not just the Lord whose identity is revealed in this story.  This is the definitive story in the life of Moses, the moment in which his identity must forever be determined.  It is the most important question he will ever face: how will he respond to the call of God? From this moment on, his life will not be defined by the promise of his early life, his status as a fugitive or failed advocate for justice. His role as a shepherd or even his identity as son, husband, or father will ultimately take a backseat to what is decided this day, this confrontation with a God who demands his future. Whether or not he obeys God’s call will determine Moses’ identity forever.  Much depends on this encounter.In chapter 3, God reveals to Moses what God is going to do.  The conversation between Moses and God begins with God making this announcement (Ex. 3:7-8):“I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Caananites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.”God reveals to Moses what God is going to.  There is no doubt who is taking action here.  The Exodus will be God-powered. The exodus is not to be an act of Moses’ strength or will, but God’s. God declares, “I have come down to deliver them.” Of course, it must be this way. Who else but God could stand against Pharaoh? Who else but God could command the powers that are to definitively defeat the armies of Egypt? Moses had already tried his own at bringing justice, years ago, and failed.Perhaps it is for this very reason that it is so surprising that God immediately follows his declaration that “I have come down” with the stunning bid to Moses in verse 10, “Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.” The God-powered Exodus depends on Moses.It is a demonstration of Gods power, but God freely chooses to invite Moses to participate.  God makes Moses what he could not become on his own, a deliverer, a force of justice and redemption. The Lord chooses to act through Moses.  It’s an incredible affirmation, but not an unusual one. Lord chooses to act through Moses, just like later he will choose to act through Joshua, Gideon, David, Saul, Elijah, Peter, James, Paul, Epaphras and Timothy.  Just like he chooses to act through you and me. “But, wait a minute,” you say. “Isn’t that stretching things a bit?  After all, this is Moses we’re talking about here. Don’t you think the call of Moses is a different deal, an exceptional occasion? Perhaps, but you have to realize:The call of Moses is not the call of Moses.Confused? Fair enough.  But think about it: is it just Moses that is called here to participate in God’s plans? Aaron, too, but that’s the easy one. After all, he’s the one God tells Moses to take with him when he makes his demands to Pharaoh. But is he the only one?What about in the elders of Israel? Here at the burning bush, in 3:18, notice that Moses isn’t going straight to Pharaoh, but to these elders, and then they’re all going to go together to meet with Pharaoh.  What about Joshua, who becomes Moses’ assistant and successor? What about Hur, who along with Aaron holds up Moses’ hands while Joshua fights the Amalekites in Chapter 17? What about those are selected as judges over the people in Chapter 18? What about Bezalel or Oholiab, who end up being in charge of the craftsmanship of the tabernacle, or the Levites who are charged with taking care of it? What about the scores of men and women who contribute to building the Tabernacle, or the entire nation that gave generously for the project?Moses is just the first domino.  He’s the one God speaks to first, but the call of Moses is not just the call of Moses.The call of Moses is the call of all Israel. And so it often is with us.  Somebody begins to hear and act on the word of God, begins to respond to their calling, and sometimes it turns out that others join in and discover their own calling there as well. [The following is very congregation-specific. As part of encouraging that process, we want to have a forum to have some of those conversations, so onJuly 18 we’re going to have an event called “Outreach Sunday”. The whole idea behind it is the recognition that Your calling may not be just for you. Here’s how it’s going to work.  After class on that Sunday, we’re going to gather for a potluck in the gym. Around the gym, we’re going to set up some booths, tables where people can share in some of the ways they’ve become involved in outreach ministries, and perhaps share some opportunities for you to come alongside and join them in that effort.  I’m very excited about the possibilities of what can happen when we dedicate this time to listening to the ways God has already started to move us into action here at Cedar Lane.Here’s what we need to pull this thing off:We need people willing to share their calling and their food. We need people willing to pay attention.Paying attention is really critical to this event, and truthfully, it’s critical to our episode with Moses as well.  ]In the version of this story that is in most of our heads, I think this whole thing starts when God’s booming voice calls out, “Moses, Moses”.  However, notice how particular the text is in how the story actually unfolds in 3:2-4.“And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. And Moses said, “I will turn aside to see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.” When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here am I.” Often I wonder, what would have happen if Moses had just turned the other way. I wonder if this was the first time it had been there, or if maybe the bush had been in these familiar grazing grounds for a long time, but this was the time Moses finally got up the courage to check in out.  Doesn’t it seem like the Lord waits for him to investigate t before speaking to him in a clear voice?But what if Moses had just said, “Whoa, that’s scary!” and hurried back home, or “This bush makes me feel uncomfortable.” What if Moses said, “I’m not comfortable with the difference between this bush’s culture and mine?” Okay, that last one’s unlikely — for Moses.But for us, I think we come up with all kinds of reasons to turn away from burning bushes, those places where if we stopped and looked for a moment, we would easily hear the voice of God calling us to serve.  The truth is, our world, our community, is full of burning bushes, waiting to be recognized. But we have to learn to pay attention to burning bushes. This sermon started with the concept of Identity. This is a story that reveals god to be an acting God, a calling God.  It is the episode that brings Moses into the action, forever shaping his identity.  It can do the same to us, if we listen.

  • Cry Out – A Sermon from Exodus 2:23-25

    (This is the first in the Exodus Sermon series. The audio for the entire series is here.)Israel was indeed a nation born of promises.  It was an entire nation that traced its lineage back to one man, Abraham, a man who had received an outlandish set of promises from God.At the beginning of Exodus, though, it seems as though those promises were merely empty words.  We find Israel, who had been promised Canaan as a homeland, living as slaves in Egypt.  How they got there was simple enough to explain. A long time ago there was a famine in Canaan, and the only place to get food was in Egypt, so, to Egypt they went.  They stayed there until the famine passed, and went it did they decided they liked it well enough, and stuck around. Why not, right? They were comfortable, they were provided for, and after a few decades, they were as at home in Egypt as they had ever been in Canaan anyways.Eventually, though, they fell prey to the fears of the powerful in Egypt. To prevent them from becoming a threat, a Pharaoh enslaved them, using them to build his own wealth and power. And so, their not-homeland became a home of oppression for them, one in which they lived without dignity, humanity, or possibility. Even Moses, the man who is to be God’s instrument of deliverance, sees no other way.  He is willing to fight the injustice himself, and he does but, he is quickly forced to recognize that he is no match for the injustice his kinsmen face, and he flees.  While in exile, he starts a family and gives his child a most telling name, Gershom, saying that this name was because  “I have been a sojourner in a foreign land.”Do you see what’s off key there?  Doesn’t it sound like Moses has bought into his current situation as an exile from his real home, which he seems to think is back in Egypt.  See, that’s part of the problem.  Israel was too at home in Egypt.  It becomes clearer and clearer as the story goes on that while Israel didn’t really want to be slaves, they also didn’t want to leave Egypt.  They really don’t even understand how extensive, how radical, God’s deliverance would be.  His actions in the Exodus would completely redeem and redefine Israel.The Exodus is a story of complete and utter redemption, God’s way.  It is the story of how God responded to the cries of his people, how he called out an unlikely leader to help him utterly defeat the forces that were against his people.  It’s a story of how The same God who collides with the powers of Egypt brings his people into covenant with himself, for the sake of living in community with him.  It is a rich story, and over the next five weeks we’re going to see how this remarkable story of redemption can redefine us, just as it did Israel.[Let us pray together.] During those many days the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel-and God knew.-Exodus 2:23-25This is the true beginning of the Exodus story.  While it seems clear enough that God was behind the earlier story of Moses’ birth, the text makes it abundantly clear that it is the crying out of Israel that triggers the Exodus event. In the next chapter, Moses is twice told that God is acting because he has heard the cry of Israel.  Later on, in chapter six, after being initially rebuffed by Pharaoh, Moses is told again, “I have heard the groaning of the people of Israel, whom the Egyptians hold as slaves, and I have remembered my covenant.”Israel had become too at home in Egypt, and had disregarded their identity as people to whom God had made incredible promises.  They had become complacent, had fallen asleep.  But when their suffering became unbearable, when they could no longer stomach the status quo, they cried out to God.  And while it may be that they really didn’t know exactly what they were asking for, the simple act of their crying out to God provoked the Lord to action.  It signals to the Lord a crack in their complacency, a readiness for redemption. Their cry means that they are stirring from their slumber.  Crying out is waking up.It means waking up to all the things around us that shouldn’t be tolerable, but have become so.  It means waking up to our own sins, to our own limitations.  It means realizing that we are not at home in Egypt, that things aren’t just fine, that things must change.As we begin this journey together, I want to simply ask you to cry out to God with me. Let us cry out to God that, even though we don’t yet know what needs to change around and within us, we are indeed desperate for his intervention, and we rely on his redemption.  Let us cry out, not just in this moment, but habitually, as we continually encourage each other to abandon the things that would enslave us, to prepare ourselves for God’s redemption and redefinition.  Let us be a people that cries out to God. Let us be a community that is always waking up.We can do this, because crying out doesn’t require much of us.  It doesn’t require us to be courageous or wise, pure or particularly holy.  We don’t have to be smart, or eloquent. Crying out only requires one thing of us, honesty.  Our cry to God, just like Israel’s, flows from an honest assessment of who we are before God.  It requires us to be hints about our flaws and weaknesses, about our limits and sins.  When we cry out we confess ourselves, we confess who we are and what we cannot do on our own.  And so, it requires us to be honest with ourselves as we speak to the one who already knows the truth about us anyway.We may take that honest cry to God, knowing that we cry out to a listening God. Exodus affirms that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is a God of action, who responds to the cries of his children.And lest we think that God only hears the cries of his people, that he only acts here because it is actually Israel, let me share with you another passage, Isaiah 19. Isaiah will not allow us to think about God’s listening ear in exclusive terms.  Like Jonah, Isaiah blows open the limits of God’s attention and care.  Speaking of Egypt, Isaiah writes, “When they cry to the Lord because of oppressors, he will send them a savior and defender, and deliver them.” The Lord will hear and respond to the cries of even the enemies of the Lord’s people, the original oppressors themselves, the Egyptians! Don’t be afraid that you are too far gone, to distant from God, that he can’t or won’t hear your cry to him.  The Lord is a listening God, and is ready to respond, even to Egypt, even to you and me.One more thing.  Everything I’ve said before assumes that when we read the story, we identify most with the part played by Israel.  But what if, in reality, we actually are best represented by the Egyptians? Maybe not Pharaoh, or even actual slave drivers, but just run of the mill Egyptians.  Innocent of direct oppression, they are complicit with the system, and destined for the same destruction as Pharaoh. What if we, who are used to being on the top of the world’s power structures, are more like these Egyptians than we are God’s oppressed people?It’s a horrible, offensive thought, isn’t it? But the more I think of it, there is really only one way to be sure. If we don’t want to be like the Egyptians, we have to learn to be like God. And this story gives us a clear picture of one important way to become more godly.If we want to be like God, we have to learn to listen like God. We have to be willing to stop and hear the voices of hurting people, the voices of people who cry out against all the things which oppress them, to the things that enslave them.  The God we serve is an attentive God. This texts affirms that God does in fact hear, he does in fact care, and he does respond! This simple fundamental fact is one of the first places we must meet God if we truly wish to be a people like him, who model our lives after him. We know we have to listen to God, but have we not learned to listen like God? We must hear people, give attention to people, be willing to respond to the needs of people.  We must work to hear what he hears.And so, let us all cry out to God.  Let us cry out for our own redemption.  Let us cry out on behalf of those around us who need redemption, and let us cry out that we may have open ears to the cries of those suffering around us.  Amen.(Please feel free to comment, or see this note about sermon manuscripts)