Zoomer's sermon of 24 June 2018: "Forty Some-Odd"

(KJV) Genesis 7:12 And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.

My friends, the Word of the Lord.

Hope that Scripture wasn't too drawn-out and complicated for you! Sometimes you set out to write on a topic and discover you've bit off more than you can chew. I was going to list all the Bible stories that last for forty days -- or forty years. I was going to go into great depth about Noah and the Ark; Moses and the Children of Israel in the wilderness for forty years, and how their journey was spiritual as well as geographical; Jesus spending forty days in the wilderness and being tempted by Satan. I was going to extrapolate on them, compare them, discover the common denominator, and present the result to you as a revelation.

Well, it would have to be a book. Or a series of sermons. Because forty is in there a LOT!

When the Bible says forty, does it mean exactly forty? Well, sometimes the answer to a Bible question is "It depends on who you ask." Sometimes forty means "many." According to some scholars, Moses is said to have spent 40 years in the wilderness because that's about how long it would take for the original generation to die off and a new one to come up. It's probably "about" 40 years. Or maybe just "years!"

One of my 'guilty pleasures' is watching historical documentaries. The reasons are threefold: It's as close to a time machine as I'll ever get. I can witness events that happened before I even got here. I can listen to voices that fell silent long ago. History helps me to understand the present, and makes me realize that our idealized past wasn't all that ideal. [We have ugly, mud-slinging Presidential campaigns. So did Jefferson and Adams.] And best of all, we already know how history resolves itself. The North wins the Civil War. Lindbergh's plane makes it all the way to France. Glenn Miller's plane doesn't. The Allies defeat the Axis. Truman defeats Dewey. There's not much nail-biting involved.

Of course, any era segues into something else, and we always wind up in the present. We don't know how current events are going to play out...

Time is a funny thing. It can be arbitrary or precise. They hit us over the head with the importance of punctuality in school. If you weren't in your seat when the bell rang, you were TARDY! Your punishment was Detention! You had to stay there an hour later than you planned. Starting time was carved in marble. Time of departure was a variable. [Or at least that's the way it was in MY day, by cracky!]

Seemingly random approximations seem to dictate our own comings and goings. Always have. That's why we say things like "noonish."

Like the old joke about the sheriff in a small town who saw a stranger and decided to run him in for vagrancy:

Hey, stranger. Do you work?
Now and then.
Where?
Here and there.
What do you do?
This and that.
Well, you're goin' to jail.
When will I get out?
Sooner or later!

Anybody here ever had a doctor's appointment? Any of you show up at the right time, only to find yourself cooling your heels in the waiting room for a long time? Of course! We expect it! I'm not trying to denigrate doctors. They've saved my life at least three times. And they don't know who's gonna walk in with what or how much time they'll take up. So I always take a book. If I'm working on a sermon, I take a study Bible and pore over the footnotes. Otherwise, I'm inching my way through the Life of Ty Cobb. They tell you when to be there, but not when you'll be free to leave.

That's pretty much what God did to Noah. He told Noah when the rain would start, and how long it would go on, but He didn't say anything about how long he would have to stay in the ark. God didn't tell him how long it would take for the water to go down and for the ground to dry. [That's all spelled out in Chapter 8.]

Noah was in the ark for a year. He didn't have a book, either.

Our own crises are like that. God promises they'll pass, but He doesn't say when.

Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD. God found him righteous. But what God gave Noah wasn't so much a kindness as it was a huge, unpleasant task. Noah's salvation was punishment. A year of hard work, discomfort, and frustration.

First, he had to build the ark to God's specifications [which are recorded in Genesis 6:13-16, if you want to read them]. The measurements are in Cubits, which is about the length of your forearm OR the distance from tip of your middle finger to bottom of your elbow. It is to be built out of gopher wood. How big was it? Oh, about the length of one-and-a-half football fields, and about four stories tall. It had three decks, and the decks had rooms. That's a lot of gopher wood!

I saw a film many years ago called In Search of Noah's Ark, wherein a model ship was built as per Biblical specs and placed in an aquarium. Guess what? It floated!

The Bible doesn't spell out the nature of life on that boat. It doesn't have to. Eight people, four couples. Wives, husbands and inlaws in each other's faces. It would've been like the Diary of Anne Frank in a floating farm. Noisy, smelly, sliding around, shoveling food, shoveling farm bi-products. Tension. Anxiety. In some versions of the story, Noah didn't sleep a wink the whole time he was in the ark.

There's a big difference between reading about it or watching it years after the fact and actually being in the middle of it as it unfolds. We can read the story of Noah with no anxiety or nail-biting because we know how it ends. Noah et al didn't. Neither did anybody not aboard the ark.

We all have periods of discomfort, grief, monumental tasks, infirmity, uncertainty. Times of trial, or testing, or searching, or waiting. We don't know how long it will last. Forty days? Forty years? A long time? A little while?

WE all have epiphanies -- realizations of truth or knowledge -- as we go through life. Scripture that manifests its meaning through our own experiences. Lessons learned.

The lesson we can learn from this old, old story is that God will not abandon us. [He promised not to flood the whole world again.] Just because our forty years feels like hard work and punishment, that doesn’t preclude it from being the work of God's grace in our lives. Things will get better. In His time. Amen.

Zoomer's sermon of 11 March 2018: "Stop It!"

James 4:1-3 (NRSV)  Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures. [Here ends the reading]

James, James, the good ol' Book of James. Sometimes I think that everything we need to know is in the Book of James. That's not accurate of course, because James doesn't proclaim that Christ has come; that Jesus is Lord. We have to get that somewhere else. James wrote this letter to people who were already Believers and it is as Believers that we approach it now.

James is a "how to" book. An instruction manual. It could be called "You've Become a Christian! Now What?" Well, being a Christian is going to inform your thought processes, your outlook, your opinions, how you treat others, what you say, and how you say it. I say "you" but I really mean "us." James tells us how to go about these things.

It never ceases to amaze me (although it shouldn't) that people in the Bible are pretty much like us. They're greedy, jealous, lustful (it took me awhile to remember THAT acceptable word!), vengeful, spiteful, violent, and just plain mean. Conversely, they're generous, content, dedicated, forgiving, gentle, and kind. They zig and they zag. They run hot and cold. They have good days and bad. Just like us.

And, just like us, they're divided. And they argue. Actually, we in our day have probably taken arguing further than they ever dreamed. In the 20th century, most of us read the newspaper, and we knew what the difference was between a news story and an editorial/opinion piece. If you read something that made you so hopping mad that you just HAD to respond, it took some effort to produce a rejoinder and go public with it. You had to sit down and write a letter to the Editor. And you had to put your name, address, and phone number on it. You couldn't be anonymous. You couldn't hide behind a user name. You had to OWN that opinion!  Then you had to put the letter in an envelope, mail it, and wait. And wait. And wait. If your letter was coherent and legible, they might eventually print an edited version of it.

But now we have the Internet! You can fly off the handle, type out the old, familiar suggestion, and everybody sees it before you have time to calm down.

How many of you are connected to social media? I know some of you are because we're Facebook friends! Facebook is a great place to re-connect with old friends, find out what they think, and un-friend them.

It can be used for good purposes, if you can keep your head above the dirty water that sloshes through it. You can post pictures of your grandbabies, or your new litter of puppies, or a spectacular El Paso sunset, and you'll be rewarded with smiley faces and little red Valentines.

But a lot of us use it to scream at each other. A few years ago, when this church was requesting donations to help feed and clothe Columbian refugees, I posted it on my page. And a guy I've known for fifty years skewered me, and them, and us. He was drunk and bellicose, which is a reason, but not an excuse. Before it was over, he had dragged me down to his level and I told him where to get off. And I hate that. As Jessica said last week, the tongue is the rudder that steers the ship. In the old days we would never have had that conversation. I saw him last December. Our eyes met. We shook hands, said each other's name, and that was that...

Last week we heard about wisdom, which James talks about back in Chapter 3. What is wisdom? It's largely a matter of knowing what's right, what's wrong, and why. And then acting accordingly. The words "right" and "wrong" primarily apply to how we treat each other. Call it "ethics." Be honest, be considerate, be kind. Watch what you say and do. In a word: Behave!

One Commentator says:
The fruits of wisdom are peacefulness, gentleness, mercy -- without partiality and hypocrisy. Over in Galatians 5:22 Paul identifies the fruit of the Spirit as: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Wisdom and the presence of the Spirit seem to go hand-in-hand, don't they?

In today's reading, James tells us that our envy, our jealousy, our desire for stuff (or power, or revenge, or pleasure) is insatiable. Impossible to satisfy. This leads to frustration, and frustration leads to anger, and anger leads to conflict.

Paul really gets into this subject -- dramatically -- in Romans 7, if you want to look it up when you get home.

The conflict is desire controlling us vs. us controlling desire. This is where wisdom comes in. You might meet an attractive person and have the opportunity to get to know them really well. Wisdom tells you what will happen if you do.

Let's look at one of the all-time great stories of lust, power and home-wrecking: the story of David & Bathsheba, over in 2 Samuel 11 & 12.

David was living the Life of Riley. It was Springtime -- that time of year when kings went out and fought wars. But David sent his officers out to do the fighting, and he hung around the house. Apparently he had too much time on his hands.

As the story opens, he's lying on the couch. Then he gets up. He goes up on the roof and looks around. He sees a beautiful woman taking a bath, and his eyes pop out of his head.

Turns out her name is Bathsheba, and she's married to a soldier -- Uriah the Hittite, who is out fighting in the wars. David sends some messengers to get her and bring her back to him. "The King wants to see you" probably only has one meaning to a young woman in that time and place. It is, a patriarchal* society, after all. So she goes to the palace and, shall we say, submits to him. When it's all over, she goes back to the house. Maybe they both thought that was the end of it, but before long Bathsheba sends David a message saying, "I am with child." This is a predicament for them both.

Now, David has been around for while. He knows how the world works. Presumably he would have enough wisdom to look beyond his urges and the immediate gratification thereof and see what the repercussions might be. But he doesn't. So what does he do? I'll tell you what he doesn't do: He doesn't "own" it. He concocts a scheme which will ultimately make matters even worse. He sends for her husband and tells him, "Uriah, you've been working hard out in the battle fields, fighting the wars for me. Why don't you take a break? Here, drink some wine, then go to the house and spend the night with that pretty little wife of yours." David figures if he can get Uriah to spend a night at home, Bathsheba can tell him the baby is his.

(Incidentally, when I was reading this I was reminded of the scene in "It's a Wonderful Life" where Old Man Potter offers George Bailey a really, really good job – if only George will let go of that run-down old Building & Loan.)

But Uriah tells the King, "No, I can't do that, not when all the other soldiers are sleeping on the hard ground. It just wouldn't be right."

David is mumbling and muttering to himself. Uriah is too dedicated for his own good. But David is too duplicitous for anyone's own good. He sits down and writes a letter to Uriah's commanding officer, telling him to put Uriah in the front lines so he will be killed. And he has Uriah deliver it! Uriah doesn't know that the letter is his death warrant, of course, so he dutifully delivers it, gets sent to the front lines, and gets killed. The news of his demise gets back to Bathsheba, and she weeps. Then David marries her. (Makes an honest woman out of her, as the old saying goes. I don't know any old sayings about making a guy an honest man.)

Anyway, problem solved! Right? Not quite. God isn't at all happy about any of this, and he sends the prophet Nathan to talk to David about it. And Nathan says, "David, I want to tell you a little story. It seems there were two men, a rich man and a poor man. Now the rich man owned a lot of livestock. He had herds of cattle and flocks of sheep. But the poor man only had one little lamb. A ewe. That's
E-W-E ewe. A girl lamb. And this little girl lamb was a pet to the man and his family, and they loved it dearly.

"Then one day a traveler came to town. He knocked at the rich man's door and asked him for food. Well, the rich man was selfish, and he said to himself, 'I'm not going to kill one of my animals for this guy.' So he took the poor man's lamb and fed it to the traveler. Ain't that just awful?"

And David said, "Yes, it's awful. In fact, it makes me mad! That rich guy has no pity! He should die!"

And Nathan said, "Well, David, that rich man is you! The Lord wants to know why you have despised His word and done what is evil in His sight?" And Nathan tells David that the baby will die. Which it does, at the age of seven days.

That's a long, drawn-out, complicated story. It could have and should have ended before it began. And if David had only shown some wisdom, it would have. David could have led his men into battle instead of sitting around the house. When he saw Bathsheba bathing, he could have looked away, or admired her from a distance. When he found out she was married – to one of his soldiers, no less – he could have and should have left it right there. But he acted on it, and look what happened: he made her an adulteress (a stoning offense), got her pregnant, had her husband killed, angered the Lord, and the baby died. What good came from this liaison? Answer: none. Except to serve as an example and make us wiser. It sure didn't make anybody happy.

James tells us that God's gift of wisdom can help us control our desires, frustration and anger. BUT, we have to pray "rightly." "What does that mean?" you ask. It means to have a relationship -- a friendship (James 4:4) -- with Jesus. We always say God is everywhere. That we can talk to Him anywhere. Let's do that. Visualize Him sitting next to you in the car. Or on the sofa. Or on the pew. He crosses His legs, stretches an arm across the back of the seat, looks at you, and smiles. It's easier to make decisions when a friend is there to talk to. Just ask Him for His advice. He'll give it to you. He'll make you wise.

Back in the day, country singers used to do what we called "recitations." Poems recited while the band softly played. They were typically serious. Somber. Maudlin. Morbid. A soldier comes home from the war. His dog is there to greet him when he gets off the bus. But when the soldier gets to the house, he is told that on the day he went away, the dog died of a broken heart. If the audience isn't in tears by the time it's over, you haven't done it right. But some of them were inspirational. Jimmy Dean used to do one called "The Farmer and the Lord." It went something like this:

While resting one evening by the side of the road
I saw an old farmer in the field he'd just hoed
His face was brown and wrinkled from the sun and the wind
And he was talking to the Lord just like he'd be talking to a friend

Well sir, he said with his voice calm and quiet
Them corn tassels need sackin'
Got no string to tie it
Had no rain in so long that the fields are mighty dusty
And it's been so unbearable hot that the kids is even gettin' fussy

Now that grass down by the pasture it should be knee high
If we could just have a little shower, Lord
It might keep the cow from going dry

Oh but listen to me talk
You'd think I wasn't grateful
Why if you didn't know me so well, Lord
You'd think I was downright hateful

You'd think I forgot about that new calf you sent
And the money in the mail that took care of the rent
Maw's cold is better and Johnny's home from the navy
And that good Sunday dinner of chicken and dumplings and gravy

Well, guess I'll mosey on home now Lord
I won't take no more of your time
Guess there's plenty o' folks hereabouts waitin' to ring your line
Evening to you Lord and watch us over tonight
And don't you worry about us none
'Cause everything is gonna be all right...

There it is, friends. Wisdom. Knowing what to ask for, how to ask for it, when to ask for it, why to ask for it, Who to ask for it, and what to do with it. Before you follow the wrong impulse or do something rash, ask Jesus about it. And then listen.

Amen.