Sermons

“A Still More Excellent Way”

Luke 13:10-17; Hebrews 12:18-24 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – August 21, 2016

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words, that we might always aim to choose love. We pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Eighteen years. Eighteen years she hadn’t been able to stand up straight. Where were you in 1998? (Assuming you’d even been born!) Can you imagine not being able to stand up straight since then? Some of you probably can. But let’s all just try to feel that feeling in our backs for a moment. And now try to imagine just how much you would want to praise God if eighteen years of that burden was suddenly lifted from you. Would it make sense at all for someone to complain that what just happened there wasn’t appropriate and true worship?

That woman’s suffering was very specific suffering, with a very specific cure. Your suffering is very specific suffering; it’s yours. Whether it’s your back, or your foot, or your heart, or your career, or your marriage, or your recovery, or your grief – your suffering is very real to Jesus. And the scriptures we heard today offer us a very stark choice about how to approach the world’s suffering, in all its specificity. Jesus makes clear, through his interaction with this woman and his defense of it afterward, that if the church isn’t about alleviating suffering, there isn’t a lot of point in us being here at all. If we aren’t helping to bring new life to the world, what are we doing? Our role here is to extend mercy, to share the grace of God with a hurting world, whatever the hurt may be.

How well we do this depends in large part, as the writer of Hebrews hints, on how we understand God. Do we bow obediently to an angry deity in the sky, watching us with an eagle eye to see when we’ll break any one of thousands of seemingly arbitrary rules? Or do we worship a loving God who delights in our attempts at faithfulness and fills in the gaps with grace beyond our understanding? Is God’s hand a fist crashing down upon our heads, or a support holding us up during times of trouble?

How we see God impacts how we treat one another. Unless we understand God as gracious and merciful and compassionate, we have no real motivation to be gracious and merciful and compassionate to others. The writer of Hebrews encourages us to focus on the “sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.” That line may need a little unpacking, but it gets at the same thing. The blood of Abel cried out for vengeance. The “better word” we’re told to choose instead is the one that says, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” The world is full of suffering. Some people have been bent over for more than 18 years. They need us to believe in a God of grace. They need us to know that bringing healing to the hurting and hope to the down-hearted is right and true worship. In a world in which we hurt each other so often, we need to choose forgiveness and reconciliation as our act of worship. In a world of gated communities and separation walls, we need to hear the gospel calling us to choose hospitality instead. As Disciples of Christ, we claim to be a “movement for wholeness in a fragmented world.” This requires that we seek out what Paul called, in the introductory line to his famous chapter on love, “a still more excellent way.”

This past week has given us here at VLM a lot of opportunities to practice extending grace to our fellow children of God. On Friday morning, the family and friends of Specialist Ryan Coz gathered in our sanctuary to remember his life and mourn his death. Ryan was a 24-year-old Range Extension Operator in the Army, who died under suspicious circumstances at a base in New York, three days after he arrived there. A massive motorcycle veterans honor guard gathered in our parking lot to accompany Ryan’s body and his family up to Miramar following the service here. It wasn’t easy to find a parking spot for the 11:00 meeting happening that morning, but we make room when we need to.

Meanwhile, in the other end of the building, preparations were underway for a happier occasion. The son of the pastor of the Hispanic congregation that worships in our upstairs chapel got married yesterday, and the wedding reception was held in our Fellowship Hall. (Did you even recognize it from this picture?) There were hours and hours of ironing going on on Friday. But the friends and relatives of the happy couple were not the only ones to help out. Jennefer & John Lehton spent an extra hour here with me after their meeting, helping to clean out the multitude of condiments and abandoned tubs of hummus from the fridge, to make room for the reception food. This too is right and true worship of the God of gracious hospitality.

These two events left little trace. But you may have noticed evidence of a less happy visitor we had earlier in the week. On Wednesday, some poor soul hurled a large rock through one of our plate glass doors. It was quite a mess. It’s going to be expensive to replace. The police came and took a report, but made it clear they wouldn’t have any chance of figuring out who did it. There was really only one strange clue left behind. Nothing was moved or taken or disturbed inside, except for this $2 bill, which was left on the Bible here on the communion table. I have no idea what it means, but it reminds me that all people need the grace of God – all people, even the destructive, angry people who may not be walking around in their right minds. We have been struggling for over a year now to cultivate a welcoming but firm, reasonable but not punitive relationship with the homeless people who sometimes take refuge in the shadowed nooks and crannies of our facility. I, of course, have no way of knowing if the window was broken by a homeless person, though it seems likely. Regardless, this is one more lesson that some of the people God most needs us to love are the hardest to love. Let us pray that we can always choose grace.

Meanwhile, of course, life in all its painful complication was happening beyond the confines of our community. The 1000-year flood that has devastated Louisiana is hard to imagine from our drought-stricken perspective. Over 30,000 people have had to evacuate their homes, many of whom will never be able to return and re-build. I was talking with Glenda’s cousin, Mike, who lives in Baton Rouge, and he was telling me about what has come to be called the “Cajun Navy.” Because it’s Louisiana, many people have boats. And rather than staying home and watching the devastation on tv, or sitting around in a shelter once they’ve been rescued, those folks have gotten out there in their boats, to help others to safety. People, dogs, goats – the Cajun Navy has collected up whomever they can find and gotten them to dry land. Now this is not likely a way that we here in San Diego County can help, but we can help those who are helping. Gifts that you give to Week of Compassion, designated for the Louisiana flooding, or for the California fires, go in their entirety to the victims of these disasters.

There is another picture you may have seen this week. Omran Daqneesh is a five-year-old boy who was pulled out of a building in Aleppo, Syria, after an airstrike. He was one of the lucky ones; his head wound was only superficial. Omran and his family survived. Shortly after they were evacuated, however, their apartment building collapsed. They have now become a few more of the four and half million Syrian refugees trying to find their place in our world.

How do we worship a God of grace in such a broken world? How can we even believe in a God of love in the face of such devastation? The writer of Hebrews is right when he implies we have a choice to make. Tomorrow, we will be sending a check for over $700 to Week of Compassion, designated for Syrian refugee assistance. That is from the proceeds of the benefit concert Deborah led last month. Your additional gifts are always welcome.

I love the logo for Week of Compassion because it reminds me of the cyclical nature of all this. Sometimes, those who have been generous donors to Week of Compassion suddenly find themselves on the receiving end, if their church has a fire or something like that. But even more than that, I believe that when we choose to believe in a God of grace and to offer grace to the world as an act of worship, those actions reinforce our choice and make it easier to believe in grace even in the midst of suffering. When our hearts are focused on grace, it’s easier to see it in the midst of people looking out for themselves. When our hearts are formed by generosity, because we’ve chosen to follow Jesus, it’s easier to notice when others are generous also, which strengthens our faith. Our worship becomes stronger and truer when we’re living it out in all aspects of our lives, from sharing our facilities to extending a helping hand to neighbors across the country we’ll never meet or children living through wars on the other side of the world.

There is much suffering in our world. A lot of it has last much longer than 18 years. We gather here to remind ourselves that we have chosen to worship a God of grace, to remember that we have claimed the name of Christ, whose way is love, to surround ourselves with the Holy Spirit, who empowers us to do justice and love kindness and walk humbly with our God. Let us continue seeking out that “still more excellent way.” Alleluia and Amen.