The Work of Faith
Numbers 21:4-9; John 3:14-21
It is good to go to the beach.
Can I get an “amen” to that?
Yes. It is good to go to the beach.
I go to the beach to stand at the edge of the ocean, to stand in that liminal space where the water meets the land, to stand there at night and stare out into the blackness and see the lights of a million stars, to be in what has always been for me a “thin place” – a place where the huge distance between me and the Holy and the wholly other God gets closed a bit as I stand in awe and wonder at the beauty and grandeur of creation.
It is good to go to the beach.
Of course there are other lessons at the edge of the ocean. As we drove down the narrow spit of sandy earth south of Virginia Beach toward the place where we stayed for a few days last week one of our kids observed that “the wise man did not build his house upon the sand.”
No, but the rich man did. Wow! You think Arlington has expensive real estate? I ran past a 1950s block-house last week, on the Back Bay side of the spit, a little square, one-story cinder block construction that was no where close to even a thousand square feet, and the sign out front said it could be mine for a mere $650,000.
That sign got me to thinking about what we value in this life, and why.
In real estate it’s easy: location, location, location. But what about how we order other priorities, how we order our lives? What about where we place our faith, and, ultimately about how we respond to the only questions that really matter: who are you, and to whom do you belong?
That’s what’s at stake for Moses and the people of Israel wandering in the wilderness. They do not have location, location, location, so they’re left to confront the other questions without the security of place. Who are they? To whom do they belong?
Before they entered the wilderness the people of Israel had answers to those questions. Who were they? They were slaves. To whom did they belong? They belonged to Pharaoh.
But what about now? They are wandering Jews, completely unsure of their ultimate allegiance. Like most of us, in their fearful insecurity they gripe, they lash out, they point fingers. Does that sound remotely familiar? Ever been in a workplace that was dominated by uncertainty? How about a family in the midst of uncertainty? Any finger pointing in those settings? Most of the time when people respond to their fears and insecurities with anger and blame things just get worse; and that’s exactly what happens in this story.
It doesn’t get much worse than snakes!
Perhaps that’s the key. It’s as bad as it can get. They’ve hit rock bottom: wandering aimlessly in a wilderness, not enough food to eat or water to drink, and now: snakes.
At the end of their collective rope the people confront their own reality. They look at themselves in the mirror, and they confess. The essence of their confession comes down to this: they’ve lost faith. Put a bit differently, they’ve failed to keep faith with the one who brought them up out of the land of Egypt, the one who redefined their very being, the one who gave them a new identity, a new name, a new life.
While this particular story doesn’t name any false gods, you can sense the implication: the people have placed their trust in things that are less than ultimate – namely security, the security of place in particular.
We are not that different these days. We find all kinds of lesser gods in which to place our trust: money, jobs, the right school, the right neighborhood. We hold on to these gods with all our might – indeed, with all our hearts, all our souls, all our strength.
When we grip and grasp after lesser gods we have no time, no energy, no passion for the one true God. We have no ears to hear God’s call. We have no time to live into it. We have no heart to give to God’s heart, and we have no heart to give for God’s people.
And so we get God all wrong, with disastrous consequences. In a particularly timely example of getting God all wrong, a friend posted this note on his Facebook wall last week: “Too many people put God in a box. And then they put that box in their underwear. God is bigger than our sex lives!”
Indeed.
It is so easy, so tempting, to shape God to suit our own purposes, our own agendas, to remake God in our image rather than looking with care and love for what’s left of the image of God that has been within us from the beginning. But it’s only when we find that image that we can do the long – life-long – work of conforming the whole of our lives to that image.
That is the work of faith. As Moses and the people of Israel surely knew, it is no easy walk to the promised land.
We began worship this morning talking about some of the places of fear, of struggle, of brokenness that we find ourselves in at various points in our own journeys. As we think about some of those places I wonder what needs to be changed in order for healing and wholeness to emerge, for the journey into the promises of God to continue without spending 40 years lost in the wilderness of our own fears.
The people of Israel needed, just as we all need, a little reassurance, a little hope in order to take the next steps along the way. God provided a sign of reassurance, of hope in the wilderness.
The story in John’s gospel is the same. God provides a sign of reassurance, of hope, for our wilderness journey in the person of Jesus.
The passage we heard a few minutes ago contains one of the most famous and most abused verses in all of scripture: John 3:16 – “For God so loved the world that he sent his only son, that whoever trusts him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”
It’s always struck me as odd that this verse gets used like a weapon, like a great line dividing the world into insiders and outsiders, into the club of the saved and the legions of the damned. It’s odd because the very next verse says this: “Indeed God did not send Jesus into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved.”
As activist Robert Roth wrote in Sojourners about the lectionary passages this week:
“God saves lives. God saves souls. God saves peoples. God has not come in Christ to condemn, but to save. In Numbers, Moses is instructed by a Lord who wants people to live. In the psalm, God’s ‘steadfast love endures forever’ (Psalm 107:1). In Ephesians, God ‘loved us,’ ‘made us alive,’ and ‘raised us up’ (Ephesians 2:4-6).”
This is the good news that we celebrate in this place! Living fully into this good news is the work of faith. The great good news is that every step of the way in our long journeys we belong to the God who loves us, the God who makes us alive, the God who raises us up!
That is the God I meet in the liminal spaces, the thin places of beauty and grandeur – the edge of the ocean, the mountaintop. This same God meets me in the much more difficult places as well – those places of brokenness and incredible challenge, places of hurt and darkness. This same God beckons me to follow, step by step, from darkness into the light of the good news.
That journey tells me who I am: a follower of Jesus; and it reminds me that I belong to the God who meets me in that following. The way of Jesus answers for me the only two questions that really matter.
So, by way of closing but not of ending, I have two other questions for you:
First, if we believe good news to be good – if we believe that God loves us, makes us alive, raises us up – what difference does it make?
And second, if we believe this, are we not compelled out of simple human kindness to share it with others so that they, too, might live into the light?
Go out and do that – share the gospel. If necessary, use words. And share it knowing that every step of the way, you belong to God. Amen.
It is good to go to the beach.
Can I get an “amen” to that?
Yes. It is good to go to the beach.
I go to the beach to stand at the edge of the ocean, to stand in that liminal space where the water meets the land, to stand there at night and stare out into the blackness and see the lights of a million stars, to be in what has always been for me a “thin place” – a place where the huge distance between me and the Holy and the wholly other God gets closed a bit as I stand in awe and wonder at the beauty and grandeur of creation.
It is good to go to the beach.
Of course there are other lessons at the edge of the ocean. As we drove down the narrow spit of sandy earth south of Virginia Beach toward the place where we stayed for a few days last week one of our kids observed that “the wise man did not build his house upon the sand.”
No, but the rich man did. Wow! You think Arlington has expensive real estate? I ran past a 1950s block-house last week, on the Back Bay side of the spit, a little square, one-story cinder block construction that was no where close to even a thousand square feet, and the sign out front said it could be mine for a mere $650,000.
That sign got me to thinking about what we value in this life, and why.
In real estate it’s easy: location, location, location. But what about how we order other priorities, how we order our lives? What about where we place our faith, and, ultimately about how we respond to the only questions that really matter: who are you, and to whom do you belong?
That’s what’s at stake for Moses and the people of Israel wandering in the wilderness. They do not have location, location, location, so they’re left to confront the other questions without the security of place. Who are they? To whom do they belong?
Before they entered the wilderness the people of Israel had answers to those questions. Who were they? They were slaves. To whom did they belong? They belonged to Pharaoh.
But what about now? They are wandering Jews, completely unsure of their ultimate allegiance. Like most of us, in their fearful insecurity they gripe, they lash out, they point fingers. Does that sound remotely familiar? Ever been in a workplace that was dominated by uncertainty? How about a family in the midst of uncertainty? Any finger pointing in those settings? Most of the time when people respond to their fears and insecurities with anger and blame things just get worse; and that’s exactly what happens in this story.
It doesn’t get much worse than snakes!
Perhaps that’s the key. It’s as bad as it can get. They’ve hit rock bottom: wandering aimlessly in a wilderness, not enough food to eat or water to drink, and now: snakes.
At the end of their collective rope the people confront their own reality. They look at themselves in the mirror, and they confess. The essence of their confession comes down to this: they’ve lost faith. Put a bit differently, they’ve failed to keep faith with the one who brought them up out of the land of Egypt, the one who redefined their very being, the one who gave them a new identity, a new name, a new life.
While this particular story doesn’t name any false gods, you can sense the implication: the people have placed their trust in things that are less than ultimate – namely security, the security of place in particular.
We are not that different these days. We find all kinds of lesser gods in which to place our trust: money, jobs, the right school, the right neighborhood. We hold on to these gods with all our might – indeed, with all our hearts, all our souls, all our strength.
When we grip and grasp after lesser gods we have no time, no energy, no passion for the one true God. We have no ears to hear God’s call. We have no time to live into it. We have no heart to give to God’s heart, and we have no heart to give for God’s people.
And so we get God all wrong, with disastrous consequences. In a particularly timely example of getting God all wrong, a friend posted this note on his Facebook wall last week: “Too many people put God in a box. And then they put that box in their underwear. God is bigger than our sex lives!”
Indeed.
It is so easy, so tempting, to shape God to suit our own purposes, our own agendas, to remake God in our image rather than looking with care and love for what’s left of the image of God that has been within us from the beginning. But it’s only when we find that image that we can do the long – life-long – work of conforming the whole of our lives to that image.
That is the work of faith. As Moses and the people of Israel surely knew, it is no easy walk to the promised land.
We began worship this morning talking about some of the places of fear, of struggle, of brokenness that we find ourselves in at various points in our own journeys. As we think about some of those places I wonder what needs to be changed in order for healing and wholeness to emerge, for the journey into the promises of God to continue without spending 40 years lost in the wilderness of our own fears.
The people of Israel needed, just as we all need, a little reassurance, a little hope in order to take the next steps along the way. God provided a sign of reassurance, of hope in the wilderness.
The story in John’s gospel is the same. God provides a sign of reassurance, of hope, for our wilderness journey in the person of Jesus.
The passage we heard a few minutes ago contains one of the most famous and most abused verses in all of scripture: John 3:16 – “For God so loved the world that he sent his only son, that whoever trusts him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”
It’s always struck me as odd that this verse gets used like a weapon, like a great line dividing the world into insiders and outsiders, into the club of the saved and the legions of the damned. It’s odd because the very next verse says this: “Indeed God did not send Jesus into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved.”
As activist Robert Roth wrote in Sojourners about the lectionary passages this week:
“God saves lives. God saves souls. God saves peoples. God has not come in Christ to condemn, but to save. In Numbers, Moses is instructed by a Lord who wants people to live. In the psalm, God’s ‘steadfast love endures forever’ (Psalm 107:1). In Ephesians, God ‘loved us,’ ‘made us alive,’ and ‘raised us up’ (Ephesians 2:4-6).”
This is the good news that we celebrate in this place! Living fully into this good news is the work of faith. The great good news is that every step of the way in our long journeys we belong to the God who loves us, the God who makes us alive, the God who raises us up!
That is the God I meet in the liminal spaces, the thin places of beauty and grandeur – the edge of the ocean, the mountaintop. This same God meets me in the much more difficult places as well – those places of brokenness and incredible challenge, places of hurt and darkness. This same God beckons me to follow, step by step, from darkness into the light of the good news.
That journey tells me who I am: a follower of Jesus; and it reminds me that I belong to the God who meets me in that following. The way of Jesus answers for me the only two questions that really matter.
So, by way of closing but not of ending, I have two other questions for you:
First, if we believe good news to be good – if we believe that God loves us, makes us alive, raises us up – what difference does it make?
And second, if we believe this, are we not compelled out of simple human kindness to share it with others so that they, too, might live into the light?
Go out and do that – share the gospel. If necessary, use words. And share it knowing that every step of the way, you belong to God. Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
8:10 AM
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