Judges 4:1-7; Matthew 25:14-30
As we were driving back from convention yesterday, the skies started to clear, there was no more rain, and the sky was beautiful. The blends of blue with white puffs on top then dark clouds, scattering and running away, and then there was the light streaming through a bank of dark clouds. As we kept driving it kept shifting and changing in layer upon layer of beauty. Deep beauty, in the storm breaking, in the contrast of dark and light, and in the gift of blue peaking through.
What if driving home in the pouring rain, with the wind blowing through at odd angles we just looked at one another and said, "the journey is not worth it, lets stop here." We would have sheltered and missed the whole beauty which was to come. Or what if we decided the storm was too rough and we decided the world was going to end, what stories would we tell one another later to relate our choice to our relatives in the future, in the new place where we quit, where we settled?
This is what we have today in our stories. One which tells why the people of Israel have to go through hard times, the other trying to make sense of the hard times and why Christ hasn't returned when they expected. Each seems to tell vastly different stories, but what if they are telling the stories in the same way. We like to make sense of our world and where it is going. We like to feel as if we are in control and then when the unexpected happens we try to explain it. We are in the ends times... not so much we decided to follow our own way so this happens.
This is what Judges tells us all the way through. After Joshua and their decision to follow God the Hebrew people decide time and again they want control, they want their own way. Because when we create the illusion we feel safer. We can somehow see an outcome. If we put in security at our churches we won't have to deal with a gunman. If we do certain bills and rules we will put others away and we won't have to deal with hardship. And yet, again and again we have the stories which tell us it is not so. We want to go our own way, in security, in gaining assurity of peace, of our own outcomes and our own making. Now what does this all have to do with faith?
It certainly doesn't have a right or wrong to it, it just is. We like to make things right and wrong, thus the story with Jesus today. We had a hard time circling this one on Thursday. There were so many questions like, if the one who took and hid his knew the master was hard, why wouldn't he have hidden it? If he failed and lost it wouldn't he have gotten worse? God is a master? We went round and round. This one is not easy and we wrestled with it, putting it back into its context, trying to make sense of what was happening to the community at the time. When all is said and done we find a wide variety of answers which break this open in new ways. In the end the person decided to go their own way though. They followed their own path of being able to be safe, to control any chance of failing and were frozen.
This brings us back to Judges. How many times do we follow our own way? How many times do we convince ourselves our own way is the right way, never asking the myriad of questions which might help us to push forward. This is the end of the story we haven't written. Israel is outnumbered, not a strength to be reckoned with and somehow in the end God helps them come through because they trust, have faith. Now in the ancient world this was so much more impressive told in a warfare story. Lets go back to yesterday's storm though.
Going our own way for safety would have meant when the car hydroplane in St. Louis we would have gotten off. We wouldn't have made it any further because it wasn't safe. People were driving crazy, there are three, four, five lanes with wall to wall traffic, lets pull in and be safest. You wouldn't get a sermon this morning, but we'd be safe and traveling home through safer weather. Now it seems extreme and funny, but if we ask ourselves what do we do this with, what blessing do we miss because we stop too soon, or what situations do we manipulate outcomes for our own outcomes we get a little deeper into our own stories.
This is the work of the biblical story. Pointing out the situations where we stop trusting, giving example and voice to when people feel its too dangerous to go on, and giving witness to the brave who decided it was well worth the journey. And, and this may be the most important, we all want to go our own way and find ourselves bound and struggling. Bound by fear, bound by issues of safety, and bound by wanting the outcome we desire yet the beauty in all this darkness is the light. The fact it has happened before and it will happen again and there is always the chance to change and trust and try again. This is our story, embrace it.
As we were driving back from convention yesterday, the skies started to clear, there was no more rain, and the sky was beautiful. The blends of blue with white puffs on top then dark clouds, scattering and running away, and then there was the light streaming through a bank of dark clouds. As we kept driving it kept shifting and changing in layer upon layer of beauty. Deep beauty, in the storm breaking, in the contrast of dark and light, and in the gift of blue peaking through.
What if driving home in the pouring rain, with the wind blowing through at odd angles we just looked at one another and said, "the journey is not worth it, lets stop here." We would have sheltered and missed the whole beauty which was to come. Or what if we decided the storm was too rough and we decided the world was going to end, what stories would we tell one another later to relate our choice to our relatives in the future, in the new place where we quit, where we settled?
This is what we have today in our stories. One which tells why the people of Israel have to go through hard times, the other trying to make sense of the hard times and why Christ hasn't returned when they expected. Each seems to tell vastly different stories, but what if they are telling the stories in the same way. We like to make sense of our world and where it is going. We like to feel as if we are in control and then when the unexpected happens we try to explain it. We are in the ends times... not so much we decided to follow our own way so this happens.
This is what Judges tells us all the way through. After Joshua and their decision to follow God the Hebrew people decide time and again they want control, they want their own way. Because when we create the illusion we feel safer. We can somehow see an outcome. If we put in security at our churches we won't have to deal with a gunman. If we do certain bills and rules we will put others away and we won't have to deal with hardship. And yet, again and again we have the stories which tell us it is not so. We want to go our own way, in security, in gaining assurity of peace, of our own outcomes and our own making. Now what does this all have to do with faith?
It certainly doesn't have a right or wrong to it, it just is. We like to make things right and wrong, thus the story with Jesus today. We had a hard time circling this one on Thursday. There were so many questions like, if the one who took and hid his knew the master was hard, why wouldn't he have hidden it? If he failed and lost it wouldn't he have gotten worse? God is a master? We went round and round. This one is not easy and we wrestled with it, putting it back into its context, trying to make sense of what was happening to the community at the time. When all is said and done we find a wide variety of answers which break this open in new ways. In the end the person decided to go their own way though. They followed their own path of being able to be safe, to control any chance of failing and were frozen.
This brings us back to Judges. How many times do we follow our own way? How many times do we convince ourselves our own way is the right way, never asking the myriad of questions which might help us to push forward. This is the end of the story we haven't written. Israel is outnumbered, not a strength to be reckoned with and somehow in the end God helps them come through because they trust, have faith. Now in the ancient world this was so much more impressive told in a warfare story. Lets go back to yesterday's storm though.
Going our own way for safety would have meant when the car hydroplane in St. Louis we would have gotten off. We wouldn't have made it any further because it wasn't safe. People were driving crazy, there are three, four, five lanes with wall to wall traffic, lets pull in and be safest. You wouldn't get a sermon this morning, but we'd be safe and traveling home through safer weather. Now it seems extreme and funny, but if we ask ourselves what do we do this with, what blessing do we miss because we stop too soon, or what situations do we manipulate outcomes for our own outcomes we get a little deeper into our own stories.
This is the work of the biblical story. Pointing out the situations where we stop trusting, giving example and voice to when people feel its too dangerous to go on, and giving witness to the brave who decided it was well worth the journey. And, and this may be the most important, we all want to go our own way and find ourselves bound and struggling. Bound by fear, bound by issues of safety, and bound by wanting the outcome we desire yet the beauty in all this darkness is the light. The fact it has happened before and it will happen again and there is always the chance to change and trust and try again. This is our story, embrace it.
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