Am I Righteous

Sermon given at Sydenstricker UMC 01/19/20

^NIV 2 Corinthians 5:14 For Christ's love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. ¹⁵ And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again. ¹⁶ So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. ¹⁷ Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! ¹⁸ All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: ¹⁹ that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. ²⁰ We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God. ²¹ God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

One Sunday morning, the pastor noticed little Alex was staring up at the large plaque that hung in the foyer of the church. The plaque was covered with names, and small American flags were mounted on either side of it. The seven-year-old had been staring at the plaque for some time, so the pastor walked up, stood beside him and said quietly, "Good morning, Alex." "Good morning, Pastor," replied the young man, still focused on the plaque. "Pastor McGhee, what is this?" Alex asked. "Well, son, it's a memorial to all the men and women who have died in the service." Soberly, they stood together, staring at the large plaque. Little Alex's voice was barely audible when he finally managed to ask, "Which one, the 8:30 or 11 service?

What is righteousness? What does it mean to be righteous? God looked upon the earth in the time of Noah and found Noah to be righteous. In the time of Abraham, God looked upon the earth and found Abraham to be righteous and decided to make a great nation from him. What does it mean to be righteous? Noah was considered righteous by God, as was Abraham. But what does that mean for you and me? In some ways that is the Holy Grail that for our lives as Christians. It is the thing we believe we are striving for as Christians, to be righteous in the eyes of God. But is it achievable by our good works and our desire to be good disciples?

David is a righteous person in the eyes of God and like Jesus, is highly favored. David starts out as a God loving person and never leaves that understanding in his life even when he allows his humanness to overwhelm him. So what does it mean to be righteous and how do we achieve that in our lives? Well the difficult news is that nothing that we can do can ever be enough to qualify for righteousness status. God looks within us at our hearts to make that determination. There I believe is the answer to the question.

So what am I saying? We can never do enough good things in the world to be righteous. We can never help enough homeless people, never feed enough, never clothe those who are cold enough to be righteous to God. There are lots of people who do great work at helping the poor, reaching out to those in need and working to heal or prevent illness. We should by the very definition of discipleship be at the forefront of those efforts. When I came to this church I heard about all the mission work we do and I continue to push that we do even more to help those in need in our community and our world. We need to be good people sharing the abundance of God with the world around us. I am so proud of the mission team who has decided that this season of Lent and Easter we are going to be helping children.

So if being good is not enough, what is the answer? Well I have already given you a hint, it is our heart. David loved God with all that he could. Even when his humanness caused him to sin with Bathsheba, his heart for God never wavered and once his sin was challenged, he went to God in earnest prayer asking for forgiveness. Abraham followed God even though Abraham had no idea where they were going believing and trusting in God with all his heart.

I remember some years ago, the congregation I was serving, wanted to give food away as an act of God’s love. But there was a snag in the work toward that. They were worried about giving the food away and doing anything that would offend anyone. We agreed though that to give it away without involving God in the process was being good without being righteous. God looks in our hearts and looks at what we love. When we love our neighbors in unconditional ways, we love in the way that God loves. When we love God with our hearts, we place God above everything else in our lives. When we focus on loving one another all the good things become fruit of that love.

What that means is that the acts we do to help the homeless, to feed the hungry and to clothe those who are cold are good things. But in order for them to be righteous things, we must do them with our hearts on God. God is the source of love and abundance and when we do things not for the benefit, we receive, though we do benefit, but we do them because our love of God overflows into them. Am I making sense here today? When we love God with all that we are, we are obedient to God in all that we do. When we look at the world in the way that God looks at the world, when we reach out to each other in the way that God reaches out to us, God sees righteousness.

Who are we today? Where are our hearts centered today? We have all come to this place because we believe that it is what we should do. But what if we have come to this place out of a deep sense of love for God, so much love that we want to worship God and thank God for all that God is doing for us. When our hearts are directed to God, everything in our lives is directed at God. When our loves are directed to God we will not only desire to do good things in our world to make it better, we will feel an overwhelming pull to do those things just as David felt an overwhelming need to go face Goliath. Paul says that we become ambassadors to Christ when we have that kind of love in our hearts. Paul tells us that Christ died so that we might have no sin in us and we could become righteous to God. Are you ready to be a righteous person to God? Give God the one thing you have to give, your hearts. Let us together become a church where the righteousness of God thrives within us and its fruit will spread out into the world around us.

Charles Colson, in Loving God, tells the story of Telemachus, a fourth century Christian. He lived in a remote village, tending his garden and spending much time in prayer when one day he heard God tell him to go to Rome. And so he did. He arrived in the excitement of Rome and heard the gladiators saluting Caesar and saying, “We who are about to die salute you.” Realizing that they would fight to the death, he shouted, “In the Name of Christ, stop!” But no-one heard him.

So he pushed his way through the crowd and dropped down to the floor of the colosseum and shouted again, “In the Name of Christ, stop!” The gladiators and crowd thinking it was part of the show laughed. But when the realized it was not the laughter turned to anger. One of the gladiators took his sword as He was pleading with them to stop and plunged it into him. As he lay dying, you could hear him still pleading, “In the Name of Christ, stop!”

Then a strange thing happened. Silence overtook the colosseum and way up in the upper rows a man stood and made his way to the exit. Soon others followed until all of the colosseum was empty. The year was BC 391 and that was the last battle fought in the colosseum. Men no longer killed each other for the entertainment of the crowd because of one small voice that spoke truth in God’s name.

Are you ready to be righteous before God?

Our gifts become fruit

Sermon given at Sydenstricker UMC on December 22nd, 2019

^NRS Galatians 5:22 By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, ²³ gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.

Webster, yes it is still in use, defines Epiphany as: an appearance or manifestation especially of a divine being, a usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something, an intuitive grasp of reality through something (such as an event) usually simple and striking, an illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure or a revealing scene or moment. Today we celebrate Epiphany in the church, as the celebration of the arrival of the Magi to see Jesus in Bethlehem. More on that in a moment.

I want to share a candid personal moment with you because I believe that friends do that with one another. It has been an interesting and ponderful week (not sure that last one is a word but I will use it anyway). As a pastor I am often confronted with unusual and delicate situations and I have to reaction in ways that are hopefully loving, nurturing and compassionate. So having had to deal with such a moment, I responded and asked Susan our communications Associate to share it with you through e-mail and social media. I have received both affirmation and critical complaint concerning my response. Then I was confronted this week by a member of the LGBT community that basically called me out to leave the denomination and if I did not leave the church I grew up in and love beyond measure then I was the enemy and not supportive of people of other preferences. Yesterday I read and shared the denominations protocol for separation which I have to say I support greatly and hope that it succeeds where our conversations have not. Meanwhile we live in a world bombarded by terrorism, impeachment and polarization. We seem unable to have conversations and if we are not in exact step with one side or the other then we become the enemy of one or both. I spent the last week pondering whether this is my last full year struggling to grow a church more bent on “what is in it for me” than what can I do for Jesus. Fortunately God has plans for me that are not finished yet and I am not planning on retiring any time soon. But this week it seemed closer than ever before.

Today is the day we celebrate Epiphany in the church even though the actual day is Monday this year. It is the twelfth day of Christmas, the day when in some countries gifts are given as a celebration of the Magi and their gifts to God. It is the day when we ponder the gifts that the Magi brought to the baby in the manger. In all likelihood, Jesus at that moment could well have been an infant or could have been two years old. We do not know how long it took the Magi to leave their homes and travel to Bethlehem to see Jesus. What we do know is that there was a much going on in the heavens in 2-6 BC with Jupiter in conjunction with Regulus in 3 BC, called the King Star, then with Venus in June of 2 BC and then as planets do, stopped in its place in December of that same year. Astrologers of that day would have pointed to these signs as the birth of a new King in Judea and followed Jupiter in hopes to meet this new King.

The Magi were the wise men of Daniel’s day and likely a remnant of those famous sages who predicted the future, anointed Kings and interpreted prophecy. They prepared for this event maybe hundreds of years. But what to bring? When we prepare to travel, we make our list of things to do and things to pack so that we are prepared for our trip. So too, the wise men. They would have been well versed in all the prophecies of the coming of the Messiah, including the ones that we ponder around Lent and Easter. So they brought gifts appropriate for the life that Jesus would lead. They brought gold, a currency then and now that would allow Jesus and His family to live. As it would be, they would be in exile in Egypt and the gold likely sustained them there. They brought Myrrh, a spice that is used to embalm bodies and as a perfume to reduce the smell of death. They brought Frankincense, a healing a balm that is used often with Myrrh to bring healing to wounds, sores and even gum illness. We should as Christians, rejoice that the Magi thought long and hard about what appropriate gifts would be for Jesus. He is the healer of wounds both superficial and spiritual. He came to heal the world and the gifts of Myrrh and Frankincense help us to see that. He came to heal the world through His death and resurrection and the sweet perfume of Myrrh reminds us of the stench of death that is no more. I believe that the Magi spend a great deal of time thinking about what to bring as they came to worship this new King.

I love the song, the Little Drummer Boy. The song is meant to touch our hearts about the gifts we bring to the Jesus child. Here are some of the words to that song, you can do the pa rum pum pum’s in your head: Little Baby, I am a poor boy too, I have no gift to bring that’s fit to give a king, Shall I play for you, on my drum…Then He smiled at me, me and my drum.

This song reminds us that we bring gifts fit for Jesus within us or within our own abilities and talents. Each of us in unique in what God gives us to share with the world as a gift to Jesus. What do you bring to the table? What do you offer to Jesus like the Magi offered to the baby in the manger.

So all of this makes me ponder, what are the fruits of our gifts to Jesus? We all come to this place poor in the sense that we don’t have perfection within us. We cannot be Jesus so what can we possibly give to Jesus to make up for our imperfections, our inadequacies and our failures? Bonnie and I attended a movie about Mr. Rogers this week. If you have not seen it please make the time. It could be life changing. It was not what I expected since it is more about the life of the journalist than about Mr. Rogers. And yet, is isn’t that either. It is about a man who cared so deeply for humanity that he sought out those who are broken, especially among the children to try and bring healing into the world. After seeing it, my sermon, which at that point was still not written, remember I was in a ponderful mood, became a little clearer.

What gifts do we bring? God gives each of us gifts that we can bring to the world around us. Those gifts of teaching, nurturing, loving and caring are meant not as gifts for us, but for fruitful service in the world around us. As long as we continue to come to church to be nurtured and cared for, we will fail at being the kind of persons God wants of us. Paul reminds us of this in the scripture today. We are called to be loving, patient and kind, generous and gentle. We are called to bring joy and peace into the neighborhoods we live and to be faithful to the God who loves us uncodntiinally by loving each other in the same way.

So how are you using the gifts that God has given you? I am asking because I want you to ponder these things today, tomorrow and the throughout the year. We are here in this place not to be uplifted for personal gain but to be recharged for fruitful ministry. Truthfully, if we are not, then we are like an apple that fell from the tree and lay on the ground. It begins to rot from the outside in and soon is wasted. Well not entirely, for you see even an apple not picked off the ground spills its seeds into the ground and God will use that to create new opportunities for fruitfulness. So again, I ask you, how are you using the gifts that God has given you.

I heard a story once about two men,

Jim Smith went to church on Sunday morning. He heard the organist miss a note during the prelude, and he winced. He saw a teenage talking when everybody was supposed to "bow in prayer." He felt like the usher was watching to see what he put in the offering plate, and it made him boil. He caught the preacher making a slip of the tongue five times during the sermon by actual count. As he slipped out through the side door during the closing hymn, he muttered to himself, "Never again! What a bunch of clods and hypocrites!"

Ron Jones went to church on Sunday morning. He heard the organist play an arrangement of "A Mighty Fortress", and he was thrilled by the majesty of it. He heard a young girl take a moment in the service to speak her simple moving message of the difference her faith makes in her life. He was glad to see that the church was sharing in a special offering for the hungry children of Nigeria. He especially appreciated the sermon that Sunday – it answered a question that had bothered him for a long time. He thought, as he walked out the doors of the church, "How can a man come here and not feel the presence of God?"

Both men went to the same church on the same Sunday morning.

I am convinced that more than anything else, our attitudes drive how we use our gifts. If we come to an event, like worship, expecting to see God at work and feel the Holy Spirit we will experience it that way. If we come expecting to be disappointed, disillusioned or somehow singled out, then we will find what we expect.

Little baby
Pa rum pum pum-pum
I am a poor boy too
Pa rum pum pum-pum
I have no gift to bring
Pa rum pum pum-pum
That's fit to give our King
Pa rum pum pum-pum
Rum pum pum-pum
Rum pum pum-pum
Shall I play for you
Pa rum pum pum-pum
On my drum

What's the buzz

So much is happening in our world, the denomination and our church. I am excited to see progress made in finding loving ways to acknowledge our differences and put us on paths that allow us to work together even if we must be separate. Having lived through the agony of divorce and its bitter perfume, I can appreciate what the group did to circumvent that experience for the Methodist church. Yet, we have to work our way through the General Conference to see how it all will work out.

Recently I found myself lamenting about the impact of social media on conversations and polarization. It is so easy on social media to blast someone, call someone an enemy or be downright rude to someone. If we acted like social media was a face to face conversation maybe we could then become more civil to one another. I grew up in a time when we would disagree but still remain friends even in the midst of great discourse. Civil Rights was a terrible time in this country and yet something better came out of it. We still have much work to do.

Christ gave His life that we may be free, spend eternity in paradise and spend our time here on earth doing the things that help one another.