Take Up Your Cross Begins with Promise

 Sermon Genesis 9:8-17 February 20, 2021 First Sunday in Lent yrB

Take Up Your Cross Begins with Promise

This season of Lent our focus is on the cross we carry. We all know that our time of Lent is a time of reflection. It is a time we begin on Ash Wednesday and say- “we put ashes on our head: to remind us of all those around the world who are mourning and suffering; to remind us that we have sinned and need repentance and must cling to the promises and love of Christ; to remind us that we all die; to remind us of Christ’s suffering and death and resurrection; and to remind us that we are still claimed, named, called, loved, children of God.” This season we will take up our cross because we need to not only figuratively remember God, but we need to literally do the labor and the discipline to remember all that God has done for us. God himself became limited and chose to enter our humanity, to become weak, and to die to save us.

So, are we willing in this Lent to choose to take up our cross and walk with it for these many weeks, these 40 days, and become vulnerable before God and others? We can if we remember whose we are. Our taking up the cross begins this week with promise. The weeks to come we will take up our cross and follow, obey, believe, and be light. We begin this week with promise.

Lent Banner for NMPC

Promises, promises, it’s all we hear anymore from politicians, community leaders, anyone in the public realm, and we are just tired of empty promises. When we hear our children say to us, or we say to them, “I promise” are we even capable anymore of being true to that promise? A promise these days seems so fickle. No one makes a deal on a handshake, or the word of another. The ability to trust seems an ancient pastime. Yet, trust, faith and promises are the very foundation of our faith. And the truth of why they are the foundation of our faith is that we have been a human race of sin, deception, destruction, and disappointment to the very God of our creation.

These first eleven chapters of Genesis are important chapters well known throughout the ancient texts of the beginning of the earth. Every culture in the Mesopotamian delta had and has stories of the beginning of humanity, the fall of humanity, and the great flood that hit the reset button for humanity. Why does this matter? Because it lets us know there was an understanding across all tribes, religions, and developing groups of a sense of the importance of telling the story of the beginning relationships of humans to each other and gods or God.

The story of the flood is taught in Sunday school. It is great biblical literature taught to all children and remembered into adulthood. We remember being taught that it rained for 40 days and 40 nights. We remember being taught that Noah built the ark out of gopher wood. We remember that Noah took in animals two by two. We remember that the waters eventually receded, and Noah landed on dry land and built an altar to thank God. We remember that God said he would never curse the ground or destroy the people again. We remember God placed a rainbow in the sky as a reminder of that promise. What we may not remember is the gift of God’s grace to us through this powerful story.

We have a God who we know created all that is. God created out chaos and nothingness a world of wonder and beauty. We recognize the depth and breadth and height of God’s grace as this moment plays out before Noah. God speaks to Noah after all the destruction is over. God accepts the sacrifice that Noah offers. God renews the responsibility to Noah to be fruitful and multiply and to care for the earth and allows for the sacrifice of animals for food.

And then God looks all around what is.

God witnesses the consequences of the judgment of sin.

God witnesses all that has been lost.  God sacrifices judgment for grace.

God places a limit on God’s own power of judgement.

God looks at Noah and the earth and the creatures of the earth and says, “enough is enough.”

God makes a promise to never, ever, ever, curse the ground again. God makes a promise to never, ever, ever, destroy creation again. In this promise God has set the limits on himself and allows his grace to rule.

Who does that?

Who limits their ability to punish?

Who limits their authority?

Who sets themselves in a position to be vulnerable to the mistakes of others?  

God does.                                                                                     

God loves beyond boundaries.

God loves beyond God’s own self.

God sent his Son into a world to become vulnerable to the point of death.

 Who does that?

DO we?

Are we able to offer ourselves in a promise to another that puts them first no matter what? Are we willing to love and forgive and to live the promise of forever with another? 

It’s those kinds of questions we ask ourselves when we witness what God has done with Noah.

But God goes one step further in this story.

God puts a reminder in the sky for God to not mess up the promise.

Photo credit Pastorale Farm, Rebekah Rodgers

You see God put all the colors in a beautiful giant bow that every creature can see, every human can see, everything that moves and breathes can see the rainbow. God put it there to make sure that God would remember the promise. God put it there because there is no mistake that this promise God has made touches everyone’s life from the past to the present to the future. God will be held accountable to every living creature, past, present, and future. The rainbow is forever!

When God puts the rainbow in the sky as a sign everything has a hope for the future.

All assurance is given that there is a tomorrow to plan for and to rejoice in.

Even amid the continuing chaos God’s promise of the rainbow reminds all that the earth will continue. God will never destroy it again.

So, when pandemics reign and death is at every corner, when sadness and grief is as deep as the ocean, God shines the rainbow and we know there will be another day to live for that will bring sunshine. In the bulb there is a flower. It enters the ground to die, so in spring it can return with the brightness of life. As Sib Towner described it, “ God enters into an everlasting covenant with alligators as well as human beings and guarantees their place within the providential order.”

The joy of the promise of God is that it is universal and eternal. It has a universal effect in the way the outreaching (horizontal bar) of the cross is to all people, to all creation. It has an eternal effect in the way the cross (the vertical bar) is God’s descent to bring heaven to earth and our eternal relationship through the threshold of life to death and resurrection.  

It may be a challenge to take up our cross.

It may be something we are not really willing to do.

It may be fear filled.

It may be all those things.

It may make us uncomfortable.

 

It will make us vulnerable.

It will make us aware.

It will make us open.

It will make us available.

It will make us present.

 

In this Lent we have the opportunity to experience grace as never before.

Embrace the promise of God.

Trust the promise of God for you today.

Trust the God who believes in second chances.

 

Remember as you take up your cross it begins with promise.

Look to the rainbow and rejoice.

Amen.

Resources: W. Sibley Towner Genesis Commentary; Feasting on the Word YrB David Lose

Property of Monica Gould sharing is permitted. Please send requests to reprint with permission to mongould@gmail.com

Walk and Not Faint

Sermon Isaiah 40:21-31 February 7, 2021

Walk and Not Faint

Today is Super Bowl Sunday. Now that might not be a big deal to many of you. Considering how messed up our sports seasons have been this year, many may not even give a hoot about watching this one football game. I do know though, that there are many who will sit down and watch this game just for a semblance of tradition as we’ve known in the past.

Tradition is something we hold dear as sport fans, as Americans, as families, and as Christian church goers. Traditions remind us that life has been worthwhile, and that life will continue beyond ourselves. Today is Super Bowl 55. That’s a lot of years for a sport to hold together a tradition in this fast-moving society. 

Which leads me to the question, "

what traditions do we cling to and why? 

Consider as we sit together today, 

here in the pews and those online, 

those things that bring comfort, joy, security, value, and purpose.

As we reflect, we will discover most of what we are considering involve being engaged with others in community. 

As we reflect on those traditions, they bring us an enormous amount of joy that draws us to a place of remembrance and praise. 

They fill us again with hope and joy.

The prophet Isaiah was talking to a people who had lost hope and were living their lives in the lament of what once was. The people of Israel had been taken captive and displaced to Babylon. They had been there for years. Life as they knew it ceased to exist. They were forced to take on manners and daily routines unlike they had ever experienced. They were full of grief and sorrow. They yearned for the day they could return to their country and return to their ways and their traditions. The people in exile were actually at a point where they were giving up looking forward. They felt abandoned by God. They wondered if the God they once believed in was really the God of deliverance.

As time went by, they became more and more despondent. And they doubted the God of wonders and the God of their tradition.

They had been in exile for so long they began to suffer amnesia and looked to the gods of their captors. Murdock was the sun god of the Babylonians as well as multiple astrid (or star) gods. Their knowledge of their traditions began to fade.

The book of Isaiah is divided into three parts. And chapter 40 is known as the beginning the second part of Isaiah. It is a crucial turning point chapter. It begins the first eleven verses with words we hear every Advent season… ‘comfort, comfort, my people’. Here in these verses we discover a God who has never abandoned his people, yet yearns to bring them from their lament to a life of praise and to return them to their traditions of worship and hopeful living.

I believe in every time and age God’s people have asked the question, “Can God really help us?” And, “Does our God still want to help us?”

Perhaps, that is where we have found ourselves as God’s people these past months. We have been removed from one another as in no other recent time. For many it is the first time in their life they have experienced a crisis. Many here were too young to remember 9/11 or WWII or the depression. But, even in those times communities were not isolated and cut off from each other. The greatest tragedy is when communities fail to function together and individual existence is more important. Even our Bible’s references are always on the universal community response to God as God’s people are called to live together.

How does the tradition of moving in life without fear, 

and seeking to participate together with God’s strength, 

return us to society?

We hear the words of Isaiah to the people of God and we respond to them.
Too many of us have been caught up sitting idle
waiting for things to change;
or waiting for things to return to what was.

Too many of us have socially distanced
ourselves from relationships.

It has been too easy to remove ourselves from society.
We can find all we need at our fingertips from home.

Our isolation from community has made it too easy
to be isolated and far removed from God.

We sing a hymn and an anthem where the refrain goes, “Come back to me with all your heart Don't let fear keep us apart,  Long have I waited for Your coming home to me And living deeply our new lives.” God is the one reaching out to us and drawing us back to himself.

Isaiah provides us with such grace in the reminder of the wonder and majesty of our God. He returns the listeners to the traditional truths of God.

God is the creator of the universe

and the ruler and power of the nations.

God is Lord of all.

God gives power to the faint and

strengthens the powerless.

Our God loves us to draw us up in our hour of need.

God removes our lament and

restores our souls with the songs of praise.

 

When we hear the song Majesty it too restores us to the tradition of God’s power and grace over all of us.

No matter how exhausted we find ourselves
we have the promise that God will renew our strength.

It is our Lord’s Supper tradition that we come to the Table remembering that Christ is our living bread where we are nourished and renewed, refreshed and strengthened. 

Photo credit Joe Valentine

In this tradition that God has given us

 we too trust that as 

we wait for the Lord 

we shall be renewed in strength, 

we shall mount up with wings as eagles and we shall run and not be weary, and we shall walk and not faint. 

It is the tradition that reminds us that we are the Body of Christ across the whole world. We are a community of faith drawn together through our Savior. Take time to return to the tradition of our faith and join in community here and now through reaching out to us as we reach out to you. Prepare your table before you as we sup as one.

Let us gather now and rejoice and praise God for his wonderful gifts to us. Let us lift up our voices and shout louder than the cheers at the football games, let us lift our spirits with joy! We are about to enter into the joyful feast of our risen Lord, it is time to praise our Jesus! Amen.

Resources: Interpretation Isaiah Paul Hanson; A Commentary on Isaiah Claus Westermann; NIB Christopher Seitz.

Property of Monica Gould sharing is permitted but not to be reprinted without permission.