Sacrifice and Honor November 11, 2018 Veteran’s Day 100th anniversary of the end of WWI

Sermon Mark 12:38-44 November 11, 2018 Veteran’s Day 100^th anniversary of the end of WWI

Sacrifice and Honor

The widow’s mite, the last two pennies of her existence, offered up to God, is a strange Scripture to use for Veteran’s Day. What Bible verse ‘better fits’ this occasion of honoring those who have served, fought, died, and lived for this nation of the United States?

There are times in the life of faith and our life in the world that they intersect. Some have this idea that we give our hour of faith on Sunday mornings and then we go out into the world and that faith doesn’t exist there.

They actually intersect in every moment of every day.

As people of faith we do not live in a bubble.

All that we do and believe affects our perception of how we respond to the world in which we live. And how we worship is dependent on how we experience God in every moment of our day. We live our lives with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other and there is a positive balance. We ignore neither, we lift up both. We remember that we are people of faith, people of the Covenant. We have a heritage that comes to us from the Torah, that is part of our legacy of faith and hope.

So we come to this story in the gospel of Mark tells of a woman filled with grace and faith. She has enough courage to trust God and the world for her life.

You see, Jesus is watching these people going in and out of the Temple to pray and give their tithes and offerings. He observes more than just what is being given, he witnesses the hearts of those who enter to pray, to worship to give, to sacrifice. He discovers quite the variety of those who come.

He also notices the widow who goes unnoticed.

She is the one the rulers and congregation are called to look after and offer what they have for her wellbeing.

 Yet, here she is offering up as a sacrifice the last two pennies of her life, and no one notices. No one stops her, no one intervenes to help her. The powerful just keep puffing themselves up as righteous and wonderful and neglect the commandments to love their neighbor and to care for those in need. She is more often caught in the debate of the powerful deciding how she is justified or not for being poor. She is caught in a system that denies her very existence as a woman and as a person of faith.

Today is probably a good day to remember that our veterans are often found caught in the middle of people’s debates.

Our veterans are often found at the end of examples people in power use to either lift them up or dismiss them as irrelevant. Veterans are also often left to the mercy of the powerful making decisions about their future, they are often lumped into one category or another and not looked at for the individual service for our country.

They are sandwiched between the power of one administration to the next.

More and more veterans are homeless and without the resources to care for themselves. More and more veterans are disabled and suffer from serious mental illness and yet the hospitals called to care for them are underfunded and understaffed.

Until a day like today, they go unnoticed.

Until there is someone that witnesses the sacrifice they have made they go unappreciated.

The fact is we have men and women who made the decision or who said yes when they were to called to arms is one the greatest and most honorable sacrifices a person can make.

Whether a person served as a cook on a ship, or a communications officer along the coast, or went deep into the jungles of battle, these men and women gave up all they had for future that was completely uncertain.

As we look again to the widow we recognize, there is no glory in poverty or widowhood. Shame on us as ministers who this woman as an example in stewardship.

There is no glory in war or battlefields.

BUT, there is glory and honor in sacrifice even to broken systems and broken worlds. Yes, to broken systems and broken worlds, there is glory in honor in sacrifice.

We have often been frustrated with the church and the corruption of so many pastors and priests, the greed of various Christian denominations. We have been angry about wars that have been fought that are called ‘lost causes’. We have been disappointed in our country’s engagement in corrupt societies and broken corners of the world. 

But, we, as a people, would we really prefer to walk away than to support things that seem to have no future for good? 

We have a tendency to justify our inactivity and our dismissiveness by saying, “well, it’s all corrupt” and we choose not be involved or part of any system.

We even pat ourselves on the back and we find ourselves quite self righteous in our attitudes.

There are very few of us who know what it is like to give up everything as a sacrifice.

There are very few of us who know the life of one who has served our country in battle.

Also, there are very few of us that can wrap our heads around what it is like to be destitute.

We don’t have any kind of frame of reference for things like these.

No one in his or her right mind would say to someone else go and be like the poverty stricken widow.

No one in their right mind would go and tell their sons and daughters to go into battle and put themselves in harms way.

But, we would say there is great honor in those who offer there lives for freedom, for a future of peace, for the hope of love to flow down, for the power of grace to cover the world.

We hold up Christ who was the ultimate sacrifice for a future of love and mercy for all, for a future of peace and God’s glory to cover the earth forever.

We lift up those who put faith, hope, trust, and one’s very life in the hands of the One who is greater than systems and institutions.

The widow had the power of faith to trust God who is greater than all things put together to receive her sacrifice and to still care for her.

Jesus points her out to the disciples because he too will go and offer up all that he has and is to the God he trusts beyond this world.

Jesus was not depending on a broken system or a broken world to save him or anyone else. He gave his life for the life of many through his sacrifice on the cross. His faith, hope, trust was in the One Creator who will ultimately bring all things together for good.

Those who serve and have served are loyal to the power of freedom, to the power of sacrifice for the sake of others. They offered their lives for wars to cease and for nations to rise up and be just.

WWI-the war to end all wars didn’t happen.

But, brave and courageous men and women get up every day and go into danger zones with the greatest trust that there will be a day when peace will be all over this land.

We owe them honor for their courage and hope and faith that what they have done has been for the honor of freedom.

All glory and honor belong to you O God, and we offer you our sacrifice and praise. Amen.

Reverend Monica Gould

PCUSA

Waters of Life

Sermon Exodus 2: 1-10 June 7, 2015 Ordinary time-communion/baptism

Waters of Life

 Last Sunday during the church picnic we had a trivia game and one of the categories was Bible and there was an option of Old Testament or New Testament, well the groups always chose New Testament-so dear friends you might note that today’s lesson and for  the next three Sundays comes from the Old Testament. Coincidence perhaps-and then again perhaps not. J

Our story begins today in Exodus. You may all well know that the previous book Genesis ended with Joseph, the son of Jacob, being the hero and the rescuer as he delivered the people of Israel, the sons of Jacob, from famine by bringing them down to Egypt. Joseph welcomed his family and so did all the people of Egypt welcome these immigrants to a foreign land. They were well received and were given a new home. And we enter into the book of Exodus, 400 years later, 400 years from the welcome of immigrants and opening up their society to those in need, to turn and to close themselves to these Israelites-these Hebrews. The welcomed people are now the oppressed and living in slavery.

Now most of you are going to tell me this morning that you know all about the story of Moses. And most of you know the story well because we have all watched Charlton Heston in the Ten Commandments. And this is good news if we remember the story.

The people of Israel were a people familiar with chaotic times. They had threats surround them and times of helplessness and serious conditions befell them. Their history speaks of the need for God to intervene in the most chaotic and horrendous times. This story of Moses and his leading of the people out of Egypt is the core of the faith of the Jewish people. God the great God is the one who rescues his people.

Every story has its beginning and the beginning of the Moses story is essential to the Jewish faith and its spirituality. There is much here about the sovereignty (the BIGness) of God about how God intervenes through the lives of people who do not even know God or acknowledge God’s existence.

There is much here about how a life of purpose comes unwittingly through the hands of others and how they mold and shape and prepare those in their care for the greater things of life.

Imagine if we were aware of the impact we had on the lives of people with whom we work or care for or encounter on a daily basis?

Think perhaps even how we might have been the instrument of being the ‘angel unaware’ as we assisted someone by the roadside or took in an animal needing shelter or simply smiled at a person in line at the grocery store.

There were so many players to make this event come to pass; the midwives, the mother, the sister, the Egyptian princess, all who acted from the heart, their hearts which were filled with love and concern for life. This princess who rescues the Hebrew baby ends up being the giver of life to the one who ultimately rescues all of God’s people from oppression, from slavery. Moses is known as the redeemer of the Jewish people.

The story works through many facets of planned and unexpected turns for the sake of the life of Moses.

His mother makes a basket for him and places it in the reeds near where she is aware the princess comes on a daily basis to wash. The reeds I assume are much like the shallows we have around here, where one can walk through them waist high. The princess has much autonomy in the Egyptian culture as well as authority to execute contracts and secure personnel.

She does so with the mother of Moses who then becomes the caretaker of her own son in the palace of the pharaoh. We can be sure that she nurtured his mind and character and instilled in him the values and traditions cherished by his people.

The salvation of Moses from certain death through the acts of others on his behalf points again to the power of God at work to bring about the salvation of all of God’s people. The very act of placing Moses in the waters is to put him in a vulnerable spot.

How could a mother do that?

How could mother put her child vulnerable to the elements of the water?

We who are the people who live between the waters know very well what it is like to be vulnerable on the water.

 We know about storms and seas and wind.

We know about going under and coming up again.

We know about how we are at the mercy of the elements when we place ourselves on the water.

Yet, this mother knew that to be vulnerable enough to place her child in the water was to place him in the hands of God, the Creator and giver of life.

We do the same through the act of baptism.

We place our children in the waters of baptism

placing them in the hands of God

and offering them up to new life in Christ.

In this story God is not mentioned on purpose. Because the writers of this story knew that the people hearing it and reading it would have also known all those other regional stories about babies in the water and how the gods intervened. God’s name is withheld to remind the people of the power of God fully present in the most vulnerable times. Again, pointing out the BIG God, the sovereign God we have who provides for us and uses the least likely to fulfill God’s will.

There are people who God has put in place to be vulnerable and take risks.

It happened in my life.

People came alongside and took the risk to invite.

A young girl who had no use for God,

who had no faith in God,

who had little faith experience

and people chose to invite,

despite the negative response.

And so after a yes to the invitation

and several weeks that followed

and continued yesses to invitations,

I too became vulnerable

to the place God had brought me

opening up to a new way of life with Christ.

And the most powerful sealing moment

was when the priest

shed his ecclesiastical robes

and became Christ for me.

He knew I was not baptized

nor would I have the opportunity

to be confirmed

or to join the church

or to be in full communion

and he became vulnerable to the moment

and he offered the bread and the cup to me

and my life was forever changed.

To be vulnerable is to take the risk that God will not only carry us on the water but will take us through the waters into new life.

To be vulnerable is to trust ourselves in the hand of God!

Offering ourselves to God,

to allow God to breathe the breath of life in us,

to allow the waters to flow freely,

is to say, “Take my Life and let it be all for Thee…”

Take my life, Lord.

Amen.