Sermon Archive

"The Real World", Hebrews 4:12-16

Date: October 11, 2009, The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Author: The Rev. Dr. James D. Kegel

GRACE TO YOU AND PEACE FROM GOD OUR FATHER AND THE LORD AND SAVIOR JESUS CHRIST, AMEN.
            “Who is the guy hanging on the plus sign?” The Episcopal theologian, Kendall Harmon, remembers when a couple came into his office with a yellow pad filled with questions from their teenage son. It was a real question they asked, “Who is the guy hanging on a plus sign; what is he doing up there.” Last week in the Parade magazine, many of us read about declining connection with traditional religious institutions. About one fourth of the respondents said they were religious and about one fourth said they had no religion. Here in Oregon, we know well that we are living in the “none” zone where more people claim no religion that any traditional faith. Only about twenty percent of the people are members of a religion and Eugene is among the five least “churched” cities in the nation. But it isn’t only the Northwest. Vermont leads the nation with 38% of the people claiming no religion. In a survey, one young man in a rock band who had grown up Roman Catholic says he is typical of his friends, “If religion comes up, everyone at the table starts mocking it. I don’t know anyone religious and hardly anyone ‘spiritual’.” Robert Wuthnow, sociologist at Princeton, says we have become a nation of what he calls “tinkerers.” Our spirituality tends to be a little bit of this and a little bit of that. And as Parade noted, a country that had sent out one million missionaries to foreign lands, now sees little need for mission because by and large everyone’s religion or lack of religion is fine. And even among those who claim Christianity, many do not know the basics of their faith let alone able to use biblical references or theological terms. I had a student tell me back in Moorhead that he was so glad to be attending Concordia College because in his beginning religion class he was finding out who people like Abraham, Moses and Jesus were. He had heard the names but didn’t know anything about them. What we once took for granted—that people had heard of Moses and the Ten Commandments or Jesus suffering and dying on the cross—that people know what the Christian faith stood for, we can no longer assume. As Greg Meyer, lead pastor a “Jacob’s Well,” an emergent Lutheran congregation in Minneapolis for those who had “given up on church,” wrote, “Don’t kid yourselves into thinking people know the difference between Noah and Jonah, what a Barabbas is or that the epistles aren’t the wives of the apostle. Most younger people who grew up in the church won’t even pass those tests anymore. More than fifty percent of those under forty-five have given up on church as a meaningful source for spiritual development.” I had people ask me when I was hiking in Yosemite last summer if I preached on hell a lot. I said, “Not very often.” That is what came first to their minds when they found out that I was a minister. Many people’s attitude is that religion is condemning and life denying. A popular movie, Ricky Gervais’ “The Invention of Lying,” suggests that religion, especially Christianity, is based on a lie; that belief in God is a lie, and that in a world where no one is able to lie, there would be no belief in God, an afterlife or religion. Books like Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’ god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything have been on the bestseller list. The world around us no longer affirms and supports our religious faith. We are not living in a country where everyone is “Protestant, Catholic and Jew,” where the Ten Commandments could be displayed on court house lawns, Bible verses quoted and alluded to in public speeches and people believed in a benevolent, personal God.
            So we can do one of two things. We can sit back and think, “Aint it awful.” I do that a lot! Or gather with like-minded friends and reminisce about the good, old days. I remember a memorial service for a Junior High teacher who had been killed. It took place in the gymnasium of South Junior High in Moorhead, Minnesota, in 1966; the place was filled with students and faculty and community members. The pastor began to say, “Our Father, who art in heaven,” and everyone joined in—I don’t think there was anyone who did not know the Lord’s Prayer. The Catholics stopped before the rest, the Presbyterians and Baptists said only one “forever” and the Episcopalians and Lutherans did “forever and ever,” but everyone knew the prayer. Those days are gone. I now ask couples being married here at Central to consider printing the words to the Lord’s Prayer in the service folders because often few chime in. We can rue what this world has come to, we can surround ourselves with like-minded people and forget about the rest, or we can honestly take a look at our community and say, “This is the place where God has placed me, to me faithful in my time.” The Book of Acts records the death of King David, “When David served God’s purpose in his own generation, he fell asleep.” We too are called to serve God in our generation, in this community today. We are not able to live in the past. As some have said, we plan for the future, but we live in today.
            And how to we live today, in this place and time? Our text from Hebrews gives us some help in that. First we recognize God’s power. God is in charge, we are not. If we are to be faithful in our generation, then we begin by being real both to God and to ourselves. Someone said recently that when coming to church, people put on their church façade. We may put on a church face to other people, even ourselves sometimes, but with God we need to be authentic. God has created us to be honest—we are not asked to be someone other than who we are. Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Community Church in California relates, “When I get to heaven, God is not going to ask my why I wasn’t Billy Graham or Robert Schuller but God is going to ask me why I wasn’t Rick Warren.” God is not going to ask you why you were not someone else, but why you weren’t you, and the best you, you can be. The language in our text about “God’s Word sharper than a two-edge sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart,” and “before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.” These are words telling us that we are real people and can not pretend to be something we are not. We are sinners before God. We are selfish people. We are good and bad all mixed up in one person and we can not always understand ourselves. Paul characterizes the human dilemma when he is open about his own life, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” In theological terms, we talk about original sin, concupiscence; in the liturgy we confess that we are by nature sinful and unclean, in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves. This is our reality. None of us is without sin and can cast a stone at another person. All of us have fallen short of what God intends for us.
            We need to be real to ourselves and to God and it would be helpful if here in this fellowship of faith, we could be real with each other. But we don’t stop there; our text goes on to talk about God who understands us. The image in Hebrews is of the Jerusalem Temple and its priesthood. We come to know our God through Jesus, through a man just like us though one who could withstand the temptations that we cannot. We can approach God with boldness but of Jesus, our brother. He can sympathize with our weakness because he is just like us. He understands the frailties of the body. I am sure he was sick as a child and I know that he suffered and died. No one is whipped without suffering. No one has nails piercing hands and feet without feeling excruciating pain. Jesus, God, knows bodily pain. Jesus also understands social rejection. Great crowds may have come to hear him and see him, but when he most needed his friends they rejected him. Peter denied ever knowing him. One of his friends, Judas, betrayed him to those who condemned him to death. Jesus understands spiritual pain. In the Garden of Gethseman, Jesus prayed that he might escape his crucifixion even to sweating drops of blood. He cried out on the cross words of dereliction, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” This is not play acting. The heavens were shut to him. God was not there when he most needed him. God needed God and God was absent.          
            Is there any good news for us in our struggles? God is not without defenders. Karen Armstrong has written a best-seller which takes on the new atheism. Her book is entitled, The Case for God. The Lord is not without witnesses today. Cultural Christianity may be fading but people are still coming to know and love God, having changed lives and hope. When we get real with God, we also find forgiveness and strength. All the energy that we use to pretend to be what we aren’t can be channeled in new and constructive ways. When we come to know and love Jesus, then God can be real with us too, helping us be faithful in our days, fulfilling God’s purpose in this our time and place.
We live in the real world. We are real people. God is real and for us.

Amen.

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