​HELP! 
Deuteronomy 22:1-6 March 18, 2018
    Barbara and I said goodbye to a good friend this week.  Even though Tom was an instant friend to everyone he met, he took a little getting used to. Tom didn’t always follow the rules, or even know there were rules, like the time he brought his chickens to Vacation Bible School so the children could meet them.  Tom sometimes got his Bible stories a little wrong.  He had no need for theological training.  But Tom knew what it meant to live like Jesus.  Tom knew what it meant to love his neighbor.  He was the “Eggman” because part of his ministry was to share eggs with his brothers and sisters in Christ. Visitors to his church were welcomed with a carton of eggs.  Often he had eggs for his friends at just the perfect time. He would often say, “God told me to give you these eggs.” And quite often it was at the time his friend needed them most.  Tom not only gave eggs to his friends, he once gave money from his wife’s life insurance after her passing to a friend so he could buy a new truck when the old truck broke down.  Tom’s real ministry was helping others and he was good at it.
    Today’s text talks about helping our neighbors.  There are a lot of scriptures that could be interpreted a few ways, but verse three of this passage is pretty clear.  We have to help our neighbor.  The Bible says it in the negative, “You may not withhold your help.”  But the point is clear.  We have no choice. We MUST help our neighbor in need.    
    If you look at our world today, you might wonder if anyone has read this text lately.  We not only withhold our help, we rejoice when bad things happen to those we dislike.  We even have a word for it.  The German word, Schadenfreude means to take joy in the misfortune of another.  In many of our interactions, we not only don’t help; we do everything we can to obstruct others trying to help.  Think about it.  When was the last time you heard about someone refusing to help someone they don’t get along with?  We don’t hear about that because it is so common.  But when someone goes out of their way to help—a police officer giving his shoes to a homeless person or a child using their hard earned money to help someone who has suffered loss—that is so rare that it is newsworthy.  
    Our text today is saying that for our society to work, we need to help each other.  So what does it mean to help our neighbor?
    First, it means that we are to take care of our neighbor as we want to be taken care of.  The text talks about this in terms of safeguarding and restoring our neighbor’s ox, or sheep, or donkey. Today we might talk about a lost wallet, or incorrect change, or a wayward cell phone. We are supposed to return whatever our neighbor lost.  If we don’t know who the thing belongs to we are to take care of the item until the owner comes to take it back.  We are to safeguard and restore our neighbor’s physical things, but what about safeguarding our neighbor’s spirit?  When we see our neighbor losing their faith shouldn’t we be there for them and try to share our faith until theirs becomes strong?  What about when they lose their hope?  We can remind them that with God there is always hope.  When they have lost their ability to love, we need to share with them the love God has given.
    Next, it means that we are supposed to ease our neighbor’s burden.  Again the Bible talks in terms of livestock.  Today, there are so many other ways to ease our neighbor’s burden:  We can feed the hungry. We can clothe the naked. We can advocate for those with no voice. We can help to seek justice when there is no justice.  We can work to restore relationships.
    But we should also ease our neighbor’s spiritual burdens: We need to pray with and for those who don’t know God’s peace.  When our neighbor doubts God’s love, we need to be God’s hands and feet showing them that God loves them. When our neighbor struggles with their belief, we need to point out to them that God is still with us. When our neighbor is brought down by the stresses of the world, we need to lift them up by helping to relieve their stress.
    Finally we need to take a global view of helping others.  The Bible says we are to care even for the bird sitting on her nest. Jesus tells us that God’s eye is on the sparrow. If God’s eye is on the sparrow ours should be as well.  Many times we try to get out of this responsibility to help by defining our neighbor narrowly.  We think maybe we only need to help those who think like us, or those who look like us, or those who worship like us.  But we need to hear what Jesus says in answer to the question, “Who is my neighbor?”  In the parable of the Good Samaritan Jesus says that my neighbor is anyone who is in need; even—or maybe especially—my enemy.
    God tells us to help our neighbor by taking care of them as we would like others to take care of us.  Even more, God shows us how to love and care for others but giving us His Son, Jesus to be our model.  I think the words of a song we sang at our friend Tom’s funeral sum it up:
"Live Like That"
Sometimes I think
What will people say of me
When I'm only just a memory
When I'm home where my soul belongs
Was I love
When no one else would show up
Was I Jesus to the least of us
Was my worship more than just a song
I want to live like that
And give it all I have
So that everything I say and do
Points to You 
God expects us to love others not only as we love ourselves, but as God loves us.  Amen.

​SSSNAKES
Numbers 21:4-9  March 4, 2018

    The Israelites were tired.  They had wandered for almost forty years and they could see the end of their journey, but there were still a lot of obstacles before they got there.  Some of them had mutinied against Moses and tried to convince the people to return to Egypt.  They had run out of water at Meribah causing Moses to lose his temper and disobey God’s instructions.  Now as they prepared to pass through Edom, the land of Israel’s brother, their cousins refused to allow safe passage and mobilized their army to fight if Israel tried to enter their land.  Going around Edom instead of through it added months, maybe years, to their journey.  They were so close to the end of their wandering, but still so far away.
    So they did what came naturally to them.  They grumbled.  They continued to question Moses’s leadership and they even began to doubt God’s power to take care of them.  They grumbled against both Moses and God, not realizing that it was only because of the grace of God and the intercession of Moses that they had survived throughout their desert journey.  They grumbled against everything.  They grumbled about the long journey.  They grumbled about the Manna God provided.  They grumbled about their lack of water. Once again as they had often done before they convinced themselves that things were better in the slavery of Egypt rather than in the freedom of their journey to the Promised Land.
    God responded to their grumbling by sending fiery serpents-- the word used is seraphim the same word we use for angels-- to bite and kill the Israelites.  Again, as they had done so often, Israel repented of their grumbling and turned to Moses for the solution.
    As I reflect on this story, I realize that we are not much different from the Israelites.  We grumble.  Most recently, many of us grumbled about our loss of power as we forgot that in many parts of the world electrical power is only available for a few hours a day if at all.  We grumble about the economy even though we are all rich by the standards of the rest of the world.  We grumble about the direction our nation is headed.  We openly grumble about our governmental leadership.  We grumble about the future of the church, we grumble about our church leadership.  We grumble because our long held beliefs are being challenged.   We want to go back to a place and time where we were comfortable in our beliefs and we avoid going forward into the place God has prepared for us.
    We grumble just like Israel did, so where are the snakes?  We might believe that they are not there, but our grumbling is just as deadly as Israel’s and for the same reason.  When we grumble, our dissatisfaction has a deadly effect on the world.  When we complain about what we don’t have we betray our trust in God to provide.  When we complain about the future, we deny that God is with us now and forever.  When we complain about our leadership we tear our community apart.  When we turn to go back to our old ways we refuse to trust that God is in control and we fail to do God’s will. All of these complaints bring with them the threat of the deadly poison that comes from the snakes. Remember the serpent in Genesis?  He did his evil work not by fighting against God, but by making Adam and Eve doubt God’s power and love.  Lack of faith is the source of all the snakes in our lives.
    When Israel came to their senses and chose to trust Moses and trust God, God told Moses to make a bronze model of the serpents and place it on a pole so that whoever was bitten could look at the serpent and live.  I can hear you asking, “What about the commandment not to make a graven image?”  Don’t confuse this with a graven image.  There are two reasons it is not.  First, God commanded Moses to make it (this is a whole other sermon about when God tells us to do something that appears to go against God’s commandments). Second, the serpent was not created to be worshipped.  In fact, later in Israel’s history, King Hezekiah destroyed the serpent because some people were worshipping it instead of God.  The purpose of the bronze serpent was to make the Israelites look up and remember the power of God who was with them and provided for them throughout their journey.  When they looked at the serpent, the people were forced to look beyond their problems and see the bigger picture of God’s love and provision.
    In chapter three of John’s gospel Jesus says that like Moses raised the serpent in the wilderness, Jesus must be raised up (on the cross) so that all who look on him will not perish.  So there is the solution to our grumbling:  Look to Jesus and remember the love that God has for us.  God loves us so much that he sent Jesus to be our savior.  We don’t need to grumble against others or against God.  We don’t need to fear our future because we can say in faith, “God’s got this!  I can trust God!”  Amen 

​Making Things Right
Numbers 5:1-10 February 25, 2018
    When we read the Bible where we start often determines where we end up.  For instance, if we read with the belief that God is an angry God, especially in the Old Testament, we will find an angry God.  When I read the Bible, I read from the perspective of God’s great love.  The lens through which I interpret scripture includes such scriptures as: 1 John 4:8, “Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” ; John 3:16-17, “‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. ‘Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”; 2 Peter 3:9, “ The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance. “; and especially Matthew 22:37-39  ‘“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”  This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.””  This is particularly important to know when reading this week’s text because the text could lead to an interpretation of exclusion.  By reading through the lens of God’s love, I believe the text tells another story as well.
    In the first part of this text, God told Moses to put people with the skin disease Leprosy, with bodily discharges, and those who had had contact with dead bodies outside the camp.  There was a practical health related reason for this.  These people could be contagious.  If they remained inside the camp, they could infect the whole camp.  But there was another, spiritual, reason.  God intended to live among the Israelites and nothing unclean was allowed to live where God lived.  Only the most holy people were allowed to enter into the presence of God.  
    This could be interpreted as a reason to exclude certain people who we call sinners from the church, or from the community of believers.  But by that standard, we should all be excluded from the church since none of us is perfect.  Not one of us is worthy to enter into God’s presence.  We may not have visible discharges or diseases, but what about our spiritual discharges?  Have you read posts on social media lately?  On social media we tend to hide behind our anonymity and we speak our hearts. Unfortunately, when we do reveal what it in our hearts, we find that we are far from healthy in our relationships with each other.  I pray for the day that we can treat each other with true respect both in person and in their absence.  When we are judged by the standard of our hearts, all of us should be outside the camp.
    This is true except for one thing.  As Christians we have not only found, but we have received the cure for our disease.  Jesus is the cure.  He is both our sacrificial lamb who paid the price for our disobedience and our scapegoat who removes our sins as far as the east is from the west.  Even though we belong outside God’s Kingdom, by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, we have been invited back in.
    So why do we treat each other so poorly?  Why do we still sin against each other once we have been saved?  The answer is that we are healed by Christ, but we are still being rehabilitated by God.  Once we accept God’s gift of justifying grace offered through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, we continue to walk in God’s sanctifying grace and with the help of the Holy Spirit we continue to grow more in love with God and to grow more into the people that God has always intended for us to be.  When we become Christians saved by grace, we are not perfect people, but every day we walk with God, we are becoming perfect with the help of God.  Christ is the cure for our sin; the Holy Spirit is our rehabilitation, our “spiritual therapy.”
    The prescription God gives us for a healthy society is love.  Christ tells us to love God and to love each other.  These two laws are like two sides of the same coin.  We can’t do one without doing the other as well.  When we are saved by Christ, we begin to learn what it means to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and we discover that one aspect of loving God is loving our neighbor.  And when we love our neighbor the way God loves our neighbor, we learn how to love God with more strength.  
    After all, as a people who have received the cure for our disease of sin, why would we not want to share that same cure with others?  Loving God and loving each other is the first step in making disciples. Loving our neighbor means building relationships, strengthening relationships, and restoring broken relationships.  Once again, God gives us instructions.  When we wrong another we need to confess our guilt and ask forgiveness and make things more than right by adding to the restitution we pay.  This is easy when the loss suffered by our neighbor is physical, but how do we make restitution for spiritual wrongs?  I’m not sure I know the answer to that except to say that we need to continue to share our love with the same extravagance that God loves us.  When we love them, we build our relationship with our neighbors and we help them restore their relationship with God.  To love like God loves, we put their actions and their beliefs aside, we ignore differences in theology, and we just love.
    That’s the whole solution:  Love God by accepting God’s grace and love our neighbors.  When we do this we spread the Gospel through our words and our actions.  Our need now is not changed laws or changed procedures even though they might help in the short term.  The only way we can change our society is to change hearts.  And only God can change people’s hearts.  Amen.