Home        Contact     Meetings     Map        Sermons     Messenger  

Good news is not always easy news.

Last week texts called for us to be ready when Christ comes. I said that Advent is not so much about waiting for Christmas as it is about standing on tiptoes, asking Jesus to come into our lives as the Messiah of Righteousness. To do that, we may need to re-order our priorities, by making an assessment of our lives to see what we need to keep and what we need to let go of. Malachi asks who can stand?

Who can endure the day of his coming? For the Lord is like a refiner's fire and like a fuller's soap.

Some of us are unable to hear those words without hearing Handel’s music. Handel knows his Bible. The voices work into a frenzied fuge, cacophony reigns, suggesting that the process of purification is even hard work for God. 

The voices lick up like flames suggesting that the energy required is Herculean …

Then there is the fuller’s soap bit -- to scrub wool to clean and bleach it before it can be made into cloth… except maybe for Mel's neighbor who raises sheep and sells woolen items. 

When I was in grammar school kids would talk about having their mouths washed out with soap… ostensibly when they were using bad language.

We, who have a million excuses for being who we are and doing what we do, might have a difficult time relating to these passages.

Dr. Phil, Judge Judy, Montell, Jerry, Ellen, spend their days with people who are not at fault.

If a spouse is unfaithful, it’s because the other did not show enough attention or because he had an overly strict father, or because he has been diagnosed as bi-polar, or society is to blame.

In these pre-Christmas lessons God’s diagnosis is no longer fashionable…

We are more concerned today that kids have a good self-image than that they are responsible.

Researchers gave a math test to high school seniors from 11 different countries. The first question was “Are you good at math?” Then they were given some math problems to solve. 

Here’s what the researchers found. American students had the lowest scores in math and the highest percentage saying “yes” I’m good in math. 

We are terrible at math but we feel good about ourselves.  We have learned to justify our failures.

If we don’t love our neighbors it’s because they are too much into themselves, or too noisy or too nosy (never could spell those two words right).

If we don’t pray it is because we are too busy or we don’t know how any more or maybe we never even tried.

If we don’t pledge to the church it is because it’s no one’s business what I give – but when it comes to signing up for another year with the cable company we are ready with our Visa or Master Card. The easiest way to avoid real responsibility is to say – “I have responsibilities.”

Recently one of our council members cautioned me not to push too hard on something that I believed to be an important issue… he said people were calling him because they are upset.

I said “Good, I’m glad that somebody is upset enough to call… I wish they were upset about their paltry giving”.

I wish they were upset that the church seems to have so little relevance in their lives.

Too many churches major on “feel me good” religion and fail on personal accountability.

It was the Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer who pointed his finger at the Christians in his homeland who were singing Advent hymns while Jews where being carted off to the Concentration Camps – He said that the sin of respectable people is their flight from responsibility.

Today is Commitment Sunday. It is the day that we must decide how we will prioritize our resources.

These are tough times.  But I believe that God has given us the means to continue as his witness in this time and place.

The temptation is to say that I’m doing all I can.

The temptation is to come up with many excuses why you will not make a pledge.

Our Gospel and the OT reading are not just angry words from another time and place – As you recall, these words are, “The Word of the Lord” and you say “Thanks be to God…”

These don’t seem like the Bible verses you want to hear three weeks before Christmas where the glow of Advent is being melted by a refiner's fire and then scrubbed down with Ajax.

With all due respect to Malachi and John, before we dismiss them, did you catch the last verse in the OT reading where the prophet says “The Lord whom you seek will come to the temple.”

We are here because we are looking for God. Judgment is God’s molding us into the promise of grace. The Good News is that God will not let go of us until we are honest with ourselves.

When I was in college I’d come home on weekends to work at a local Piggly Wiggly. One particular Saturday a friend of mine invited me to spend the night at his house.

He lived down a winding road between Manchester and Tullahoma.

My parents told me I could take the car for that night.

It was foggy and what I thought was the road was actually the reflection of the headlights on the beads of fog.

The next thing I saw was the ditch – jerked the car to the right – not good!

I over-compensated and flipped the car landing in the opposite ditch upside down and I thought, I’m dead. 

I thought of my father and his car and again I thought, “I’m dead”.

This was a little Renault.

I managed to crawl out the front window which had popped out and patted myself down, to see if I still had all my body parts… with the wheels still spinning, I headed out on foot.

It wasn’t long before I heard the distant sounds of a siren and then flashing blue lights coming toward me… I waved the trooper's car down.

He took me to my car. By the time we got there, people were searching in the woods for the driver – C'est moi.

One of those standing there was my dad. How did he get here so fast …?

I knew I was in real trouble...

While riding in the police car, I was trying to think what I was going to say when he found out.

Now it was judgment day. Someone who knew the car had called my dad.

In that moment I realized that all the good reasons I had thought about would not work with my dad. I expected the worst. I saw judgment, fuller soap and flames of torment as my dad walked toward me.

I decided to walk right up and tell him the whole truth… yes, I had a beer, yes I was tired, yes I might have been speeding…

I would use the prodigal son’s speech.

“Father I have sinned against heaven and before you.  I am no longer worthy to be called your son.”

I started the speech. I was completely unprepared for what happened next.

He broke me worse than anything I could have imagined. He did the most painful wondrous thing.

I would not have been surprised if he had physically or verbally abused me – I deserved both.

But he took me in his arms and hugged me. All he ever said was Gott sei Dank, Gott sei Dank…“I am so glad that your are ok.”

The fire from my father’s love melted me – the soap of the fuller washed me clean.

I had not expected such totally undeserved goodness… My father had never hugged me until that moment… beat me yes, hugged me no!

Judgment wasn’t anything like what I thought it would be. For the next several weeks, I waited for the other shoe to drop. I waited for many years and it never came.

Maybe he thought that forgiveness would be the best punishment. My dad believed in the OT passage about “sparing the rod and spoiling the child.”

Maybe he thought that I was too old to do that? Or maybe he didn’t think about it at all. Maybe he was really glad that I was ok.

Could that be the way that judgment works?

Could it be that God loves us not because He wants to make us feel guilty or manipulate us or send us to hell, but because that is who God is?

This is my Sunday for a Stewardship Sermon. I pray that God’s Judgment may open your heart to continue the support of our ministry here in this beautiful place on this fantastic southern shore of NJ.

Amen