The Rev. Neale L. Miller

Sermon for January 7, 2007

Texts: Isaiah 53:1-10  Matthew 11:2-11

Sermon Title: We Belong to God”

              “Let’s choose up sides.”  Not the suggestion some of us wanted to hear when we were kids.  My friend Kerry didn’t want to hear it.  He stood by as the two captains performed a ritual as old as the game he hoped to play.  The two captains went about their work. The obvious picks came first; to those selected no protest would be raised.  The not-so-obvious picks raised a murmur of disapproval among the players still unselected.  From those picked on the third round there was an audible sigh of relief.  Now the two or three players not chosen, my friend Kerry among them, players whose skills were deficient, shared a common dread.  What if no one picked them?

              To go unpicked, left out, is not the kind of experience anyone wants to have.

              Ask the Kerry’s of this world.  They know what it feels like to stand on the sideline while others enjoy themselves. To the Kerry’s of this world, the sideline standers, but also to those who are privileged to live lives the Kerry’s of the world can only dream about, God declares, “you, my baptized sons and daughters, you belong to me.”

              Our denomination’s most recent confessional statement, “A Brief Statement of Faith,” highlights that declaration, stating “in life and in death we belong to God.”  Not to our spouse, our families, our work, our country---we belong to God.  This, of course, is not radical doctrine for those of us who gather to worship as a Christian congregation.  It is the “bread and butter,” the very substance, of a Christian profession of faith.

              “We belong to God,” nothing could be more basic to our self-understanding as Christians.  We in the Reformed faith tradition, heirs of Luther, Calvin and that gang, declare that Christians are the elect of God, elect, not in the sense that we are more beloved or worthy than others, but that God working through Abraham and the people of Israel chose a people, and through them chose us, to be God’s ambassadors on earth.  God chose, God elected us, and not the other way around.  In our baptisms we wear God’s very identity, and not because it is the garb we have personally chosen, but because it is the identity God chose to give us.

              We belong to God.  All this stuff we call protoplasm, matter, and all this stuff swirling around in here (the mind), and in here (the heart) we call Spirit is God’s gift to us.  Trouble is, people like you and I very often reject that whole notion.  We carry one as if we didn’t belong.  We can’t bring ourselves to accept the fact that God is personally invested in us.

              We belong to God.  Friends, that’s Bible 101, the testimony of Holy Scripture at its most basic.  The world, however, makes its own claims on us.  The world would have us believe that we belong to it. Very often we accept the culture’s definition of reality and model our behavior according to its morns and standards.  We make bad choices and wonder why we feel bad.  Depressed, we feel detached from life, relegated to the sidelines.

             I’ve made bad choices.  You have made bad choices.  I am here to tell you that there is a God who regrets our bad choices even more than we do, regrets them so much that he won’t let us forget that, bad choices and all, we still belong to him. 

              You may believe that you have been consigned to the sidelines for good, that you have been left behind, and left out, but God says, “Wait, not so fast, you belong to me.”

                Luke takes us to the river’s edge.  All the people were baptized, and Jesus was baptized with them.  Recall what happened next? Luke tells us that a Spirit like a dove descended on Jesus and a voice from heaven was heard to declare, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”  Pretty special guy that Jesus, but don’t think for a minute that the Spirit’s blessing was meant only for Jesus.  Not at all.  We can without fear of contradiction say that each of those baptized with Jesus in the Jordan was no less beloved of God than Jesus, and equally pleasing in his sight. But don’t take my word for it.  Feel excluded if you must, only know that your baptism means everything to God, even if it means little or nothing to you. 

                      Long before Jesus walked the earth, God was busy at work through his prophets sounding the same refrain as the Spirit did at the river Jordan, though using slightly different vocabulary. “I have called you by name,” the voice of God announces in Isaiah. Slightly later God asks, “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb?  Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.”  Pretty profound stuff. “I will not forget you.”

                  Now Israel had a response to make to God’s declaration of commitment.  “I hear what you are saying, God.  But you will have to excuse me for saying I feel pretty forgotten. I am up to my neck in trouble down here.”

                Mind you, Israel had the facts on her side.  She was a conquered nation.  Babylon was held on a short leash under her king Nebuchadnezzar. One tug on that leash to assert herself and the wrath of his discipline would descend promptly and decisively.     

                “I won’t forget you,” so says God. “Sorry God, you are going to have a bigger effort to prove it,” so we say.

                 In a wonderful piece introducing the new issue of our “These Days” devotional, Sylvia Cleland recalls “a period of transition not of my choosing,” where God’s absence was keenly felt. She describes reading the psalms and the Gospels “over and over again,” but not finding the comfort she was seeking. “Paragraph slid into paragraph.  I read, feeling empty, remembering nothing.”  Then, she states, “One day a shaft of sunlight slowing penetrated the mist surrounding me, and a few words broke into the foggy silence, ‘I am with you always.’…In God’s promise was a beginning.  Though there would be far to go before my journey through the dark valley would end, I could begin.”                       

                You and I are no strangers to the emotions Sylvia Cleland is describing.  We have felt estranged from our God, from our friends, from our family, from ourselves. 

                  There was a time in my life when I had completely bottomed out.   The day matched my mood perfectly.  It was one of those oppressively dreary March afternoons in St. Paul, Mn.  It was Sunday and I didn’t want to be alone with myself.  It happened that a friend of mine from my hometown in Wisconsin was visiting his sister in St. Paul that weekend.  Without calling, I went over there to see him.

            His sister came to the door announcing that my friend wasn’t there.  But she asked me if I would like to come in.  Three hours later, having unburdened myself of all the stuff that was bothering me, I left her house.  For three hours, this woman with whom I hadn’t had anything more than the most casual conversation before gave me her undivided attention. To quote my friend, Sylvia Cleland, “Though there would be far to go before my journey through the dark valley would end, I could begin.”

                I do not believe for a moment that my meeting with Clare Forman was a matter of blind chance.  Instead I believe that Jesus was there to remind me that he is always with me. That caring person was God’s outstretched hand to me. 

              Israel was languishing just as I was, and she needn’t a serious jumpstart to get her up and running again.  That jumpstart came in the form of a prophet sent by God, “Do not fear [Isaiah announced], for I will bring your offspring from the east and from the west I will gather you; I will say to the north, “Give them up,” and to the south, “Do not withhold; bring my sons from far away and my daughters from the end of the earth---everyone who is called by my name, whom I created from my glory, whom I formed and made.”

              “Whom I created from my glory, whom I formed and made.” Yes, indeed, quote the confession, “In life and in death we belong to God.”

              My friend Kerry stood on the sidelines feeling completely marginalized, alone, left out, the last one to be picked, and then only grudgingly. 

              Exclusion and marginalization are not in God’s plan for us.  God wants us to experience the full cup of blessing our baptism guarantees.  God wants us to experience wholeness, happiness, and the joy of belonging to him.

“Isaiah prophesied joy [Steve MacArthur has written], a joy that comes from God to those who have just about lost all hope that they will ever be happy.  Joy is a superlative happiness.  Given-by-God happiness.” 

              Presbyterian pastor and author Frederick Buechner speaks to this when he writes, “Joy is home…God created us in joy and created us for joy, and in the long run not all the darkness there is in the world and in ourselves can separate us finally from that joy, because whatever else it means to say that God created us in his image, I think it means that even when we cannot believe in him, even when we feel most spiritually bankrupt and deserted by him, his mark is deep within us.  We have God’s joy in our blood.”

              Joy is the path God takes when assuring he is near. We have tried to make life work on our own terms, but in time the poverty of those efforts is always exposed because we find no satisfaction, no joy, in what we are doing.  It is to experience joy, this essential union with God, that we were created.  Joy, not of the fleeting variety we experience for an hour or an afternoon, instead God created us to be connoisseurs of joy, people who can apprehend the gift in its true dimensions and power.

              We belong to God.  Some of us can’t really bring ourselves to believe that we have made the draw that we are part of the team.  We feel relegated to the sideline, remote from the action.  Yet things don’t have to be that way.  In fact, things aren’t that way, for God in Christ Jesus has redeemed us from alienation for good.  There are no sideline standers in the kingdom of God, for all were invited to the party, all were created to experience God’s joy.

              Joy may be muted for a time, war and upheaval gaining the upper hand, personal setbacks gaining the upper hand, but friends, joy is of God and that joy will never ever be suppressed.

              It was the mere rumor of joy that John the Baptist heard in prison.  Eager to confirm that rumor he sent his disciples to Jesus.  “Are you the one to come, or are we to wait for another?” they asked.  Friends, when Jesus is on the scene, there is no waiting.  Joy is the agenda, and that agenda is being fulfilled not in the sweet by and by, but in real time here and now.  Joy is the agenda because joy is of God, and to experience joy, the realization that we are God’s own in life and in death is the goal to which we are called.   AMEN

PRAYER
              O Christ, Lord and intercessor, intercede for us this day before your father and our father, that the offerings of thy brothers and sisters, the prayers prayed, the lessons read, and the music sung, may be pleasing in our Father’s sight.  Discipline our errant wills, O Christ, when our concentration drifts and the words we say and sing rise to our lips empty of content.  Preserve us, O Christ, from the self-deception that we are here merely to fulfill a religious obligation.

              Habit brings some here.  Threat others.  Some of us do not know even why we are here at all.  Lord, who made the deaf to hear and the blind to see, open us to your Spirit in new ways, that in newness of life we may walk with thee.

              O Christ, who art the source of meaning and joy for our lives, refresh our spirits in this worship that we may take yet another step in building a worship-centered life.  Prepare minds committed elsewhere, O Christ, to receive a new word, accept a new challenge.  Be patient and forbearing for we are but children in matters of faith, people who struggle for direction apart from thee.

              O God, our God, we are gathered on this Sunday remembering the baptism of our Lord, and by extension our own baptisms. Others were baptized before us, others called to serve. The path we are traveling is well marked, O God, generations of people having traveled before us, yet you have reserved new discoveries for us alone.  Help us to make them.  Help us to find new things in familiar stories and familiar songs, that through the lens of tradition we may make a new acquaintanceship with Christ, one that will strengthen and sustain us for that portion of our journey yet to be taken.

              O God our God, we fret over what is missing from life, seldom pausing to account for what is present.  For the present, this hour of peace, our friends with whom we worship, the ability to draw breath unimpaired, for children, and the sights and sounds that fill this sanctuary we give you thanks.  Slow us down that we might live in the moment for our thoughts and aspirations are often linked to what might be or what will be to the neglect of is.  O God, your Spirit is with us every moment, may we live conscious of your nearness every moment.

              You summon us to peace, not as the world gives, O God, but the peace that passes understanding; the peace that is Christ’s to confer.  Make us instruments of your peace, O God, proclaimers of your gospel of hope.  We are living through a difficult, exasperating period in our history, the stress of a war breeding anxiety and rancor. O God, we depend upon a wisdom much greater than our own to resolve the great challenges we confront.  Be our wisdom, our ears to hear, our eyes to see.

              A new Congress has convened, and we hold out great hopes, O God, for what that Congress may achieve.  Disaffected and dismayed by the ineffectiveness of the last Congress, the citizens of the land expect better from their elected representatives. May the non-partisanship our elected officials are espousing be more than mere words, but be an agenda to which they are willing to commit in deed.

              O God, our God, this world resembles so little the world you envisioned.  We have failed you and each other’s, and in that failure have squandered opportunity after opportunity to make this a world where peace and equity may reign. In your mercy forgive our parochialism, the narrowness of our focus, the preoccupation with self and its betterment over the neighbor who is also beloved of you, a child of your creating.

              Sovereign God, whose sovereignty extends over all you have made, hear the prayers we have spoken, and the prayers welling up in our hearts yet to be spoken, for we pray in the confidence that you are near, always near at hand.  Heal us where we are broken, support us where we are weak, and above all forgive our sins.  These thing we ask in Jesus’ name…