watch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJMCSvMKLms&t=11s
Sunday,
February 7, 2021
Who are we? Who will we be? Beloved movie heroes entertain us for 2-3
hours, trying to answer these questions.
Elsa in Frozen; who will she become, now that everyone knows she
has super powers? Luke Skywalker in Star
Wars; will he ever become a Jedi Knight?
If he does, what then? Steve
Rogers in the Avengers; once the skinny weakling takes the super-soldier
serum, what then? What does he
become?
As much as I love these stories, I find your more
interesting because, (1) I can see you and talk to you. You’re real!
And, (2) you don’t have super-soldier serum, you can’t shoot icicles out
of your hands, and you can’t control force.
What you have going for you is the Holy Spirit! I want to hear your story once the Holy
Spirit enters your life.
I want to find out who you are when you are ‘in
Christ.’ I want to find out who the
church will become. The pandemic has
rattled the church’s sense of itself.
Potlucks; bedside hospital visits; raucous laughter shared around the
front hall coffee pot before the worship service; laying hands on someone being
commissioned or ordained; embracing a friend; these things make the church and
we can’t hardly do any of them. Thanks,
COVID-19.
What’s more, our church had just changed our name to
“Hillside.” At the end of 2019. We were
coming out of two years of bumpy transition.
We were in the process of rediscovering our identity before COVID came
along! Does that mean we were ahead of
every other church that had to deal with re-evaluating itself in light of COVID? Or did it mean we were set back a year in the
work we were doing to once again hear and answer God’s call. I think it’s a little of both.
More
and more people are vaccinated each day.
The end is coming and when it does, we’ll have to be ready to understand
our identity so we can be God’s witnesses here, drawing people in our town to
Jesus. But really, we have to begin that
work before the pandemic ends. Right
now, today, we are called to be witnesses who tell what we have seen and
experienced in following Jesus Christ.
I had us begin 2021 in Haggai and now in Zechariah
because these prophets spoke the word of the Lord to the covenant community in
Jerusalem after the exile. Exile had
diminished them, displaced them, and broken them. None of that changed the call. Israel was to be God’s chosen people through
whom the entire world would know and worship and serve the only true God.
Exile had been the means
by which God had punished his people for failing to answer that call and live
his way. When we get to Haggai and
Zechariah, we find that the exile is over.
It’s time to start over, rebuild, and once again turn to the Lord and
then draw the world to the Lord. These
prophets speak God’s word to a rebuilding people.
We are a rebuilding people. The “who” question is an identity
question. Zechariah is not part of the
answer to the “who” question. Zechariah
is a guide. Listening to his truth, it
sinks in. We are the answer to the “who”
question. Who is this story about? It’s about God as God is revealed in a rebuilding
congregation, Hillside Church, emerging from years of transition and seemingly
endless months of social distancing. Who
will we become as God’s people in Chapel Hill?
In this story, we are the “who”.
God’s church. What about the “what” and
the “how”?
Who will Hillside Church
be when we live into the identity God gives us?
“What” is the next question. What
needs to happen for us to be ready to live into our God-given identity as a
people? The prophet Zechariah tells us in chapter 1.
“Return to me,” says the
Lord of hosts in verse 3. Zechariah
warns the people not to repeat the mistakes of their parents, the exile
generation. God invited them to return, but
they continued in their rebellion. Now,
they were gone. God’s word remained. And
so, the invitation is once again given.
“Return to me” (1:3).
Zechariah writes in verse
6 that the people repented. They turned
away from injustice. They turned away from the worship of idols, false
gods. They turned away from sin and
turned to God. In their broken state,
they accepted God’s justice, including the punishment. With exile over, they were ready to return to
God.
After this initial call to
repentance and report that the people answered by repenting, Zechariah shares
the first of his seven “night visions.”
At night, in a grove of myrtle trees, he sees a man astride a horse, and
behind them several horses of different color, typical colors for horses.
These horses act as God’s
emissaries patrolling the earth. The
vision depicts for the prophet what he and we already know. God can see the entire earth. He is all-seeing and all-knowing. The angel reports in Zechariah 1:11 that all
is calm, the earth is at peace.
How can this be so? How we say “all is well” when God’s temple is
a pile of rubble and God’s people live as exiles? Thus, the angel, not the prophet, confronts
God asking accusingly, “How Long, O Lord” will you withhold mercy” (1:12)? We can relate. We know people refuse to wear masks, gather
in close quarters, and ignore good pandemic behavior. We know part of the reason this contagion has
persisted and dogged us as it has is that people don’t do what is necessary to
curb it. Still, like Zechariah’s angel
in chapter 1, we look to heaven, shake our fists, and through our tears bellow
out, “How long will this go on, O Lord?”
Zechariah 1:13 shows God
as an understanding counselor, a patient therapist. It says the “Lord replied with gracious and
comforting words to the angel.” In this
same chapter, God is angry and God is understanding. Both are true because God is perfect love. In
verse 16, God says, “I have returned to Jerusalem with compassion.”
Human suffering breaks
God’s heart, even when we bring the suffering on ourselves. God’s compassion is always for us. As Jesus says in Luke 15, “There is joy in
the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents” (15:10b). God wants us to be free of the pain sin imposes
and God offers us that freedom. We need
to turn to Him. We turn from the sin,
acknowledge our absolute need, and turn to God.
Thus the “who” – our
identity is defined by the “what”; what we do.
We see understand that we can only live dependent on God. We turn away from putting our faith in people,
things, dreams, and systems. We turn
from that and we turn to God. The “what”
is our need for His grace, for the Spirit’s empowerment, for forgiveness, and
energy to start again.
What about the “how?” Who?
What? How? How do we begin living into the identity God
has given to us?
This part of the story is
God’s work. God says, in Zechariah 1:16,
“I have returned, with compassion.” More
than once in Haggai God says, I will be with you. The Gospel of Matthew ends with Jesus’
promise to his disciples (and to us), “I am with you always to the end of the
age” (28:20). In Revelation, we know
that at the end of the age, Jesus returns, we are resurrected, and we live
forever with him in our resurrection bodies.
The presence of God ties this all together.
Just as Zechariah
prophesied the temple building in Jerusalem, 515BC, we will build Jesus’ church
right here in Chapel Hill. God is with
us, so we can do it. We can encourage
each other, feed the hungry, share good news, love all who come, and grow our
family because God is here, filling us with His empowering spirit.
Furthermore, in Zechariah
1:17, God declares, “My cities shall again overflow with prosperity.” We will flourish as God’s church because we
stand in our need, as a broken people who have been healed by love, a dead people
born again, a repentant people made new.
It’s the story of God and us – us returning to the God who loves
us. That repentance is our act of
acknowledgement and faith. And the story
ends in joy and peace because God is present.
At the communion table, we
take a necessary step in the story. We
come to the table as we are. We don’t put
on a false front, no facades. We don’t hide
behind masks of respectability, false presentations of our best selves. We wear our warts, pimples, scars, wrinkles
and dried tears. This is us. We come name what we have lost. We hold out our mistakes. We have in mind those we have hurt either by
our actions or our failure to act.
On our way to the
communion table, a table welcoming all, we stop at the cross. There we lay down everything – our entire
story. When Zechariah says “return,” this
is the repentance we ought to have in mind.
All are welcome, but we can’t get to the table without a stop at the
cross. We meet Jesus at the cross, and
he guides us to take our seat at the table where we gather with brothers and
sisters, a family, united by God’s love.
Take your place. Bring your story. Open your heart to God. Receive the grace and forgiveness he
gives. And the prosperity. He makes us new. Even as wrong as things seem in the world, he
makes things right.
AMEN
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