Hold Someone’s Hand (Ezekiel 16:46-52, 59-63)

Sunday, October 12, 2014

            Is it easier to hug another person or to avoid being involved with that other person?  This is kind of tricky.  Some folks are huggers: they just hug everybody.  For others, it is less certain.  Maybe they came from a family of hand-shakers.  Maybe in their experience, there has not been much physical affection.   It could be their culture is not as affectionate as other cultures.  I went through a phase in my early 20’s where the only real contact I wanted with other people was of the violent kind that came in rugby matches; no hugging or affection!  I walked around proudly showing off my bruises and blackened eyes.  Then I went on a trip to Mexico.  All the men hugged me and all the women kissed me.  I had more affection in one week than two years.  It was great.

            But, be careful with this.  In my life now, in the sexual climate of the United States, I have to be aware of how my actions could be perceived.  It would be foolishly irresponsible for me to be oblivious to how someone might interpret what I do or how I do it.  I hug female friends, but I also watch for cues or hints that someone might misunderstand my intentions.

            Hugging comes with risks.  Innuendo is one.  Vulnerability is another, and here I mean literally the act of the embrace, and metaphorically, the posture of embrace.  The best book out there on this is titled Exclusion and Embrace by theologian Miroslav Volf.  To present yourself to another, arm open, face inviting, heart expectant is to let your defenses down.  You have opened the gate in the wall that is safeguarding your heart.  You are saying to the other, this is how close I want to be.  I want to pull your body to me.  This is not sexual.  It is intimate.  Intimacy scares us.  Vulnerability scares us.

            It is also risky.  What if you decide the hug is worth it, the relationship is worth it and the other feels differently.  You open, and the other closes.  Now what?  Are you embarrassed?  I certainly am when that happens.  It definitely does happen.  I am left there, arms opened.  More significantly, I have opened my heart, and the other’s closed posture is an unmistakable message.  Stay back.  Stay at a distance.  I do not want you close to me – not in body, not in spirit. 

            Mistaken intentions, unwanted vulnerability, terrifying intimacy, needless risk – is the posture of embrace worth it?  We could leave the gate in the wall locked up tight.  We could protect ourselves by never opening ourselves to anyone.  A lot of people live this way, emotions withheld, arms stiff, bodies rigid; it is a cold way to be. 

            To live rejecting embrace – this is so isolating.  Those who live this way lose the art of living in relationship and God made us to live in relationship.  To live in a perpetual defense mode keeping the world at bay is to say to the creator God, I know you made me to walk with others, but I cannot.  We all go through seasons in which we shut others out.  Sometimes solitude is necessary.  But if rejection becomes our life, we in effect say to God, I know you created me for relationship, but it hurts too much.  I have been beaten up by lovers, by friends, by family, and by strangers.  I cannot do it.  Then your experience becomes more powerful in defining your life than God’s wisdom. 

            Yes, embrace is confusing, exposing, intimate, and risky.  It is all those things.  If you choose to embrace others and relationships of love with other humans who sin as much you do, you will get bruised and burned.  You will also be living in the way God created you to live – life in relationship.  I intend to show that faith is comprised of a life in which we live by God’s designs even when our experience would suggests this is not always the best idea.  No, it is not easier to hug than to not hug.  But it is better.  Embrace is the pathway to life lived as people who are made in the image of God. 

           

            Is it easier to worship God or to rely on the self?  I know that I am asking it in the midst of a worship service.  The answer might seem painfully obvious.  But, let us look at it. 

            When we truly worship – worship in spirit and in truth as Jesus says (John 4) – certain realities are in play.  First, we really believe there is a force, a personality, a being, a reality present – one we cannot necessarily see, feel, or hear.  But this thing – God – is here.  We set ourselves up for a diagnosis of some mental illness.  We gather, study, sing to, pray to, and give our allegiance to this empty space that we claim is occupied by … what?  God.  What is God? 

            Moreover, we not only claim God is real.  We also assert God is all powerful.  Dina typed out the worship bulletin.  Starlyn selected the songs – song that were written by people, humans and sung by the humans you see up on the stage.  I wrote this sermon.  Yet, we all conspire to say God is the one who is in control.  Are we sure?  Are you?  If we are truly worshipping, we have to be pretty convinced that this whole idea of God is real.

             Yet, we cannot be because doubt always has seat in our gatherings.  Some Sundays, you are so in touch with God, you feel a light and see a heat in the sanctuary that normal human senses could not perceive.  You don’t need convincing any more than you would need someone to prove water is wet.  Some Sundays, you know God.  But someone a few rows behind you isn’t so sure.  He got himself here.  He came.  The effort to do that was all he could muster.  He is right now hearing this sermon and thinking, oh, I don’t know.  This whole thing might be a farce. 

            He leaves less convinced than when he came in.  But then, over time, he sees God.  Others don’t what he’s talking about, but he knows it is God.  And in a month, he’s back in church and it is real.  By then, things have happened in your life, and your faith is being hit by gale force winds and you are unsure.  Is this house built on drifting sand or a firm foundation?  You do not know.    Then there is the Sunday where you are sure and your friend is sure and everyone here is absolutely sure of the reality and presence and love and power of God; everyone except the pastor.  He or she has days of doubt too.

            To worship is to acknowledge uncertainty.  If we want a positive spin, we say it is mystery.  That sounds nice.  But often mystery is scarier than it is inviting because it is mysterious. 

            I mentioned the power of God.  That’s another thing to acknowledge when we are trying to figure out if a life of worship is easier than a life in which we eschew worship.  When we worship, we are bowing, whether we literally go to our knees or not.  We say that God is the one in charge, the one with the power, not us.  Do we want to say that?  Do we want to name our weakness?  Do we want to confess sins?  Do we want to have to ask the unseen, unfelt, all powerful one for blessing?  Is life easier like this?

            No!  No, if we put our hearts into worship, life is not easier.  I say this not because getting up for church on Sundays is all that difficult.  It is not.  Thousands of people get up every Sunday, go church, and they do this without fail all their lives.  Not all of them truly worship, truly pour their hearts before God.  For many this is just part of the weekly routine.  If we really believe God is here right now, there can be nothing routine about this moment.  If we seriously think God is all-knowing, we cannot hold anything of ourselves back in this moment of worship.  To hold back would be a pointless waste of the time, time in God’s presence. 

            I say a life of worship is not easy because it is a life in which we give up control.  We pray, often very specifically, but God chooses when and how to answer.  We seek, but it is God’s decision as to how God will reveal God’s self.  God calls us by God’s initiative.  Worship, in one sense, is an exercise in waiting.  In hope and in faith, worship is a life of waiting to see what God will do in the world and how God will involve us in what God is doing.  Of course that is not all worship is.  Some might take great offense at this definition.  Fine.  Take offense.  Or embrace the definition and get to waiting, but always waiting in faith, expectantly, and hopefully. 

            No, this life of worship will not feel easier than a life of ignoring God.  It is though better than the godless life because God does act.  God is involved in the world.  God indeed does call us before we ever step toward Him in worship.  Giving ourselves to a life of worship does not guarantee we’ll be in the starting lineup on God’s team.  But it does orient us toward God – the God of infinite grace and infinite love, the God who calls us to be His sons and daughters.  Living in worship is better than avoiding God.  Living in worship points us to Him.  However it plays out, to choose the opposite of worship is to choose to turn away from God’s love.

            I have made the claim that embrace while not easier is better than a relationless life.  It is better to choose embrace.  I have made the claim that to live in worship while not easier is better than a godless life.  It is better to live in worship.

            What did Jesus name as the two greatest commandments?  Love the Lord your God with all your, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind.  Obeying this by loving God begins in worship.  The second of the commands Jesus names is that we are to love our neighbors as ourselves.  Neighbor-love begins when commit ourselves to embrace. 

            The prophet Ezekiel did his work about 600 years before Jesus came on the scene.  But what Jesus said about God-love and neighbor-love was as true in Ezekiel’s days as in Jesus’.  In God’s view of how the world ought to work, God-love and neighbor-love are absolute truths going back to the very beginning, Adam and Eve.  Ezekiel’s prophecies come after God had determined that his people, the nation of Israel, had worshiped idols of Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon. 

            Idolatry is at the root of all sin.       Idolatry is giving worship that belongs to God to someone or something other than God.  It is a failure of Jesus’ first command – the command to love God.  This failure always leads to a failure of the second command – the failure to love people. 

            Ezekiel was an Israelite priest, but he lived in Babylon.    The Babylonians had overrun Jerusalem, defeated the Israelites in battle and enslaved the most powerful among the people.  Are you one of the educate elite among the Israelites?  Off to slavery in exile in Babylon you go!  Are you an army officer?  Off you go to exile.  One of the religious leaders, a priest?  Off you go! 

The first 25 chapters of Ezekiel are comprised of prophetic allegories Ezekiel wrote and shared among the exiles in Babylon.  He graphically tells of God’s punishment.  Israel practiced idolatry, exploitation, and host of other sins and did so for many generations.

In Ezekiel 16, the prophet likens Israel to Sodom.  The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is found in Genesis 19.  Abraham’s cousin Lot is lives in Sodom.  Along with its sister city Gomorrah, Sodom is known for sexual excess and perversion.  God is going to wipe out both cities, but first, Lot and his family must be rescued. 

Angels come to extract Lot, but when the men of Sodom see the angels, they have other ideas.  These angels appear as human men.  The men of Sodom are going to spend the night raping them.  Lot shelters the men in his home not knowing that it is they who will rescue him, not the other way around.

At daybreak, the angels hustle Lot out of town and then Sodom and Gomorrah are obliterated by fire from Heaven.  Some interpreters believe this story is a condemnation of homosexuality.  The men of Sodom intended to have relations with these angels whom they took to be men also.  That would be rape, a crime of violence that is sexual in nature but not the same thing as consensual homoerotic relationships.  The Sodom account definitely relates to sexual purity, but it would be wrong to hold this up as a cornerstone defense in arguing that homosexuality is sinful.  It would be wrong because it would be missing the point of the story.

Other readers make the case that the real failure in Sodom was a failure of hospitality.  There clearly is this failure by the men of town.  They want to take something from the visitors instead of offering shelter and food to the visitors.  Just as there was sexual sin involved in the story, there is the failure to care for travelers.  But again to say the Sodom account is primarily about the sin of not showing hospitality is to focus on a detail instead of the overarching theme. 

The overarching theme is faithfulness to God.  This is seen in worship and neighbor-love.  In Ezekiel 16, the prophet says to the people of God who now wallow as slaves in exile, “The people of Sodom … were never as sinful as you.  … They had everything they needed [yet] they refused to help the poor and needy” (from Ez. 16:48-49, CEV).  In the verses leading up to this, Ezekiel rails against the exiles for idolatry (see v. 36).  Both idolatry (failure of God-love) and Sodom (failure of neighbor-love) enrage God. 

In verse 60, God reminds the beleaguered exiles that he has not abandoned them.  They have not stopped being God’s people.  They are just under God’s heavy hand of discipline.  God will one day fulfill all his promises to Israel.  We Christians believe that day came in the life of Jesus, his death on the cross, his resurrection, and his sending of the Holy Spirit.  He is God’s final answer to sin.  He defines worship and embrace, God-love and neighbor-love for us. 

We live awaiting the final consummation of the Kingdom – Jesus’ return, the resurrection of all the dead when those in Christ will enter the Kingdom and those not in Christ will be banished.  That’s coming. 

Until then, we bear witness to the goodness of God, and we do it in a posture of embrace as we love our neighbors.  As we await Jesus’ return, we worship, loving God with our heart, soul, strength, and mind. 

In the commentary on Ezekiel Franz Delitzsch and Carl Friedrich Keil translate the Biblical text into German.  Later, James Martin, translated their work into English.  His rendering of their translation of Ezekiel 16:48 sets for me a concept that is the essence of what it is to love in God-love and neighbor-love, worship and embrace. 

“Behold this was the sin of Sodom, [your] sister, [Israel]; pride, super abdundance of food, and rest had she with her daughters, and the hand of the poor and needy she did not hold” (p.219).  The hand of the poor and needy, she did not hold.

We can learn from Israel’s mistake by asking God to help us see the needy in our midst – the spiritually needy, those who suffer from poverty of relationships, and the emotionally needy.  Whatever actions of love we show to help someone come from hearts that beat with love for God.  We have embraced His Gospel when it is said of us they held the hand of those who needed to be held. 

Open your arms in embrace.  Bend your knee in worship.  Live in God-love and neighbor-love.  Bear witness to the Kingdom God and the Lordship of Jesus by holding someone’s hand. 

AMEN

“Saved in the Wilderness” (Exodus 16:2-16)

Once upon our time, there is a man named Joe.

Twenty-nine-year-old Joe, an only child, is going through his parents’ financial records. Or, more accurately, he’s trying to read what is left of those records. He’s a week into sifting through materials from the bank, documents from the lawyer, reports from the police and fire department.

Five years ago, Joe finished law school and got married. He started his job with the firm that represents nonprofit organizations, mostly those that advocate for environmental causes. Four years ago, Joe’s young marriage failed – infidelity on the part of both spouses. Joe cranked up the partying for a while. Booze carried him through the depression, but only so far. It stopped working. Then, booze made the depression worse.

Hitting what he thought was rock-bottom, Joe three years ago accepted a friend’s invitation to church and within a few months, accepted Christ. His life truly turned around. He was even awarded greater responsibility at the firm and nice pay raise. Life was looking up.

Then, one of the major clients went out of business. Less lawyers were needed and a few months ago, Joe was let go. The search for new employment has been fruitless.

Last week, Joe’s parents were killed in a house fire. It is still unclear what happened, but it is entirely possible that medication both parents were taken played a role in them being unable to escape before they died. Now Joe has made the startling discovery that his parents had a lot more debt than money. He’s dealing with investigators who want to determine what happened. He’s dealing with creditors. He’s had to work with the funeral home and the attorneys who handled his parents’ will.

Joe feels utterly lost and completely alone.

I thought about beginning this morning with some word association. I would say, “Wilderness.” And you’d maybe shout out the first thoughts that came to mind. The campers and lovers-of-all-things-outdoors among us hear “wilderness,” and get excited. When can we go?? Others despise bugs and itchy, hot weather, and frosty cold nights in a tent with a sleeping bag that just isn’t quite warm enough. I say, “Wilderness,” and they say, “Next question.”

Or, I thought about opening up by saying, “Now imagine, without any preparation, you were dropped into a wilderness that is far, far from the nearest home or road. It’s so far out there, you have no idea which direction is civilization. What would you do?” And we would each write down our answers and share with the person on our left or on our right.

The problem with that illustration is it isn’t going to happen to you or to me. No one is going to take us out to the middle of nowhere with zero warning and then just leave us there. We can imagine what we might do in such a circumstance, but that imagining is unrelated to anything that will happen in our lives this week. It’s unrealistic.

Joe is not unrealistic. You can imagine being Joe. Many here don’t have to imagine. Sudden losses hit us, drastic life change, change that is not for the good. If you live a charmed life and haven’t dealt with sudden job loss or sudden relationship loss or unexpected financial trouble, you might think I have exaggerated Joe’s circumstance. If you suspect me of overplaying it, ask people in our church about their life circumstances. We’re not one large collection of people down in the dumps, but many here have had to and are traversing the desert of pain, loss, disappointment, and crippling uncertainty.

If you haven’t been lost in the desert, it is something that is probably going to happen. Don’t seek out calamity. Just know that it hits everyone.

What do we do in the desert, with nowhere to turn?

Exodus reads, “The whole congregation complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness” (16:2).

I suggested in my hypothetical that we might imagine being taken so far into remote, wild barren lands that wouldn’t even know the direction of civilization. We wouldn’t know which way to walk for the nearest road. The Hebrews we meet in Exodus were in a wilderness where there were no roads in any direction. They had to make there way and they had no idea how to do that.

The wilderness was a place where they were lost. The wilderness was a place where they had no direction. And they had no provisions. And no ability to provide for themselves. They were powerless. They found themselves at the mercy of nature, and nature, as hurricanes and earthquakes and famines show us, is merciless. The desert wilderness was a place void of hope. In scripture, the ocean depths embody abyss – a bottomless, black chaos that threatens to completely swallow a small, insignificant speck that is the human being.

If the ocean fills the man or women with the dread, the ultimate fear of annihilation, the desert robs the person of hope. The desert is a wasteland where there is nothing, and the person is forgotten. Loss, abandonment, isolation, alienation from human touch and human society; in the ocean we are swallowed; in the desert forgotten. Either way, we become nothing, cutoff from humanity and worse, cutoff from God.

Instead of literally trying to imagine how to survive the harshness of the desert the way an explorer or army ranger might survive imagine powerlessness and hopelessness. When reading Exodus and trying to enter the story, we submit the story of our lives to this Biblical epic, and in doing so, through Exodus, God speaks into our journeys. To connect with Exodus, we don’t put ourselves in the desert. We call to mind our own experiences of powerlessness, abandonment, dependency, and frustrating loss; frustration that brings us to tears because we know we cannot do anything. That’s the wilderness.

It clouds our vision. Why was Israel in the desert? Through Moses, God led them there. Why did God lead them there? In agony, they cried out to God. Why did they cry out to God? In Egypt, the monarch, Pharaoh was cruel. He killed the Hebrew boy babies. He made the people slaves. He made their labors impossible – making bricks without straw. He had his overseers drive the Hebrews with the whip. They fell into a less than human existence and cried out to God and God led them out from that horrid situation.

Now, 2½ into their desert sojourn, they follow God’s Moses, and they feel the massive wilderness engulf them, and their anxieties and their aching bellies create a fiction of where they came from. They forget the Egyptian whip. They forget the murderous evil of Pharaoh. They only remember that Pharaoh wanted his slaves fed, so they could work. “In Egypt, we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread. You have brought us out into this wilderness to kill the whole assembly with hunger” (16:3). They are shouting at Moses and Aaron. They have completely forgotten God and are instead turning full force against God’s representatives, and they shout words that are absolute idiocy. They wilderness does that. It makes us go mad.

The same happens in life when stress builds. It becomes all we can see. We feel totally trapped – maybe it is financial stress. The treadmill is (1) go to work; (2) pay bills and expenses that exceed what came in on the paycheck; (3) dig into savings and watch that number decline; (4) repeat. This trap is a hopeless cycle and we lose the ability to see anything else in life. We cannot think creatively about ways to altar life so we aren’t caught in this rut. We cannot see the blessings that are in life and are obvious to those who look into our lives on the outside. We just feel lost, we then lose sight of God, and then we say and believe the absurd.

What did Jesus think of the wilderness? “In the morning, while it was still very dark, [Jesus] got up and went to a deserted place, and there he prayed” (Mark 1:35). Oh? Is the desert as awful as we’ve made it sound? Jesus proactively sought out the desert, the deserted place. Why would he do that? “Now when Jesus heard this [the news of the death of John the Baptist], he withdrew … in a boat to a deserted place by himself” (Matthew 14:13). In the instance from Mark, Jesus tried to slip away in the pre-dawn darkness. He fled the company of others and sought the solitary isolation of the desert. In the example from Matthew 14, grieving for the loss of his friend John, He got in a boat and sailed away so others couldn’t follow him. Jesus wanted to be alone, so he went to desert places.

We’ve cited the dangers and the potential for spiritual evil in the desert, but throughout the Old and New Testaments, the desert is also where we meet God. In fact, sometimes God leads his people out to the wastelands because they aren’t really wastelands at all. The barrenness and the deathly quiet and the isolation – only there will God be heard.

In fact, Moses says to the complaining people, “You shall know that it was God who brought you out of Egypt.” That is repeated twice in the passage. In the desert, the people would know the power of God.

God tells Moses, “I have heard the complaining” (16:12). God hears Joe as Joe wallows in all his misery. When marriages die, God hears us. When our loved ones are faced with cancer, God hears. In times of job loss, financial uncertainty, depression, and unexpected calamity. God hears. It’s not wrong to cry out to him. There’s an entire Old Testament book called Lamentations. The prayer of complaint to God is sanctioned by scripture. In dire straits, what else should we do? We cry out, and God hears.

“You shall know.” “I have heard.” Moses also tells the people, “You shall see the glory of the Lord.” There’s something about God we cannot see until we are in the spiritual wandering places where it seems despair, hunger, solitude, and pain are in abundance, and hope and sustenance and safety cannot be found. There are aspects of God we need and we can only see God in that saving way when we journey into the desert. That’s where God shows up.

He said to Moses, “I will text Israel.” God provides quail meat and manna bread, and God imposes some rules on how these gifts of his grace are to be used. Only use what you need for today. The day before Sabbath, gather extra, and bake the manna and boil the meat so you can rest on Sabbath as God rests. God tests to see if his people will embrace a life of dependence on Him.

He didn’t save them from Egypt for the sake of freedom. He saved them so they would be a holy people, called out by God to be a nation of priests. Israel was saved to be in service to God that God’s holiness and love and grace and salvation would be known throughout the world.

As Christians, we aren’t saved so we’ll get to Heaven. We aren’t saved so we’ll be happy. We aren’t saved so we will have financial and material success and prosperity and perfect health. We are saved to be God’s people sharing the gospel of salvation in the world. We experience the desert in order we understand our absolute need for God. With that understanding, we receive Jesus and the forgiveness he offers, and then we live as dependent people. We depend on God every day for spiritual truth and for spiritual feeding. In the desert, God tests to see if we will truly depend on Him, or as soon as we feel confident, will we depend on our own strength instead of his grace?

What happened to Jesus? He went into the desert and ate nothing for 40 days. For forty days, he lived off prayer and nothing else – no shelter, no food. Then he was tested by the temptations of Satan.

Obviously the wilderness is many things. It is where we are lost and without hope. It is where God hears us and we know God and see God’s glory. And it is a place where God tests those who would be his people. Disciples are tested in desert times of life.

The hungry Israelites gathered before Moses and Aaron and the blinding glory of God look at the flaky white substance and ask and simple and logical question. Man hu in the Hebrew. “What is it?” That Hebrew phrase Man hu, that natural question from hungry people, “what is it,” is translated into English ‘Manna.’ What is this blessing God has given to satisfy our hunger and help us know we can live in complete dependence on him?

They had never seen this ‘bread from Heaven.’ Upon eating it, they discovered it tasted like honey-soaked wafers, a creamy, sweet taste. Where was God leading them? The land of milk and honey? Ah in there more desperate wilderness time, God gives a foretaste of all his promises of abundant blessing – blessing given to those who live in complete dependence on him.

What’s the path to hope, the path that leads us out of the desert wilderness of fear and despair and into salvation? Jesus. He said, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty” (John 6:35). In Jesus God, hears us as we cry out from the pain of our sin. In Jesus, we know God. In Jesus, we see God’s glory. He is our salvation in the wilderness, our manna. What is it? It is Jesus.

AMEN