God Is There, Oct 14, 2008

I have always been awed by folk that seem to have an internal sense of direction. I am one of those who can get lost in the Village of Skaneateles. Over the years it got so bad, that when pulling up to an intersection I would consider which way to go and if right seemed correct, I would intentionally choose left instead and more often than not it turned out to be correct after all. Yet, over a lifetime, confidence and experience increased, and brovado dissipated, to developing a sense of trust that any road could get you there. The point of this morning's Scriptures is questioning:
whether we have a clue where we are and where we are going?

Often, the mistakes of life are NOT that we chose wrong, but that we forget where we are going and we drift aimlessly, instead of knowing that where ever you are, God is with you.
The purpose of RELIGION, is not to give people faith. The purpose of RELIGION is to establish processes and methods for one generation to share their faith, their ethics and morals, and even more their exerience of God with another. The pain and frustration is that it is entirely possible to follow all the rules and procedures and still get lost.
As educators we can teach our students to attain 100 on standardized tests, yet have no idea what they are learning or why.

Nearly 600 years before the birth of Jesus, the Nation of Judah was invaded by Nebuchadnezzer, King of Babylon. The leaders of the Nation of Judah were carried off in bondage as exiles. This passage from Jeremiah reflects that they were not sold and dispersed as slaves, but kept together as prisoners of war in a foreign culture, communicating with the people back home a sense of desperation. Like Dorothy in that scene from the Wizard of Oz, where locked in the Witch's Tower she can witness her Aunt M through the Crystal Ball searching for her, weeping, knowing she is lost feeling helpless to do anything. Communicating to those left behind, was to instill in them a political leverage to friends and family, to be subserviant.

Like us, those far from home, adopted a stoic identity that we could put up with anything for a short time. But the prophecy of Jeremiah was that they would never come home again. The new and different hope offered is that in 70 years, your children, or children's children might. How different life appears, if we are not short-termers, but in a Covenant that will endure for generations to come. We can imagine 6 weeks of hardship, or 6 months, a year or even 5-10, but 70 years, a lifetime. 70 years ago, in the midst of the Great Depression, who would have imagined what life would be like today? 70 years in the future, what might life be like in 2077? What if our concerns were not the immediate ones, not about us, or today's worries, but decisions effecting our children's children? None of us will be alive in 2077, will any of the problems we are weighed by, still matter? AnnaMargaret will be a 70 year old, a professor of Mathematics, Physics and Engineering, a preacher and author, with six children and 14 grandchildren. Will it matter, will anyone even remember, that before she was five she had open heat surgery three times? Traumatic to us all this last month, these next several years, but in the scheme of things, a brief time that makes one resolved to live.

Up until this time, the RELIGION of Israel had become demonstrative. When you are thankful, make an offering of two turtle doves or the first fruits of the harvest. When you are guilt-ridden, make a sacrifice of an unblemished lamb or a heiffer. But Jeremiah's message changed that for ever. FAITH has less to do with the outward actions and appearances, and everything to do with where your heart is. Judaism and Christianity each have endured persecutions through societies hostile to the presence of faith. These have endured because belief in God is not about CIRCUMCISION, or KOSHER foods, or KNOWING the WORDS of Confessions or Hymns.
Belief in God is a willing, intimate, personal covenant, circumcising one's heart. Knowing and claiming what is good and right and heplful and choosing that, choosing to stay away from what is not. Not muttering and mumbling archaic phrases, but singing, especially when you sing poorly, choosing to not hold back but to sing praise of God. A SACRIFICE is NOT cutting a thing in two on an altar, SACRIFICE is GIVING what we most love for, those we cannot live without.

If all we learn through the experience of Cancer is that we can survive without hair, without a breast or uterus, or that we can endure impotence; then we have followed the therapies, made all the right turns and gotten through, but life is pretty empty. How different is that life, to know that parts of ourselves were so infected we were trying to kill us. That without hair, or breasts or a uterus, without the ability to share intercourse, you are of course still loved, not only valued but prized, not for your accomplishments or earning potential, but for your presence in our lives.

For the time, LEPROSY was a Social Disease, an affliction that austrocized people as excluded. Driving to University Hospital or any of the interchanges in Syracuse, there are men with signs saying “Disabled Vet”, “Unable to Work” and cars slow at intersections to hand off a few coins to help these persons get by another meal, another day. We have made DEPRESSSIONinto a social disease, Post-Traumatic Stress from being part of WAR, something that separates as not acceptable.
What if, you could give that person, what would not only meet their needs but change their life.
Would you?
Would they notice?
Would change, really change a person's life or only circumstances for a moment?
10 people with LEPROSY BEG Jesus for help. Jesus not only helps them, he heals them of their Leprosy, and tells them to go to show themselves to the priest so as to be recognized as no longer socially outcast, but claimed, a part of the community of faith.
They received the direction they were seeking. Not only did they receive the help they requested, they were told what next to do, where to go. 9 out of 10 went on unchanged. Only a tenth, one who actually was a Samartan, stopped to look at what he had asked for, and realized he had been healed, which alows the wordplay that he was not only “healed” he was “cured” he was “saved”. We have come to expect “SALVATION” as an event, that at 10:43 am on the 2nd of October, the clouds parted a ray of sunlight appeared and something like scales fel from our eyes. Here, in Luke, SALVATION is the persons' own acceptance that life has changed.

The problem the Pharisees needed to be healed of, was believing RESURRECTION could only come in a Future time, far off. They trusted that ater death, in seventy years for a future generation CHANGE MIGHT COME, but all around them, persons who had been blind were suddenly able to see, persons who had been deaf were able to hear. Can we allow ourselves to see what God is doing among us, or can we only cling to the hope that one day maybe.

Each of us, all of us, at differing times become lost, the only question that matters is whether we know that NO MATTER WHERE YOU ARE, GOD KNOWS YOU ARE THERE.