"What Do We Believe" Feb 17, 2013

Deuteronomy 26:1-11 Luke 4: 1-13 Our Scripture readings this morning are foundational pieces, theological statements of what we believe, Who do you think you are? Who is God to you? What do you believe? How much do you believe, Why and So what? I am not trying to be argumentative, or confrontational. Therein is our first difficulty in discussing Theology (what we believe about God) most often, we have used theology to distance ourselves from others... The Catholics believe in Transubstantiation of the Elements, the Pope's In-Fallibility, and Absolute authority of the Priest. The Episcopalians believe the Head of the Church is the Queen of England. The Baptists believe you have to know the time and date of your conversion. What we have really described by these distancing statements are issues of polity and power, not theologically What We Believe. It's like the person who was rescued off of a deserted island where they had spent ten years. As they were leaving, they showed their rescuers the home they had built on the island and the Sanctuary they had built as a place to worship God. The stranger said, “Yes and what is that other building?” The survivor said “That's where I used to go to Church, before where I go now.” Theology is not about where we go to worship, or what we left to find this, or even what we claim to not be. Theology is as basic as questioning Who are you? Who is God? What do you believe? Our ancestors in this congregation, in the early 1800s, knew what they believed. They believed themselves to be in need of God. They believed in the absolute authority of God, Christ and the Holy Spirit. They believed in Scripture. Two circumstances occurred between then and now, which called everything into question. But they are not what we usually identify as the social circumstance splitting the church. It is not War, not Sexuality, or the Sexes, not Politics, even Money, or a Generation Gap in understanding. The first was the opening of King Tut's Tomb and others like it. With the study of Archeology, we took a fresh look at the Bible. Up until this time, you either believed in the Bible or you did not. The Bible was considered as the IN-ERRANT WORD of GOD. The problem of Archeology was discovery that there were several different names for God: Yahweh, Elohim, Adonai, El Ahenu, El Shaddai. It appeared as though the Bible may have been written by a variety of authors over time and edited. Can we believe in the authority of Scripture, if the words (how ever inspired) were written down by human hands like ours? It seems such a simple thing, we know there are publishers of the Bible, we know there have been translations, but questioning the Authority of Scripture, whether we take literally the Bible as without error, or whether this is the INSPIRED WORDs OF PEOPLE like us, enabled people to question the absolute authority and inerrancy of whether the WORD of God is true. When the Inerrancy of the Scriptures was questioned, the First Vatican Council was convened in 1868 declaring instead in the Infallibility of the Pope. The Protestants then began just over the Bridge from New York State, at Niagara on the Lake in Canada to hold Bible Conferences, just after the turn of the 19th Century to the 20th, at which there were identified 5 Foundational Statements, declared as Fundamental to all theology. Biblical Inerrancy The Virginity of Mary That all of the Miracles of the Bible were Verifiable and True Salvation is by The Blood Atonement of Jesus on the Cross and The Bodily Resurrection of Jesus In answer to which, in the early 1920s the alumni of Auburn Seminary, located in Auburn NY, declared we accept and believe in these principles, however in a world at War, in the face of Poverty and Starvation, Slavery and Abuse, we believe God to be concerned about a great deal more than these five. Throughout the last Century the Church in all our denominations have been fighting over what is really important, what do we stand for, what is foundational and fundamental? Is it Slavery or Abolition? Is it Prohibition? Is it Public Education? Is it Universal availability of Health Care? Is it Child Labor? The Rights of Women? Tolerance and Acceptance of Divorce? What is FUNDAMENTAL? The Old Testament Book of Deuteronomy identifies a circumstance in people's lives like we are celebrating this morning with Dick and Fine, being American Citizens for 50 years. This could just as easily be, the circumstance of a couple's Engagement, or Marriage, the Birth of a Child, or their Graduation. On this occasion, when you realize how blessed you are, what a new life you have, create for yourself a special offering and bring it to the Priest. The point is not what the offering should be, or who the minister, but that we recognize how blessed we are, and by whom we are blessed. Make a declaration of WHO YOU ARE this day. “I declare to the LORD GOD, my Dreams are fulfilled! Why declare this to the Lord God? We know and believe from experience, that before anything else we were loved. Some think the world came into being by accident, by a cataclysm of gases, by fate. Whether or not there was a Garden of Eden, an Ark with two of each animal and the Captain's name was Noah, whether an unfinished Tower was built to heaven, we can never prove.When we describe the origin of reality, before there was time or space, anything of what we know, there was God. We believe God blessed Creation, witnessing all that is as Good, and encouraging that the world is not complete. We also believe that God so loved the world, that the Author of Life stepped into and became part of reality, because of love. So where did you come from? My ancestor was a Wandering Aramean. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob all were wanderers, homeless, unknown, purposeless vagabonds, nomads wandering the face of the earth. One might also add to this, as the High Priest Isaiah declared I am a sinner, dwelling among sinners. I was alone and life was without meaning. And God, Almighty God of the Universe cared, loved us, and has transformed us. Then celebrate with the people of faith, and with those who are strangers as you once were, having compassion on those in need. The Gospel according to Luke is less about Temptation as described in Matthew and Mark, than about TESTING. Immediately after Jesus Baptism by John in the River Jordan, where the clouds part and a voice from heaven declared “THOU ART MY BELOVED SON, WITH THEE I AM WELL PLEASED” there is a genealogy of how this had happened when Jesus who was thirty years of age and Jesus was directly descended from Adam. The testing in the wilderness is SINCE YOU A DESCENDENT OF ADAM ARE THE CHILD OF GOD, what are you going to do? I have a good friend who is a retired Judge, who claims the difficulty is not between choosing Right from Wrong, the difficulty is when there are two social Rights at odds, and discerning which was right in this circumstance. In the wilderness, Moses had asked for bread to cover the earth, and there was Manna. Later Jesus would feed 5000 with bread and fish. But SINCE YOU ARE THE CHILD OF GOD, test your authority and power by changing a sone into bread. In the era of Roman Domination, when the people were looking for something to believe in, a different way of life, recognize that all power and authority comes from the Devil, will you sell yourself to power? Eventually, Jesus would be lived up, on the cross, and at the Ascension, but testing God by risking your life for the sake of risk, is foolish. What the TESTING of Jesus in Luke describes as a Starting point for what we believe, is that Jesus is the Son of Adam just as we are, and also the Child of God, which is not for his own pleasure or power or to test the love of God, but as demonstration that we can live committed to the Love of God. As a Presbyterian Christian, what I believe is that nothing separates us from the love of God, we each have direct access to God. SO what happens in the Sacrament is that by the love and forgiveness of God, we are changed. By experience of Faith IN Life, what some what called Missions, I have seen that whenever there are obstacles, dead ends denying possibility, all that is really needed is for believers to commit themselves to work together, and any dead end can be surpassed.