Sermon, St. Barnabas, March 19, 2017
Lent is a time of returning to the Lord – when we ask ourselves: are we walking with God? are we tracking with God?
Sometimes it is helpful to have some practices that help us walk with God, to step into His footsteps as He leads the way through
I have a wonderful Spiritual Director – someone who is trained to listen and to encourage another to become aware of God’s presence as one seeks to walk with God
The Spiritual Director in my life at the moment has encouraged me to read an exceptional book entitled, Catching Fire Become Flame: A Guide for Spiritual Transformation, by Albert Haase.
A chapter in this book gives instruction in an old Christian practice that many here already know. But for those who do not, the practice is called “the Examen,” a practice by which we become more aware of God in the midst of our lives. The author Albert Haase presents this old Christian practice in five easy steps. I would like to encourage that we each take a minute to practice these five steps here and now to provide first-hand experience for both the practice of the Examen and the main theme of our Scripture readings today.
Those who practice “the Examen” already may find the following five steps in perhaps a different order and expressed perhaps in different words from those one is used to, but no worries, the practice is the same.
Step One: Ask the Holy Spirit to enliven your awareness so that you may become alert to the presence of God. Take a minute to do this.
Step Two: Ask the Holy Spirit to point out to you that for which you want to give thanks and praise. Take a minute to thank God for gifts, graces, and blessings you have received this day.
Step Three: Ask the Holy Spirit to inspire with you a sense of how God is present in the midst of what you have to do this day:
- Is God present in events that are challenging you?
- Is God inviting you to hear the needs of others?
- Is God asking you to receive the stories of others: their joys, sorrows, cries for help?
- Is God prompting you to decrease allowing another by the Holy Spirit to increase as you receive the other in gratitude into your life?
In other words, where is God leading you in the midst of your thoughts right now. Take a minute to experience this.
Step Four: Ask the Holy Spirit to inspire within you awareness of how you have you have walked right by God in persons and events as you hurried ahead to get more of what you want? Take a moment to become aware of those around you whom you have not noticed and ask God’s forgiveness for overlooking or looking past your neighbor, failing to notice him or her and his or her needs. Through Jesus Christ, receive God’s forgiveness.
Step Five: Ask the Holy Spirit to renew in you a clean heart, a grateful heart, a heart alert to God’s presence in persons, in events, in relationships. Take a moment to imagine how God might surprise you in the midst of your hurrying and worrying as you go about getting what you need to do today.
Now let’s turn to the readings:
Exodus 17: 1-7, read verses 1-3
Were members of the Israelite community attuned to God’s presence in their midst? (Ask the congregation)
So Moses cries out to God asking: What am I to do with these people, they are about to kill me?!
Then, God moved by Moses’ plea, responds by once again demonstrating dramatically, like he had when he held back the waters of the Red Sea, that God is really with them. So God causes Moses to strike the rock with his staff and water comes gushing out. It’s as though God is saying, “SEE, I am making it quite plain to you that I am with you.” But it seems God was not happy about being tested to produce signs in this visible and dramatic way. Thus he names the place: Massah, meaning “testing” and “Meribah” meaning “quarreling,” because in a quarrelsome and testing manner the people had inquired of God, “Are you still with us?”
Perhaps the Israelites would have been helped by the practice of “the Examen.”
In my practice of memorizing a few lines from a new psalm each day, I was struck by Psalm 44, which begins with the Israelites reciting all that God did for their ancestors. Praising God for his mighty arm and sword by which the Lord had won battles for their ancestors, the psalmist affirms that it was by such victories the people were aware of the Lord’s presence and they knew the Lord loved them.
But the psalmist suddenly turns sour, like the Israelites in the desert who complained to Moses, testing and quarreling with the Lord. “Now you have rejected us and humbled us… now you no longer win battles for us, we are being devoured like sheep, sold for a pittance, reproached by our neighbors, scorned and derided. Where, God, did you go? Though we praised you, you allowed us to be crushed. “Awake, Lord? Why do you sleep?” “Rouse yourself, do not reject us forever!” “Rise up, rescue us, with your unfailing love.”
This psalm speaks true to our experience, doesn’t it? It’s easy to thank and praise God when he is easily visible to us winning victories in our lives. It’s not so easy to thank and praise God when he goes invisible, when there are no victories, no visible signs of the Lord’s presence.
What do we do in these times when God seems to have slipped out the back door of our lives? Does this lack of visible sign mean that God has suddenly ceased with his life-offering love for us?
Today’s Psalm 95 tells us “no.” Psalm 95 tells us: get back to singing with joy to the Lord. Read psalm 95, 1-2 As the Examen practice also teaches: Sing with joy, thanksgiving and praise, and you will find him in the depths of the earth, in the mountain peaks, in the sea and in dry land. For He has made everything for us, “we are the people of his pasture, the flock under his care. The point is when we change our attitude from quarreling and complaining to singing songs with joy, thanksgiving and praise, God who is always with us invisibly, suddenly becomes visible in ways of which we have not previously been aware. This happens when we sing hymns!
BUT, read verses 7-11:
Clearly God does not like an ungrateful, joyless, songless heart. And there are consequences, for God does judge us. Those whose hearts lack joy, thanksgiving and praise, and thereby have gone astray, do not enter the Lord’s rest.
Yet, even here there is help from the Lord. For the Lord who judges is also the Lord rich in mercy.
Read Romans 5: 6-11.
Thus, on those days, when the suffering of the world is all around us, and the pain, loneliness, and isolation of our lives distracts us, and we drown in sadness, even then, if by the Holy Spirit we look, we find trickles of the blood of Jesus, God’s life-offering love, invisibly all around us, embracing us, for while we were still sinners, Christ died for us, that through his death we might live, live to boast in God, who sacrificed himself, that we might be reconciled to him, to others, and the whole creation. Invisible though this sacrifice may be,, it is there, there, and there. Look around, sing songs of thanksgiving, and you will start see the living God, every day dying that we, who are powerless, lost in sin, might live—and not only live, but live to praise him.
So what does our familiar Gospel reading today have to offer us on our theme of becoming aware of God’s ever present, ever sure life-offering love and sacrifice that we might live and live abundantly?
In the Gospel reading of John 4:5-42, a story we all know well, we find Jesus, God’s life-offering love in person, wandering into a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph.
A woman from the Samaritan tribe, finding him there, is blind to who is standing before her. She sees only someone from the tribe of Jews. She is like us, unaware of God standing right there before us.
Keeping with the customs her tribe knows, she says in so many words, “people should stick to their own kind.”
But Jesus says, “open your eyes, see who is standing before you: the living God offering his life for you.” But she doesn’t see him: she sees only what she wants to see, what she is familiar with, and so she misses seeing Jesus.
Take a moment to think about your own life: is there someone standing there before you, offering life-giving love and you don’t see them, you walk right by them? Take a moment by the Holy Spirit to become aware, who in your life is sacrificing his or her life in order to lift you up that you might have live, that you might thrive? Is it a mother? Is it an uncle? Is it a friend? Is it a child? Who is offering life-giving love that you might live? When we become aware of these persons in our lives, it can become overwhelming. Barbara Myerhoff story
Jesus begins to encourage the woman to become aware that the more she seeks to get what she thinks will satisfy her thirst, the more her thirst will never be quenched. He offers her an alternative, another kind of water, another way of living, a way that is aware of God standing before her, all around her, quietly and unassumingly, sacrificing his life for her, that she might live and live abundantly.
But she laughs it off, saying to Jesus, “Give me of that water so I don’t have to come here to the well to get water anymore.”
So Jesus goes about the lesson another way round: He tells her, her life’s story. Now she knows He is a Prophet and she begins to trust him, with a question of spiritual importance: Our tribe worships on this mountain but your tribe worships in Jerusalem, which is true?
Jesus replies that the time has come when it no longer matters who one’s people are. Beyond family, tribe, caste, social position or lack of it, the time has come that now anyone – ALL- can worship God in Spirit and in truth.
The woman takes another step forward towards living water: could you be the one to open this universal way for all?
Jesus responds, “Yes, I am He.”
He is life-offering, living water, but will her eyes be opened, will she see, will she receive the water? Will she become a receiver of God’s life-offering love, filling up her glass to overlflowing until she too becomes a giver of that life-offering love to others? Will she become a receiver of God’s ever constant presence, overflowing with gratitude enough to sing God’s praise with music and song? Will she become a receiver overflowing with gratitude enough to give of herself to others, even others she does not know?
Or will she remain a go-getter, seeking only what she knows, day after day walking by the life-offering love of others and of the Lord in endless pursuit of that which can never satisfy?
Just then the disciples burst on the scene in the same mode of holding onto the familiar and rejecting the unknown: “Who are you talking to? They ask Jesus. “She is from the Samaritan tribe,” they tell him.
Now comes the moment when we know she has received Jesus, received God’s life-offering love: leaving her jar for getting water at the well, she runs back to town, brimming to overflowing wanting to share the new life she has received.
Haven’t we all done this? Hearing the Word of God in a new, life-giving way, have we not run to those we know and love to tell them what we have found out, how God has revealed himself to us this day?
But the disciples are still stuck in their old ways, saying, “Surely someone should have gotten the Rabbi something to eat?” Stuck in their tribal ways, like the Samaritan woman, they don’t see Jesus for who he really is.
But Jesus is patient with them too. He says the life he has to give is not about getting food: it’s about giving food, giving water to the living, giving that comes from an unending reservoir—the reservoir of God’s life-offering love, an unending source of food and water, an unending source of life: God’s sacrifice of himself by which he lifts us up that we might live and love one another as he has loved us.
As the parable finishes, Jesus instructs: God has sown himself that we might reap what we did not sow. We are alive because he gives of himself that we might live. Every day, every day we reap what we have not sown. Every day every day we live by the grace of the life-giving sacrifices of others, most often by the sacrifices of those we don’t see, known or acknowledge. Every day, every day God is giving of himself that we might live. God and others have done the hard work and we reap the benefit.
So in those times when God seems to have slipped away and is no longer with us, let us not grumble, quarrel and test the Lord like those at Massah and Meribah. Let us instead, by the Holy Spirit, turn around to see who is emptying him or herself for us that day. No one is alive who has not reaped the benefits of what one did not sow.
Who in your life is invisibly sacrificing, sowing, that you might reap? If we are to have eyes to see, we begin with songs of joy and thanksgiving, giving thanks to the living God by whose sacrifice we have been rescued from darkness and brought into the kingdom of light, life, and love.
Then, in songs of joy and thanksgiving, by the Holy Spirit, pray that our eyes be opened to see those who by their life-offering sacrifices lift us up to reap what we have not sown. In songs of joy and thanksgiving, by the Holy Spirit may we see in their faces the living face of Jesus, the Savior of the world.
Go in peace as you sing in joy and thanksgiving.