Message: December 10, 2017 Given by: Geoff Kohler Series: The Gospel: Still Good, Still News Scripture: Matthew 1:18-25; Luke 3:2-6,

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1 Message: December 10, 2017 Given by: Geoff Kohler Series: The Gospel: Still Good, Still News Scripture: Matthew 1:18-25; Luke 3:2-6, Title: Curing Our Souls Are you celebrating Advent? I know a family, actually, it s our oldest daughter s, Kate s, family. They celebrate all of Advent each year by turning off the electric lights in their house except for the lights on the Christmas tree. They use only candles in the evenings. So, they ll read or listen to stories, they ll play games together, they ll wash the dishes together instead of using the dish washer. They do this all the way through until Christmas day, when all the lights come on and so do the rest of the electronics. In their home, for a whole month there is a significant lack of electronic connection. They don t own a TV they use their computers. But during Advent, Netflix, Hulu, shows, movies, phones, pads, , computers, social media it s all at a vastly diminished minimum. So, when it all comes back on Christmas day, it s a celebration of light and power. Now, I don t know how you hear all that maybe it makes you wonder if you could do that but to me, it s a mark of my daughter s rebellion. She grew up in a household where her father was always saying, Tonight A Charlie Brown Christmas is on, or Let s watch Rudolph, or The Grinch! You don t have to go to bed yet! We re all going to watch the Grinch together. I think it s just lingering teenage rebellion. Actually, I recognize what they re doing. They are teaching their household and their hearts to experience the proximity of God, that, God s right here and has never been anywhere else. That s how they celebrate Advent, with activities that draw them closer to each other and to our Lord and by getting out of the soaking atmosphere of our world. We are being soaked by the world, aren t we? The soaking from noise, crowds, hurry, information that are all part of the season now. The constant barrage of Christmas stuff is just added onto the constant barrage of our lives now. We are continually inundated with 1

2 information, with politics, with sexuality, with trauma, with news, with s. We are soaking in everything everyone everywhere has to tell us. So, what do we do to dry out? If you re soaked with all the stuff coming at us from every direction today, Advent is a time to dry out. I want us to think on that today. I want us to consider drying out during this time. What are we doing to cure our souls? Curing souls is an ancient term in the Christian church. It s about healing, but it makes me think of curing other things. When we cure something meat, fish we manage moisture. Curing is a process where we remove enough moisture that the bad stuff, the stuff that would spoil it, little stuff like bacteria, can t thrive. We remove enough moisture that the good stuff is preserved. The curing of our souls is handling the inundation of all the stuff that s soaking us. Curing our souls is, obviously, the healing we receive from God. Last week we looked at how God restores us, but restoration begins by just putting us back in relationship. It s getting the lines of communication working again. God doesn t work in magic. He works in reality, so it takes time for healing to take place, and healing is the next step after restoration. Once the lines of communication work, we can hear God s Spirit speaking into our souls. We begin to recognize where things are out of whack in our lives and, really, in our souls, and we can start learning to surrender those parts to God so he can grow them into new life. God starts to dry out the soaking we ve received from the world and starts to bring out and to preserve the healthy wholeness he knows is in us. Surrendering our damage or choices that could damage is a hard thing. There s a place just north of us here called The Harbor. It s just this side of Lititz and it is the base of the work by the North Star Initiative a ministry that has created a home for survivors of sex trafficking and sexual exploitation. Sex trafficking is an issue here in Lancaster. It was just in the news last week where a police operation broke up prostitution that was happening right on Route 30 just east of us. The police have been asking, Are you open yet? for almost a year, because they know the need. We re in a season where people are taking seriously the objectification of women and the work of North Star helps women escape the most serious forms of objectification. And now they re open and they are restoring women into the environment of a home and a community. 2

3 They are restoring women back into relationship as a daughter or a sister, but once that happens the real work of healing needs to take place. Healing requires these women to surrender and they need to surrender so much. Do you have that in your imaginations? Can you imagine how they walk into surrender? Surrender to God is confession, it is admitting the truth. In the old TV show, Angel (that spun-off from Buffy the Vampire Slayer ), there s a character named Fred. Fred was a beautiful young woman who gets trapped in a demon world and is there for years. The Angel gang finds her there and helps her escape and come back to our world. After a little time goes by, Fred s parents show up because they ve learned she s been found. She refuses to see them. And after a long effort, she finally admits that if she sees them and, more than that, if they see her, then everything she went through was real. She d been able to deny the reality of all her suffering, but she couldn t move to healing until she actually admitted it was real. Women in The Harbor, women who have survived exploitation, once they are restored into relationship still have to go through healing. They have to admit that all they ve gone through was real and it wasn t good. We all do. Human beings have to go through healing. That s one of the things that therapy does for us. Counseling helps us get down to the place where we admit what s true about us. Community does that as well. We all have blind spots and being with other people teaches us our blind spots. None of us know how to never hurt another person or never to neglect them or never to be so caught up in our own needs that we forget others. Once we come to faith in Jesus, once we ve been restored to relationship with God, we need to be healed. Some of you have been part of that all your life. You don t remember a time when you didn t turn to Jesus, when you didn t recognize the work of God in life and in your heart. For those of us who came to faith at a particular moment, it may be more of a revelation that someone cares about us, someone actually knows us, someone isn t put off by what s wrong with us and we don t have to hide it. But, all of us need healing, to admit the truth of what doesn t seem to work right, doesn t work as it should. God went about healing in a practical manner in the earlier time of the world. He started with a relationship with one man, Abraham, that grew into a relationship with a family and then into a tribe and then into a nation. He taught them to practice being a family even the entire 3

4 nation so that they would never forget that they shared history, that they shared memories and that they had a future that required that they work together. He gave them instructions. The Hebrew word for instruction has been translated as Commandment in English. The practices he taught them on how to eat and live were to be guidance on how to be healthy, it says in the Bible. But people turned them from being instructions into requirements. One of the things God needs to heal in many people is this idea of Law. When instruction becomes Law then people who need healing can feel more like they are being given a yardstick to which they must measure up, instead of a prescription by which they can become well. There are a lot of people in our world who have been told they must measure up instead of just heal. When that happens, the Law is no longer a healing element. It doesn t cure. It doesn t show the way. Dan Snyder and I fell into a conversation this week over how the Rabbis at the time of Jesus were using the terms Salt and Light to describe the Law of God. Dan was just reading about this and was sharing it with me. We started talking over what Jesus was saying in the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 5, when he said, 13 if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. He may be talking to the people about the Law of God in that moment. He may be telling them that if the Law is no longer doing what it was created to do, to be part of the curing, the healing of the world, then it s become useless. If it isn t showing the way, if it s become something we hide as our own, just for us, then it s worthless. So, then when he says, You are salt of the earth and you are the light of the world, he s telling the people that God is looking for us to be the living reality of healing in the world. That s what God wants. These words have been used to teach Christians over and over that they better not hide their witness, that they better be out there evangelizing, they better measure up. But, Jesus may be saying something else A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Of course not. People who bump into those who have been healed by God don t need to be evangelized. They re going Yeah! That s it. I want some of that. Let your light shine before others, that they may see the excellence of your ways and glorify your Father in heaven. 4

5 Some translations read that others should see your good works, but the Greek in that place means ideal acts. It s the excellence of our choices to which people respond. It s the stuff that makes life work. There was a good man who was looking forward to marrying a woman when he learned that she was already pregnant. That changed his view of her and he knew it would also change the view other people had of her. The requirement of the law was that she should be stoned to death, but regular people at that time knew they couldn t do that. It was too harsh a response, even if that was the Law. So, they would shun her, mistreat her, deny her presence in their community. This good man, this righteous man, Joseph, knew that and so he decided to move past the requirement and he picked up another instruction by God from the book of Isaiah Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Joseph decided to be salt, to be light. He decided that he would divorce Mary quietly. Now some might ask why he didn t just decide to keep her. Well, it should have appeared to him that she had given her heart to someone else. So, he needed a further intervention and God stepped in to give him even more instruction. He needed to be told that Mary s heart hadn t changed. Years later a man came out of the wilderness to shout to the world that God was on his way to do a new thing. John the Baptist came to the people who should have known God and God s ways and he had to teach them what to do and to say. He taught them that if they were to be part of the kingdom of God, they had to be restored. He taught them that they had to stop doing damage in the world. And then he taught them that they were to be part of the healing of the world. There was one who was coming to lead the way into the healing of the world. We have been called into restoration. We ve been called into healing. And now we re being called into being part of the healing of the world. Is your soul being cured during this season? Are you drying out from the inundation of the world? It s Advent. Now s the time. 5