Invisible Blessings, Tangible Gifts

Transcription

1 Christ Church United Church of Christ Sunday Sermon Invisible Blessings, Tangible Gifts November 23, 2014 Ezekiel 34: 11-16, Ephesians 1: I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him. By Rev. Dr. Galen E. Russell III

2 Ezekiel 34: 11-16, Rev. Dr. Galen E. Russell III Ephesians 1: November 23, 2014 I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him. Prayer: O living God, with your guidance we are able to see more than we ever imagined. Thanks be to you, O God! Amen. Rev. Gordon Cosby, founder and pastor of the Church of our Savior in Washington, D.C., tells about guest preaching at a Lenten mid-week evening service somewhere in New England. The worship was particularly dull and uninspiring. Nobody sang the hymns; nobody smiled or reacted. The only thing that moved, he said, were the offering plates. Afterward he and his wife were depressed. The church had reserved a room for them in a roadside inn, above a tavern. And they couldn t help compare the sounds of laughter, music, and camaraderie beneath them with the grim lifeless exercise in religion they had experienced. He said, I realized that there was more warmth and fellowship in that tavern than there was in the church. If Jesus of Nazareth had his choice, he would probably have come to the tavern rather than to the church we visited (see Ernest Campbell, Locked in a Room With Open Doors (Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1974), 159) retrieved November 21, 2014). That scenario doesn t describe us, does it?! No way! We have the blessing of enthusiasm! I ve sensed it. We ve felt it! Just look at our kiddos! Just listen to our music! Just participate in our conversations with each other! It all shows the energy! Just get a sense of how passionate several of us are about doing mission and ministry, about our love of God, about our gratitude for our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of our church! Amen! 2

3 Paul was as enthusiastic as we are, perhaps more so. Did you sense it? In a nutshell, Paul is filled with gratitude as he prays for the new Christians at Ephesus because they received a spirit of wisdom and revelation that enlightened their lives. That spirit of wisdom is God s word about Jesus Christ, and that revelation is how about powerful the word of God is, as they come to know God. Those last words are crucial because coming to know God is not a flip-on-the-switch type of thing. As you know, probably from your personal experiences, coming to have faith in Jesus Christ means that the Holy Spirit instantly entered into every part of your being transforming you from within, but most people aren t instantly filled with all wisdom and revelation, like Solomon. The invisible blessings of wisdom and revelation usually take time. They usually come with spiritual disciplines of discernment and prayer. Also with spiritual practices of worship, conversation, and study and all the while we come to know God. This means we are all on a faith journey a journey that encourages relationship as we come to know God. I believe God wants a 2-way street relationship with us. So, as we engage in these types of spiritual disciplines and practices, we reach to God and come to know God. As we grow faith in Jesus Christ, we actively strengthen the bedrock of our personal faith in God, deepening our profound trust in God s unfailing grace, wisdom, goodness, and love. As we deliberately seek God out and include God in all of our decisions, we are bringing God into the mix of our lives. And as we practice doing that, including God in the very essence of our lives, we are reaching to God, and lo and behold! We will find God reaching to us, all the time, offering us the invisible blessings of a new spiritual life for right now, incredible hope that we can endure life s ups and downs, and inherited riches of a life with God in God s eternal realm where God, by immeasurable power has made Jesus Christ Sovereign over all things, visible and invisible. 3

4 What wonderful blessings! Christ! What power in the Gospel of Jesus Are we enthusiastically receiving these blessings? The invisible blessing of a new life within our inner lives? The intangible blessing of hope, the wonderful blessing of unseen, but inherited riches? These blessings are right there for us in our personal spiritual lives, but might we easily miss them? Here s where I think the importance of Thanksgiving kicks in. I wonder if a grateful heart helps us recognize those invisible blessings. Famed preacher Henry Ward Beecher describes the invisible blessings like particles of iron in a dish of sand. He says should someone give me a dish of sand and tell me there were particles of iron in it, I might look for those particles with my eyes and search for them with my clumsy fingers and be unable to detect them; but let me take a magnet and sweep through the sand. Now the magnet would draw to itself the almost invisible iron particles by the mere power of magnetic attraction. The ungrateful heart, like my fingers in the sand, discovers no blessings during the day; but let the grateful heart sweep through the day, and just as the magnet finds the iron, so the grateful heart will find in every moment, in every hour, some of God s heavenly blessings ( Henry Ward Beecher, retrieved November 21, 2014). A grateful heart helps us see invisible blessings in our spiritual lives. Now, I ve spoken a lot about our personal spiritual lives today. And, indeed Paul s ideas easily encourage personal spiritual growth. But, as you come to know me better, you will know that personal faith is one side of the same coin. That personal faith always has an impact on the other side of the coin, the public life, the shared life that we have as people of faith, as people of the church, relating to our world. Even the passage from Ezekiel can be looked at from a personal point of view God has set up one shepherd for us personally Jesus Christ. God will feed us through Christ Jesus, and he will be God s Prince among us. 4

5 But, Ezekiel and all the prophets write and speak almost exclusively about nations, about governing bodies, about public problems. Their message most often is about the systemic and institutional difficulties that exist because of the religious leaders aren t connecting personal faith to public faith. They weren t addressing the injustices of the day. They conveniently ignored the oppression that the powerful inflicted upon the people as a whole. In some cases, the powerful was the ruling government. In other cases, the oppressors are the kings of Judah and Israel. The point is they didn t connect the dots I believe loving and receiving the invisible blessings personally must always connect to sharing tangible gifts with others in the community. True religion, true spirituality makes blessings become real, tangible gifts, I think. Apparently God thinks so, too, because God is always concerned about the sheep, especially the regular folk who don t have much the least of these, says Jesus, the waitresses, the door to door magazine sales people, the nursing home residents, the panhandlers, the inmates, the strangers at the grocery store, the immigrants, the impoverished, the poor, the voiceless and on and on And sometimes we re among the least of these because we, too, at times, don t have much. Sometimes we feel spiritually dry, bereft of sharing in the abundance of God s invisible spiritual blessings. The point is that no matter what, we still can connect the dots invisible blessings connect to tangible gifts to others. Our relationship with God opens our minds with wisdom, our eyes with revelation, and causes us to respond to the needs of others. Like 99-year-old greatgrandmother from Bettendorf, 1,000 by the time she turns 100 next May. After that, she intends to keep on sewiowa, Lillian Weber. Lillian started making a dress a day in 2011 for distribution to underprivileged girls through the Michigan-based Christian nonprofit organization, Little Dresses for Africa. In the past two years, Lillian has made more than 840 of those dresses for girls she has never met and wants to sew another 150 or so for a total of ing as long as possible. I believe one of our Adult Education classes might have talked about Miss Lillian this morning (from The Wired Word for November 23, 2014, retrieved from personal , November 20, 2014). She s a woman of faith. She 5

6 knows God s personal blessings and she translated that into tangible gifts. Or how about Dr. Raymond Burse, the interim president of Kentucky State University? Dr. Burse is giving up $90K of his $350K annual salary to increase payment to minimum-wage earners on campus. Their pay will increase from $7.25 /hour to $10.25 / hour. Also the same was done by Dr. William Harvey at Hampton University in Virginia when he donated over $100k for all those on campus making less than $9 / hour. He did the same thing in 2006, in 2011, and now again in 2014 (The Christian Century, Nov. 12, 2014, p. 8 and HU-President-makes-donation-to-increase-hourly-staff-wages#, retrieved November 21, 2014). These people know God! And God s spirit of wisdom and revelation. And they ve turned it into tangible gifts. How will we do this? The invisible blessings we receive cause tangible gifts for others to occur. How might you do it? It takes a spirit of wisdom and revelation and a good dose of enthusiasm to make it all happen. But, it also takes a spirit of thanksgiving. So let us give thanks to God as we offer our gifts to others. Let us stand and sing. Amen. 6

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