"Helpless"

Ephesians 2:1-10

Over the years, I have met people who were once active in church, but who had become disillusioned and dropped out. I have also met their counterparts: people still going to church but are there for mainly social reasons, and long ago had developed a tepid faith after many years of feeling God had deserted them in the face of all the difficulties they’ve encountered and problems they still have. They might be heard saying under there breath, “where was God when I needed Him?

There are degrees of this problem; some people have it worse than others, but it all springs from the erroneous notion of what a personal relationship with God entails. In our lesson today, Paul is stressing to the Ephesians that whatever relationship we have with God, God is the initiator. He chooses us, not the other way around. And we are helpless, totally at God’s mercy in all things.

When we assume we have a relationship of mutuality with God, an understanding, a bargain, a contract, a quid pro quo connection, and God fails to deliver his side of agreement, some are so disillusioned they walk away from God. They lose faith. But if you know that God is sovereign and is not subject to your influence, that He moves on his own time and according to his own purposes---that we are his instruments in the world, then you stand on a firmer foundation.

God does not always remove adversity from our paths, as we would like it, but rest assured the strength that can only come from Him will help us weather whatever storms we encounter. Our challenge is never to lose faith that God is with us, no matter how hot it may get in the kitchen of life.

We strive to shape our preferred circumstances, then declare that what WE want as God’s will. When we say that God is our friend, what we really mean is that God is our “buddy”---that you and God have an understanding that if you will do certain things for Him, he will do certain things you.

Acts 17:25 says God is not “served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.” He is a sovereign God and all that is, flows from Him. He has created us to serve as vehicles of his nature in the world—his love, his compassion, his right actions. If we have the strength to love without condition, it is not our doing, rather it is the love of God, flowing through us.

Our very purpose in the time we have been given in life is to avail ourselves to His will, to become holy vessels of healing, reconciliation and the outbreak of joy! I say this even as the troubles of this world never relent. Once understood, this becomes the source of our security, the ending of our anxieties, and our struggles are put in perspective. All our suffering, all our disappointments, our missteps are put in perspective.

I know this because, despite our pathetic state, God saved us---not by anything we have done, but by His grace. God is the giver and we are the receiver. He is the creator; we are the creature. He is the potter; we are the clay. And if we are righteous, it is God moving through us. Otherwise, we are but self-serving sinners, committing acts of kindness and charity that are designed to redound to our own purposes.

God is the unmoved mover (Aristotle), the Alpha and the Omega (Revelation 1:8). He stands alone and is not subject to my influence. “In him we live, we move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28)

“The Creeping Worldly Norm"

John 2:13-22
The Lenten season is meant to be a time when we come back to the realization of what is urgent and central to our faith, what is the source of our peace and joy. It is a time to reconsider what is important to us, what is more likely to contribute to the fulfillment of our lives and the soothing of our souls. Lent does not arrive this year or any other year in a vacuum, but in the midst of competing claims about how we should live our lives, about who we should be.

All around, the streams of social change are running wild---so many choices that may not be good for us, but we are free to choose. What was known and accepted yesterday as the “in-thing” is now passé. The pressure, however subtle, is in our faces to be on the cutting edge, to be up with what’s happening now. This doesn’t mean what is happening now is an asset to the lives we want to build, or should want to build. While temptations are as old as humankind itself, media, technology, fast travel, and communications are agents that make it feel as if temptations are more powerful, that change is happening at lightning speed. Yet what this change brings is no more superior to what we already have than are things, which are imported, are better than things made right around the corner. Fast change is inevitable, I suppose, but not always good.
And the change we see today is often driven by greed, the hunger for power, notoriety and selfishness. Virtually nothing seems sacred and worth holding on to, and nothing appears exempt from the demands of the marketplace.

The temple need not ignore the market place, but is must clearly and intentionally stand separate and apart from it and not become gobbled up by it, and it must be our home base for building up resistance to the onslaught of anti-human values.
Without the temple’s role, we can become unraveled and left to behave like wild animals. With all the things we hear are happening, near and far, we need a place of retreat and renewal, and it was no less so in Jesus’ time. The pressures to adopt the ways of the world were no less evident. What goes on beyond these walls in the name of living has too many pitfalls that potentially distract us from lives that leave affirmative legacies, which shape communities in ways that leave them stronger than we found them. It takes a special discipline to resist greed, to resist a quest for power, to resist shortcuts, to resist corruption. But none of this is new.

As is so evident as we contemplate Jesus’ challenge, upon entering the temple and finding it had become virtually a shopping mall. Even in this ancient context, where the need was just as strong for a sacred place to which persons could retreat and be revived, we find the norms of the world were creeping in. The wall of separation between the sacred and the profane had fallen down. The nurturing, the acceptance, the teaching of unadulterated truth and caring, were threatened with compromise by the unbridled norms of a sinful world. What was the “right thing” by the world’s standards was becoming the right thing in the temple, and Jesus would have nothing of it.

We, too, are often attracted to this co-mingling. More and more, we want the church to remind us of the world. But if we get what we want, it may be too late when we realize that the rhythms and ethos of the world are what makes us feel lost and aimless.
That is why Jesus shows a rare anger and outrage. He feels too much is at stake to approach this situation with a calm voice. He knows how much our hope depends upon our response to a higher calling. We who yearn to respond must have a sanctuary of refuge to find communion with God and with each other. But if the temple is indistinguishable from the world; if the commercial values that obtain here as they do out there, where is our solace and our place of spiritual rest?