After 60 years of captivity in Babylon,
the Jews returned
to their hometown, Jerusalem,
to find the wall of
their city torn down.
Back then, the city wall was the national
security system.
To live in a city without a wall was like
living in a bad
neighborhood in a house with no door.
But security also meant having God on your
side.
To keep God on your side, you needed a
Temple for God to live in.
No Temple, no God was how they saw it.
But the Temple had been destroyed. It was
rubble.
If they didn’t have a Temple,
they
didn’t think they could get by
agriculturally,
economically, or militarily.
So they
set out to make Jerusalem great again
starting
with building the Wall and the Temple.
But it wasn’t going well.
The capital fund drive flopped.
People were squabbling with each other,
blaming
and blame shifting, left and right.
They felt poor -- and the poorest among them,
the
am ha-aretz, the people of the land,
were
a burden on the better off folks.
The better off folks weren’t mean or stingy or greedy.
They were just afraid.
They were financially, militarily, and spiritually
afraid.
They didn’t have enough army, enough
police, enough wall,
enough
Temple, enough anything.
Scarcity and fear were the hallmarks of the
day.
So they hunkered down. They pinched their
pennies.
They launched a campaign to deport
immigrants
from their neighbor country, Moab.
They adopted a fortress mentality --
suspicious of outsiders
and even of each
other.
Then along came Isaiah with this surprising
message from God.
“If you want to restore your City,
you’re going about
it all wrong.
you gotta do it
different.
Here’s how:
If you remove the yoke from among you . . .
if you offer your food to the hungry,
and
satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light will rise in the darkness
and
your gloom be like noonday.”
The word of the Lord.
They added up the construction costs
and
saw there just wasn’t enough money
in
the building fund.
So God said, “Not a problem. Here’s what
you do.
Take some of that money in your building fund
and
put it in outreach.
You don’t have enough construction workers
on the wall project?
Send a few of them over to tutor the
children of the poor folk.”
“Just
do it,” God said, “and watch what happens.
“Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt,
you
shall raise up the foundation of many generations,
you shall be called the repairer of the
breach,
the
restorer of streets to live in.”
The word of the Lord.
God is saying something completely
backwards:
When you don’t have enough,
take
some of what you’ve got and give it away.
It doesn’t make sense, does it?
That’s because God doesn’t play by our
rules.
God also said through this same prophet,
“'My
thoughts are not your thoughts;
nor are your ways my ways,' says the Lord.
'For as the heavens are
higher than the earth,
so
are my thoughts higher than your thoughts
and
my ways higher than your ways.'”
when
you get to realest possible level of real,
the
take it to the bank truth of life,
everything
we think we know is wrong.
It’s wrong because everything we think we
know
is
based on fear and scarcity.
Our basic assumption is that life is a zero
sum game.
There isn’t enough of it to go around.
But God says “not so.”
Jesus said,
“I came that you might have life and that
you might have it abundantly.”
Life isn’t something to be seized by fang
and claw.
It’s a gift to be received in faith,
and
the test of faith is generosity,
-- the courage,
when we don’t have enough,
to
give away some of what we have.
Crazy? Of course it’s crazy.
Some spiritual traditions call it “crazy
wisdom.”
I know churches that live like that.
I was once at the budget meeting of our
congregation in Pahrump.
They adopted a deficit budget without
blinking an eye.
Then they began expressing their concerns,
their real worries.
They had heard some other congregations
were struggling
and
they wanted to help.
So they added a line item to support
another parish.
They got an unexpected gift and they sent
it to a local ministry.
We sent them their assessment rebate.
They gave it to St. Jude’s Ranch For
Children.
You just can’t help some people.
I’m describing faith, a leap into the dark.
It is a leap into God’s ways – the ones
that are higher than our ways
--
God’s ways of faith, hope, and love.
It’s like exhaling in the faith that the
air will still be there
so
we can inhale again.
It’s crazy like that.
But you know that crazy little congregation
somehow
manages to pay the
light bill,
and
last year they bought additional land.
How do they do it?
They don’t. It’s a God thing.
I like to see a congregation walk by faith
because
that’s the only way
into the Kingdom
Mission;
and the Kingdom Mission is what makes life
count.
But the best thing about it is a faithful
congregation
teaches its people how
to live faithfully.
It doesn’t just talk about faith and trust.
It shows us what they look like.
Such congregations teach the art of
breathing.
You have to breathe out all the way so you
can breathe back in.
One basic thing I’ve noticed about living
churches and living people:
They breathe – in and out.
The heart of being a Christian is living
by God’s ways
instead of human ways
-- by faith instead
of fear.
When we are baptized,
we
take our stand on this earth as believers.
Believing is our trust.
We don’t just say, “I believe that God
exists.”
That’s just an opinion.
An opinion and 2 bucks will get you a tall
coffee at Starbucks.
We say “I believe in God the Father. I believe in
Jesus.
I
believe in the Holy Spirit.”
I jump out of this burning building of
mortal life
because
I trust God to be holding the net.
I know a young man in another of our
churches,
a
financially prosperous young man,
who
carefully calculates the Church’s value to him
-- it’s the
difference between his kids’ tuition at Camp Galilee
and the tuition at
a comparable private camp.
He subtracts the Galilee tuition from what
he’d have had to pay
a
private camp,
then he gives the difference to the Church
at the end of the year
after
he makes sure all his other obligations are paid first.
And God says,
“My
thoughts are not your thoughts,
nor your ways my
ways.
My measures of worth are not your measures of worth,
My measures of worth are not your measures of worth,
nor your
calculations my calculations.”
Brothers and sisters, this isn’t about a
bill we owe to God.
It isn’t about a moral debt we owe the
Church or the Church
owes
the community.
It’s about a chance to breathe.
It’s about an opportunity to live in God’s
ways of faith
instead
of our human ways of fear.
God’s ways are lighter, freer, happier, in
every way – better.
