Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri

The Worship of God · February 28, 2010

The Second Sunday of Lent

Litany and Confession

From Psalm 27

The Lord is our light and my salvation; whom shall we fear?

            The Lord is the stronghold of our lives; of whom shall we be afraid?

One thing we asked of the Lord, that we will seek:

To live in the house of God’s presence all the days of our lives, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple.

Let us confess the ways we have abandoned the joy of God and harmed our neighbor:

You have invited us into your gracious presence as a host taking in guests, but we have resisted your invitation and turned aside from the gifts you offer us.  Speak to our hearts and make us hungry for the bread of life that no other food can satisfy.

Lord, have mercy upon us.

Christ, have mercy upon us.

Lord, have mercy upon us.

Pastoral Prayer

Jacob Thorne

Gracious God and loving God, today we gather to worship you. During this season of Lent, we journey with you toward Jerusalem. We make our way through our own wilderness. We know that as we face the trials of fear, times of emptiness, and times full of sorrow, you are always with us. You never leave our side. You give us strength to face the impossible to find beauty and thanksgiving even in times of despair. 

As we journey with you these next 40 days, remind us that we hear you calling. We see you motioning to us, and we fall in step beside you. We pray that when we are exhausted, you will raise us up to walk again. When we stumble, lend us your gentle hand. When we want to turn back, give us the encouragement to move forward. 

For you, O God, give us the strength to smooth the way for the advent of your reign. You give us the strength and the hope to work for your peace. You give us the knowledge to take seriously the meaning of your cross. We work with you. We stand beside one another, challenging each other to take the risks that you ask, to work together in order that we may live out your mission in the world.

Hear us now as we sing together the prayer that your Son taught us…

Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen, Amen.

New Testament Lesson

Luke 13:31-35

At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” He said to them, “Go and tell that fox for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.’ Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’”

Message

My Way or the Highway: Roadwork Ahead

Tim Carson

I am struck so powerfully by this story before us today. Here is Jesus, following his destiny, walking the path God has given him. It has required every bit of his obedience and trust. Along that road, one that is hard and littered with obstacles, he encounters two forces. One is the force of advocates, and the other is the force of opposition.

The interesting thing about Jesus’ advocates is that they come out of an unexpected corner. They are not his family and not his disciples, though you would expect that disciples, friends, and family would most surely be the ones who would guard his back. You expect and hope that your friends and loved ones will stand up for you when the going gets tough. But that’s not always the way it works. Is it? This time Jesus receives support that comes from the other dugout, from those on the other side of the field who may have been arguing with him just a short time before, the Pharisees.

The Pharisees were a lay-renewal movement within Judaism, folks who insisted that you need to walk the walk, not simply talk the talk. Jesus basically shared their view about the afterlife, which books should constitute the Hebrew Scriptures, and about the difference between empty religion and religion of the heart. Like Jesus, the Pharisees had a deep suspicion of the Temple and its leadership. Like Jesus, Pharisees were no friends of the religious elite. And yet, Jesus and the Pharisees were always wrangling about something.

The truth, says one of my good rabbi friends, is that Jesus was more like the Pharisees than unlike them. And so, like a family feud, you always fight most openly with those closest to you. That can explain the beginning of the story today. It is the Pharisees who come and warn Jesus in order to keep him out of danger. They are actually protecting him, which is the softer side of Pharisees, not the way they are normally portrayed – which lends extra credibility to this story!

What we also have to remember is that arguing, disagreeing is not the same thing as wishing another harm. In fact, some of our most loyal friends may be the ones with whom we have knock-down-drag-outs over theology, church, politics, sex, and money. I’ve had people with whom I could agree about very little who earned my deepest respect by the way they put ideas aside in order to love people. We may not agree with each other; but we know, without a doubt, how much we’ve cared for and loved each other.

The Pharisees didn’t wish Jesus harm; in fact, they were trying to help him like they hoped someone would help them. They loved their neighbor Jesus as much as they loved themselves. So you never absolutely know where you’re going to find support, just as you never absolutely know where you may be undermined. You just never know. But when it came to Herod Antipas, there was no ambiguity. This was a guy who, like sharks, always smelled blood in the water.

Herod Antipas was one of the Tetrarchs of the Roman realm. If John the Baptist was Herod’s public enemy number one, Jesus was not far behind. And around this one truth, Jesus and the Pharisees were undivided: Herod is bad news. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Watch out, Jesus; Herod wants your head.

When Jesus gets the news that Herod has him in his sights, he is defiant. In fact, he asks them to send a message, which they most surely will not; they cannot. The message is, “Go tell that fox that it is not my time! I will be on the road today, tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow. It’s not right that a prophet be killed outside of Jerusalem. It’s not my time. Herod, you have no power over me.”

If we have just seen the softer side of the Pharisees, we have just seen the harder side of Jesus. I like it. This is the same Jesus we see later in the temple overturning the table, because it is blasphemy to turn the temple into a marketplace.

The word he uses for Herod, fox, is not meant to describe the king as a cute, sleek, beautiful animal. When used figuratively, when used like this, fox was a pejorative word. It’s like this: “Go tell that cunning, crafty, slippery, deceptive, no-good, disingenuous varmint that he has no power over me; it is not my time. That fox.”

How incredibly bold this statement is considering the fox’s history of brutality. How could Jesus respond in such a way? The answer to that question is found in the heart of Jesus himself.

What compels a Canadian skater to go the distance in the Olympics just after hearing of her mother’s untimely death? What compels a person to go against the crowd and take an unpopular position? What compels the researcher to persist when roadblock after roadblock obscures the solution? What compels the person who has searched and searched for their place in the world to keep on keeping on until they find it?

What compels them all is a deep sense of passion around their mission, their purpose, a sense of God’s movement in their life. They stride forward enduring pain, risking failure, suffering social criticism, and shaking a defiant fist at anything that might impede progress toward their goal. This is courage and at the heart of it dwells the affirmation, “If not me, then who? If not now, then when?”

What I want to say today is that Jesus still travels that road with us, and when we are at our very best, we let our traveling be shaped by him. We still receive warnings from unexpected places of grace that some kind of Herod is around the bend. But what form does that Herod take today?

Ever the megalomaniac, today’s Herod is always found in the unjust powers and principalities that dehumanize and destroy. Herod wears many guises, shifting his shape throughout the world, wielding tyrannical power, undermining justice, and shrinking compassion.

But just as often, Herod comes in more personal terms: the great push back to do what is right, the challenge to our survival, the secret mantra of the inner Herod is, “You’ll never do it.” It loops in the back of our minds and hearts. Can we borrow the fortitude of Jesus as we respond to it? Can we tell that fox that the day does not belong to him, because our job is not done, because God is beside us on the road today, tomorrow, and the next day?

For some, cancer is their Herod, or a physical condition, or a devastating development in a family situation, or deep doubts that they can achieve the goal that seemed so clear just a short time before. This person feels the fire of faith cooling and their resolve to act more decisively weakening. She graduated from the university with the loftiest sense of how she could make a difference in the world, but recently she has felt her idealism shrinking. He took the job because the values of the company matched his own, but now he is wondering if he made the right choice as questions about motives and practices keep him from sleeping well at night.

Herod is alive and well, on a rampage through our sense of self, turning over the trashcans in our memory, mocking our high ideals and making them look sillier and sillier. Herod keeps us from volunteering, because it won’t make any difference anyway. He makes sure that our forward motion gets stuck in standstill traffic. His favorite words are, “You can’t,” and “You might get in trouble thinking like that.” He winks, pours us a glass, and says, “Now is it really worth all that?” That’s what he does – that’s what Herod does – and there just can’t be too many Pharisees reminding us that he’s around the corner.

When Jose Saramago wrote the book Blindness (Harcourt, 1997), there was simply no way to know that he would receive the Nobel Prize for Literature for it. When you read this book that has been translated from the Portuguese, you encounter a one-of-a-kind creation. The prose is written as the mind really thinks, without the aid of artificial punctuation or starts and stops for dialogue. As in conversation, one voice twists and turns into the next. There is no need of paragraphs.

One day, a terrible epidemic strikes, and it is called the “white blindness.” One by one, the population loses sight as in snow blindness. The affected ones are herded into an old mental institution because they might be contagious. They are treated like criminals by the guards. They are treated like animals by some fellow inmates who prey upon them. For an unknown reason, one character never succumbs to the blindness. She becomes very remarkable by possessing the most ordinary of abilities – seeing. “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is King.”

In time, she becomes the guide of an intrepid band of seven who follow her seeing. She warns them of impending danger and leads them to find what they need. And because she is good hearted, she does not take advantage of her power, but rather uses it to serve others.

In a world of blindness and illusion, the person who really sees becomes at once guide and threat to those who do not. Only the seeing have the wisdom to respond to threats with words of singular purpose. Only they can clearly state that today, tomorrow, and the next day, I am still on the road and nothing can impede my progress.

King Herod hates those who can see, and Jesus sees with unequaled clarity. And if we dare plead, in the words of the old hymn, “Open my eyes that I may see…” we should be braced for the possibility that the prayer is answered, and then the inevitable kickback. Really seeing – really seeing with the eyes of faith and of the Spirit – places us in a predicament; it is the burden of one who knows to whom they belong and what they must do. And only courage is willing to walk down that road without fear and name our Herods as the foxes they really are.

Jesus’ disciples did not have a good track record when it came to sticking by him when his back was against the wall, and sometimes neither do we. But this one thing I know: Whenever we are willing to walk the road again, we are given another chance, a blank slate as we take another pass at it. And this time, fortified with the well-intentioned warnings from unexpected places, we have one more chance to let Herod know what we think of him. And that means that we’re far from done, that the road stretches out ahead of us into the distance, and the best and hardest and most beautiful may well stretch ahead of us more than behind us. What looks like roadwork ahead is really the beginning of a new chapter, that is, if you can see it.

Thanks be to God for the remarkable gift. Amen. 

Benediction

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship and communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.  Amen.