God Made Known: Promise Fulfilled
Rev. Cynthia Anderson, January 24, 2010 We are a culture that is fascinated by performance – particularly excellent performance – a perfect performance. I’m using the word performance here in a broader sense – the real and consistent mastery of a gift or skill and the ability to perform it in such a way that the one performing it seems caught up in something larger than him or herself. It’s that moment when a musician performs a piece of music so beautifully that he or she embodies the music itself and everyone listening is caught up in it. Somehow they hold out the promise that we all can be elevated to a new level by observing them. Whether it’s music or sports, literature or movies, politics or business, religious or charitable endeavors, our society loves a good performance – so much so that we often elevate those who perform well to an almost cult-like status. But unfortunately, many of those who deliver amazing performances in some arena or another seem to come crashing down from the heights on which we place them or the trust we give them. Whether its Tiger Woods or Mark McGuire, or executives in the banking industry or on wall street, or a platinum selling artist who is discovered lip syncing in a live performance, or a politician or well-known pastor caught in a scandal – we live in a society whose top performers so often seem unable to really perform life well. Even the performance of their skill so often turns out to be an illusion, fueled by drugs, greed or a new way to cook the books. They seem unable to truly fulfill the promises of the gifts they’ve been given. Of course that’s not a new story, nor are we by any means the first society to encounter these difficulties. The biblical story itself is full of flawed performances – the failure of all human beings to live in the image of God, to be who God has created us to be. The story of our human performance as those called to be God’s people is a mostly sorry tale. It can leave you downright discouraged and more than a tad cynical. And certainly the news headlines in the world don’t provide a whole lot of encouragement. As human beings we seem caught in a cycle of persistently yearning for someone who is full of promise, who is gifted and able to fulfill the promise of that gift, and then being disappointed, wearily expecting those with such gifts to disappoint us again. We become afraid to believe – afraid to hope. I find myself wondering if that was the mindset of those gathering in the synagogue in Nazareth the day Jesus appeared and was handed the scroll of Isaiah. For so long, the Jewish people had hoped for a messiah who would deliver them from the oppression of the Romans, who would restore their nation, who would fulfill God’s promises to them. There was a lot of buzz about Jesus going around the countryside. So as Jesus entered the synagogue that day, perhaps everyone leaned forward in an almost unconscious hope. As Jesus reads, people hear familiar and beloved words of promise to a poor and oppressed people – someday God’s kingdom would come and the captives, the poor, the blind and oppressed would find healing and liberation. And then Jesus makes a truly astonishing claim: Today these promises have been fulfilled in your hearing. He makes the audacious pronouncement that they have been fulfilled in him – in his person, in his words, his actions. God’s fulfilled promises of life, salvation, healing, freedom and new life are standing right there in front of them, embodied in a Jewish peasant carpenter in a little nondescript backwater village in the shadow of the mighty Roman Empire. It’s quite a claim. That’s quite a promise to fulfill. But that’s exactly what Jesus says about himself. He is the fulfillment of all of God’s promises. He is the perfect enactment, the perfect performance of God’s love walking around in the world. If we want to know who God is, what God is like – look at Jesus. If we want to know what God expects of us – look at Jesus. If we want to live as God’s partners, as God’s friends, we look at Jesus and we accept his invitation to be in relationship with him. If we want to know God, then we look at this one in whom God freely makes himself known. And the truly astonishing thing is that God makes God’s self known through a Person with whom we can have an ongoing relationship, someone we can get to know, someone who walks among us, who talks to us, who heals us when we hurt, comforts us when we’re worried or sad, confronts us where we need to change and introduces us to a whole new way of living as God’s beloved children. Can we hear this truly astonishing, outlandish way God has chosen to make himself known to us? Can we see and hear this morning, that Jesus stands right here in our midst and makes this same claim to us – he is the fulfillment of all of God’s promises for us and for our world. Do we really believe it? Not just in the way intellectual assent, but do we believe it in a way that really changes how we see ourselves and the world and what we do, how we perform God’s love in the world? Because, there is no denying that we live in a world in which hatred and oppression run rampant, in which the poor are becoming poorer every day, in which violence and war seem to escalate unchecked. We’ve all heard the cries of the sick and hungry and dying in new ways as we’ve watched the news reports on the devastation in Haiti. Personally, our own lives are filled with challenges and struggles. In our more honest moments, we know that we too are captive to forms of brokenness, or to the demands we feel are placed on us by work or family or the culture. And if we’re not careful, we succumb to a pale caricature of the world God created, to a culture that tells us ‘there it is- that’s all there is.’ The same cycles of unfilled promise are simply going to repeat themselves over and over again. Luke challenges us this morning: Do we believe that Jesus changes all that? That God has truly made God’s self known in Jesus Christ and that Jesus is truly the fulfillment of all of God’s promises. That God’s peace and love are already being fulfilled even in the difficulties and messiness of our daily lives? Preacher Tom Long once told a story in which he was asked to preach at a special family worship service. The worship service was to be in the fellowship hall instead of the sanctuary. Families would gather around tables and they would each bake a mini loaf of bread and then amid the sweet smell of baking bread, the sermon would be preached and everyone would receive communion with that fresh bread. It was a great idea – on paper. Within minutes of starting, the fellowship hall was a hazy cloud of flour dust, while kids threw dough balls at one another. Families began to squabble. Then the ovens weren’t working right and the bread took forever to bake. Kids were crying and screaming, and adults were wishing they could. Finally, the end of the service came and the script for the evening called for Long to pronounce a blessing. Holding up flour-caked hands in a room that was a disaster, Long pronounced, “the peace of God be with you.” And immediately from the back of the room a small voice piped up, “It already is.”1 That small child could see and experience the fulfillment of God’s promise of peace in the middle of a room that was anything but peaceful. That child knew the presence of Jesus is larger than anything else. Do we live as if we believe that? Do we allow Jesus to become the lens through which we view the world? Do we see the hurts and brokenness of the world through his eyes and his heart and believe that no matter how awful things look, God is at work to redeem and heal, to bring liberation and peace in that circumstance? Do we dare to hope? And do we believe that Jesus empowers us share in the power of God at work in the world – to be a performance of God’s love in the world? That is the life to which God invites us, that is the pattern of life God calls us to live. God has fulfilled and is fulfilling all of God’s promises for healing, liberation, justice and new life through Jesus Christ. Jesus is the perfect performance of God’s love and he is our master teacher. As we spend time in his presence, allowing him to teach us, to mold us, to live at the very center of our lives, we find that we too can dare to hope, we too can more and more perform God’s love in the world and point to the One who never fails to fulfill promises – Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God. Amen. 1 Cited in Calvin Theological Seminary’s Center for Excellence in Preaching website. |
