Father of Heaven and Universe beyond. Lord today we humbly come before you to thank you for all the goodness that exists in a world humankind seems dedicated to polluting with sin. Please forgive us of our contributing to that sin Father, and we ask that you would help us to grow in you more and more each day you provide us. In your Son’s Heavenly Name; Amen!
Message: In Grief or Wine, Our Lord Divine!
I want to welcome all of you to the second Sunday after Epiphany, or my thought, the second Sunday of Epiphany. Since we are living a life with the Lord in it, maybe we should try to act as we were really living Epiphany each day with our Lord a part of our lives and making a change in us for the good, permanently!
Today’s title, really reflects my own wrestling with the concept of God being in our lives, and my life precisely. You see like many of you, I struggle to make sense of the things God does in our lives, and yes once again, my life specifically. So, I kind of thought that just maybe, I am not alone in trying to figure out why our Savior does the things He does, and the way that He does them. In English, I’m a confused person at times, trying to make sense of God!
My confusion begins right after Christmas, when the Church usually changes focus from the nativity (birth of Christ), and Epiphany (the understanding that God is with us), into the life of Jesus. After all the beauty of the Holliday season, we now tend to slink into the humdrum of everyday life and bla, bla, bla!
A couple of events in the Gospels that take place after Christmas and the beautiful birth of Jesus, have always stuck with me. I think because both passages represent opposite ends of human activity. I’m speaking of the massacre of infant boys that took place right after the Nativity in Matthew 2:16-18 (today’s Call to Worship), and then traditionally the first recorded miracle of Jesus in Scripture (of creating wine), in John 2:1-11 (today’s Message Reading).
Both events are set at the opposite ends of the spectrum of human emotion, from grief, pain, evil, and terror, to wine, joy, wedding, and celebration.
Today, I would like to make a link between the two events by relating both passages to our own walks in this thing we call life of the here and now. Beginning with the acknowledgement that God’s scripture covers all of the different emotions and behaviors of human kind. Capturing people soring like eagles with the angels, and then creeping with the worms of the lowest recesses of baseline behavior. For reference, just read Psalms. That book can take you to the heights of beauty, and the depths of despair, sometimes in the same passages.
Today we will look at the something akin to the 180-degree turnabout that I just described about Psalms, with the depiction in the Gospels. By following the nativity (Birth), and Epiphany (humanity’s acknowledgement) of Jesus by kings and shepherds alike, with the genocide of all the little boys of the town of Bethlehem, just after the Lord’s family escapes to Egypt for the Baby Lord’s safety. Reading again from today’s Call to Worship Matthew 2:12-18;
12 And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they (the Magi) returned to their country by another route.
13 When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”
14 So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, 15 where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”
16 When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. 17 Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:
18 “A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more.”
So, a horrible Shoah has taken place. Shoah being the Hebrew word for catastrophe, calamity, devastation, or outright holocaust. The mourning is so great, so loud that it is heard in Ramah (the very heights of expanse), because those children are no more. What a sad, sad, state of affairs.
The Gospel had just finished showing us what special thing God was and is doing in the world with the birth of Christ, only to be followed with a depiction of what our sin was and is doing in this world, with this carnage. Innocent children caught up in the seemingly unexplainable, in much of life.
And yet this depravity of Herod’s ranks as just one of many in the outline of human history. Just an index mark of a litany. One on an seemingly endless list of deplorable, despicable, maniacal behavior committed by humanity against humanity. Just look at the barbarism committed by Western civilization in the last century, or what humanity is doing to innocents around the world today. Why?
In this case, why does God’s scripture go from such beauty as found in Christmas to a holocaust, both passages found in Bethlehem in a flash? What is the Lord trying to tell you and me about His divine plans, about life, about us?
Could it be that one of the underlying currents of instruction in scripture is that we desperately need to be in relationship with our Lord. And our God, passionately wants us to be in relationship in and with Him. Plain and simple. When we don’t, calamity often is the result.
Could it be that God time and again is instructing that because we are fallen people in a fallen world, and that we must continually come to our Lord through our free choice to accept Him in our lives for; guidance, understanding, clarity, and solace. In fact, scripture is replete with reminders to seek out the Lord from all the other options out there in the buffet of selfishness, ego, depravity, and instant gratification we are bombarded with daily. One passage that sticks with me is where the Lord instructs us in the difference between him and the worldly ways through Isaiah 55:6-9
6 Seek the Lord while he may be found;
call on him while he is near.
7 Let the wicked forsake their ways
and the unrighteous their thoughts.
Let them turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on them,
and to our God, for he will freely pardon.
8 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.
9 “As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
On our best day, our very best efforts only amount to rags and refuse in the presence of the Lord. That it is our willingness to trust in Him that justifies us, and make us acceptable in God’s family. That being said, there are horrific things that happen in this world that at times can make us feel like the Lord is absent, and we are all alone.
Why do we feel God is absent and uncaring at times, when in fact He is not? This is one of the big questions we face in our Faithwalk, along with looking for the answer to why bad things happen to people in life. Notice, I did not say good people, because we are all fallen people in a fallen world, which is why our Lord died for us and our sin. Additionally, we feel a separateness from God when we choose to keep Him out and follow our own selfish selves, which really reflects the state of the world today.
At this point, you might be thinking; OK, I can understand that there are bad things that happen in life (because of our bad choices). I still don’t quite understand it, but I’ll try to trust the Lord to make sense out of the unintelligible stuff like suffering, and free choice gone bad.
We don’t like it, but there it is. There are bad people in the world and they choose to do bad things that hurt other people trying to do good… Notice, even in that rational, the passing the buck from us to those bad people out there. Fact is the world is a mess, people are groping in the dark to find their way and you have been placed here at this time, to bring light into other people’s lives.
How do you curb the horrific things that happen like Herod’s atrocity to the boys of Bethlehem? By representing your Lord in this life of yours! Remember, Herod, like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Poe Pott could not have done it alone. Sometimes what life takes are one or two to say enough, evil will not continue on my watch.
OK, but in the second passage read today, why are there people drinking with the Lord present in scripture? With the Lord as the provider of the beverages to be drank? Leading us back to today’s Message Reading from John 2:1-11;
2 On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus’ mother was there, 2 and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. 3 When the wine was gone, Jesus’ mother said to him, “They have no more wine.”
4 “Woman, why do you involve me?” Jesus replied. “My hour has not yet come.”
5 His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”
6 Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from twenty to thirty gallons.
7 Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water”; so they filled them to the brim.
8 Then he told them, “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet.”
They did so, 9 and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine. He did not realize where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew. Then he called the bridegroom aside 10 and said, “Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.”
11 What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.
News Flash, even when you have not invited God into your day-to-day activities, He’s still there! He was with you when you were at every party you have ever attended, doing who knows what (He does). He was with you as you when you stretched the truth or outright lied to your spouse, mom, dad, teacher, boss, or who knows who (He does). There when you decided that you needed something more than anyone else so you ensured that you got what you wanted regardless of what your actions caused, who knows to whom. Well, He did and does!
This is not designed to make you a walking around basket case of paranoia, but cognizant, conscious of the fact that God is not dead, He is not gone, and you cannot remove Him from the reality of now, just from the heart and sole he wants to share with you!
As for drinking wine… I am not here to tell you what is right for your ingestion, drink, food, inhalement, or other. All of you are able to think for yourselves and do not need a babysitter to dictate your free choice. Personally, in these things, I follow Paul’s instruction or advice to the Church in Corinth. Reading from 1 Corinthians 10:23-25, 31-32
23 “I have the right to do anything,” you say—but not everything is beneficial. “I have the right to do anything”—but not everything is constructive. 24 No one should seek their own good, but the good of others.
31 So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. 32 Do not cause anyone to stumble, whether Jews, Greeks or the church of God.
I can do anything, but not everything is good for me! Or you! So, when I am in my day-to-day life, I need to be thinking; am I going in excess, could what I’m doing harm others, and am I only thinking of myself. Again!
My thought (you have the burden of thinking for yourselves), if you have made certain decisions in your own life of what is good or bad, in behavior or to ingest into your body (to include being inoculated for whatever), that is between you and the Lord, and should not be intended to be a rule, law, or church tradition, we impose on others that we live in community with. Please remember, other people must be a part of our thought process if we really are who we say we are. Loving others as ourselves guides us, and we leave the judging to God!
Again, my thought, at the end of the day, regardless of man’s inhumanity to others like Herod’s massacre (Shoah) of the boys in Bethlehem, or the turning of water to wine at the wedding in Cana, our God is alive, listening and ready to walk with you in joy and in sorrow. Not to take away from our own decisions and responsibilities to others and ourselves in life, but to aid you in your decisions, guide you in your compassions, and love you in the process.
My hope and prayer for you this week, is that you find your pace, your stride, in this walk of ours, and that you take on those difficult questions in scripture and in life one day at a time with your family in God, and your Lord walking with and in you! Amen!