God Space
Readings: Isaiah 56:1-8; Matthew 15:10-20
Sermon People like us
- Beautiful vision for a restored humanity:
“these I will bring to my holy mountain
and give them joy in my house of prayer.
Their burnt offerings and sacrifices
will be accepted on my altar;
for my house will be called
a house of prayer for all nations.”- Reminder of God’s promise to Abraham, that his family will be a blessing to all nations
- Reminds us too, as Christians, of Paul’s great words of freedom from Galatians 3: “28 There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
- Reminds us that no matter where we go, no matter who we’re with, whether they look the same, talk the same, or live the same as us, they’re people like us. We are all children of God, called and drawn to God’s kingdom come.
- Isaiah’s words are a beautiful vision of heaven on earth.
- A vision we can hope for and believe in.
- A vision shattered by the violence and hatred and bitterness and bile that seems to be consuming our world at the moment.
- Charlottesville – white supremacists and neo-nazis blaming other people for the loss of their hateful heritage.
- Trump – blaming the counter-protestors for showing up.
- Social media – blaming everyone who’s different from me with the most inhuman bile, without the filter of actually having to look your adversary in the eye.
- We are constantly bombarded by messages of anger and hate and blame.
- Maybe it feels like it’s a million miles away from little old New Zealand, but we have our own histories of violence and blame and hate.
- Even now, we have a political lobby group, distributing flyers in our mailboxes that claim to want an end to race based policies, and yet every single one of their policies is based on race. Policies that sound reasonable until you scratch the surface. Flyers that blame everything from pollution to water rights to growing inequality in our nation on “brown tape” and a “Maori elite”.
- Why, oh why, do we always need to find someone to blame?
- Could we be any further from the house of prayer for all nations?
- Could we be anyfurther from God’s ideal: “Love the Lord your God with all of your soul and mind and strength, and love your neighbour as you love yourself”?
- And who is my neighbour?
- I was listening to a podcast the other day that was talking about loving our neighbours across these hate – filled divides. This is what the presenters had to say: “The first step to bridging the divide is to admit our own weakness.”
- It’s so hard to do that, though, isn’t it?
- It seems like it is almost impossible for us as humans to admit our own weakness, to admit that were not perfect, to admit, in the heat of an argument, “Hey, actually, maybe youhave a point. Actually, I think that I might be wrong.”
- It’s the hardest thing to do, isn’t it? In the heat of an argument? In the middle of a conflict? We want nothing more that to stick to our guns, and defend ourselves, and blame the other person for everything that is going wrong.
- We seek out other people who agree with us.
- We get further and further away from the other person until we hate them so much that we don’t even really see them as a real person anymore. Certainly not someone who we want to spend eternity with in heaven.
- I do it, you do it, we all do it, and unless someone, somewhere breaks the cycle, the pattern of anger and hatred and blame just escalates until you have an outburst like we’ve had this week in America.
- Why do we do it? Why?
- A couple of weeks ago we had that passage from Romans 10 “9 If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”
- Jesus offers us an alternative, and a way out of the cycle of hate.
- Because when we declare that Jesus is Lord, we also declare that we are not.
- That we’re in need of saving too.
- That we haven’t got it all together.
- That maybe, just maybe, we might be wrong. About a few things at least.
- When we declare that Jesus is Lord, then we embrace humility, we embrace weakness. And, paradoxically, we are set free. We have the freedom to be weak. We have the freedom not to be right all of the time. We have the freedom to let go of the bone. To admit we might be wrong. To forgive. To love.
- I wonder if this is what Jesus was getting at in our story from Matthew’s gospel today?
- Let’s listen again: “10 Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen and understand.11 What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them.”
12 Then the disciples came to him and asked, “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this?” - There it is “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this?” The cycle has begun again. And yet let’s focus on Jesus words “What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them.”
- Clearly Jesus is talking about the Jewish purity laws, the laws about food in particular. These laws were designed to keep a person pure in body and in soul. Maybe, for today only, we could paraphrase Jesus like this: “What goes into someone’s heart does not defile them, but what comes out of their heart, that is what defiles them.”
- Our hearts are constantly being bombarded with messages of blame and hate in a world that can only be transformed by love.
- Perhaps Jesus is calling us to be the change that we want to see in the world. Perhaps Jesus is calling us to run our daily struggles through the filter of his lordship and his love. Perhaps Jesus is saying, to us, when someone attacks us, or something or someone that we hold dear that we don’t need to react out fo hatred and fear. Jesus is Lord. We don’t have to be. Transform those words.of hate into actions of love.
- Because no matter who our adversary is, they are people, just like us. People who are hurting and broken and lost. People who are loved by God. People who are being called by Jesus into a new kind of living. A life where we can journey up the mountain into God’s house of prayer for all nations.
- For “28 There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
- Amen
