Day 91 – Faith and Family Fights

A sermon given at First Presbyterian Church, Soddy-Daisy, TN, March 10, 2013

scripture references: Gen. 4:1-16; Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

In my reflections of Day 57, 61 and 77,  we explored the meaning and source of faith. Paul eloquently claims (in Romans 10) that faith is found in two things, (1) the true confession,  and (2) understanding that Jesus is Lord and his resurrection is our resurrection. Faith is felt in the heart and voiced in words. Paul says faith does not come from our internal willful intent but from external sources. It is a heartfelt certainty that God’s promises are trustworthy which demand our action.

We read in the Gospel of Isaiah, (Day 57) and the parable of the fig tree that faith is not only felt and voiced, it causes us to act in a new way. It is the embrace of repentance and fruit that sustains us. It compels us to realize that our relationship to God and Christ demands a wholesale change in our way of living. A faithful person experiences heartfelt understanding of God and Christ, proclaims the Good News and seeks a new way of living.

But we still have a lingering question, how do we gain faith if we clearly do not earn it through our good work? So far, we have uncovered the signs and feelings of faith not its origin.  Today’s sermon uses Cain and Abel and the prodigal son and his brother to put a final exclamation point what we have learned about the connection of repentance, grace and faith. We won’t get to a complete answer of how faith comes about until a later sermon.

As I reread the parable of the prodigal son and the story of Cain and Abel to prepare this sermon, I realized I have always shortchanged both stories by not paying close enough attention to conversation between God and Cain before he slew Abel, and not enough attention to the interaction of the older brother of the prodigal son and their father. The similarity and difference of the two stories immediately struck me. I realized they are part of many epic tragedies of siblings and parents in the Bible.

The torn love between father and son, and between brothers and sisters is the subject of numerous biblical and artistic writings. They are so woven throughout our Bible that they suggest a common human problem.

There is this elder Cain and younger Abel. We have the founding story of faith in the story of God, Abraham Isaac and Ishmael (Gen 22). We have the story of David, his elder son Amnon who raped his sister Tamar. His younger brother Absalom slew Amnon because of Tamar and then through his own death at the hands of his father’s troops caused the collapse of the kingdom into the ten tribes of Israel and 2 of Judah (2 Samuel 14-19).

Even the unpleasant stories show faith is tied up in the idea of family. So it makes sense for Christian congregations who are the church family to look to these family stories for the positive characteristics of family that come with faith in God.

Furthermore, remember Jesus was first the Jewish Messiah. His experience and teachings are strongly connected to Jewish history.  When Jesus spoke this parable of the prodigal son his Jewish listeners that read their Scriptures well likely recollected the stories of Cain and Abel, and Amnon and Absalom.  Appreciating this Jewish history and his conflict with Jewish authority adds new flavor to our parable.

Our lectionary reading skips over two other sayings or parables by Jesus about the shepherd who does not rest until he finds the one lost sheep and the one about the lost coin to read only the parable of the prodigal son. But true to Jesus’ parables this jump points to more disguised meanings to vex us.

 Normally we read this story as the homecoming of the dissolute son to the grace of his father. Given the way the Greek is written this is a very reasonable reading.

(NRVS) For example, in verse 20 reads:  “²⁰So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.”  This Greek word translated as compassion is a very powerful word; it means extreme compassion.  In fact, it deserves an explanation. It is literally an intense, gut-wrenching compassion. We may say it is an intense heartfelt compassion, though I believe even that understates its power. It is the compassion of unconstrained love perhaps tinged with grief over another human’s suffering that evokes compassionate pain such as felt over our adult child who has an untimely death of their own child.

It is a powerful word that is used in the NT only a few times. With two exceptions, it is reserved to describe the compassion felt by Christ when he looked upon a destitute person. Those two exceptions are the compassion the Samaritan felt towards the injured man on the roadside from Jerusalem and here, the compassion of the father towards his son who returns after being lost to him. The true power of this reconciliation of father and son is lost without understanding this meaning. It is unavoidable to conclude the father in our parable must symbolize God.

Given that symbolism, we are pointed towards another part of this story, the older son’s reaction to the good grace of the father:  (NRSV)

²⁵“Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. ²⁶He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. ²⁷He replied, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.’ ²⁸Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. ²⁹But he answered his father, ‘Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. ³⁰But when this son of yours (not my brother) came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!’ ³¹Then the father said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. ³²But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.’”

The father celebrates the joy of finding a lost sheep, the repentance and resurrection of a son presumed lost, but the older brother stews in brotherly jealousy and grapples with the futility of earning grace.

The prodigal son came back after squandering his inheritance and crashing into rock bottom destitution (a Jew willing to eat with pigs!) but seems to have gotten a free pass from dad. Have you wondered why the prodigal son had the confidence or faith to come back to his father, knowing how much he had abused their relationship? As I said earlier, he was at rock bottom and had wasted his early inheritance. He only option short of death was repentance. In spite of all this he was certain his father would forgive him, even though he had no reason to expect that forgiveness and this compassion was possible from his father.

The disguised meaning within this story of repentance and grace of the father rests in the reaction of the brother and counsel of the father in contrast to the Cain and Abel story. By the way, another layer of this parable may well be the older brother symbolizes the Jews, the Pharisees, tax collectors and teachers of the law to whom Jesus told this parable and the younger brother the Gentile people. Parables!

Could Jesus also have intended this parable to contrast the story of Cain and Abel, or Jew and Gentile/Samaritan? For God’s own reason God was pleased with younger Abel’s gift of the fatted lamb but not so pleased with older Cain’s gift from the ground.  God first counseled the angry Cain, “⁷If you do well, will you not be accepted?”  Although this does foretell the conditional nature of the covenant of the Law (do well and you will be accepted), God is also making a promise to Cain to be believed on faith alone. The promise is, “ even though I preferred Abel’s gift I love you both if you do well.”  Cain was blind to faith in God’s promise. Perhaps his anger and resentment was the barrier to hearing God’s word. Cain only got the message after God cursed the ground of Cain’s livelihood bringing him to his knees.

 Listen how the father of the prodigal son counsels his angry older son, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.” We will never know if the older son heard this promise and understood on faith that it was a trustworthy promise.

The father does not follow with a warning as Cain received, but with a twist. He speaks joyfully of the resurrection of the dead brother, “³²But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.”  Parables are tricky, I wonder, did the older son get the message of his inheritance and reconcile with his father?

I heard a story last week that puts faith, family and these two brothers in our modern context. Some of you know I work with homeless men at a Shelter in urban Chattanooga.

Thursday we were talking to a broken shell of a 50+ year old man who said he has been doing drugs for practically his whole life. He sat at the table the whole time we talked on the verge of tears, putting his hands on his head then on the table and then on his face repetitively as he talked, totally restless from the aftermath of drugs and his sense of complete helplessness and avoiding eye contact.

 He has lost his wife and a child to diabetes, a teen-aged (grand?)son to gun violence. Most of his family "helped" him deal with those deaths and all his other troubles by providing access to alcohol and drugs that are as available as water. He spent time in prison twice, suffering much violence there. 

He is physically and emotionally damaged and under medicated. He has not talked to the side of his family who can actually help him in over 20 years. He asked us to find one of those sisters for him.  He said he knows his life has to change, he knows who in his family are working against him and wants to change and never go back to that life.  He wants prayer and the family of the church. He needs to find the peace of the Holy Spirit to ease his grief.  If ever a statement of desire to repent is heard, it was Thursday night. His blood cries from the ground. 

Will he make it? I do not know. Everything is stacked against him. The only thing he has is our compassion and willingness to help him find his own way out of this mess to grace. His only way out is to understand the faith in the father’s promise to the older son. It is God’s promise to all the faithful, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.”

Do we have the faith and compassion in our Christian family to act to make the promise to stand by a broken child of God like this 50 year old man, and to the young parents facing the same end? May God grant us that Christian faith. Amen. 

Day 77 - Listening and Looking for Faith

A sermon delivered on Feb. 10, 2013 at First Presbyterian Church, Soddy-Daisy, TN. 

Exodus 34:29-35; 2 Cor 3:12-4:2; Luke 9: 28-43

During the Easter season which begins in three days on Ash Wednesday I am going to explore the question “What is faith?” somewhat in the manner we explored the question posed by advent, “Why did Jesus come to earth?

The first question about faith is why is it often so hard to believe something we are told is true?  How often do we receive a message but fail to understand it or ignore it?  You may hear, “If you don’t watch out how you are using that chain saw you are going to hurt yourself!” only to keep working until you nick your leg.

Hearing and seeing may lead us to knowledge, but not necessarily to understanding what is heard and seen. In Moses and the prophets’ time, The Lord would often allow people to hear a message or warning but not open their minds to it until they had sunk deep into the misery of a sinful predicament.  In our Exodus passage the message to the Hebrews was possession of the law without understanding is deadly.

Here in the desert after leaving Egypt Moses would go up on the mountain to to talk with God and bring His commands to the Hebrews.  Being in the presence of the glory of the Lord changed the face of Moses. It shone brightly. When he delivered the message of the covenant to the Hebrews, they listened to him, captivated as much by his shining face as the Lord’s words. That shining of the Lord’s glory was the Holy Spirit. It conveyed the meaning to Moses and the Hebrews until Moses put his face behind the veil. Paul in 2 Corinthians 3:12 – 18 (4:2), says the Hebrews only understood while Moses’ face glowed with the glory of God. When Moses put on the veil to keep the Hebrews for staring at him they no longer understood the law. They heard it but did not have faith in the truth of the what they heard.

Paul was surely also thinking about Isaiah 6:9-13 when the Lord spoke through Isaiah to the Hebrews before the Babylonian captivity: “⁹And he said, “Go and say to this people: ‘Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand.’ ¹⁰Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed” … ¹²until the Lord sends everyone far away and the land is empty. ¹³Even if a tenth part remain in it, it will be burned again, like an oak whose stump remains standing when it is felled.” The holy seed is its stump.’ This Isaiah passage reveals the heritage of the old covenant of the Law was God’s continued punishment and wrath towards his beloved, but errant people who could not keep it.

Imagine how it would be to hear and see but have God bar understanding so you had to fail. Let there be no doubt that the Lord said he was a jealous God. Did Jesus come to change all this on behalf of the Lord as part of an unfolding plan to blind our understanding of grace until He revealed his true glory in Christ?

Luke’s account of the transfiguration has several messages. (1)At the end of this encounter with Jesus, both Moses and Elijah fade into the background. This tells us Jesus is supplanting the Law.  (2) The Lord’s voice and command comes from the cloud cementing Christ’s authority and identity, “This is my Son, my Chosen, listen to him!” (3) Finally we see that none of the three disciples will understand what they saw and heard until after the post-Easter resurrection.

I want to focus on this human reaction to the message because it shows how we easily fail to understand the circumstances. In v33 “³³Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah” —not knowing what he said.” Peter wanted to celebrate the presence of Moses and Elijah with Jesus but did not see the deeper significance. 

Can you imagine these three disciples were having an out-of-this-world experience with the Glory of God shining from the face of Jesus (special word è Presence of God) and two long deceased prophets who I might add they recognized, and a cloud emanating a loud voice but not realizing this was the culmination of all that Jesus had preached with them in his ministry? They were given the full truth about Jesus yet they leave dumb of everything but the experience of the event.  They only saw and heard, but did not understand because they had no faith yet. (V36: ³⁶When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.) Faith comes later. 

This reminds me of my experience at Ga. Tech. I was hired to manage a research lab. Now Research in the university is a pay-as-you-go proposition. This was a research laboratory that worked in metallurgy and materials such as ceramics, polymers and special materials that increased efficiency of making gasoline from crude oil but had struggled economically for years. Historically in science and engineering, metallurgy and materials have always held an honored place in all engineering disciplines. It is the science that gave us high strength steels for bridges, exotic alloys used to make turbines engines in aircraft and generators of electricity such as in TVA, and the lightweight exotic alloys used to make aircraft, artificial joints and teeth, weapons of war, you name it. Any university worth its weight has a good materials program. This had been a very good research laboratory.

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall in the 1980’s there was always plenty of contracts and grants from the DoD, DoE and NSF to support their research. Then Congress reduced the Defense budget and less and less government money was available for other research programs. At first enough the profit being made in the giant research program of Ga. Tech kept this old prestigious materials research group afloat. But that dole caused many scientists in my laboratory to take the money for granted as recognition of their elite position as materials scientists.

The money was gone and the research group needed to revitalize and to relearn how to survive on their own contracts in this new world, or else. I developed a new strategy for a research program on new problems. We held a series of individual and group meetings explaining this “new” reality, and defined how their older research could fit into this new plan to find contracts to continue their employment. I very carefully explained that the consequences of not doing this, the money was gone and their jobs would disappear.

No matter how much counseling  about this Armageddon facing them, they seemed to think I was just Chicken Little crying the sky is falling. Even as I began to cut their jobs to ¾ time, or ½ time or began having to let some folks go, they kept to their old research that had grown increasingly irrelevant while they looked for the dole as if time was unchanged.

It was as if they were standing on a railroad track looking down the track in one direction while a train was bearing down on them from the other direction. No matter how loudly I shouted the warning of their situation, a situation that should have been as painfully obvious to them as the loud horn of the locomotive and the roar of its engines, but their whole past experience made it impossible for them to turn and see the train, to hear and understand that their demise was imminent unless they took action and stepped off the tracks. It was too late, that laboratory is no more. They could see and they could hear but had no faith to follow a new way.

The Transfiguration is such a powerful telling of the beginning of faith. For the disciples, the voice from the clouds and the departure of Moses and Elijah signaled the departure of the old covenant and imminent coming of the new covenant of God with his people through Jesus. Yet even with the presence of the Holy Spirit (the glory of God) shining in Jesus’ face, they did not understand or perhaps even recognize it or the meaning of the words from the cloud. (Remember Peter subsequently denied Jesus.) To understand grace requires the faith found in the empty tomb on resurrection day.

For us today, the power of this story is the light of Jesus’ face, his dazzling white clothes and the voice in the cloud. They signify the presence of the Holy Spirit that conveys the true image of Christ in prophetic words, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” We no longer rely on the covenant of Law of the prophets to understand, we understand through the presence of the Holy Spirit that Jesus left with us. The Holy Spirit is the beginning of our faith.

Where and how do we find the Holy Spirit? The presence of Elijah in this passage may recall the answer.  In the first verse Jesus went up on the mountain to pray. Prayer preceded every event of importance in the life of Jesus. 

Elijah discovered it in the desert as he fled the forces of Jezebel, the wife of King Ahab after he had killed all her prophets of Baal.  1 kgs19:4-15 tells us in his flight he stopped for the night exhausted and without hope hiding in a cave. He prayed to the Lord to take his life. These are the words of the Lord: ‘But the word of the Lord told him  “Go out and stand on the mountain before the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake;  12 and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.  13 When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” ‘ and then the voice told Elijah to go about the Lord’s business and stop worrying about Jezebel’s troops.

If we desire the understanding given by the Holy Spirit we must listen for the sound of silence, and that is found only in prayer.

Last Wednesday we talked about the nature of creation and the universe from a Biblical and scientific perspective.  Science reveals that the age of universe and the world far exceeds a literal calculation of Bible.

 Skeptics use that scientific data to reject what is seen, heard and understood by faith that we are God’s beloved creation and the Scriptures reveal the history of and promise between God and his creation. Such skeptics read the Bible and see the great conflict with the observed world and reject it in favor of the secular or objective view.

But on the other hand some of our brothers and sisters who are uncertain and perhaps harbor doubt or only hope but not faith, would deny their experience of the real world revealed by the objective observations of science in favor of the comfort of the literal word of Scripture. In a sense both of these extremes deny the world as it is, a world formed by God, not humanity. In each case people have seen, heard and read without understanding, because they have not attuned self to Holy Spirit.

          With the Holy Spirit we read scripture and understand God and Christ’s purpose for us by faith alone.  Pray and listen for understanding. AMEN