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| Date of Sermon: July 23, 2006 |
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My brother is two years older than I am and when we were little kids, we played almost as much as we fought. Mostly we liked to play games that involved safe places; we called them ‘base’. When you have a brother two years older and at least two times bigger you make sure that you familiarize yourself with where the bases are located very early in the game. My claim to fame, as his little sister, was calling base anywhere and everywhere that best benefited my not getting caught, hurt, or slaughtered. If I happened to be close to a tree when I realized I couldn’t win and that he was rapidly closing in, I’d call “base”. “This tree is now base”. He could outrun, out hit, out fight me, but he could not out argue me. And so in some instances, our German shepherd, King would suddenly become base and I would be safe. Other times, when lots of kids were playing, I’d just stay on base and pretend I had at some point left and actually participated in the game. I’d get called out for staying on base too long, or “just hanging out around base”, not going very far away. Most of us played these kinds of games as kids, didn’t we? And then we got a little older and we stopped playing those kinds of games. We were too old, too mature for these games and definitely too slow. And let me tell you that when my brother and I get together, these days, we do not play chase. But, at some point, we find ourselves playing the safety game again, as adults. We try to make everything in our world safe and risk free. We buy cars with extra air bags and read up to see what the car’s safety rating is, we live in houses with alarm systems and extra locks on the doors, we build playgrounds for our children that hold no possible means of harm. We really want to feel safe in our home, our cars, our places of business, and our schools. We just want to hang out around base for as long as we can. I know there are still people in this country who don’t involve themselves in the locked door, safe car, safe everything theory, but those people are becoming more and more difficult to find. Most of us want some guarantees that we will be safe and when something bad happens, someone must be to blame. For most of us, we want to be able to call “base”. When life gets too difficult to understand or to deal with we want to be able to say “I’m safe, you can’t touch me when I’m on base.” Then we watch the news and we hear of what happened to someone in his or her home and our illusion of safety in our own home is broken. We pass a wreck on the highway, someone driving a car much like our own and we hear later that someone died in that wreck. When we hear of children being terminally ill and nothing can help them, our sense of safety and security is shattered. When our base is taken away, we don’t understand why. Why did this happen? For centuries people have been trying to understand why bad things happen to good people AND how are we to respond when these unexplained tragedies happen in our lives. Saint Augustine, had decided in his rather grandiose way that he had come to the perfect conclusion for the question “why do bad things happen? He had decided that God could not be powerful and good. There must then be two gods. Kind of like a senior god and a junior god. The senior god created everything and holds the power to punish and bring wrath. The junior god is running things, trying to keep the peace between senior god and the world that he created – much like that middle child co-dependent thing. But one day, Saint Augustine went to hear Ambrose speak and he heard that God is a good and a powerful god, that bad things happen because … life is difficult. No one every promised us that life would be a breeze. Dr. William Jennings Bryan, professor at Perkins Seminary in Dallas, suggests that there may be four reasons why bad things happen in our world: 1. Sometimes we make wrong choices 2. We bump into each other 3. Life is difficult 4. Evil in our world Let’s look to scripture, to God’s Holy word to learn about our base, our safe place for those times when we find our lives affected by one of these four issues. Romans 8:31-39
31
What, then, shall
we say in response to this?
36
As it is written:
37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. 1. Sometimes we choose sin over good and the consequences can produce great suffering in our lives and in the lives of others. God’s promise to love us is our base. This scripture says that nothing in our past, nothing in our present or our future can separate us from God’s love. God is for us, we are more than conquerors. I don’t know if you’ve ever had to go see a judge for a traffic violation, but . . .I have once. . .or twice. (hold up three fingers) You are truly standing there at the mercy of that judge. It’s very unsettling. They talk OPENLY about the things that you’ve done wrong. Very unsettling. Then they decide what your punishment will be. I’ve thought about how different this scenario is with God as our judge. For me, as I sat in the defendant’s chair, person after person could come into the courtroom to testify. One person, after another, after another could come in and tell some of the things, about me, that I want to keep hidden. I would only be able to hang my head in shame, no defense. But my Judge is God and he would stand in my defense: “I know all of these things about her, and I am still for her. I still love her and I am on her side. God is on your side, He is for you, and he loves you and nothing that you have ever done can come between you and the love that God has for you. 2. Our lives intersect with the lives of others, every single day. Sometimes those moments of intersection can be devastating. When an entire family is killed because someone made the choice to drink and then get behind the wheel of a car unbelievable suffering begins. Shall danger or sword, death or life separate us from the God who loves us, No, we are more than conquerors through Christ Jesus our Lord. 3. Life is difficult, we hear regularly of the intense hardships that others face or we find ourselves smack dab in the middle of a hardship so great, so seemingly insurmountable that we wonder how could God let this happen? When I worked at Columbia Medical Center, I met a man who had been in a terrible car accident. He and his wife and their newborn baby were moving and were riding in a UHAUL truck. The wheel fell off of their truck and they slammed into oncoming traffic. His wife and newborn baby were killed in that accident and he was in ICU. One day, when I was talking with him, this is what he told me, he said: “You know, it’s just like a woke up in one world that morning and went to bed in a completely different world that night. My life is no longer the same.” Shall hardship or persecution be able to drive a wedge between us and God’s love for us? No, none of these things can change the fact that God’s love is for us. 4. When evil happens in this world, when planes are intentionally flown into buildings to kill the maximum amount of people, when men wear white hoods and march around burning crosses – hearts filled with hate, when children are abused and dying and when wars are being fought all over our world, how can we not wonder and worry? And yet, as horrible as these things are, as nightmarish as they may be, as incomprehensible as we find them and as contradictory as they well are to all that we hold to be good and right in this world, they do not possess the power to separate us from the love of Jesus Christ. This love goes beyond what we are able to comprehend or explain. While it might be easier to understand and explain if we could limit it to our terms and conditions, God’s love cannot be limited or contained. We know that the things that we have defined as base aren’t really base. We can call it, we can say my safety is found in the loving relationships I have here, we can say my safe place is here in my home, here in my church, here in my ability to rescue myself, but it doesn’t make it so. Our safe place is in the love of God. Over 500 years ago Thomas aKempis wrote these words: Love Him, then; keep Him as a friend. He will not leave you as others do, or let you suffer lasting death. Sometime, whether you will or not, you will have to part with everything. Cling, therefore, to Jesus in life and death; trust yourself to the glory of Him who alone can help you when all others fail. God is for us, He is our base, our safe place and there does not exist in this world anything or anyone who can separate us from God’s love for us. Prayer: God you are a loving and powerful God and we give you thanks for your great love. It is our prayer today that we would begin to live our lives believing that you love us and that this belief would make a difference in the way we live our lives. May we see these words of love not just as words printed in a book, but instead, print them on our hearts and in our minds that we, too, may love you and love others. Amen Benediction:
God’s grace pardons, God’s grace cleanses, Amen
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