Sermons

But still, one little candle, one audacious voice, helped changed the world.  Ahaz’s son Hezekiah would heed Isaiah’s future counsel, and under Hezekiah’s reforms, Judah would return to the worship of YHWH. And even in the siege of his city, Hezekiah chose to listen to Isaiah’s voice – he chose to believe that somewhere out on the horizon, God’s world was still coming.  He looked to the light of one little candle.

But let me tell you, friends, God isn’t here to zap us. God is here to love us.  And if we are to be an expression of God’s love in the world, an expression that our world desperately needs to know, and right this very minute, then we must make a holy racket.

The Psalmist tells us we belong to the God of Jacob. Jacob’s God is with us, and Jacob’s God is our strength and refuge. And because we belong to Jacob’s God, anything can happen children of God, anything can be!!!

We can’t spend our lives banking on representations of God. We must spend our lives believing in, and banking on the reality of God.  It is not the systems created to serve God that continually salvage, and resurrect, and recreate our lives and spirits. It is God that continually salvages, resurrects, and recreates our lives and spirits.  And when our faith in institutions is stronger than our faith in God, our judgement becomes muddied, and our future becomes veiled.

God invites us, Millbrook, into a kind of community that is not about the haves and the have-nots, but rather, a community about everyone having enough. When we love God, and we love neighbor as we love ourselves, we not only follow the example of our beloved saints, but we help bring about that day when God’s enough-ness will trump Caesar’s scarcity.

Today’s text is not an endorsement for the tax collector over the Pharisee.  Today’s text is a commentary on systems that prevent us from living full and happy lives, systems that prevent us from living into our created purpose: to be children of God!!!