Sermon 3-20-11

"The Lord is Your Keeper"
Psalm 121, John 3:1-17

Why come to church?  Is it about spirituality?  Is it about socializing?  Is it about guilt or duty?  What if it were about simple sanity in an insane, or least inane, world.  Sanity gives us the ability to distinguish between the real and the unreal, the trivial and the important, the selfish and the selfless.  Our culture is testing my sanity, such as it is. 

Here are three recent examples:

• There is a Sirius satellite radio channel devoted exclusively to Charlie Sheen – imagine, Charlie Sheen 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
• CNN, the cable news channel, has 50 reporters and crew in Japan covering the triple disasters there.  That is a credible effort you might think until you compare it with the 400 they are preparing to send to London to cover the royal wedding next month.  The situation is actually far worse at NBC, with only four people in Tokyo and where some of the advance guard of the wedding crew had to be pressed into service to cover Japan from London.
• Yesterday’s Democrat and Chronicle devoted twice as much space on its front page to the Syracuse win in the NCAA basketball tournament as to the next most important story – something about U.S. involvement in a civil war in Libya.  And then, of course, there was the whole sports section for the in depth analysis of the Orange’s prospects in tonight’s game.  Duke was barely mentioned.

In the face of such seeming distortions of attention to human priorities, I don’t condemn the media.  I weep for us, the American people, whose entertainment demands the media are simply responding to.  And I applaud you who are here this morning trying to connect with something more enduring and more meaningful.  That’s a purely practical reason why we ought to come to church – to connect with our essential humanness, to maintain our sanity, to nourish our souls, to celebrate the essential and the eternal.  The scriptures, our worship, Jesus Christ himself, are antidotes to the baseness of our culture. 

And now for the punch line to all of this, listen now… with regard to saving yourself from the inanity of our culture my point is…  there is a place to turn for rescue…. here it comes…the Lord is your keeper.  You wondered how I was going to work the sermon title in, didn’t you?

Psalm 121 tells us that life is a journey, and in that journey the Lord is the ground upon which we walk.  God is the guardian of our hope. God is a comforting constant in a life filled with unwelcome changes.  Although there be earthquakes, God will not let our feet be moved under us.  Although there be tsunamis, God will protect us.

But we need to be clear, we cannot be our own Gods.  Our security cannot be based on us getting everything right.  At some point we have to ask for help beyond ourselves.  This is the assumption behind HeAt exercise, for example.  We cannot be our own guardians, our own keepers.  From where will our help come the quarter million homeless in Japan are asking?  From where will our help come the residents of Benghazi, Libya are asking?  The Lord loves you, the Lord is watching over you the Psalm says.  The Lord is your keeper.  Your help is in the Lord.

Thanks to all those signs in the audience at sports events, our reading from the Gospel of John includes one of the best known phrases in the Bible, John, Chapter 3, verse 16:

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,
so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

Nicodemus was a member of the Pharisee’s ruling council. He came to see Jesus at night because a man of his stature could not be seen consulting Jesus.  Are any of us too proud to be seen as needing Jesus?  For those of you who have read ahead, you’ll recall that this is the same Nicodemus who reappears at Jesus’ temple trial and at his burial.  In this passage, he comes out of the darkness of unbelief seeking the light.  Nicodemus was puzzled, as many were, about this business of being born again.  Jesus explains that this was a spiritual rebirth, not a physical one and that spiritual rebirth simply requires one to believe in him.

Jesus is the driver of the vehicle that stops to pick up we weary hitchhikers on our long journey through a dangerous land.  All we have to do is lift our thumbs, to enter his presence with gratitude and we will be saved.  Jesus personalizes God, makes God known to us.  God, our keeper, did this for us to help us get the idea.  After some confusion, Nicodemus eventually got the idea and not just intellectually.    At Jesus’ burial he showed up with 75 pounds of spices to preserve Jesus’ body.  That quantity of spices would have ordinarily only been used for royalty.  For Nicodemus, lugging that 75 pounds through town, faith was a verb, an action.

The Lord was there in the Psalm and Jesus was there in John and we are here in Lima, NY in 2011.  People are always rooted in their particular contexts.  Somehow, like Nicodemus, we have to find our way out of the darkness to Jesus.

And as the evangelist Katheen Kulman used to say, “God has no grandchildren.”  By that she meant that we don’t inherit God from our parents. We have to find our own way, make our own commitment.  We are reborn directly into God, or not at all.   

And once ’born again,’ how are we to make sense of Jesus’ extravagant promises of eternal life.  In short we have to become theologians in residence in our own time and place, even in our own homes.  What does “born again” look like in your household?  Is it a scary prospect?  For many it is.

Lord Kenneth Clark, internationally know for his television series Civilization, lived and died without faith in Jesus Christ. He admitted in his autobiography that while visiting a beautiful church he had what he believed to be an overwhelming religious experience. "My whole being," Clark wrote, "was irradiated by a kind of heavenly joy far more intense than anything I had known before."

But the "gloom of grace," as he described it, created a problem. If he allowed himself to be influenced by it, he knew he would have to change, his family might think he had lost his mind, and maybe that intense joy would prove to be an illusion. So he concluded, "I was too deeply embedded in the world to change course."

The Lord is your personal keeper.  God in his love will save your soul, that is, provide eternal life, if you believe.  You don’t have to do anything else. You are already worthy of this grace.  Now if you accept this grace, there may be serious side effects as with any powerful medicine.  Like Kenneth Clark’s, your life will change, or has changed or is changing.  Beforehand, those changes seem daunting, in the change itself, they are welcome.  Through it all, the Lord, your keeper, is right there beside you on your path.  God wants you to let him help you.  The hard, the tricky, the human part is continuing to ask for that help through life’s changes, especially the unwelcome, involuntary ones.

Jesus knew Nicodemus was embedded in his role and understandings; after all, he came in the dark because he was afraid of unwelcome changes such as a backlash from his colleagues.  But John’s account tells us Nicodemus was searching for answers.  He was even open to answers he didn’t fully understand.  Trying to understand God will always bring us face to face with our own ignorance and doubt.  Still, like it or not, understanding or not, here we are stumbling along on our life’s journey. 

Have you seen those State Farm HELP trucks that cruise the local interstates looking for motorists in trouble?  Like them, Jesus is out there looking for people in trouble, hitchhikers like us with raised thumbs.  The trick is not to get Jesus to stop for us; he’ll gladly do that.  The trick is in accepting the ride he offers.

Last night we enjoyed a particularly large and bright moon, which reminded me of an old story. 

One of the first astronauts to walk on the moon was asked, “What did you think about as you stood on the moon and looked back at the earth hundreds of thousands of miles away?”

The astronaut replied, “I remembered that both our lunar lander and our spacecraft were built by the lowest bidders.”

Well ours is not a lowest bidder God.  Our promise of salvation is not qualified by, “your results may vary,” or “this is a limited warranty subject to the following conditions…”  There are no ifs, ands, or buts in Jesus’ words,  “everyone who believes in him… will be saved.”  All we have to do is believe the good news, the Lord is your keeper.

Amen.