Sunday, March 1, 2020 is the second Sunday in Lent of RCL Year A. Today’s sermon touches on all four readings, which are Genesis 12:1-4a; Psalm 121; Romans 4:1-5, 13-17; and John 3:1-17.
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen
Last week, we heard the story of Jesus being tempted by the devil in the wilderness. Each time he was tempted, Jesus responded from Scripture. I talked a bit then about how important it is for us to follow Jesus’ example and read the Bible, learn scripture, know what God is saying through the Bible’s stories.
Knowing and quoting individual verses can be dangerous, because like I said last week, you can twist the Bible to say whatever you want when you just pull out phrases or sentences.
Memorizing Bible verses is good, just make sure you’re also familiar with their context and what they actually mean in the Bible. For the sermon today, I want to pull out one verse from each reading, and challenge you to memorize at least one of them.
Let’s start with the first lesson from Genesis. The verse I want you to remember is the second verse of Genesis 12. Here’s the context: God tells Abram to pack up everything he has, take his family, leave his country, and go somewhere new, to a place God will show him. And God makes him a promise.
Genesis 12:2 – I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.
Underline that verse. God promises to bless Abram, but God’s blessing is for a purpose. Everything Abram is given is intended to be used for the benefit of others.
As the rest of the Biblical story unfolds, the “great nation” that comes from Abraham is Israel, and the purpose of Israel’s existence—the reason God chooses a people and sets them aside—is so that they will be a blessing to the world. Through Abram’s family Israel, all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
I spent all day Thursday at a workshop in Ames called “Faithful Readiness” learning about how churches can be prepared for disasters. There were speakers from FEMA, and the Department of Homeland Security, and the Red Cross (by the way, check your smoke detectors when you get home today – Daylight Savings Time is a good opportunity to make sure they work).
But one of the speakers who stood out to me was Pastor Jill Cameron Michel, who was a pastor in Joplin, Missouri during the tornadoes there. Twenty families in her congregation lost their homes.
For the next three and a half years during the recovery, their congregation hosted work groups who came to Joplin to do repairs and rebuilding.
One of the things she said was this: “We noticed that our best volunteers were people who’d had their homes destroyed.”
The people who’d lost everything themselves understood that what they had was to be used to help their neighbors. They understood they were blessed to be a blessing.
When God blesses you, it is so you will be a blessing to the world. Our church exists to be a blessing to our neighbors, both here in Greene and around the world. That’s why we do things like raise money for world hunger. That’s why we give to the food bank and make quilts and collect hygiene kits.
And it’s not just physical blessings; it’s sharing God’s love in Jesus Christ. We’ve been talking about evangelism and how important it is to invite other people to come to church, but sometimes we fall into the human trap of thinking we need people to come to church so our church doesn’t die, as if it’s somehow about us.
Any time we invite someone to come to church, it has to be because we believe Jesus wants to be a blessing in their lives. Because we know what God has done for us, we want to bless our neighbors.
This verse is a turning point in the story of the Bible. The rest of the Bible is God keeping this promise, continuing to be present, blessing God’s people so they will be a blessing to the world.
Let’s look at the Psalm. Please don’t underline this one in the hymnal, but you can write it down in the bulletin if you want.
This Psalm is the first of several written for travelers on their way to the temple. Sometimes it could be a dangerous journey.
Of course, life is full of dangers whether you’re traveling or not. Some of the dangers are physical, like disease or injury, car accidents and cancers, war and natural disaster.
Other dangers are economic: recession, unemployment, bad markets, debt, theft. Or spiritual dangers: doubt, sin, evil, corruption, and extremism. Facing all those dangers and more, the Psalmist asks, “From where will my help come?” Where shall we put our hope? Whom shall we trust in?
And then the answer: My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.
And here’s the verse I want you to remember, verse 3. He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber.
Psalm 121 is one of my favorite Scripture passages to read with people who are in tough situations, especially in hospital rooms.
In those times when it seems like time is standing still and you’re just waiting and watching, watching a loved one’s chest rise and fall, wondering each time if there will be another breath.
When you’re keeping vigil at night, I can’t think of anything more comforting than this promise that God is with you, and God does not fall asleep. The Lord is watching over you, keeping you from the power of evil, keeping your life. Whether you go out or you come in, whether in this life or beyond this life, God is still watching over you.
As the world throws more and more reasons for fear and panic at you, from coronavirus, to politics, to the economy, to whatever you have going on personally, remember that promise.
God who watches over you does not slumber or sleep. God keeps vigil over you. “He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber.”
Next, let’s jump to the Gospel reading from John 3. Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night to ask for some more information about what he’s teaching, and Jesus tells him that to see the kingdom of God, you must be born again.
They have a little debate about what it means to be born again, and Jesus explains that it’s not about literally going through the human birth process a second time; it’s about re-orienting your life towards God.
One of my favorite images of sin comes from Martin Luther, who described sin as us being curved in on ourselves. He said, “Our nature, but the corruption of the first sin, [is] so deeply curved in on itself that it not only bends the best gifts of God towards itself and enjoys them…but it also fails to realize that it so wickedly, cursedly, and viciously seeks all things, even God, for its own sake.”
As sinful people, our nature is to be selfish, to take everything we have, which of course is all a gift from God, and use it for ourselves, for our own pleasure and glory.
But Jesus tells us we must be born again, and in that rebirth of water and Spirit, we are set free from our bondage to sin. Our curved-in nature is re-oriented toward God and our neighbor. Being born again means living for God, rather than living for yourself.
It means being transformed to put others in front of yourself. It means using our blessings to bless our neighbors, to bless the world.
In this lesson, the verse I want you to remember is John 3:17. Well, you should probably know John 3:16, because it’s about the clearest picture in the whole Bible of what Jesus came to do. “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.”
But what I want you to underline and memorize is the next verse, John 3:17: Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
Jesus came because God wanted to bless us, to set us free to be a blessing to others, to liberate us from being curved in on ourselves in sin, to forgive us so we could have eternal life with God, living God’s way.
Jesus was not sent to condemn, but to liberate, to bless us with true, abundant, eternal life.
One final verse, this time from Paul’s letter to the Romans. Romans 4:5 – But to one who without works trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness. You can underline that one too.
This one’s probably not as easy to memorize, but it’s one of the verses Martin Luther grabbed ahold of to understand God’s grace. This verse is so important because it reminds us all this is up to God, not to us.
The blessings we are given, all our abilities to do good in the world and bless our neighbors, all of it comes from God, not from anything you or I do.
Our sinful nature wants to claim that when we do good, we deserve to be blessed.
But if we measure ourselves by that standard, says Paul, we’re only setting ourselves up for failure, because we never do well enough to earn eternal life. Paul says if you work for your wages, then your wages are not a gift; they’re something you’re owed.
But God doesn’t want us to work for our salvation; God just wants to bless us by grace, and then to work to do good and bless others precisely because we’ve been blessed.
The righteousness reckoned to Abraham—the blessings God gave Abraham—that was given to him as a free gift from God. All Abraham did was believe and follow and trust that God’s blessings to him were intended to be used to bless others.
God chose to bless Abraham. God chooses to bless you, to forgive you, to set you free.
May God’s blessing lead you to faith that you may be a blessing to the world, in Jesus’ name.
Amen