Re-Thinking God
Scripture: Luke 6:1-111
Rev. Richard H. Thompson, February 7, 2010

A summary of Luke chapter 5

The crowds didn't want Jesus to leave. "Stay here," they said, "We'll come to you with all our needs." But Jesus surprised them. He said, "No, I have to keep moving. My mission is to tell the world the good news. God is going to meet everyone's needs, not just yours."

He surprised Peter too. At the time he was working as a commercial fisherman . He and his crew had been out all night and caught nothing. Jesus somehow convinced Peter to trust him enough to go against Peter's own common sense professional experience and try again, in broad daylight! The catch practically swamped the boats. In an instant Peter was forced to re-think Jesus, and himself. That day Peter got a new mission in life. He became a fisher of people.

Then there was this leper. Everyone assumed you don't touch lepers because then you'd get it too, sort of like how people used to think about people with AIDS. This lonely man with a horrible skin disease begged Jesus for help. Amazingly, against all advice and commonly held wisdom , Jesus touched him and the man was healed. Then Jesus told him to go to the priest to get signed off as clean. Best thing Jesus could have done, because that day that man could go home.

Word spread like wild fire about Jesus. The crowds grew. Even so, Jesus still found ways to be alone to pray.

One time when Jesus was teaching about God with religious leaders present in the house there was a strange noise up on the roof. Somebody was moving tiles and timbers up there. Dust and dirt rained down on everyone's head as a paralyzed man lying on a stretcher was lowered down by four ropes. The friends on the roof aimed perfectly and dropped the man right in front of Jesus. The first thing Jesus said caught everyone off guard. He didn't say, "You are healed." He said, "Friend, your sins are forgiven." That set off a big argument. The religious leaders wanted to find out, "Who did he think he was? GOD!?" Jesus answered in a very unexpected way, "Just so you get it about my right to forgive, watch this." And then he turned to this paralyzed fellow on the stretcher and said, "Get up, and take this stretcher with you and go home." And that's exactly what that man did. As Luke put it, everybody in that house was in awe of God. They were heard to say things like, "We have seen strange things today..." .

But Jesus was far from finished getting people to think again about God. He walked into a tax collector's office-one of the most hated kinds of people in the whole country because they extorted whatever they wanted and no one could stop them-and Jesus said, "Follow me." People must have been wondering, "My God, will this Jesus take anyone?" That tax collector, his name was Levi, dropped everything and walked out with Jesus. A little later he threw a huge party at his big house and invited all his tax collector friends just so they could all meet Jesus. There was no way a party like that would go unnoticed by the religious leaders. "How very inappropriate," they later said to Jesus, "to party with people our rules tell us we are to have nothing to do with." Maybe Jesus shrugged his shoulders with a little smile when he said, "Hey, this is what I'm all about. I'm not here just to hang out with people who get it about God. I'm here to help those who don't get it, get it!"

And then he said, "You don't know what this party is about, do you? You think this should be a wake. I tell you this is more like a wedding! You're all dressed in black. We're wearing our party clothes. You don't get it either. This is a new thing boys. You don't sew new cloth on old clothes. And you don't pour unfermented wine into brittle old skins either. Time to re-think what you believe about God boys, Or maybe you've already made up your minds, that old wine is always better..."

 

How does God love us? As we follow Jesus it seems clear God loves us by getting us to re-think our assumptions about God.

-In Peter's case, based on his own life experience, he assumed there was nothing to catch out there. So often common sense judgment is a huge limiting factor.

-Then there's the assumption that certain people are best left alone and untouched because you can't be too careful.

-How about the mindset that says in your case forgiveness is impossible? That you're paralyzed by what you've done, and you will be for the rest of your life...

-Or that there is any reason to celebrate when everything seems to being going to hell in a hand basket.

Jesus has a tough job. Everywhere he went, and goes, he runs into minds made up, mental-sets that seem fixed in cement. Somehow he has to find a way to pry us loose from our assumptions to get us to think again about how very much God loves us.

For example, Luke 6:1-11:

One sabbath while Jesus was going through the grainfields, his disciples plucked some heads of grain, rubbed them in their hands, and ate them. But some of the Pharisees said, "Why are you doing what is not lawful on the sabbath?" Jesus answered, "Have you not read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God and took and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and gave some to his companions?" Then he said to them, "The Son of Man is lord of the sabbath." On another sabbath he entered the synagogue and taught, and there was a man there whose right hand was withered. The scribes and the Pharisees watched him to see whether he would cure on the sabbath, so that they might find an accusation against him. Even though he knew what they were thinking, he said to the man who had the withered hand, "Come and stand here." He got up and stood there. Then Jesus said to them, "I ask you, is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to destroy it?" After looking around at all of them, he said to him, "Stretch out your hand." He did so, and his hand was restored. But they were filled with fury and discussed with one another what they might do to Jesus.

Jesus' toughest cases were people like me-religious leaders. So a word in defense of the Pharisees. They were generally considered pretty good guys. I say "guys" because there were no women Pharisees. They visited villages, homes and synagogues to help people understand the Scriptures and how to apply it in particular situations. They really cared. And they were careful. The Pharisees got their start about 160 years before Jesus was born during a long period of reflection on how it happened that Israel had lost so much, independence, their Temple, their land. The big conclusion was they had broken faith with God. They had disobeyed God's commands. So they reasoned, "Let's not have this happen ever again. Let's be really careful. Let's be safe." So, one of the Ten Commandments says, "Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the sabbath day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. You shall not do any work..." The question was, "What constitutes 'work'?" On the one hand the Book of Deuteronomy says it's okay to eat from a field while you're traveling. On the other hand it also says it's not okay to harvest on sabbath. Oral and written traditions came up with hundreds of regulations to try and help with questions like this. For example you could only walk a certain number of steps on sabbath before your walking became "work".

It's clear certain Pharisees took a very safe position on what constituted "work". It's also clear some had pretty much already made up their minds about Jesus. They must have been walking along with Jesus and his followers to even have noticed when those famished disciples plucked heads of grain from a nearby field, then rubbed the heads in the palms of their hands to remove the husk before popping the grain into their mouths like trail mix. "AHA!"they seemed to have said, "Did you see that? That's 'work'! We've caught you 'red handed'!" (Maybe that's where that expression comes from...)

Now there's a mindset for you. Talk about playing it safe. It reminds me of when I worked for Mayflower Moving Company. Once in a while we'd have to move somebody's office. And in some offices there would inevitably be a safe. I remember one in particular. It sat in the middle of the floor, about 4'x4'x4', double steel walled with concrete poured in between the walls to insulate from fire, and to make it really, really heavy so that it can't be moved, at least not easily. It's what makes a safe, "safe". We only had one way to deal with a safe like that. We used a Johnson Bar. This had a short heavy gauge steel lip on one end with small heavy steel wheels as a fulcrum, and about a ten foot long wooden handle on the other end as a giant lever. We'd put the edge of the lip of the Johnson Bar under one corner of that safe, and then two of us would pull down hard on the other end. Usually that was Bob and me. Bob had a belly that went out to here, so he was perfect. At the same time two other guys would slip a hydraulic lift under the edge of the safe as it slowly came off the ground.

Mindsets are like safes. Decided, secure, solid, unmovable, or at least not moved easily.

That's why Jesus had to use "leverage" with Peter, and on those who've decided some were untouchable, or unforgivable, or unacceptable. Jesus has to find a way to get under our made up minds about who God is and how God works. He has to find a way to set his edge in us to pry us loose of our assumptions about who we are, and what we are here to do.

Jesus loved those religious leaders just the way he loves you and me.

So Jesus answered, "Even David went into the Temple and got a dispensation to use the bread dedicated to God to feed his hungry soldiers." Interesting parallel he's drawing. It was believed the Messiah would be like David... exactly what Jesus was hinting when he laid out a principle, "The Son of Man [meaning himself] is Lord of the sabbath."

Read - Religion and ritual serve God's purposes. Not the other way around. In Jesus' day the religious mindset had gotten this exactly backwards. When it comes to ritual there are times to make exceptions. Don't make absolute matters of instruments, or style, or the order of things. If a starving person came in here this morning and desperately needed something to eat, there's no reason we couldn't break off a piece of this bread and give it to them. We get this. No problem. We get it about styles of worship too. We worship differently here every Sunday. We try things, just like this morning.

I think we have an opposite problem today. We were talking about this in staff this week. It used to be "sabbath" meant a whole day. Then it came to mean a "morning". Then it came to mean "an hour". Now it has come to mean, "if there is time..." And Lord knows there is a lot of competition for our "time". Time has become the most precious commodity, hasn't it? So what does Jesus' principle, "The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath" mean today? Jesus kept sabbath. The Scriptures give two reasons for keeping sabbath. One is to reflect on the fact that life is a gift from God. That we don't achieve anything by ourselves. We remember that God is holy, gracious, and true. The other reason is to give ourselves and everything a rest. Because otherwise we can burn out. So can everything else.

When we don't take time to reflect on these things we get what some call "Christianity Lite". One sociologist interviewed 3,000 teens to ask them what they believed about God. Many didn't know what to say. They'd use the word, "Whatever" a lot. Boiled down, the researchers found teens today believe in a god who exists, who watches over things, wants people to be nice, who does not get particularly involved except when needed to solve a problem. But ask these same teens about musicians, or how to get into college, or what's on television, they are very articulate. This is one reason I am so thankful for our Student Ministry here at WPC. Any teen who spends any length of sabbath time here is going to be able to talk about what they believe and why in a personal and meaningful way. I pray the same can be said about the rest of us.

Because sabbath is supposed to be a different kind of day. Well, this sabbath is! There's a new cultural ritual now. About 44 years old. The #1 party event of the entire year. The #2 food consumption event of the year where 20 million pounds of chips, 4,000 tons of popcorn, and 8 million pounds of guacamole are consumed. We'll spend $55 million today on food.

At least we're pushing back by bringing cans of soup to help those are hungry...

You can see how tough a job Jesus has. On another sabbath the religious leaders tried to trap Jesus using a man with a withered hand. Ironic isn't it? A mind so fixed on catching Jesus doing "work" that it misses the suffering of the person used as "bait"! What amazes me is Jesus knows this about them, and still he loves them. Just the way he loves you and me.

What also amazes me is that Jesus heals this man right in front of their very eyes and their response is rage! Rage! Is it possible that a mindset can be so fixed that it can observe a healing and call it meaningless? Call it "Par for the course"? "To be expected"? All the while it's God's grace, God's provision of the Holy Spirit at work, whether anyone sees it or not?

Jesus spent himself in ministry every day getting underneath these assumptions, these ways we take God for granted, and how God loves us. He spent himself for us to be able to get it about what he accomplished on that Johnson Bar of a Cross.

Let us prepare our hearts, minds and souls for some new thinking about how God loves us and this world as we come to His Table.

Questions for Reflection.