Rev. Dr. John Judson
January 23, 2022 Watch Service Watch Sermon Print Version Ezra 3:1-7, Luke 4:14-21 I had everything packed in the car. I had carefully loaded my camera bags with my video cameras, tripods, and sound equipment. Cindy and I then hopped in the car and headed for the interview we were going to be doing with Justin and Alexis Black. If you are unaware of who they are, Justin and Alexis both grew up in the foster care system. They met in college, married, and then wrote a book entitled, “Redefining Normal,” which is about their journey through the system and how with God’s help they redefined their lives. It is a great book. Cindy and I were excited about meeting them, and doing the interview, and so we headed up I-75. When we had driven about two hours, Cindy asked me, “Are you sure you have the right address?” “Of course,” I replied. “Why don’t we just pull over at this upcoming rest stop,” She said, “And be sure.” As Cindy was making her wise recommendation there was a still, small voice in the back of my head saying…didn’t you get a new address? Pulling into the rest area, we phoned. “Oh no, “Alexis said when she answered. “We moved to Kalamazoo a couple of months ago.” I apologized for the mix up and they were gracious letting us know that it would be ok if we were late. I then plugged their address into Google Maps and realized there was no easy way to get from where we were to where they were. I suppose the upside was that Cindy and I saw parts of Michigan we would never have seen otherwise. We finally made it to their home, were received warmly, and got a marvelous interview…which by the way you can watch on our website. That story kept coming back to me this week as I thought about first steps; the first steps of a journey. That while it is true that the longest journey begins with a single step, it always helps if that step is in the right direction. The same holds true for our faith journeys. To start, or to start again, it helps to be pointed in the right direction. The question is, how do we do that? How do we ensure that our first steps are in the right direction? Fortunately, both our stories this morning offer us insight into how we can move in the right direction regardless of where we are in our journeys. Our story out of Ezra describes the first steps that the returning Jewish community made when they returned to the ruins of Jerusalem after years of exile. I say that Jerusalem was in ruins because the Babylonians had literally burned what could be burned and pulled down what could be pulled down. The city was a heap of rubble. One would think that the first priority of the returnees would be to rebuild the walls of the city for protection, or to raise a defense force; for they were surrounded by enemies, nations who did not want the Jews to rebuild their city and their lives. But the returnees did not do that. Instead, they built an altar to God. Then they made their first offerings. Then they made plans to rebuild the Temple. In other words what the Jewish people did was to begin their journey by orienting themselves to the God who had saved them. The people engaged in religious practices and rituals that made sure that their hearts were rightly oriented, toward God and not toward fear. In this way they believed that this new opportunity they had been given to be God’s people would be successful. Our story out of Luke offers us a different look at what first steps might look like. Jesus has been baptized, anointed by the Spirit, and successfully resisted the temptation to wander off the path God had set for him. Our story then is Jesus taking his first steps in his new journey. The text begins with Jesus reading from the prophet Isaiah “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Then Jesus sits down and says, “Today these words have been fulfilled in your hearing.” In other words, Jesus is telling the people that he is the anointed one. He is the one who has come to save the world. To put it another way. What Jesus is doing is taking his place in “The Story.” The Story is what I referred to a couple of weeks ago when we were packing for this journey. We were to pack The Story, the Spirit, and the Son. The Story was the story of God at work redeeming the world. It was the story that God had not only been working for redemption over time, freeing God’s people from slavery and bringing them home from exile, but that now, in Jesus, God was going to something decisive to bring the restoration of the world; to set humanity free from sin and bondage. We can see this a bit more clearly when we focus on the word “Today” with which Jesus began. It meant that “The Story was not a someday, some time, in some way story. It is a story in which Jesus is taking his place in that moment. Both stories point us to possibilities for our first steps. First, we can and should intentionally orient ourselves to God through religious practices and rituals. I realize that this sounds very churchy, but the reality is that we are creatures of habit. What we do and how we do it, what we believe and how we live those beliefs are all guided by our practices. In their book “Redefining Normal,” Justin and Alexis talk about the “practices” and “rituals” that their biological families taught them. These practices and rituals were not life-giving. They were destructive. Only by learning and practicing new ways of living, including orienting themselves to God, were they able to live lives of joy and hope. If we want to be those whose lives are moving in the right direction, in the Jesus direction toward life, then we need to develop practices and rituals that point us down the path God desires that we take. These can be as simple as attending worship, whether online or in-person. It can be a practice of prayer, extemporaneous or familiar. It can be meditation or Bible reading. Or it can be all the above. The advantage of engaging in these practices is that once they become a ritual, like our morning or evening rituals, they will help to ensure that our first steps are pointing us in the way we should go. The second way in which we can ensure that we are headed in the right direction is to place ourselves in The Story as did Jesus. What I mean by this is that The Story is both an ancient story and a story being lived today. It is a story that is not only intended to inform us of what God has done and is doing, but it is a story in which we are to play a part. Justin and Alexis found their part of the story. They felt led to create a ministry to assist children and teens not only in the Foster Care system, but in any life circumstance, to discover how to reorient their lives toward life and joy. Being part of The Story means discovering where God can use our gifts and talents to help make creation look more and more like the Kingdom of God, so that God’s will can be done on earth as it is in heaven. And if you are wondering where you might serve, or where your place might be, get in touch with Rev. Bethany or me and we can offer you some guidance. I realize that many of us have been on our faith journeys for a long time and we might be wondering what do these first steps have to do with us? The answer I would offer is that it is a good thing to on occasion, pull into a rest stop, and check to be sure that the address to which are headed is the right one…and then take some new first steps. My challenge for you then during this week is to ask yourselves, how am I orienting myself daily to God, and where is my place in The Story? Rev. Dr. John Judson
January 16, 2022 Watch Sermon Watch Service Print Version Ezra 2:59-63; Luke 3:23-38 It looked like something that would be good to have. It was my first year here at First Presbyterian and I met one of my pastor friends in the parking structure at Beaumont Hospital. Attached to his shirt was a red “clergy badge.” I asked him about it and he said that it was not necessary to visit but that it would get me in after normal visiting hours and into places in the hospital that ordinary mortals were not allowed to go. I then enquired as to where to get one. He told me to go to the chaplain’s office. So, after my hospital visit, I went to apply. When I entered the office and asked about getting a badge, they informed me that they would need to see my credentials. They would need to see my certificate of ordination and a letter from my church, on letterhead, signed by someone other than me. As I walked away, I thought two things. First how was I going to get my certificate of ordination since I had never received one when I was ordained in 1985? The second was, why would anyone want to fake being a pastor just to get one of those little red badges? The first question was answered by the Stated Clerk of my ordaining presbytery who got me my certificate, and by Jan Peters who wrote and signed the letter. The second question was answered, in a way, when I discovered that close to thirty-percent of people lie on their resumes by exaggerating their skills and experience. In other words, people, for any number of reasons, are willing to lie about their credentials to get what they want. Lying about credentials isn’t anything new. In the ancient world, kings and potentates were always lying about how great they were, the battles they had won, and the kingdoms they had conquered. And evidently there were some priests that it would appear were lying about their credentials in the return to Jerusalem from Babylon. As Ezra puts it, “The following were those who came up from Tel-melah, Tel-harsha, Cherub, Addan, and Immer, though they could not prove their families or their descent, whether they belonged to Israel.” What was this all about? Well, there are two things we need to understand about this rather cryptic passage. The first is that the Jews that had been exiled into Babylon remained an intact community by doing two things. First, they made lists of who really belonged to the people of Israel so that they would know who was in and who was out. Second, they kept the Law of Moses in everything that they did. In this way they were not absorbed religiously into the Babylonian world. When they returned home, they looked for priests to serve in the soon to be rebuilt temple, so they checked their lists. They checked their lists to ensure that only the people referenced in Torah were allowed to serve God…and the people mentioned in our morning’s story were not on any of their lists. They had faked their credentials. Credentials were equally important to the Jews of Jesus’ time as well as to those who ran the Roman Empire. Jews were still doing record keeping of who was in and who was out. The Empire kept records of who was a citizen, who was a slave, who was adopted, and who was natural born. And one’s status in the empire was always tied to these sorts of credentials. This posed a problem for Luke as he was telling his tale about Jesus. This was a problem because on the surface Jesus had no credentials that would lead either Jews or Romans to consider him to be a messiah. All they knew of him was that he was a carpenter, turned traveling teacher, who “supposedly” died and was then resurrected. While that is somewhat impressive, the people listening to Luke’s story would want to know if Jesus had any credentials that would let people know he was worth following. So, Luke offers a genealogy that was intended to satisfy both audiences. For the Jews, Luke begins by saying that Jesus was thirty years old when he began his work, which was the age that priests were when they began to work…so Jesus was spiritually mature and capable of the work. Second Luke ties Jesus to David, the great king. This was critical for a Jewish audience because only a descendant of David could be king, and for many, a messiah. As a side note, the last descendant of David who was acknowledged as a prince of the people, was a man named Zerubbabel, who we read about last week. In other words, it had been four hundred years since a king of Israel had been seen. So here is Jesus, with his lineage credentials tying him to David. For the Roman audience, Luke had to dig a little deeper. Within Roman culture the more ancient one’s lineage, the better. The more one could tie oneself to the past, the more respect one was given. Where this led was that many of the emperors had pedigrees that listed gods or goddesses in their family tree. Luke, then, is not about to let any emperor outdo Jesus, and so Jesus’ lineage is offered unbroken back to the first human being and to God’s own self. While these credentials alone did not bring people into the church, into the Jesus community, they were foundational for assuring Luke’s audience that Jesus was worth following. Where this brings us then is to our own credentials. What are the credentials that we are to take on our journey? The first is a credential for those within the Church. One of the interesting things about the worldwide church is that there are churches and denominations that refuse to recognize our place within the community. There are churches and denominations that claim that they, and they alone, are the true church; that only by joining them, or being baptized like they are baptized, or having the spiritual gifts that they have, can we be true Christians. But my friends, we have credentials. We have our baptisms. I say this because in baptism we have been grafted into Christ. We have been adopted as a child of God. We have been made part of the very body of Christ, the church. We also have the cross. We have our profession of faith in Jesus Christ, that he is Lord and Savior. These two credentials, whether others accept them or not, demonstrate that we are part and parcel of the Jesus’ community. The second credential we have is for the world. Unfortunately, when the world looks at the church and Christians, what it often sees is hatred, condescension, and a community that does not seem to care about anyone other than itself. Our credential to the world then is our service to the least, the lost, and the lonely. Our credential is the service we offer to those outside of our community. It is our work with Angels’ Place homes, at Alcott, packing food baskets, serving the homeless, and caring for others. These acts of service are the credentials to the world that we are who we say we are, followers of Jesus, and we do what He has asked us to do. Which, if we read the Book of Acts, also written by Luke, was what drew people into the life of the church. In other words, we serve the world because we are they, and they are us. And as the old hymn states, they will know we are Christians by our love, by our love. This is our credential to the world. We are now ready for our journey. Two weeks ago, we heard Rev. Bethany talk about the ethical map of John the Baptist. Last week we packed the Story, the Spirit, and the Son. This week we discovered our credentials. And so next week we take our first steps. My challenge to you then is this, to ask yourselves, how am I allowing my credentials to guide who I am and what I do? Rev. Dr. John Judson
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