And then, here in chapter ten, there is a startling turning point in the gospel. Like a skilled filmmaker who suddenly changes the focus of a lens, bringing what was blurred in the background of the shot into clear focus, Matthew reveals that he is not simply telling the story about Jesus, but about his disciples. They’ve been there the whole time—following Jesus from synagogue to synagogue, town to town, house to house. They’ve been watching him teach, hearing him proclaim the good news of the kingdom of heaven, and then they’ve watched him act out that sermon by healing the sick, casting out demons, and offering forgiveness. They’ve been here the whole time, but always in the background. But now, Matthew twists the lens, and they suddenly jump from the background to the front of the story.

It’s one of those moments that makes you go back and rethink the movie. Everything Jesus has been doing now becomes a rehearsal for what he’s calling them to do. Notice what he tells them in verses 7-8: “As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.” It sounds a lot like what Matthew’s been telling us Jesus did, doesn’t it? It’s a radical turning point in the story—the disciples are not just to watch Jesus or even to merely go on learning from him, but are to go out and replicate his ministry to others. The last few chapters have been a barrage of stories that demonstrate that Jesus has authority—now he gives it away. “Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority…”

This provokes a new, different kind of faith question. Up until now, all the stories have been about what people believed Jesus could do for them:

“Do you believe that I am teaching you the truth?”
“Do you believe I can heal your servant?”
“Do you believe I can protect you from this storm?”
“Do you believe I can forgive you?”

It’s a radical turning point in the story—the disciples are not just to watch Jesus or even to merely learn from him, but are to go out and replicate his ministry to others. As somebody in our small group said last week when we read those words, and were imagining what it was like to be sent on that mission by Jesus, “These are life-changing words.” Now, all of a sudden, the question for the disciples is not “What do we believe Jesus can do for us?” but “What what do we believe Jesus will do through us?” That is a tremendous difference.

But even while we recognize the difference, it’s important to recognize that even though this is a different kind of question, it’s still a faith question. It’s not a question of what the disciples are capable of in and of themselves. Jesus can’t give them authority unless he truly has it himself. There isn’t even a question of the gospel beginning at this point—this moment depends on their faith in everything that’s happened before this. Matthew doesn’t begin in chapter ten, (and there’s no Acts without Luke). Christian mission is never about what we are capable of or not—it’s about what God is capable of. It exists in the tension between what God is at work doing and what we are at work doing. But both of those work together—God is at work through us.

The challenge implicit in all of this is: “Are we ready to be agents of the gospels?” Are we willing to take on the mantle of what Jesus was doing, and take his mission to be our own? Are we content to be recipients of the gospel, or are we ready to become participants of the gospel?

That’s an important question in the gospel, one that I think is implicit in this story. And normally, this is the point in the sermon when I would dramatically hold out my hands and ask you to seriously consider that challenge…but not this week. At this point in the gospel, in chapter ten, we’re still not ready for it. This story, where Jesus sends his disciples out to replicate his ministry, is incomplete. Sure, the mission as it is would be enough to keep their hands full, and it’s full of the gospel—but it’s still an incomplete gospel. After all, the story Matthew is telling doesn’t end here, but ends in another sending story, what we call the great commission. Matthew is a tale of two commissions, or two sendings, and what happens between the two is incredibly important.

So far, Jesus’s disciples have learned about his power, but they have not yet seen him become powerless. They’ve seen him in strength, but not yet in weakness. Between the two commissions, stands the truth of Jesus’s suffering. Before they can receive the great commission, they have to follow Jesus on the road to the cross—and so do we. Because it’s on that road that we finally can  experience the full gospel of Jesus in his life, death, and resurrection—the gospel that we are called not only to receive, but to participate in.

Here’s a preview for the sermon this Sunday.  (January 29, 2012)

Sometimes the sermon comes easier than others. This week’s had to go through a lot of wrestling, but in the end, after a lot of listening and struggle, I’m extremely excited to share it with the church.

“They sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”

]]> http://www.stevenhovater.com/wordpress/2011/07/preaching-on-power/feed/ 1 http://www.stevenhovater.com/wordpress/2011/06/hosea-and-gomer%e2%80%94a-sermon-about-the-love-of-god/ http://www.stevenhovater.com/wordpress/2011/06/hosea-and-gomer%e2%80%94a-sermon-about-the-love-of-god/#comments Sun, 19 Jun 2011 18:00:36 +0000 stevepvc http://www.stevenhovater.com/wordpress/?p=432729039 Continue reading →]]> When my friends and I used to sit around and talk about women (and the chasing of them), I used to say that I was looking for somebody with three “G”s.  I wanted somebody who was Genuine, Gentle, and Godly. (Kelly and I have often debated whether I have in fact gotten my wish list—I generally think she has a more gentle side than she recognizes herself.) There were two others aspects that, if pressed, I would have admitted pursuing. One is “Gorgeous”, although I might not have confessed that because it doesn’t sound too spiritual.

The final element—and if I’m honest, this was at times the most important element of all—was that I was looking, quite simply, for a woman who would love me. For a while Kelly wasn’t sure about that, and eventually, this was not just a peripheral issue, but THE issue. If she did in fact love me, we’d get married. If not, we were probably done. I knew I loved her, but if it didn’t go both ways, I just wasn’t willing to go any further.

I suppose that isn’t that uncommon. If you peel back the surface of what we all chase in relationships, it comes to this: we want somebody to love us.  We just want to love someone and be loved back. All the world’s tragedy and comedy comes down to this.

And so we can only come to Hosea’s story with bewilderment. While Hosea’s marriage to Gomer was introduced in the first chapter, there it is essentially the context for the children and their prophetic names, in an account told by a third person narrator—”this is what happened to Hosea”. In chapter 3, it takes center stage, in a first person account. This is Hosea saying, “This is my story.” The first verse is enough for us to start with: “The Lord said to me again, Go, love a woman who has a lover and is an adulteress, just as the Lord loves the people of Israel, though they turn to other gods…”

God invites Hosea to dive into God’s own heart by entering into a relationship which he knows will be unreciprocal. God wants Hosea to love someone—not just marry them, but love them!—in the knowledge that his love will not be returned.

You ever been there? Maybe not on purpose, but have you ever found yourself completely in love with someone that just wasn’t that into you?That is simply one of the most painful things that can happen to humans—and it happens to most of us at some time or another.

What is amazing is that God experiences this in his own heart. This is the most fundamental story we tell about God and his relationship with humans—God loves us, knowing that we often won’t love him back. Indeed, this isn’t accidental, but God created us with this precise possibility. God created us to live in community with him, but also created us with the possibility that we could choose to walk away from him. We often say that God did this so that our love would be of a certain kind—love freely given is the only kind that really matters, after all.  I suppose there is a good bit of truth in that, but I think that this Hosea story reveals a deeper truth.

The metaphor here works not because Gomer is going to love Hosea in a particularly powerful way after her faithlessness, although that is a possibility. Gomer’s love simply isn’t the point. It’s all about Hosea’s love—which of course means that it’s all about God’s love. See, God doesn’t just give us freedom only for the sake of making sure that our love is free and thus particularly powerful. Even more, our freedom works to show us the incredible power of God’s own love. God’s love is a powerful “even though” sort of love that loves despite going unreturned. God loves even when repeatedly rejected.

And yet, God’s love always pursues us. God relentlessly chases us, desiring to draw us into relationship with him. God desires for us to respond to him, to freely come and join him. His desire in this text is that Israel would—eventually—come to love him, that eventually Israel would seek God out and join him.  He desires the same of us, that as Ephesians says, we may have the power to comprehend the breadth, length, height and depth of God’s love for us, and that perceiving that we may be live in the fullness of God, firmly rooted in his love.

Radically, we might even take this further. Not only does he desire that we realize his love and return it to him, but God’s vision for his people is that we join him in loving the world. Jesus roots his command that we love our enemies in exactly this, that this is how God loves the world. He knows it is different than how the world thinks about love—that’s his point!

“You have heard it said, ‘you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your father in heaven; for he makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly father is perfect.” (Mt 5:43-48)

God loves even when his love is unreturned, and Jesus calls us to learn to love in exactly this way.

Do we have the audacity to mimic God’s love in our own lives—can we learn to love those who simply do not and will not love us back? Can we stop using our love simply as a tool to gain love back for ourselves? Once, God called the prophet Hosea to put his love—God’s love— on display by loving someone who would not love him back—now he calls the church to do the same. We are called to be “Hoseas.” Despite the knowledge that it will often be unreturned, we are called to love all—even our enemies. We do it in the hope that such love might communicate the unbelievable, relentless love of God—in the hope that even our enemies may be redeemed by God. And yet, even as we hope for their redemption, we are called to love regardless whether it ever has that effect or not. We are called to become like God, to break away from the limited nature of our natural way of loving. We are called to become, by the working of God’s own spirit, capable of loving with God’s own love.

Thus the story of Hosea is a story of the gospel, that God loves us furiously. But that gospel is never for us alone. As soon as we grasp its meaning for ourselves, we are drawn into living it out for the world around us. We love with God’s own love, for the sake of God’s own glory.  Amen.

We normally think of repentance as being about the past. We avoid it because we think it means a reliving of our worst mistakes, but nothing could be further than the truth. In repentance we confess and name our sin—not as a way of reliving it, but as a way of moving away from it. Repentance is about freedom from the past. Repentance is a consequence of hope.

It grows out of two convictions about the future, convictions which Hosea leads us into by sharing God’s mind with us.

First, God owns the future. God declares the future through Hosea, not because he has some secret power of prediction, but because the future consists of the actions of God. God does not predict sports scores or the playing cards of a magician’s trick, but is simply stating what he intends to do, with the knowledge that he can and will in fact do these things. While humans have plenty to say about what will happen in the mean time, the future—the ultimate future—will be as God wills.  And so, God can declare that Israel will be exposed, that they will be stripped of all that they hold dear, that they will be confronted by the futility of their quests for power, security, and independence from him—not because it’s a magical prediction, but because God himself will act to do these things.  “I will strip her naked…I will expose her as in the day she was born…I will make her like a wilderness…I will turn her into a parched land…I will kill her with thirst…I will hedge up her way with thorns and I will build a wall against her, so that she cannot find her paths…I will take back my grain, my wine, my wool and my flax…I will uncover her shame…I will put an end to her celebrations…I will lay waste her vines and her fig trees…” God can make these announcements because they are his actions. God is free and powerful to act in whatever way he wills. God owns the future.

Second, God wants us to share his future. Hosea’s word is ultimately one of invitation—God intensely desires for Israel to join him in the future. All of the judgments issued are for this purpose, and point toward the day of its completion, the day when Israel is restored to God. God acts to provoke a repentant response in Israel, so that she will come to freely love him and live in a covenant with God marked by peace, righteousness, justice, love, mercy, and faithfulness.

What’s remarkable about Hosea is the kind of language that God uses to describe his passionate desire for Israel to have a part in this future. God won’t force Israel into repentance, but he will do almost anything else. Besides the prophetic word of warning, God flirts with Israel, gives her gifts, tries taking them away, exposes her other loves as frauds, finally draws her back out into the wilderness—like a husband who takes his wife back to the site of their honeymoon. He speaks softly to her, whispering, “we can just start over.”

His goal is the day when she responds with repentance, when she sees that he alone truly does own the future and yet offers her a place in it. His goal is a day of dramatic reversal, when all the pronouncements of judgment find their fulfillment—which is not to say, the destruction they foretell. No, Hosea’s warnings only find their fulfillment in the repentance they are meant to provoke, whether or not that occurs before or after the impending calamity. His goal is the day when Israel responds with repentance, and all that is wrong can be made right.

Hosea plays off of the warnings of chapter 1 to describe he dramatic reversal, flipping each name from its message or warning to one of hope. The stigma of bloodshed that brought about the name “Jezreel” will be replaced by the word’s linguistic meaning—”God sows”—and God will plant the people in the land, establishing her with peace and abundance from his own hand, not as a result of her political or religious manipulation. To those whom he gave the name, “no mercy”, he will now have mercy, and to those whom he called “not my people”, he will again say, “you are my people.” The renaming is completed, not by a word from God, but one from the people, as they finally and dramatically will say, “you are my God.” God paints the picture of this future, seeking to inspire hope in Israel—for where hope lives, repentance is possible.

Repentance happens in the lives of those who understand that God owns the future, and who believe they have a place in God’s future. Reading Hosea now, some 2700 years later, and reading it on the other side of Jesus, we know that God has taken a dramatic step to bring about this future. While we wait for the final scene to begin, God has invited us to share in his future…now!

God declares that his rule will be over all the earth, and in repentance we begin to live in that future now; we join God now, leaving the past behind and orienting ourselves by a future that redeems the present.

And so it is that within these words of warning there is also a seed of hope, the promise of God’s willingness to honor repentance, his burning desire to take back what belongs to him and make right what has been broken. I urge you to heed the warning that the future belongs to God, to take on the hope that he has a place for you within it, and to let it that hope bring forth the repentance by which God may enact his reversal.

The parents expression darkens—the mother turns away, finding something else to do. The father’s eyes narrow, and he steps closer. Pointing straight at the little girl, he says, “We call her ‘unloved’. Unloved.” Not knowing how to respond, the man shuffles his feet a bit, and finally says, “And the boy?”

“Not mine.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought…”

“No, that’s his name.  His name is ‘not-mine.’ ”

Hosea is a shocking story. It does not allow for passive bland reading, and I assure you it does not consist of passive, bland writing. It opens with the story of Hosea’s family—a family whose very existence could not but shock literally everyone who met them. The book of Hosea consists mostly prophetic poetry. Not the poetry which many of us have in mind—the dry tedious metered verses we labored to understand as school kids. This is the kind of poetry that Walter Brueggemann describes as “shattering, evocative speech that breaks fixed conclusions and presses us always toward new, dangerous, imaginative possibilities.” (Finally Comes the Poet, 6) Hosea is full of wrecking-ball language, the kind that comes to destroy the peace of the present for the sake of the future.

The book opens with a narrative, but the story is just as disturbing as the poetry that follows. In fact, we might think of the story as a setting for three brief, super dense poems—the names of the children. After all, even within the story, it’s the word—the word from the Lord—that really matters.

So in what was already a weird marriage (more on that when we get to chapter 3), three children are born, and given names that are extremely disturbing.

It starts off with a son, who Hosea is told to name Jezreel. Hosea is prophesying during the reign of Jeroboam II, somewhere in the middle of the eighth century BC, in the northern Kingdom that we normally just call Israel. In the southern kingdom, which we call Judah, there had been stable dynasty for over two hundred years—the descendants of David. But in the north it had never really been like that. It was a country born out of rebellion, and which had seen it’s share over the years. One of the most vicious upheavals had been at the hands of Jeroboam’s grandfather Jehu. Granted, the dynasty in power before then (you remember Ahab and Jezebel, right?) had it coming, but when Jehu took up the sword to seize the throne he went above and beyond The site where all this went down was the city “Jezreel”. So Hosea names his firstborn son after the site of a famous bloodbath, with a finger pointed straight at the king. “It’s your turn, Jeroboam. The same violence that began your family’s reign will soon put it too an end.  It’s time for another Jezreel.”

While the historical specificity of the name “jezreel” may protect us from the cold challenge the word contains, our own reactions intensify with the name of the second child.  I mean, seriously, who would name a child “unloved”? The second child’s name—”Lo-Ruhamah”—means exactly that.

In 1920 a young woman named Josephine Dickenson worked hard to be the best housewife she could be, spending a lot of time on that one task of getting supper ready for her husband, Earle, before he got home from his job as a cotton buyer.  Unfortunately, she was a little accident prone, and was constantly nicking her fingers with knives and getting little burns. Earle’s first job when he got home was usually to help her dress the wounds. Finally he decided to come up with a way to make it possible for her to do this by herself before he got home, by rolling out a long strip of adhesive tape and placing little squares of cotton at intervals, so that she could just cut off a piece, wrap it on her fingers, and keep going.  After that proved to be a great solution, he took his idea to his employer, Johnson & Johnson, and so was born the “band-aid”.  Sales didn’t go too well at first, but WWII picked things up, as did the company’s brilliant move in 1951 to start making band-aids with cartoon characters on them. After all, what kid can resist a sticker that comes with compassion?

Part of my role as “daddy” is “band-aid dispenser.” Now sure, there are times when I just kiss the supposed boo-boo and try to convince the child that it’s not that big of a deal, but sometimes, when a kid is just absolutely certain that the wound is a matter of life and death, the best thing to do is to get the band-aid on and give some hugs and kisses, right?

And that’s just the small stuff. How many of us would refuse to give care to a child—any child, not even our own—if we went outside in this very moment and found one gravely injured? Who among us would just shake our heads and walk away? Who can refuse compassion to a child?

That’s why the second name is so shocking. “Lo-Ruhamah.” The prophetic word means “uncared-for”, “unpitied”. God, who has always acted with mercy, pity, compassion for Israel since the day he heard their groaning in Egypt, will do so no more.

That sense is intensified with the third name, “Lo-Ammi”, or “not my people.”  Israel’s fundamental identity was the covenant people of God, whom God had specially chosen, and called as his people. God’s covenant was summed up in the phrase “You shall be my people, and I shall be your God.” Now that is reversed—the very identity of the nation is reversed!—and God declares, “you are not my people.” This prophetic word disowns the people.

That is intensified by a fourth name here, one that is somewhat masked by the translation. In Hosea 1:9 most of the translations read something like “For you are not my people and I am not your God.” That’s not a bad translation, but it masks some of the punch. What the second part of that sentence says is kind of awkward in Hebrew, but literally reads, “And I am not ‘I am’ to you.” God takes back his own name! God doesn’t just put these odd names on the children, but changes his own name here, revokes the name which he had revealed to Moses at the burning bush.  This is the ultimate message of the names—the world you live in is about to be undone. Everything from the seeming security of your monarchy to the relationship you have with God, even the very name which you know God by—all of it is undone by your sin. All of it is coming apart.

The names provoke us. Why? What’s the big deal? Why all the fuss? The names shock us. The question, “Who would ever name their kid that?” gets our attention so that God can look us in the eyes and speak to us about how serious sin is.

And yet, even within these names and their word of judgement there is the seed of grace. Hosea will speak to the people of a repentance that can change the future, so that “Not my people can once again be called simply, “my people”, and “unloved” will be called simply “loved”. Hosea will offer a word of eventual reversal, when what is wrong will be made right. But don’t read ahead to all of that, not just yet anyways. First, let this word of judgment break into your world, and ask yourself, “What is it in my life that needs to be undone.” That word of redemption can only be heard once we hear the word of judgment and digest its reality. So today, we’ll let that seed of grace wait for its time, and hear this single important word from the Lord—to walk away from him means death. Digest that reality.

And then, the God who changes reality can act.

This may well be a parable of the church.

While much attention continues to be given (appropriately) to training leaders and discussing the evolving model of elderships within churches, but we need to talk more about the other side of the relationship—what we sheep bring to our relationship with our shepherds. Like any relationship, we can’t work on only one side of the equation. For our model of shepherding to become truly effective, it can’t just be about the shepherds. We have to also develop our sense of what it means to receive shepherding. You can’t have good healthy shepherds in a church full of bloodthirsty zombie sheep.

Scripture says something really interesting about this in Hebrews 13, which reads “Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls and will give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with sighing—for that would not be beneficial to you.” Working on the sheep side of the relationship with shepherds doesn’t just make their job more enjoyable for their sake, but it actually helps us, the sheep. When we engage our shepherds and willingly receive the shepherding they offer us, it is to our great advantage, because it creates the possibility of the sort of shepherding relationships we need—shepherds who show us grace, teach us the word, and help us carry our burdens when we are weak.

But how can we have shepherds who show grace if we don’t have sheep who show vulnerability? How can we have shepherds who teach if we don’t have sheep who are eager to learn? How can we have shepherds who help the weak carry their burdens unless we are willing to freely admit our own weaknesses and accept help when it’s offered to us?

The shepherds don’t function in isolation from the body, but function as a part of a body, as an expression of what God is doing in the church as a whole. And the relationship between how the shepherds do their work and how we do ours is one in which the church grows as every piece does its part, as each one of us contributes to the sort of community in which good healthy shepherding naturally happens. The eldership has a role in helping us become the kind of church we need to be, but we must also recognize that the church has a role in helping the elders become the kinds of shepherds they need to be.

We need shepherds who help us hear the word, so that we can be formed by it and hear exactly what we need to take the next steps in growth. But to be able to do that, the elders need us to be willing to share with them where we already are in our process of growth. They need us to become candid about where we have grown, where God is working on us now, and where we are struggling in our faith. This is challenging, because we want to pretend that we’re all in the same place, that we’re all growing in exactly the same way, in exactly the same time—or worse, we want to pretend like we don’t need to grow at all.  We treat Christian maturity as if it’s an all or nothing deal, as if we come up out of the water as fully formed disciples and there is nothing left to do but just hold on and hope we don’t mess up. But in reality, we always need to be fed, we always need to grow.

Elders have a teaching role, not just in classes or big public settings, but as a part of their relationship with their sheep, they naturally feed the sheep with insight from the word. I remember hearing Brent say that an important part of his role is to help people in struggle see their situation from a spiritual perspective, to help them see themselves in a way informed by scripture. And we need that, don’t we? We need people who can come alongside us to speak to where we’re at. But, how can that happen unless we’re willing to be honest about where we really are—not just in times of obvious crisis, but in the routine times that make up so much of our lives and where most of our growing takes place.

We need shepherds who will walk with us in all of life. Not just because they’re elders, but because they are simply part of the church, and that’s what church folk do—we walk with each other. We take care of each other, experience life with each other. Like Paul says:

“But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.” -1 Cor 12:24-26

That’s for everybody, whether we think of ourselves as leaders or not—the church is built to be a community of people who live life together, and who share the ups and downs of life together. Good pastoral care doesn’t happen in a church where the shepherds are the only ones doing it. It happens best in communities that understand that we all—each one of  us—has an obligation to look out for each other. Ken has talked with me about continuing to build a culture of pastoral care in the church where it’s not just about the elders, but about all of us pitching in to care for each other. In that culture, the elders are shepherds who lead by example. Shepherds give care to the hurting, but not alone. They lead a community that cares for the hurting among us.

And not just in times of struggle! As we walk together, we learn to give God glory for all the different ways he is at work in our lives. Lance wrote to me that one of the things that has most surprised him about being an elder is how he started noticing how the Spirit was at work in so many lives around the church—Not because of anything special about him being and elder, but because he started opening his eyes and noticing more. He wrote, “I am constantly amazed how the Word of God transforms, grows and matures the believer…To increase my awareness of God growing so many members’ spiritual lives has been a surprise I was not expecting.” Maybe our shepherds could help us recognize more and more of those ways God is at work—but how will that happen unless we make a commitment to share more of our lives with them, to let them walk with us? How will we recognize God’s work in each other unless we’re walking with each other?

As we developed the process we’re using this time to appoint additional elders, Tom reminded us that we needed to build in, from the beginning, some way of gauging the willingness of men to serve. The concept of willingness is critical to the role—we must have willing elders, willing shepherds. First Peter uses that language, that elders should serve willingly, not under compulsion, even eagerly. It’s also true on the other end—we must have members who willingly receive shepherding. Willing shepherds, and willing sheep. Willingness may come easily to neither. But that spirit of willingness is at the heart of the church.

Remember Mark 10? It was in a discussion of who in the community of disciples would lead and who would be led that Jesus told the disciples that he himself “had come not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” In discussing their willingness to serve each other, Jesus called the disciples to consider his own willingness to walk the way of the cross. To close this morning, I want to call you to do the same: consider Jesus. Is there anything in this sermon that exceeds the cross? In the cross, Jesus becomes the ultimate willing shepherd, and paradoxically, the best example of a willing sheep.

In this, as in everything, may we only follow him.

Kelly, apparently knowing full well that I was unprepared to preach for mother’s day—being a man who understands almost nothing about the subject, graciously offered me the opportunity to deepen my understanding while she went to the beach this week. That’s right—for nearly a week I’ve been flying solo with the girls, which is of course a joke you can understand only if you know both me and the girls in question. Indeed, today’s short sermon is mostly due to the fact that I have to get home and clean up before she gets back later tonight.

Mothers are amazing. It is well and good that today is a day marked off to say thank you to all those mothers out there, the stay at home moms, the working moms, the single moms, the struggling and victorious moms who give so much of themselves to their families, fulfilling the sacrifice of Christ in the most humble and incredible ways. To you all we say, “Thank you. We could not be who we are without your love and sacrifice.”

The Bible has much to say about motherhood. The story of redemption is full of many stories of women, women who took down and raised up kings, who preserved the people of God and who opened the way for exodus, conquest, and redemption. Along the way, many of these stories (though not all!) are stories of women who worked, wept, and waited for children—women who saw their place in the story of God as being related to their calling as mothers. That’s not at all to suggest that this was a single, homogenous sort of work. Indeed, stories such as Sarah, Rebecca, Hannah, Mary, Elizabeth, Bathsheba, Ruth, Jochebed and Zipporah testify to the diversity of paths that may all be called, faithfully, “motherhood”. “Motherhood” mysteriously takes many forms, as each person who finds that role to be part of her story works out what it means in her own context, in the face of her own challenges and amidst her own blessings. We do motherhood a disservice when we try to make it take one form. Indeed, no two moms are any more alike than any two sons or daughters. Mothers, be free, not to become just like the other moms you see, but what has called you to be in the life of your family. Learn from the example and wisdom of other women as well as you can, but do not try to become them. God did not give your children to them, but placed them in your care, entrusted them to you. You honor that trust not by simply imitating others, but by seeking out the gifts and blessings that you can uniquely offer your children. That freedom is not license to be irresponsible (this is just my way!) but is an immense challenge, that by struggling, collecting wisdom, and discerning what is right and faithful you can become exactly the mother God created you to be rather than a copy of someone else.

God gives us different mothers because we all have different needs and challenges. Some of us struggle to understand boundaries and responsibility, some of us struggle to find our independence. Some children need to be coaxed into hitting the books, some need to be coaxed out of them from time to time. Some of us need more help making friendships, some of us need more help understanding what it means to have boundaries in our relationships. Different mothers do things differently, and part of the challenge in this role—like in many of the things God calls us to— is figuring out what it means to do it as you. what does it mean to take all the things that make you unique and fit them to the unique challenges posed by your situation. Motherhood, as a calling, is intensely personal. But that doesn’t mean it’s all about you. Rather, if I have one challenge to give you today, it’s to learn the mystery that as personal as your calling is, it is not all about you. In fact, in the call to motherhood we can clearly see the challenge of what it means to be called by God to do anything, namely that we must learn to live as though the world does not revolve around us. In accepting any call of God we lay down any claim to our own self-interests, and place ourselves at God’s disposal. Hear that well: when I say that motherhood is not about you, I do not mean that it is all about your children, either. Rather, it is all about God. What you want or desire, as well as what your children want or desire, is not as important as participating in God’s story and mission.

Mothers do well when they teach their kids that the world revolves around neither the mother or the child, but for the sake of God’s glory and honor. In motherhood, you participate with God in his work to redeem the world, by teaching your children to hear and follow God. By providing for their needs you can become for them both the means and a symbol of his gracious provision in their life. By your speaking and living what you see in the scriptures, God’s word can again become incarnate before your children’s eyes, so that faith can take on flesh and become a part of the world made up of car pools and summer walks, the world of crazy schedules and bedtime stories, the world of soccer practice and lost shin guards. Your participation with God makes you a missionary to a world of crayons and swim meets, to the foreign lands of sidewalk chalk and middle school cafeterias.

Becoming a mother may not be the only expression of your role in God’s mission, but it can be a powerful one, filled with the miracles of supper and found shoes, the hard tasks of homework and the perils of prom. Paul in his shipwrecks was in no place as strange as those corners of the world a mother’s minivan takes her on her missionary journeys, and his heartbreak over the Corinthians scarcely matches the tears any mother sheds over the sorrows of the children God places in their hands.

Mothers, may God bless your work, not because it is easy or rewarding, but because it is His work, because it is part of His mission, for the sake of His glory.  For your calling to be a mother is not about you, or even your children. It is one place where, mysteriously, we become co-workers with God, his ambassadors of reconciliation. Motherhood is about God, and God’s work in the world. You may say about your work as mothers what Paul mysteriously says about his own ministry (2 Cor. 6:1), “As we work together with him…”. This is the mystery of life, the mystery of ministry, the mystery of motherhood. It is a partnership with God, something that he gives us to do, but something that he also does with you and through you. In motherhood, you participate in God’s work. May we all listen to the call of God, so that wherever he bids us to join him, we may joyfully and faithfully follow, for the sake of his glory.

Amen.

John’s gospel, in telling the resurrection story seems to stress, among other things, how the resurrection leads us to believing in Jesus. “These things were written so that you might believe” the gospel tells us about its own mission, and indeed the post-resurrection stories in John certainly highlight the disciples’ journey into faith in the resurrected Jesus. Most paradigmatic for that within the fourth gospel is the story of Thomas. Thomas’s story begins when the risen Jesus appears to the disciples who are gathered together—all except Thomas, that is. when Thomas shows up, Jesus has gone, and he finds their story incredulous. He declares that he won’t believe it until he sees it for himself—and that is exactly what happens. This whole episode is highlighted by Jesus’ declaration to Thomas that there is an even greater blessing in store for those who are able to believe without seeing. It’s the gospel’s way of acknowledging that what it asks of us, namely belief, isn’t easy. But it’s important, because believing in Jesus is ultimately the way to truth and the realization of God’s mission in our lives and the world.  So John’s story of resurrection is all about belief.

Luke’s account tells a different story. The fundamental story is not a crisis of belief, but of confusion. There’s a story of two disciples who are walking to a town called Emmaus, and as they walk, they (unknowingly) meet the resurrected Jesus. Jesus finds them confused and so he painstakingly explains to them everything that had happened, and how the scriptures had described it. In Luke’s story, we don’t just find belief in the resurrection story, but its within the resurrection that we find understanding. It’s the resurrected Jesus who reinterprets the world for us, who explains the way things really are. Everything that before seemed definitive, things like death and power, are reinterpreted and re-understood as we walk with the risen Jesus. We understand in the resurrection.

Matthew’s version of resurrection is very brief. It culminates with Jesus giving the disciples the great commission. the risen Jesus sends the disciples out. Jesus doesn’t just want us to understand his resurrection, but to understand the entire world awaits resurrection, that it all waits to be drawn back into God’s mission, back to the way things are really supposed to be. In Matthew, the resurrection isn’t just about rewriting the past, it’s about rewriting the future. The resurrected Jesus sends us out on his mission.

So we believe in the resurrection, we understand the resurrection, and we find our mission in the resurrection. So say John, Luke, and Matthew. But, of course, that leaves Mark.

If Mark’s version makes you uncomfortable, that’s okay.  It has a long history of doing that.

Before we can really start into what Mark’s story, we have to make a note from textual criticism, not something I usually do overtly from the pulpit. If you notice in Mark 16, between verses 8 and 9 there is probably some sort of a note about how some early manuscripts leave out everything from verses 9. What scholars think happened is that those verses were added, probably late in the second century, by someone who thought that the original ending in verse 8 left too much unsaid. We think that someone added the longer ending so that it would look more like what we read in Matthew and Luke.

That may seem somewhat offensive, but I can understand why they would do that, because the earlier, shorter reading is hard to swallow. We don’t normally notice how hard this ending is because we typically read the gospels as a blended whole, and fail to pick up on the differences between the four versions. but this is one of those places where the differences are so stark and real that they are worth noticing.  Here is Mark’s version:

When the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. And they were saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?” And looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back—it was very large. And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe, and they were alarmed. And he said to them, “Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.” And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. (Mark 16:1-8)

And that’s it. No gathered disciples meeting with Jesus, not even a pair of disciples who have a conversation with the risen Lord. Instead, Mark tells a story about two who receive the news of the resurrection from an apparent angel, and who go home confused and afraid. Mark leaves us not just astonished at the empty tomb and the announcement of Jesus’s resurrection, but astonished at the response of these two witnesses. The Marys are so paralyzed by fear, that they don’t even fulfill the mission given to them.

This short and tough version is worth listening too, because it tells the truth—we are challenged by resurrection. Perhaps that isn’t even about whether or not the women believed or not—don’t fear and belief go together more often than we like to admit? Yet the gospel closes seemingly asking us, what will we do with the story? Will we tell and live the resurrection story, or will we just go back to our homes in paralysed fear. the resurrection story isn’t passive, just waiting to be believed, but it asks something of us.

Ultimately, what we believe about Jesus changes what we must believe about ourselves and the world around us. How we understand Jesus changes the way we understand everything, all of it given new perspective by the resurrection. The mission that Jesus sends us on awaits a response, but it isn’t a foregone conclusion. We can still go home, shut the doors, and act as if nothing happened. Perhaps that’s what we want to do.

The resurrection of Jesus simply doesn’t allow us to go along with our lives in a business as usual mode of being. If we find Jesus’s teachings such as the sermon on the mount challenging, they become ever more so when we realize that they are issued by the resurrected Jesus. In Revelation, it is from this very position—the resurrected Lord–that Jesus speaks to the churches, commanding them to turn away from idolatry and mediocrity, to abandon the things that pull our love away from him, to embrace suffering and anticipate the recreation of the world in him.  Jesus says all this after announcing himself, saying, “I am the First and the Last, and the Living one. I died and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys to death and Hades.” The resurrected Jesus will not be appeased by lukewarm faith, he will not be followed from a distance, halfheartedly. He demands all that we are, and he demands it from the position of being the Resurrected One.

And yet, he doesn’t demand it as an absent Lord, but as one who is present and who works within to accomplish the mission he gives us. Paul prays that the Ephesians would become aware that the same power that resurrected Jesus works within us. We must learn to live in that place, not just of the awareness of Jesus’s resurrection, but aware of our own. We live in the resurrection. We live in the resurrection now, the new world made possible by Jesus’s defeat of death and his power to recreate the world is actively at work in us, changing us, restoring his kingdom in us, and calling us to help him restore the world.

That is our gospel, or at least our version of Jesus’s gospel. The call of Jesus to come and live in the resurrection now, to believe it, to understand ourselves anew in it, and to take on the mission that it sends us on, with the power of the risen Christ working those things into reality within us—that is our witness to the world.  That is our resurrection story. But, hear from Mark this truth: all resurrection stories don’t get told. May it not be so with ours.

Amen.