Someone Is Trying To Get Through
Sermon
Sermons On The Second Reading
Series I, Cycle A
Someone is trying to get through to you. Someone with an important message for you is trying to get in touch with you. It would be greatly to your advantage to make contact with the one who is trying to get through to you.
That is what Epiphany is all about. This is the season of Epiphany in the church year. "Epiphany" is a Greek word that means the showing forth of God, or God's self--revelation. Epiphany means that God is trying to get through to us to make God's self known to us, to help us experience the reality of God and to help us discover what life can be like if we allow our lives to be shaped by our relationship with God.
We really need to let God get through to us. By trying to help us experience a relationship with God, God is trying to help us to meet one of the biggest needs of our lives. God is trying to help us to answer a big question that every one of us asks - and eventually answers - in the very center of our being. The question is too big to put into words. If we had to put it into words, it would sound something like, "What is life really all about?" or "How is everything out there related to me and how should I relate to it?" or "Who am I and how do I fit into everything?" Many of us may never in our lives have asked those questions in words. But every one of us lives her or his way through a quest for an answer and every one of us comes up with some kind of an answer and, for good or for ill, the answers we come up with shape our lives.
If you want to do something interesting - and very significant - look at the ways in which the people you know are living their lives and try to guess what kinds of answers they must have come up with to the question about the meaning of life. Then, when you have gotten good at it, ask those same questions about yourself.
God wants to give us the answer to our big question. But the answer we need is not something that can be just stated in words and explained and believed, though that may be a part of the process. The answer that we need is something that has to be shown to us so that we can experience it.
Just as the big question cannot adequately be put into words, the answer can't be adequately put into words, either. But, again, if we had to put it into words, it might sound something like this: "There is a great someone out there who is in and behind all of the little things that surround us in life and that someone is God. God is great and powerful beyond our ability to imagine and God loves us like a parent loves a child. If we learn to trust that great someone and to love that great someone and to try to know and to do what that great someone wants us to and to let our whole lives be shaped by our relationship with that great someone, then our lives will be good in a way that we just can't imagine until we have experienced it."
Now you can see why the message that we need to hear can't just be delivered in words. We have all heard those words, or others like them, a thousand times, haven't we? But lots of us seem not to have really gotten the message yet, at least not completely, because our lives have not really been reshaped by the message behind them. That is why God keeps trying to get through to us to make God's self known to us. That is what we really need to know. We don't just need to know about God, we need to know God. We need to experience the reality of God and to experience our relationship with God in a way that will reshape our lives from the inside out.
God has been trying to get through to us and to be known by us since the beginning of time.
God created everything that is. Just looking at the vastness and the intricacy and the beauty of all that God has created should make us able to know that God is. In fact, many people have been able to come to their first experience of the reality of God while marveling at the creation that we see around us and within us. It can also make us able to know a lot about God. The Apostle Paul believed that people should be able to tell a lot about what is right and what is wrong just by looking at the order of the creation. He wrote, "What can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world, his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made" (Romans 1:19--20).
God has also been trying to get through to us through the experiences of our lives and the history of the human race. The people of Israel learned to experience God in that way, and they have left us a fascinating record of the things they have learned through those experiences.
But at one particular time in human history, God did something really special to help us know God in a way that would help us to come to a new understanding of God and a new relationship with God. God came to live among us as one of us. God was born among us in the form of a helpless little baby. His parents named him Jesus, which means "The Lord's Salvation." The event itself was not very impressive. But God made it known to a few people - the child's parents, some shepherds, some astrologers from a distant country, and a few others - that something really special was happening in the birth of this baby. God was being shown forth among us in a surprising new way.
About thirty years later, that baby had grown up into a young man. One day, he came to a place by the Jordan River where his kinsman, John, was preaching repentance and a baptism for the cleansing of sins. Jesus came and asked to be baptized. John recognized him as the one who was to make God known to all people, and he did not want to baptize him. But Jesus insisted. He knew that his baptism would be a very special happening. It would enable him to stand with a needy human race in their need so that he could begin to minister to them. After Jesus was baptized, the Spirit of God came upon him and the voice of God was heard saying, "This is my Son ..." (Matthew 3:17).
Soon after that, Jesus began his ministry. He went around his country telling people about God's love and doing loving things, like healing the sick, so that people could experience the reality of God's love. Jesus taught that we should live trusting God and obeying God and loving God as if God is our king and that, if we do, we will experience a new kind of life and participate in building a new kind of world.
Many people were drawn to God by his message. But, for one reason or another, some could not receive it. They hated the one who came to show us God's love. They hated him so much that they killed him. And he loved them - and us - so much that, to show us how much God loves us, he died. God would not let the story end there. To show us that Jesus had indeed shown us God, God raised him up out of death.
But that was not the end of God's trying to get through to us and to make us able to know God. The same God who once came among us in the visible form of the man, Jesus, continues to live among us in the invisible form of the Holy Spirit and to do the same works that Jesus did among us. As the Holy Spirit, God continues to work among us through people, especially the people who have come to know God and to live lives that are shaped by their relationship with God. God continues to work especially - but not only - through the church, which is the fellowship of those who are committed to living lives shaped by their relationship with God. God continues to work through such people to make God known.
Our scripture lesson for today tells about part of a very important event that took place in the story of God's trying to get through to us. For some time after the death and resurrection of Jesus, the faith that Jesus taught was shared only among the people with whom Jesus had lived, his own people, the Jews. But God had really sent Jesus to make God and God's new possibility known to all people. God spoke to Peter, one of the leaders of the followers of Jesus, and told him to go and talk with a group of people who were not Jews. They were people who wanted to hear about Jesus. They were gathered in the home of a Roman army officer named Cornelius. Even though it broke all of the traditions of his people, Peter went, in obedience to God, and shared the Christian faith with them. Our scripture lesson is a summary of what he said. There must have been much more. Eventually, the people gathered there in the house of Cornelius came to experience the reality and the presence of God. They received the Holy Spirit just as the Jewish Christians had. When Peter saw that they had indeed come to know God, he baptized them into the Christian faith. That was the beginning of the church's mission to make God known to all of the people of the world.
God is still trying to get through to everyone. God is still trying to get through to us. Why is it so hard for God to get through to us? Maybe we have just not been tuned in. Maybe we have been so preoccupied with other things that we have just not been paying attention when God has tapped us on the shoulder or spoken into our ears. Or maybe God's message has gotten drowned out in all of the static that confuses our ability to receive. After all, there are an awful lot of voices whispering - talking - shouting in our ears and trying to tell us what life is all about. It can be confusing. And an awful lot of us are living confused lives, lives that fall far short of that good life that God wants for us.
But God is still trying to get through to us - and we need to let God get through to us - and we need to let our discovery of God bring us into a new set of relationships with God and with life so that our lives can be all that they can be.
How can we do that? How can we tune God in so that God can get through to us and be known to us? When and how can that happen?
It could happen to us as we are sitting in church. After all, that is really what church services are for. It could actually happen. When you come into a church, remember that God is really there. The preacher is not just talking about something or someone who is somewhere else - if anywhere. The preacher is trying to introduce you to someone who is really there and who wants to get in touch with you. Remember to look beyond the words that are spoken to see the realities that they represent. Remember, when you go through the motions of rituals, like the service of the Lord's Supper, to see yourself actually living through the relationships and interactions that the ritual is trying to dramatize. If you give it a chance to happen, God may actually get through to you while you are sitting in church.
But don't stop "tuning in" when you leave the church building. Remember, God is in the church, but God is everywhere else, too. Remember the things that you heard in church and keep watching to see if any of them will give you a new way of understanding the things that happen to you in your daily life. God really is there in and behind all of the other things that surround you in life. God is trying to get through to you through the experiences of your daily life. God may finally get through to you as you drive to work or as you sit in class or as you wash the dishes or as you do whatever you do day by day. Just stay open to the presence of God.
When, at last, you find yourself experiencing the reality of God, even if you just experience it a little bit, stop and pay attention to what you are experiencing. Don't just push it aside and go on to more pressing things. It is interesting that one part of the call to prayer to which Muslim people respond several times a day says, "Nothing is more important." We all need to remember that nothing is more important than getting in touch and staying in touch with the living God. Pay attention to your experience of God and move it to the center of your life and let your life be very intentionally reorganized around it. That will be a growing experience for you. You will learn more and more about God and about yourself and about life as you live daily in relationship with the living God.
When you find yourself living a new kind of life that is shaped by a relationship with God, live it openly and unashamedly and joyfully. When people ask you what shapes your life, talk about your faith freely. It really is not impolite to talk about your religion unless you cut down someone else's religion. Share what you have discovered. You just may be the agent through which God may get through to some others, just as Peter was the agent by which God got through to Cornelius and his friends.
When God finally gets through to you, it can make a difference in your life. Then you may make a difference in the world you live in. To see how that might work, let's go back to the story of Peter and Cornelius.
Cornelius was an interesting person. He was a high officer in the Roman army of occupation sent to govern the troublesome people of Palestine. But Cornelius had actually adopted the religion of the people he was sent to govern and he practiced it quite devoutly. He had probably been raised in the Roman version of the Greek religion that had many gods, all of whom had some very human failings, and all of whom could be managed by people who knew how to do it. He was a participant in a power structure that he knew was oppressive to everyone - even those, like himself, whom it favored. He must have found something attractive about a religion committed to the worship of one God who made the heavens and the earth and who was committed to justice for all people.
But we can imagine that there were still some deep needs in his life. He must have heard of Jesus and he must have felt a deeper sadness than most because he had probably been required to participate in the execution of other innocent people, following the orders of some powerful person who thought it would be expedient. There must have been lots of painful guilt feelings. There must have been a deep yearning for some way to peace, both peace in the world and peace in his heart.
When he heard the message of peace through Jesus Christ and of forgiveness of sins, and when he then experienced those things through the Holy Spirit, we can know that it must have made a big difference in his life. If he then began to exercise his power in love, that may have made a difference in life for many people.
But the same encounter made a difference in Peter's life. Peter probably knew more than anyone else in the world at that time about Jesus Christ and about the Christian faith. But he had continued to be contained within the Jewish traditions about not associating with people of other races. When God sent him to preach to Cornelius and his friends, God pushed back the horizons of Peter's faith. Soon after that, the Christian church began to reach out to the non--Jewish people of the world - and that made a big difference for lots of people in the world - including us.
Someone really is trying to get through to you - and to all of us. Someone with an important message about an exciting new possibility really is trying to get in touch with you. God is trying to get through. It really would be good for you to tune in.
That is what Epiphany is all about. This is the season of Epiphany in the church year. "Epiphany" is a Greek word that means the showing forth of God, or God's self--revelation. Epiphany means that God is trying to get through to us to make God's self known to us, to help us experience the reality of God and to help us discover what life can be like if we allow our lives to be shaped by our relationship with God.
We really need to let God get through to us. By trying to help us experience a relationship with God, God is trying to help us to meet one of the biggest needs of our lives. God is trying to help us to answer a big question that every one of us asks - and eventually answers - in the very center of our being. The question is too big to put into words. If we had to put it into words, it would sound something like, "What is life really all about?" or "How is everything out there related to me and how should I relate to it?" or "Who am I and how do I fit into everything?" Many of us may never in our lives have asked those questions in words. But every one of us lives her or his way through a quest for an answer and every one of us comes up with some kind of an answer and, for good or for ill, the answers we come up with shape our lives.
If you want to do something interesting - and very significant - look at the ways in which the people you know are living their lives and try to guess what kinds of answers they must have come up with to the question about the meaning of life. Then, when you have gotten good at it, ask those same questions about yourself.
God wants to give us the answer to our big question. But the answer we need is not something that can be just stated in words and explained and believed, though that may be a part of the process. The answer that we need is something that has to be shown to us so that we can experience it.
Just as the big question cannot adequately be put into words, the answer can't be adequately put into words, either. But, again, if we had to put it into words, it might sound something like this: "There is a great someone out there who is in and behind all of the little things that surround us in life and that someone is God. God is great and powerful beyond our ability to imagine and God loves us like a parent loves a child. If we learn to trust that great someone and to love that great someone and to try to know and to do what that great someone wants us to and to let our whole lives be shaped by our relationship with that great someone, then our lives will be good in a way that we just can't imagine until we have experienced it."
Now you can see why the message that we need to hear can't just be delivered in words. We have all heard those words, or others like them, a thousand times, haven't we? But lots of us seem not to have really gotten the message yet, at least not completely, because our lives have not really been reshaped by the message behind them. That is why God keeps trying to get through to us to make God's self known to us. That is what we really need to know. We don't just need to know about God, we need to know God. We need to experience the reality of God and to experience our relationship with God in a way that will reshape our lives from the inside out.
God has been trying to get through to us and to be known by us since the beginning of time.
God created everything that is. Just looking at the vastness and the intricacy and the beauty of all that God has created should make us able to know that God is. In fact, many people have been able to come to their first experience of the reality of God while marveling at the creation that we see around us and within us. It can also make us able to know a lot about God. The Apostle Paul believed that people should be able to tell a lot about what is right and what is wrong just by looking at the order of the creation. He wrote, "What can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world, his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made" (Romans 1:19--20).
God has also been trying to get through to us through the experiences of our lives and the history of the human race. The people of Israel learned to experience God in that way, and they have left us a fascinating record of the things they have learned through those experiences.
But at one particular time in human history, God did something really special to help us know God in a way that would help us to come to a new understanding of God and a new relationship with God. God came to live among us as one of us. God was born among us in the form of a helpless little baby. His parents named him Jesus, which means "The Lord's Salvation." The event itself was not very impressive. But God made it known to a few people - the child's parents, some shepherds, some astrologers from a distant country, and a few others - that something really special was happening in the birth of this baby. God was being shown forth among us in a surprising new way.
About thirty years later, that baby had grown up into a young man. One day, he came to a place by the Jordan River where his kinsman, John, was preaching repentance and a baptism for the cleansing of sins. Jesus came and asked to be baptized. John recognized him as the one who was to make God known to all people, and he did not want to baptize him. But Jesus insisted. He knew that his baptism would be a very special happening. It would enable him to stand with a needy human race in their need so that he could begin to minister to them. After Jesus was baptized, the Spirit of God came upon him and the voice of God was heard saying, "This is my Son ..." (Matthew 3:17).
Soon after that, Jesus began his ministry. He went around his country telling people about God's love and doing loving things, like healing the sick, so that people could experience the reality of God's love. Jesus taught that we should live trusting God and obeying God and loving God as if God is our king and that, if we do, we will experience a new kind of life and participate in building a new kind of world.
Many people were drawn to God by his message. But, for one reason or another, some could not receive it. They hated the one who came to show us God's love. They hated him so much that they killed him. And he loved them - and us - so much that, to show us how much God loves us, he died. God would not let the story end there. To show us that Jesus had indeed shown us God, God raised him up out of death.
But that was not the end of God's trying to get through to us and to make us able to know God. The same God who once came among us in the visible form of the man, Jesus, continues to live among us in the invisible form of the Holy Spirit and to do the same works that Jesus did among us. As the Holy Spirit, God continues to work among us through people, especially the people who have come to know God and to live lives that are shaped by their relationship with God. God continues to work especially - but not only - through the church, which is the fellowship of those who are committed to living lives shaped by their relationship with God. God continues to work through such people to make God known.
Our scripture lesson for today tells about part of a very important event that took place in the story of God's trying to get through to us. For some time after the death and resurrection of Jesus, the faith that Jesus taught was shared only among the people with whom Jesus had lived, his own people, the Jews. But God had really sent Jesus to make God and God's new possibility known to all people. God spoke to Peter, one of the leaders of the followers of Jesus, and told him to go and talk with a group of people who were not Jews. They were people who wanted to hear about Jesus. They were gathered in the home of a Roman army officer named Cornelius. Even though it broke all of the traditions of his people, Peter went, in obedience to God, and shared the Christian faith with them. Our scripture lesson is a summary of what he said. There must have been much more. Eventually, the people gathered there in the house of Cornelius came to experience the reality and the presence of God. They received the Holy Spirit just as the Jewish Christians had. When Peter saw that they had indeed come to know God, he baptized them into the Christian faith. That was the beginning of the church's mission to make God known to all of the people of the world.
God is still trying to get through to everyone. God is still trying to get through to us. Why is it so hard for God to get through to us? Maybe we have just not been tuned in. Maybe we have been so preoccupied with other things that we have just not been paying attention when God has tapped us on the shoulder or spoken into our ears. Or maybe God's message has gotten drowned out in all of the static that confuses our ability to receive. After all, there are an awful lot of voices whispering - talking - shouting in our ears and trying to tell us what life is all about. It can be confusing. And an awful lot of us are living confused lives, lives that fall far short of that good life that God wants for us.
But God is still trying to get through to us - and we need to let God get through to us - and we need to let our discovery of God bring us into a new set of relationships with God and with life so that our lives can be all that they can be.
How can we do that? How can we tune God in so that God can get through to us and be known to us? When and how can that happen?
It could happen to us as we are sitting in church. After all, that is really what church services are for. It could actually happen. When you come into a church, remember that God is really there. The preacher is not just talking about something or someone who is somewhere else - if anywhere. The preacher is trying to introduce you to someone who is really there and who wants to get in touch with you. Remember to look beyond the words that are spoken to see the realities that they represent. Remember, when you go through the motions of rituals, like the service of the Lord's Supper, to see yourself actually living through the relationships and interactions that the ritual is trying to dramatize. If you give it a chance to happen, God may actually get through to you while you are sitting in church.
But don't stop "tuning in" when you leave the church building. Remember, God is in the church, but God is everywhere else, too. Remember the things that you heard in church and keep watching to see if any of them will give you a new way of understanding the things that happen to you in your daily life. God really is there in and behind all of the other things that surround you in life. God is trying to get through to you through the experiences of your daily life. God may finally get through to you as you drive to work or as you sit in class or as you wash the dishes or as you do whatever you do day by day. Just stay open to the presence of God.
When, at last, you find yourself experiencing the reality of God, even if you just experience it a little bit, stop and pay attention to what you are experiencing. Don't just push it aside and go on to more pressing things. It is interesting that one part of the call to prayer to which Muslim people respond several times a day says, "Nothing is more important." We all need to remember that nothing is more important than getting in touch and staying in touch with the living God. Pay attention to your experience of God and move it to the center of your life and let your life be very intentionally reorganized around it. That will be a growing experience for you. You will learn more and more about God and about yourself and about life as you live daily in relationship with the living God.
When you find yourself living a new kind of life that is shaped by a relationship with God, live it openly and unashamedly and joyfully. When people ask you what shapes your life, talk about your faith freely. It really is not impolite to talk about your religion unless you cut down someone else's religion. Share what you have discovered. You just may be the agent through which God may get through to some others, just as Peter was the agent by which God got through to Cornelius and his friends.
When God finally gets through to you, it can make a difference in your life. Then you may make a difference in the world you live in. To see how that might work, let's go back to the story of Peter and Cornelius.
Cornelius was an interesting person. He was a high officer in the Roman army of occupation sent to govern the troublesome people of Palestine. But Cornelius had actually adopted the religion of the people he was sent to govern and he practiced it quite devoutly. He had probably been raised in the Roman version of the Greek religion that had many gods, all of whom had some very human failings, and all of whom could be managed by people who knew how to do it. He was a participant in a power structure that he knew was oppressive to everyone - even those, like himself, whom it favored. He must have found something attractive about a religion committed to the worship of one God who made the heavens and the earth and who was committed to justice for all people.
But we can imagine that there were still some deep needs in his life. He must have heard of Jesus and he must have felt a deeper sadness than most because he had probably been required to participate in the execution of other innocent people, following the orders of some powerful person who thought it would be expedient. There must have been lots of painful guilt feelings. There must have been a deep yearning for some way to peace, both peace in the world and peace in his heart.
When he heard the message of peace through Jesus Christ and of forgiveness of sins, and when he then experienced those things through the Holy Spirit, we can know that it must have made a big difference in his life. If he then began to exercise his power in love, that may have made a difference in life for many people.
But the same encounter made a difference in Peter's life. Peter probably knew more than anyone else in the world at that time about Jesus Christ and about the Christian faith. But he had continued to be contained within the Jewish traditions about not associating with people of other races. When God sent him to preach to Cornelius and his friends, God pushed back the horizons of Peter's faith. Soon after that, the Christian church began to reach out to the non--Jewish people of the world - and that made a big difference for lots of people in the world - including us.
Someone really is trying to get through to you - and to all of us. Someone with an important message about an exciting new possibility really is trying to get in touch with you. God is trying to get through. It really would be good for you to tune in.
