Sermon from Sunday.
If you prefer the spoken version, here you go.
Almost Persuaded: On Being
Full of It
text: “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit”
(Luke 4:1)
Lent I – 17.February.2013
Judson Memorial
Baptist Church
Minneapolis, MN
The Rev’d G. Travis Norvell
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here is an
ancient Celtic tradition called smooring the fire wehereby a a woman, before
she retired for the night, would arrange all of the coals of the fire into a
circle, divide them into three parts for the Trinity, then go to bed. In the morning she would add peat to the fire
to create a new blaze and more hot coals.
And then one morning, on the morning of her daughter’s wedding she would
put some of the new morning hot coals into a metal container and take them to
her daughter as her wedding present.
One author states that, “The fire
has been in the family for many generations.
Generation after generation of women has smoored the fire, each mother
passing it on to a her daughter on her wedding day. In a damp climate where tending the fire is
constant work, these are precious family heirlooms.” As we embark on our Lenten journey together I
ask that use this time to set ablaze the smooring fires of our hearts, minds,
bodies, and souls.
In a few short weeks Easter morn
will be here, let us prepare to open the doors to heaven by reigniting the
fires of our souls. I take as my text
today the first verse of the fourth chapter of Luke’s gospel, Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit.
Let
us pray.
Living
God,
as
we pause
for
sustenance and succor
for
strength and solace
for
comfort and challenge
for
care and courage
be with us as we seek to
fill the brokenness of our hearts with Thy light and love. Amen.
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he Apostle Paul
in his second letter to the church in Corinth
warned the early church not to think to highly of their message of Christ
crucified for many will see it as foolishness, a stumbling block from the Greek
skandalon. In my translation Paul was telling the first century church, look,
when you start teaching and living a crucified life people will not think you
are wise, insightful, enlightened, or knowing, in fact they’ll think just the
opposite of you, they’ll think you are full of it.
And when you’re full of it, amazing
things happen.
After Jesus said YES to the way of
God in this world in and was baptized by John the heavens were torn apart and
the voice of God flooded Jesus’ soul with the words, “You are my Son, the
Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
Immediately after that Jesus was escorted by the Spirit of God to the
wilderness for a time of trial and temptation.
I think God wanted to make sure and I think Jesus wanted to make
sure. There world could not handle
another halfway Messiah, another separation from the world Messiah, or another
deliverance via the sword Messiah. If
Jesus was the Christ then both and he and God needed absolute certainty.
And when you’re full of the spirit
that kind of dangerous certainty emerges, for you just might change the world.
Before
moving on I do want to address the Devil in this story. You may be tempted (popular word today) to
write off the Devil as some kind of Neanderthalic primitive bad guy. But not so fast, no I’m not asking you to
believe in a dude in a red suit with a forked tail, horns, a van dyke on his
chin and a trident in his hand. But I am
asking that we realize that the Bible did a clever thing by personalizing evil
as a device to introduce the presence of evil in the story; the devil, in the
bible, is a rhetorical tool, a great symbol, don’t write him off.
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don’t know about your past spiritual
experiences to know how you relate to this story. Perhaps you see the Devil’s time of
concentrated temptations as the opportune time to strike. Some would see them as Jesus at his weakest
point. But from my own experiences and
the experiences others have shared with me in the past when the Devil ‘struck’
he did it at the time when Jesus was his finest. Jesus
was on fire.
God
with me,
God within me,
God behind me,
God before me,
God beside me,
God to win me,
God to comfort and restore me.
God beneath me, God above me,
God in quiet, God in danger,
Rabbi
Lawrence Kushner commented on the wilderness in the Jewish experience as, it
“is not just a desert which we wandered for forty years.
It is a way of being…
In the wilderness your possessions
cannot surround you.
Your preconceptions cannot protect
you.
Your logic cannot promise you the
future.
Your guilt can no longer place you
safely in the past.
You are left alone each day with an
immediacy that
Astonishes
Chastens
&
Exults.
You see the world as it is for the first
time.
The
teasing temptations did not blur Jesus’ vision but rather honed them to a
clarity that only emerges from this kind of experience.
For
forty mythical days and forty mythical nights the devil tempted Jesus like a
wolf circling him, attacking every now and then, weakening before he went for
the kill. Beaten and bruised, just like
those on the ark who for forty days and forty nights were battered at sea, just
like the Israelites who wandered the desert for forty years, just like a babe
in the womb gestating for 40 weeks. What
kind of new creation would emerge from this experience? How would Jesus see the world as it is for
the first time?
What
does it look like when you are full of it?
When
the Devil thought he had Jesus on the ropes, weakened, and worn down he went in
to throw off the Messiah veil with three core temptations:
To turn stone into bread
To rule the
kingdoms of the world
To throw
himself off the pinnacle of the temple
These temptations are our temptations. Now I’m gonna lean on the late William Sloane
Coffin for a little help here. They are
temptations to trade in the best for something good. Jesus could have been a wonder worker simply
rearranging matter, a heavenly alchemist providing bread for the people and
that would have been good but it wouldn’t have been the best. Jesus could have ruled the world a loving
despotic sovereign like Thomas Hobbes’ portrait of the ruler on the cover of Leviathan and that would have been good
but not the best. Jesus could have
hurled himself off the Temple
to show God’s providence and care for him and that would have been good but not
the best.
To be the Beloved
To be the Love Supreme
God needed someone who had a
singular vision of reconciliation, a vision that could not be thwarted by a
pragmatic alternative. God needed
someone full of it.
If
you are the Beloved of God then command this stone to turn into bread. It is
written, One does not live by bread alone.
If you, then, will worship me, it
will all be yours.’
Worship the Lord your God and serve only
God.
‘If you are the Son of God, throw
yourself down from here,
Do not put the Lord your God to the test.
When you’re full of it that is the
kind of stuff that emerges from your soul, foolish mutterings - because your
gripped by
a
Love that will not let you go,
a
love that will not let you settle for something good when the best is still out
there.
Deep within us we all have the
desire for this best,
Deep within us all is a fire smooring
that is waiting to burst into flame
Deep within us is the Spirit of God
waiting to be filled in excess
And Lent is the time our ancestors
set aside for us to ignite.
It is the season to see world as it
is for the first time.
It is the season to get and be full
of it.
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n Palm Sunday I
will have the honor and pleasure of baptizing two youth, one being my daughter. This week they will begin their baptism
class. It is my hope and prayer that
through the love and experiences of this community they will become full of
it. I hope their baptism will be the
ignition of a life full of the Spirit of God and I hope that the witness and
ongoing responsibility to make sure they are full of it will reignite our own
call to be full of it.
It is my hope and prayer that we
together will be a foolish community doing foolish things in the name of a God
who wills
reconciliation,
peace,
grace,
forgiveness,
and a just world.
We are going to need to be involved
in foolish activities and hear over and again stories of people full of it
doing those foolish activities. I close
with this one:
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ifty two years
ago members of the embryonic Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee boarded
buses in Washington DC and headed through the American South to
protest the segregation at public facilities with Whites Only signs. They were known as Freedom Riders.
During one of the journeys the bus
stopped at Rock Hill, SC
(just south of North Carolina border, now part
of the metro Charlotte
area). As a 21 year old Baptist seminary
student, John Lewis, exited the bus he attempted to enter the Whites Only
section of the bus stop. By the door was
Elwin Wilson, a young local white man. Wilson grabbed Lewis and
started beating him till he laid on the ground and blood oozed from his body;
he stopped only because someone called the police.
Years after the incident Elwin
Wilson realized that the young man that he as a young man beat that day was a
member of Congress, Democratic Rep. John
Lewis. A few years ago Wilson, in his faith narrative states that he
found the Lord and realized it was his work, for the remainder of his life, to
just to help get one person not to hate.
He began his work by traveling to DC, going to Lewis’ office and
apologizing. When he and Lewis met,
Lewis recounted the story this way, I said, “I forgive you. I don’t have any ill feelings, any
bitterness, any malice. He gave me a
hug. I hugged him back. He cried a little, and I cried.”
Lewis continued describing the event
as, “a moment of grace, a moment of forgiveness and a moment of reconciliation,
and that’s what the movement, that’s what the struggle was all about.”
Because when you’re full of it you
say foolish things and are involved in the foolish work.
Brothers and sisters let us, like
Jesus,
set our hearts ablaze,
have our souls filled with God’s Spirit,
and let us get busy being full of
it.
Amen & Amen.
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