Merredin Uniting Church

Texts: 1 Samuel 3:1-10, 1 Corinthians 6:12-20, John 1:35-42

Being a Christian is a dreadful anomaly.

We live as a people trying to balance virtually impossible tensions.

We are in the world but we are not of the world ….

We proclaim that the Kingdom of God is already here but it clearly is not yet…

On the one hand we say that we are saved by faith and not by works and on the other we claim that faith without works is dead.

These, and many other tensions in our faith, are Biblical truths … and we say that the Bible is without contradiction.

How do we hold all of these things together ? When they seem to be so filled with contradiction …

The reality is that we struggle, and in our humanness find ourselves pulled to one or other of the extremes. And Satan plays on our weakness : he challenges the tensions we struggle with and finds great delight when we give up and are drawn to one of the extremes. The first recorded words we have of Satan are of him causing Eve to doubt God’s motive in prohibiting them from eating from one of the trees when they had permission to eat from all the rest. His strategy of temptation is always to challenge the incongruity of God’s word so that we lose the radical middle of affirming God’s yes and God’s no at the same time.

It is extremely hard to sustain this radical middle and so to keep the biblical balance at all times … simply because it is a place of tension. It needs us to step forward in trusting faith and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as Peter challenges us in his 2nd letter.

Its no wonder that non-Christians call us hypocrites. I recently read an editorial article by someone who professes to having been a Christian but who no longer is a Christian. His complaint was that he did all “the things” as a child but that as he grew up he found them to be empty and meaningless … so he decided to give  up being a Christian.

He almost certainly was never a Christian – he had been introduced to the Christian faith at one end of the tension spectrum :

where one does Sunday School,

attends church,

and is introduced to the morality and legalism of the Christian faith etc

but he had never been introduced to the other end :

where one lives by faith in the power of the Holy Spirit

and the reality of God who deals with us in our everyday

and he certainly had no understanding of the tension of holding both these extremes in the tension of the radical middle.

This is what had happened at the time of Eli, when Samuel was a boy …

The word of the Lord was rare, and there were not many visions …

Eli, the senior priest of the Lord had eyes so weak that he could hardly see …

BUT the lamp of God had not yet gone out !

And Samuel was in the temple of the Lord where the Ark was !

And so God called him …. Samuel, Samuel ….

But Samuel did not know the Lord and so he thought it was Eli who was calling him.

God called twice, and Samuel didn’t know who it was.

The third time, the Bible tells us, “The Lord came and stood there ! and then called.

This time Samuel responded, “Speak Lord, for your servant is listening.”

You see, the Lord is always in the radical middle. He is in that place of tension where He is both the object of our faith and the reality of our life.

Samuel didn’t know the Lord other than as the object of his faith. He went through all the temple rituals : said prayers, learned scripture, offered sacrifices ….

BUT he didn’t know the Lord as subjective reality.

He had been brought up in a world that only knew one side of the bipolar tension.

It wasn’t always like that. His mother Hannah … barren for most of her life, had held on to the truth of the God who answers prayer, who had given the scripture, to whom sacrifices were offered. And despite her barrenness, she kept up her prayers that God would give her a son. And He did … because she made her place in the radical middle, holding the tension between the reality of her barrenness and the reality of the God who could answer her prayers.

Its a tough place to be … and its even harder to remain there when the reality of your situation is pulling you away from the centre.

Even Eli, who had observed her in her prayers accused her of drunken babbling.

Its a tough place to be … in the radical middle … where you believe not only the words of God in the Bible with your head but also the reality of His being in your heart.

Samuel was the greatest Judge of Israel … because he sought to hold the tension of the radical middle in his life, in his faith, in his concept of God. In his time God’s people turned again to God … they moved from empty religious gestures to a reality of the living God.

When John the Baptist pointed out Jesus as “the Lamb of God”, Andrew and John left him to follow Jesus. John had been challenging the people of his time about their religious indifference. He had been calling people into a deeper relationship with God – into that place where God is apparently invisible and distant but is also real and always nearby. He had been calling people into the radical middle.

Andrew and John had responded and became disciples of John the Baptist. But when he pointed out Jesus, they understood, quite rightly, that only in the presence of Jesus, and as His disciples would they be able to hold the inherent tensions of the radical middle.

They followed behind Jesus until He turned and asked them, “What do you want ?”

Their reply is interesting …. “Sir,” they said, “where are you staying ?”

They wanted to be where He is … they wanted to be in the radical middle !

Just as I said about Samuel, when the Lord came and stood there to call him :The Lord is always in the radical middle. He is in that place of tension where He is both the object of our faith and the reality of our life.

Yes, you might say. This all makes a kind of sense … but where is the radical middle? How do I get there ? Is it possible for me to live in this world under the incredible pressure it places on me to conform to its ways, and at the same time believe God with all my heart and soul and spirit ?

It seems that my choices are limited : either I conform to the world, or I become a religious nut. I don’t want to do either and yet I’m still not happy here at this place in the middle where I try to compromise on both extremes.

That, my friends, is precisely the problem. And you have understood exactly what I mean by the radical middle.

It is definitely not the place of compromise. It is the place of tension ! It is where you radically believe and act as if you are in the world but not of it …. and as if you are not in the world but are of it.

It is the place where Jesus – God made flesh – is a consistent reality of your life.

It is where you understand that “everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial.”

Our text from 1 Corinthians 6:12-20 is not so much about sexual immorality as the NIV editors have indicated as about spiritual purity in the radical middle.

Everything is permissible but not everything is permissible.

I can eat anything but it is not all good for me … and that’s perhaps more true in today’s world of fast synthetic foods that it has ever been.

You belong to Christ … you are His ! And so don’t seek solace elsewhere.

Paul says that it is the same as sexual immorality … you can gratify your flesh with a prostitute but you will find no satisfaction.

True satisfaction comes only from a spiritual relationship with God – one who unites himself with the Lord is one with Him in spirit.

I started by saying that “Being a Christian is a dreadful anomaly. That we live as a people trying to balance virtually impossible tensions”.

These tensions pull us from either side all the time …

There is the world/God tension …

There is the Word/Spirit tension …

There is the Head/heart tension …

The only resolve to these tensions is not compromise – as mostly happens in the life of the church and in the life of the church.

It is not holding fast to just one of the poles – the head OR the heart

the word OR the Spirit

the world OR God,

this leads to cultism and false religion.

The only resolve is to be found in the Lord Jesus Christ, who though fully God has dwelt amongst us as man. He has set the place for us in the radical middle, where the object of our faith is also the reality of our life.

Amen

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