Merredin Uniting Church

Sermon by Rev David de Kock (Morning service)

Texts: Leviticus 8:1-9, 1 Peter 2:4-12 & Mark 1:1-8

‘The Franklin Expedition to the North Pole in 1845, with 138 officers and men, carried a “1200 volume library, a hand organ playing fifty tunes, china place settings for officers and men, cutglass wine goblets, sterling silver flatware, and no special clothing for the Arctic, only the uniforms of Her Majesty’s Navy.” It was a noble enterprise, and they were nobly dressed for it. They all died. Their corpses were found with pieces of backgammon board and a great deal of table silver engraved with officer’s initials and family crests. Dignity was all.’ So writes Annie Dillard in her masterpiece of reflection on human expeditions and encounters with God, called “Teaching a Stone to Talk.”

Her experiences in the church’s worship are interweaved with commentary on polar explorations. She finds the amateurism distressing: “A high school stage play is more polished than this service we have been rehearsing since the year one. “In two thousand years”, she says, “we have not yet worked out the kinks.”

The attempts to be relevant are laughable: I have overcome a fiercely anti-Catholic upbringing”, she says, “in order to attend Mass, simply and solely to escape Protestant guitars.”

And though she says that “people in churches are like cheerful, brainless tourists on a tour of the Absolute” she cannot keep herself away, for this is the only bus heading that way. So she discards her dignity and throws in her lot with random people, joining the motley sublime, ludicrous people who show up in polar expeditions and church congregations.

But listen to this comment … “On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?

The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. The ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares as we come in the door; they should lash us to the pews. For one day the sleeping God may awake and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.”

“Week after week we witness the same miracle: that God, for reasons unfathomable, refrains from blowing our dancing bear act to smithereens. Week after week, Christ washes our dirty feet, handles our stinky toes, and repeats, ‘It is all right, believe it or not, to be people.’”

In the great mystery of our faith, God calls us into relationship with Him – into covenant. He knows exactly what it is that we are supposed to be and to do; we, for the most part, stumble along in the dark. We pore over the Bible to find the answers. Like a proud daughter after her first ballet lesson we do our worship pirouettes before our doting Father – its clumsy and graceless, but He smiles lovingly at us, as if we had rendered a world class performance of Swan Lake. We trip over our feet and our tongues, and despite it all, we are okay.

When God calls us, we have absolutely no idea of what it means and where it is going to lead us. We think we do, but for the most part, we are like a man lost, who refuses to ask directions. We go round and round, seeing the same landmarks and then at some point, we turn right, instead of left, and behold, there is our destination. Its never been far away at all.

The beginning of the Gospel is about John baptizing in the desert. All the people went out to him, for he was preaching a baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. They came because here was a man who seemed to know where he was going, and they were lost. Thousands were baptized by him but he always said that there would be one who would come after who would baptize with the Holy Spirit. While wholly within the mission of God, John was still playing with a chemistry set on the church floor – but he was warning the people to don their hard hats: the dynamite was about to explode.

And it exploded when Jesus preached his first sermon in Nazareth – “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor; he has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”

This was turnaround time, the stone was laid in Zion – the chosen and precious cornerstone. He called us out of darkness into His glorious light – He issued us with crash helmets and life preserving jackets, He lashed us to the pews.

And He called us … listen carefully to what He called us, “a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God.” We are set apart from our fate, we are rescued from our destiny, we are set on a new course – indeed we are given new life.

Peter, in describing God’s turnaround of our destiny through the ministry of Jesus borrows the words from Hosea the prophet and turns them around. Hosea was instructed to take for himself an unfaithful wife. She bore two children and Hosea was instructed to name them Lo-Ammi (meaning “not my people”) and Lo-Ruhamah (meaning “not loved”, or “not having mercy”). They were symbolic of the destiny of God’s divided people: The Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah – people who were respectively “rejected” and “shown no mercy”.

Peter now says to us, once you were not a people (Lo-Ammi) now you are the people of God (Ammi-El); once you were not shown mercy (Lo-Ruhamah) now you have received mercy.

In Christ, Jesus has turned the tables on our destiny. In His death, He has given us life. By His stripes, we are healed.

We plod along on our journey, often not seeing its purpose and embarrassed about our worn clothes. But that’s not right. We are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation. It might not seem like it to us, but our garments are of splendour – sparkling white, washed in the blood of the Lamb. We are robed in glory, we are headed, with the heavenly throng, to take our place before the Throne – to cry out Holiness and Glory to our magnificent God.

And it begins with our baptism. The first record of a ceremonial washing in the Bible comes with the preparation of Aaron and his sons to be ordained as priests of the Most High God.

The Lord said to Moses, “Bring Aaron and his sons.” Moses washed them and then dressed them in magnificent robes. They were a chosen people, a royal priesthood for a holy nation.

When we are baptized, we too become a chosen nation, a royal priesthood and a holy nation. It might not seem like that to us, but nothing in God’s economy is as it seems. We pray poorly worded prayers, we sing songs out of tunes, we miss God’s cues in the events of life – but it changes nothing.

In faith, we have come; in grace we are blessed.

We play games with God but He takes us seriously, because that is His promise, His covenant. He does not doubt us, He will not forsake us.

We are adorned in royal robes, we stand at the foot of the Throne, God bends forward to hear our whispered prayers – and we are playing with dynamite. Not because it is dangerous to do what we do, but because God takes us seriously. He has made a promise which He will not break, not even bend.

Paul says to Timothy …

If we died with Him, we will also live with Him,

If we endure, we will also reign with Him.

If we disown Him, He will disown us;

If we are faithless, He will remain faithful, for He cannot disown Himself.

God’s promise is certain and true, He will cleanse us, He will determine a new destiny for us.

If we reject His promise, He will allow Himself to be rejected, but He will remain faithful to His promise to us, because He has made Himself one with us in Christ.

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