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Good
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 Sermon
03/21/10
I Am About to Do a New Thing ~ by
Reverend Thomas Cary Kinder
March 21, 2010, Fifth Sunday in Lent
First Congregational Church in Thetford,
Vermont, UCC
Isaiah 43:16-21; Philippians 3:4b-14; Mark
14:1-9
The
people of Israel
had been carried off as captives to Babylon. Their nation was destroyed, they
were absolutely powerless, and there was no hope of return. But the prophet Isaiah stood up
among them and said, “Thus says God, who makes a way in the
sea, a path in the mighty waters: do not remember the former things,
or consider the things of old.
I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not
perceive it? I will make a way
in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”
The
captives in Babylon
were losing faith, but Isaiah’s language recalled the exodus
from slavery in Egypt,
when God did a new thing through Moses and they found a way through
the wilderness and found water in the dry sand and made it to the
Promised Land. Recalling it
gave them enough hope to survive until, sure enough, God did another
new thing and freed them from Babylon.
The
Civil Rights movement had a phrase for this: “a way out of no
way.” Like every exodus
to freedom against all odds, the Civil Rights movement saw miracles
happen. They saw God do a new
thing, time and again, to make a way out where there seemed to be no
way. And perhaps the even
greater mystery was that they themselves became the agents of these
miracles. Even though many
were poor and oppressed, God worked through them to do new things
that they had no idea they could do.
What
challenges are you facing in your life that seem impossible? What issues in the world are
troubling your heart that seem so huge that no one will ever be able
to resolve them? Listen to
God, who says, “I am about to do a new thing.” Listen to the Holy Spirit who wants
to guide and empower you to be the instrument of that new thing. Listen to Christ who wants to show
you the way. And remember that
you are not the first to be facing impossible odds. Remember that God has done new
things before, and made a way where there was no way.
Jesus
said that the realm of God is like a treasure that was hidden in a
field. A man found it and went
and sold everything he owned and bought the field. (Matthew 13:44) In today’s passage from
Philippians the Apostle Paul said that he considered everything he
had to be rubbish compared to the value of knowing the way of
Christ. Just a chapter before
he had described that way when he said that Christ “emptied
himself…, humbled himself and became obedient to the point of
death—even death on a cross.” (Philippians 2:5-9)
The
treasure that is hidden in the field is this: there is a way out of
no way, there is a power that can change even impossible situations,
and the power of that way comes when we empty ourselves of everything
except God, when we let go of everything—even life
itself—in order to let God direct our heart and mind and
hand.
Jesus
did this, Paul did this, people in the Civil Rights movement did
this, and yet this is a way that goes against everything that a
culture based on greed, pride and violence believes and values, so
people who follow this way will be considered scandalous fools by the
mainstream. The culture will
look at people who follow this way and say, what a waste!
Today’s
gospel story is an example of even followers of Christ considering an
act of self-emptying a foolish waste.
A woman poured extravagantly expensive oil over Jesus’
head. Many of the people
around Jesus were outraged, asking why the oil wasn’t sold
instead and the money given to the poor. It truly was a waste in human
terms, but not in God’s terms.
It had a meaning far beyond what they saw. God was doing a new thing through
that woman, as through Christ himself. A power was being released that was
far greater than it appeared on the surface.
Maybe
it would help to understand this if we looked at a more recent
example before coming back to the gospel story.
More
than twenty of us are reading Michael Nagler’s book The Search for a Nonviolent Future. If I could I would make it required
reading for our entire congregation.
It can make you feel more hopeful and help you understand the
way and power of Christ more clearly, even though it is not a
Christian book. It is worth
reading for its many stories alone.
Here is one of them (from The
Search for a Nonviolent Future, page 103 ff).
A
prisoner escaped from Auschwitz,
the Nazi death camp, one day in the summer of 1941. The standard punishment was to take
all the several hundred prisoners from the escapee’s block and
make them stand at attention until he was caught. If he was not caught, then ten
people would be selected and put down in a bunker without food or
water to die a slow, painful death.
That torture was considered to be the worst thing that could
happen to you at Auschwitz.
This
particular day the prisoners stood outside in the hot sun, weak from
starvation and hard labor, denied even the inadequate food they
usually received, until evening when the search was called off. The guards pulled the ten doomed
men, one at a time, from the terrified ranks. One broke down and wept, “My
poor wife, my poor children, goodbye, goodbye!”
Then
God did a new thing. Something
unheard of happened. A
prisoner stepped calmly out of the formation and walked toward the
commandant. The commandant
pulled out his pistol, but for some reason did not shoot, but merely
yelled, “Who is this Polish pig?” It was a question that everyone
wanted to know, and the word was whispered through the lines that it
was Father Kolbe, a Catholic priest who had inspired many by showing
human decency and dignity, despite all the Nazis did to crush every
prisoner’s spirit.
Father
Kolbe walked right up to the commandant and said calmly, “I
have a request.” The
shocked commandant barked back, “Well, what do you
want?” Kolbe quietly
said, “I would like permission to die in place of one of these
men.” The Nazis hated
priests almost as much as they hated Jews, and so he gladly accepted
Kolbe’s offer.
The
man who had wept for his family was spared, and in fact he survived Auschwitz
and lived to the age of 93.
Father Kolbe suffered the torture of the bunker for eight days
and then the Nazis killed him with an injection of gasoline.
You
could ask, why was this extraordinary man wasted in this way? If he had chosen to live, he could
have helped so many. Why did
he waste his life, trading it for only one other? But here is what an Auschwitz
survivor said after the war:
It was an enormous
shock to the whole camp. We
became aware someone…among us in this spiritual night was
raising the standard of love on high.
Someone…went to a horrible death for the sake of someone
not even related to him.
Therefore it is not true, we cried, that humanity is cast down
and trampled in the mud…. Thousands of prisoners were convinced
the true world continued to exist and that our torturers would not be
able to destroy it…. To say that Father Kolbe died for one of
us or that person’s family is too great a simplification. His death was the salvation of
thousands.
Father
Kolbe’s miracle came through his small, personal act, giving
just his one life for just one other life. The miracle was that he was able to
let go of his own fear and doubt and make himself available for God
to do this new thing through him that freed thousands from their
spiritual slavery and gave them a power of love strong enough to
triumph over the Nazis’ seemingly greater power of hate.
This
is exactly why Jesus said about the woman who anointed his head with
oil, “Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in
the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of
her.” It was just a
small, personal act done quietly in a leper’s home. Why was it so powerful? First, because like Father
Kolbe’s, it was a real sacrifice. The nard she poured out was worth
almost an entire year’s salary for a worker, the equivalent of
roughly $30,000.00 today. It
was shocking, breathtaking, mind-blowing.
The
realness of the sacrifice filled its symbolism with power. The symbol was this. The anointing of the head was
something prophets or priests did for kings. Jesus had spent the past three
years proclaiming that the realm of God was at hand, a social order
that was in direct conflict with the Jewish King, the Roman Emperor,
and the entire Jewish religious and secular establishment that served
those kingdoms. Jesus was
leading a revolution of values that asserted God’s way of
compassion and mercy. He was
calling for an end to the exploitation and oppression of the poor,
and the renunciation of all forms of violence and materialism, a
direct threat to the rich and powerful who profited by them.
It
was unthinkable, it was crazy unless he was the messiah they were
expecting to lead a great army to re-establish the throne of David,
but here he was breaking all the rules, a religious leader eating in
the home of an outcast leper, welcoming women and children, preaching
nonviolence, and here he was talking about giving up his life and
being buried—what kind of messiah was that? Yet here comes this unknown woman
taking the role of a male prophet and anointing him king with this
extravagant, self-giving sacrifice.
Like
Father Kolbe, she shocked people into awareness of a new way of
viewing reality. She raised
the flag of loving self-sacrifice on high for all to see. After the terrible, torturous
crucifixion, people remembered what that woman had done and were
convinced that the true world Jesus taught about ‘continued to
exist and that his torturers would not be able to destroy
it.’ Her loss was the
gain of hope and spiritual wisdom and power for untold thousands.
God
did a new thing through that woman, just as God did a new thing
through Jesus sacrificing himself on the cross, just as God did a new
thing through Father Kolbe giving his life for another prisoner, just
as God did a new thing through the nonviolent Civil Rights movement
that found a way out of no way.
The
thing that is unthinkable today in the wilderness of our lives or in
the wilderness of this violent, unjust world may be exactly the new
thing God is about to do. We
don’t know. We
can’t know. All we know
is that God has made a highway through the sea in the past, God has
made rivers flow through the desert sand, God has led people to do
what looked like foolish things, wasting their lives or their
precious oil, and those have turned out to make all the difference
for countless thousands of others.
If
you need a miracle in your life, if you are praying to help bring
about a miracle in the world, Christ has shown the way, and the Holy
Spirit is waiting to guide and empower you to follow. Your task is to empty yourself, to
let go of all you have and all you know and focus on God, all on the
risky bet that God is about to do a new thing that will make every other
thing in your life work out better than you can possibly imagine.
Let
us practice this now in silent prayer, considering everything else in
our mind and heart and surroundings as rubbish, as Paul would say,
letting everything go for the sake of opening fully to the
Spirit’s peace and power and wisdom in our hearts. Let us pray in silence…
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