Recent Sermon from Myers Park Baptist Church

H. Stephen Shoemaker
Myers Park Baptist Church
Charlotte, North Carolina
March 7, 2004

GOD SEEKS TO SAVE
Texts: Hosea 11:1-5, 8-9; Ephesians 2:4-10;
John 3:16-17

There is a gone-wrong-ness about our life. This gone-wrongness challenges our belief in the goodness of God, the goodness of creation, maybe even our own creedal goodness.

Every religion, philosophy, political theory, psychology and sociology wrestles with it. Call it:

Read it on the front pages of the newspaper, read it in the back pages of our lives, p. 16B. It is there.

We experience it as loss, as the haunting sense that the goodness of life has fallen into something far from goodness. We experience it as a loneliness, a longing for God, for home, for our own true self.

We see it in the personal realm in acts of betrayal and thoughtless cruelty – when we just screw up, if you’ll pardon my slang.

We see it in the social realm in systems of injustice, in cultures of built-in inequity and legally encoded discrimination. Slavery was once defended by laws, by Bible, by science.

We people of privilege are normally blind to the prerogatives of privilege. We take pride in our position as if we earned it all. As the old quip goes: "He was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple." Some people never get to the plate.

And as for our twisted hearts: We find ourselves perversely sad when others triumph and perversely happy when others fall and fail.

It’s enough to help you understand what Luther meant about his term, "the bondage of the will." It almost makes you believe in the devil.

This condition is not a disease invented by the church because it owns the patent on the medicine.

There is a gone-wrong-ness. It is real. And all alone, left to our own resources, we are helpless to overcome it.

I

The Bible tells of its beginnings in the garden. God put Adam and Eve there, provided all they needed and gave only one prohibition: Not to eat of this one tree.

A serpent insinuated itself up to Eve and suggested to her that God was being unfair to them to place boundaries on what they could eat. The fence God put around that tree was for God’s benefit, not theirs. Planting this distrust in her heart, the serpent handed her the fruit from the forbidden tree. She took and ate – and handed it to Adam, who did the same.

Watch what happened next. God came for a visit. They ran and hid themselves from God. How terrible to have to live in hiding.

God asked Adam if he’d eaten the fruit. He said yes and blamed Eve. No surprise there. The Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution which blamed Eve for the "Edenic Fall" and used that misogynist theology to bar women from full participation in ministry.

Then, Eve blamed the serpent. "The devil made me do it!" There’s always someone to blame.

And now we live "east of Eden." Augustine called it Original Sin and said this Original Sin was passed down to every child by sexual intercourse. Sin, thus, became a sexually transmitted disease, and infant baptism became the cure owned by the church to save us from it.

Conservatives tend to focus on the personal sins and ignore social sins. Liberals tend to focus on the social sins and ignore personal sins. That’s why we need each ! Don’t you hate it that we need each other?!

Some "with-it" contemporary churches call sin a "downer" and have eliminated the Confession of Sin from Sunday worship. A confessionectomy of Sunday liturgy.

Others are spiritual masochists who would like it if every minute of worship were a confession of sin or a denunciation of sins, particularly others’!

But beneath it all there is this reality we must face: This gone-wrongness, this disorder. "The times are out of joint," wrote Shakespeare, and so too our lives. Estrangement feels less like a momentary affliction, more like a condition. There is a brokenness in life, in ourselves.

In the Bible sin is not just something we do. It is a power which imposes itself on us and takes control. James called it a "devouring lion." In face of it Paul said: "The things I want to do I do not do; and the things I hate are the things I do." Jeremiah cries from our condition: "Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?"

II

In face of all this gone-wrong-ness, this brokenness, what we testify to in our Statement of Faith is this:

Aimlessness and sin.

Aimlessness is part of the gone-wrong-ness. There is a Hebrew word for sin that means "missing the mark." Yes, we’ve all done that. But sometimes we get to the point where we don’t even aim anymore. We give up on life, on God, on self. We fall into the malaise of apathy, a no-caring, into what the French call ennui, a wan, world-weary carelessness. Sometimes we get there because we’ve cared so much and gotten so hurt.

But aimlessness too can be deadly for our souls and for the society’s good.

As the saying goes:

Evil prevails when good people do nothing.

But the good news of God in Hebrew scriptures and New Testament alike is this:

Our text today from Hosea expresses this holy love. Hosea the prophet has seen Israel headed toward destruction through their sins, personal, social and political. The text depicts God as a mother raising her child, loving her child fully and completely, then watching the child wander off toward destruction. What is more painful than this?

"Remember me," says God. "I heard your cry to me from slavery in Egypt, and I came and rescued you. . . .

"I taught you how to walk and nursed you in my arms, I dandled you on my knees. When you were sick I took care of you."

But now you have wandered far from me and taken after other gods. All I see for you is ruin and destruction.

"How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel?"

This God, our God, has from the very beginning been coming to seek and save the lost. This God, our God, has from the beginning been doing all God can do and been giving all God can give that we might flourish.

God gave to Israel the Ten Commandments; God gave to all people laws written on their hearts, inscribed upon our malleable conscience.

God rescued the Hebrews from slavery and exile, and kept their hope alive, their souls alive, until they could be free. God has taught rulers how to rule and citizens how to govern. God has taught parents how to parent and has made our hearts pliable to recognize our wrong and turn to the right.

III

And then and then, in the fullness of time God came to save us in Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus, Yeshua, whose very name means God comes to save.

Jesus, who forgave sin and befriended sinners, who healed the broken ones and gave power to the powerless, who challenged tyrants, who took on injustice and turned over tables in God’s temple, our temple.

He was the salvation of God – the holy love of God that comes to save us from aimlessness and sin – made flesh.

What God is up to in the world is not condemnation but salvation. How does John put it:

What hinders you from opening your hands to receive that salvation? From believing in, believing into Jesus, the grace of God to us? There may be some good reason. Has the church made it something less than grace? Have we preached some other gospel than the gospel of Jesus?

IV

What the New Testament says over and over is that salvation comes by grace. It comes by the power and mercy of God, not by our attempts at self-salvation, our trying and trying and trying. As Buechner describes grace:

Grace means God comes to do what we cannot do. If, as Buechner suggests, the power of sin is centrifugal – that is, what it does is "to push everything out to the periphery. Bits and pieces go flying off until only the core is left." Then " bits and pieces of the core itself go flying off until in the end nothing is left."² If that is true, then the power of God unto salvation is the restoring of the center, our center.

Kathleen Norris tells of a friend who revealed to her one day that he’d gotten his life into such a mess that the only way out seemed to be the killing of a person. He knew where a gun was. The only thing that kept him from going ahead was that the person he intended to kill was not at that moment alone. While he waited something happened

Kathleen Norris writes:

There is a gone-wrong-ness about life. But God comes in holy love to save us. And it comes, this salvation, by grace. How does St. Paul put it? For we are saved by grace through faith, not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are God’s workmanship, God’s poeima, poem, God’s work of art, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God is already preparing for us to do.

Georgia poet David Bottoms has written of redemption and grace in one of my favorite of his poems: "In a U-Haul North of Damascus":

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