Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.
Face to Face with God
Scriptures: Deuteronomy 18:15-20, Mark 1:21-28
When I was a teenager we had a bible study discussing the Samaritan Woman at the Well who said she knew that another prophet would come, and she concluded Jesus was that prophet.
I had assumed that all the things that pointed to Jesus coming had come from Isaiah and other prophets. I also knew that the Samaritans didn’t have those books; they were said to share the first five books -the books of Moses
I asked my minister how the woman would have known this prophesy. He said he didn’t know, but he’d look into it, and he did. And so I learned about our Deuteronomy lesson today in which Moses promises another prophet like himself.
At the core of this is a very natural human issue: we can’t bear to look upon the face of God.
It’s not a rule, but a reflection of how overwhelming it must be for we limited humans to come face-to-face with infinity – with the power to create the universe. More than once the prophetic writings describe how people dealing with the Creator want to hide, want to die. It’s beyond scary: it’s mind-blowing!
We have a hard time dealing with getting to the moon, with all the challenges of getting safely out of our gravity well, out of Earth orbit, to circle around this smaller planet that circles us. What must it be like to encounter the Being who decided what the speed of light should be?
It’s not hard to imagine why the ancient prophets considered it to be a shattering experience: existential in nature. Wouldn’t it be preferable to live your life in peace, doing your job, raising your kids, not being disturbed by the deep questions of existence, not being challenged in a way that shakes you to your core?
The pairing of this Deuteronomy lesson with the lesson from Mark suggests the same thing the Woman at the Well said: Jesus must be that prophet, that person who comes with as much authority as Moses, which is great, from a Christian point of view. We consider Jesus to be pretty hot stuff, don’t we?
But the challenge we face is the same one faced by the people who asked Moses to stand between them and God. We are scared of dealing directly with our Creator.
And what did Jesus do in his ministry? He promised that God loves each of us. He talked about the fulfillment of those sayings in the prophetic books, about ordinary people seeing visions, dreaming dreams and being messengers from God. He said that we would be the ones to make that come true; that the gift of prophesy would be spread around and that we would deal with God face-to-face.
In our Reformed tradition, we have taken that seriously. It’s why we don’t have priests: we have ministers. My job is to interpret scripture and help people understand God, not to stand in between God and anyone else. We get to approach God directly without fear of being wiped out.
The Christian church has existed for 2000 years now and we have coped with our connection to God, sometimes poorly, sometimes well, but always most intensely when life has thrown challenges at us, when we’ve been shaken out of our comfortable ruts and called to consider deeply what it means to be a follower of Jesus in practical, life-changing ways.
Knox has existed for 61 years. This is something to celebrate, certainly, but quite a short portion of that 2000 year church history and right now we are feeling a bit like those early prophets. We wonder if we are facing an existential threat. We wonder what the future holds and how we can possibly do what Jesus teaches with fewer resources than we have ever had before. It’s a bit like meeting God face-to-face: we feel overwhelmed and we wonder if we can survive.
The good thing about a 2000 year history is that it gives you a perspective that calms you down; it shows just how many challenges churches have faced in the past, and not only survived but come out thriving, often with a fresh vision of why they exist at all.
In my first charge I had one congregation that survived a tornado that took a massive bite out of the church roof and destroyed the brick tower so that, in the words of one of my elders, it looked like a Polled Hereford. That happened in the 1950s and by the time I got there the group was small but mighty. Sometimes only three or four gathered in the summer but they were convinced of their value to the community and they are still going strong today. They even rebuilt the tower after I left.
Another Point had to endure a conflict that I can barely imagine: there was strong opposition to the first purchase of an organ, one of those little pedal ones that gave the organist exercise. Some called it the “instrument of the Devil” and wanted to stay with the centuries old ways of having a precentor with his tuning fork leading the singing of the Psalms without any instruments but human voices involved.
The new organ was brought in for the first choir practise on Saturday. On Sunday morning the congregation gathered to find that it had been carried out and dumped in the cemetery at the back – nobody locked churches in those days.
Did they get all excited and have a fuss about it? Did they call a board of inquiry and discover who did it? No, they picked up the organ, dusted it off, carried it in and began their first worship service with this new instrument. Very practical people!
Challenges happen: some are bigger than others; the financial challenges facing Knox right now are probably the most challenging this congregation has faced in its 61 years.
But if history has anything to teach us, it is that we can rise to the challenge. What feels like an existential crisis is actually a call to examine who we are, to re-discover what matters most, to find a new sense of direction and discover the new possibilities ahead of us.
After 61 years we are still a young congregation; we are still learning to walk and this experience will challenge us and shape us into the Knox that will be here in the future.
As we face our challenges let us remember that Jesus promised us that we could be face-to-face with God and not only survive, but also come out inspired, prophetic and able to see a new way of doing things.
Let’s prove Jesus right and step forward boldly to face our challenges like the prophets we are called to be.
Amen.
Knox United Church Nepean 