Why everything we think we know is probably wrong

A Sermon for January 30, 2011
Texts: Micah 6:1-9; 1 Corinthians 1:18-31 and Matthew 5:1-12

In the title of this sermon I promise to tell you why everything we think we know is probably wrong. I’m also going to tell you why that is good news. When we survey the scriptures, we find that whenever people think they have God figured out, God begs to differ. That’s why everything we think we know is probably wrong, and why meekness is a virtue.
Take for example this passage from Micah. Now, in Micah’s day, which was a time of rebuilding Israel after the long Babylonian exile, people were trying to figure out how to get Israel back on top. They had heard the stories from their parents and grandparents, about how great it was back in the day, back when Jerusalem was the center of the world, back when queens and princes from faraway lands would travel by camel caravan just to see the glory of that city. But, you know, how grandparents can embellish stories, right? How the stories become tall tales, so the past becomes legendary. The Jerusalem of the stories probably far outshone the Jerusalem of history.
Rebuilding a city and a nation was not as simple as it had seemed. They did not find it as their great-grandparents had left it. After decades of neglect, Jerusalem was a ruin, the land of Israel forgotten. What do we have to do, the people were complaining. We returned, we cleaned up the temple, we devoted ourselves to the worship of God the way our grandparents told us. They promised that if we do this, the riches of the nations would come pouring back into Jerusalem. Well, what more can we do? We have kept our part of the bargain, where is God?
You think you know me? God says, through Micah. You don’t know me! It doesn’t matter what you do inside the temple, if you don’t do right outside the temple. What happened was, the returning exiles turned the restoration of Israel into a big land grab. When they came back to the city they acted as if they had a right to all the best houses and all the best lands, and they displaced the people who had been living there for generations, whose families did not Go into exile. Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God. The retuning exiles thought that justice was something God would do for them, once they got their ritual on. God, through Micah, turned the world upside down and inside out. Justice is not the reward at the end of the journey, it is the journey. Everything the people thought they knew about God was wrong, and that was good news! Because God was working through them to build the city of peace, Jeru-salem, (that’s what the name means, the dwelling place of peace).
And in Jesus day, people thought they knew who was blessed and who was cursed, just by looking at them. Obviously, the wealthy person with a house full of children is blessed by God; obviously the beggar at the gate was cursed. But Jesus, he saw things differently. Through him, the people learned to look with the eyes of their heart and see things differently. Once again through Jesus, God turns the world upside down and inside out, blessing the cursed.
And in the days of the apostle Paul, when the people of the church in Corinth were trying to outdo one another in claims to wisdom, God did it again—turned the world upside down and inside out through the words of the apostle Paul. What you think you know, Paul said, is foolishness, and that is good news. You don’t have to depend on your own cleverness, and that is good news. ‘Cause you aren’t so clever as you think!
And even now God is calling us to turn our vision inside out. Turning the church inside out is one of the keys to success—and I’m a bit uneasy with the term—in church development. I’m uneasy with the term “success” when it comes to the church because what we think of as success conflicts with the Jesus movement. Jesus turns our idea of success upside down and inside out too. Look at Jesus. He was not the leader of a mega-church. Jesus had a small church, a small band of disciples. And sometimes, Jesus would say something that would make people mad, and they would leave. Jesus didn’t even have a home or land or a big family, and he didn’t live to a ripe old age—these were the measures of success in his day. He was arrested, tortured, and killed. Hardly a success story, by our conventional standards.
According to the Center for Progressive Renewal, the vital, successful church is one that is turned inside-out: the one where people come in, for the purpose of going out. So, when we think of a “successful” church, we shouldn’t picture the church of the past, the church of history or legend, where everyone up and down the street went to worship every Sunday morning, and the Sunday schools were bursting at the seams. I don’t think recreating the protestant church of the 1950’s is high on God’s list of priorities. But God has shown us what success means: what is high on God’s list is that we do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God
Humility, is one virtue I still have to work on, when it comes to my church. Because I am so proud of my church. Even when people say, “First Congregational, which Lutheran Synod is that?” Or “United Church of Christ? Church of Christ, like Pat Roberton?” I say, no, no that’s a different church, and we have no connection to that famous person. The Congregational church and the United Church of Christ—remember the pilgrims? You know us. We invented America. And we invented the abolition of slavery. And women’s rights. And we even invented Unitarianism.
But we cannot rest on our laurels. We cannot sit back and bask in the reflected glory of the faithful past. When we get together here in this church, we come to fill up on the nourishment of the scriptures, and to build one another up in love, but that’s not the be-all and end-all of the faith. We come here to fill up, so we can go out there and give it away. The Holy Spirit comes to us all, and gives each of us gifts, but not for our own sake. The Holy Spirit comes to us on its way to somebody else.
So, go from this place and do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God. And come back for more, to go out again. Thanks be to God for the Spirit in our midst.