One Great Day

God is still speaking whether we allow ourselves to be accountable or not…  The days are surely coming when the battle field lines are clearly seen and the real war begins!  There is a lot of fire in all of today’s texts.  It is a good and cleansing fire from a particular perspective.  It depends on how you keep your spiritual footing’s balance. In ruminating through great conversation Saturday morning; I heard voices. 

I heard the voice of MLK in his famous speech—‘I have a dream:’ “But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. As we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope.”

This was the beautiful fantastic speech made to motivate people to rise up and be accountable against civil rights oppression.  But let us think about the few snippets I included here to relate to our call to action as Christians…  There’s a lot going on these days especially Christians persecuting other Christians and evil similar to what Jesus experiences in the temple preaching the coming of man and the destruction of evil…  Here is God himself supposedly in His House(!), seen as a very unwelcome, uncomfortable VOICE to the people calling for true Transformation and speaking to that little talked about place: the internal church.

Malachi is the very last book in the Old Testament, not including apocryphal books that is; to end its chapters with a blaze of controversial things for us to think about! “¹See, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. ²But for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings. ^3aAnd you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet… ⁵Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. ^6aHe will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents…” Little did the Prophet Malachi know that Jesus would essentially be the non-violent fulfillment of his oracle. BUT, perhaps Jesus was speaking about “violence?”  I would say the internal process of spiritual transformation is a violent upheaval of change from the Old Nature to the New.

The string of Prophecies from God Himself spoken in the temple of the narrow closed world of the Scribes and Pharisees were not welcomed Words for them to hear!  Daring to speak for our transformation in metaphor to the destruction of both the temple and the Jerusalem had Jesus’ enemies thinking in terms of actual violence: (Luke 22:1-6) “¹Now the festival of Unleavened Bread, which is called the Passover, was near. ²The chief priests and the scribes were looking for a way to put Jesus to death, for they were afraid of the people. ³Then Satan entered into Judas called Iscariot, who was one of the twelve; ⁴he went away and conferred with the chief priests and officers of the temple police about how he might betray him to them.⁵They were greatly pleased and agreed to give him money. ⁶So he consented and began to look for an opportunity to betray him to them when no crowd was present.”

We know that Jesus turning over the tables of the money changers would prove to make the final justification and conviction for the Scribes & Pharisees to have Jesus Crucified BUT, in regards to my first example of speaking up for righteousness sake…  What justified those who assassinated Martin Luther King?  Simply talking about loving neighbor with color-blind eyes?  Satan finds his ways to work into our calls to righteousness whether they be coming out of God’s mouth literally to those speaking for true values to be realized NOW without trepidation, without fear and trembling against oppression but obedience to the discipleship call to action!  Action without accountability is social justice.  Action from within the truthfully transformed heart of the individual for the love of God and neighbor—where Christ is the Lord of their lives! IS the true righteousness—with no holds barred GRACE—not cheap grace’s “works righteousness!”

The Martin Luther from 500 plus years ago illumines the Christian disciples’ challenge: “This life therefore is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, not health, but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it, the process is not yet finished, but it is going on, this is not the end, but it is the road. All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being purified.”

Yes, he was sure right about that wasn’t he?  It is one, long and winding road that we all face if we live into that lifestyle of GRACE and respond with the transformed spiritual fruits of our faith.  We are the agents of change within a transactional world curving inward like a star collapsing—a black hole of eventual death; Satan’s victory!

In regards to the Christian battlefield of Christians persecuting other Christians today… we are called to an even greater sense of urgency and agency.  It is truly an ironic thought that God himself in the flesh—Jesus Christ would be so unwelcome and feared to the point of death in our Gospel texts today…  Where in speaking about today and its “corporate community” to Christ, have themselves in certain camps: preaching, teaching in the “name of Jesus!” chaplaincy to the transactional world of the self and all its ugly fruits: greed, indifference, intolerance, bigotry, phobia, and all things that circumvent and tear down the cross of Christ itself! How welcoming… when ourselves and our Will or pursuit of supposed righteous can fail to be ok and even dare I say welcoming atheist mega churches to develop abroad!

This past week, I saw an interesting post about affirm or being “politically correct,” in accepting the development of atheist churches; that we have to be welcoming not defending our call to voice the Gospel if we say we are Christians and not Gnostics…  What is the true root of failure here?  Could it be in avoiding the uncomfortable call from Jesus to not only be Transformed but to preach, teach and example His living Word in the world as His disciples?  There are many who call themselves disciples but who’s voice could they be perhaps hearing truthfully instead of Christ’s?  Satan!  We have to hear this as well: Satan is real and his minions have had great success in our politically saturated, “correct” world!

St. Paul in today’s letter snippet from his second letter to the Thessalonians basically says: “⁹This was not because we do not have that right, but in order to give you an example to imitate. ¹⁰For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat. ¹¹For we hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work. ¹²Now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living.¹³Brothers and sisters, do not be weary in doing what is right.”

Transformational discipleship which Jesus taught takes work!  It is work not around the self but FOR Love of God and neighbor—living into that commandment that is written upon our tabernacle to the Holy Spirit: the heart.  We instead fight battles dividing each other into nihilism and spiritual death.  We allow Satan to build a “Mighty Fortress” to the God of the self and its agendas.  Idolatry feeds very well into our Old Nature temptations.  Why change at all?  Why bother, I need to fight for myself!  It is like hearing Martin Luther King’s speech: “I have a dream…” and only hearing it as someone’s ideals… NOT values!  It is like hearing Jesus in today’s text as threatening to tear down the temple, literally… when he is actually speaking of the need for our hearts to be rebuilt to and for God and neighbor!  But who am I to share these things?  To dare start the fire of TRUTH that needs to be SAID?!

Instead of focusing on who am I… think in terms of whose You are.

AMEN

November 17^th, 2013; Lectionary 33; 26^th Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 28; Year C; SOLA Lectionary

Psalm 98; Malachi 4:1-6; 2 Thessalonians 3:1-13; Luke 21:5-36                 Nicole Collins