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The problem with coming to know God's grace and trusting
in it, is often feeling lost. We may be in a culture that is lost, that does
not seek to change. We may be many sheep that have gone out into the wilderness
with no hopes of being found. We may be some of those sheep that have wantonly
chosen to be an island unto ourselves, seeking a justification suited to our purposes
and agendas. We may be those sheep that have heard the Lord’s voice and ran
towards that voice to be carried upon His shoulders and taken home.
Is it a wilderness that has no hope of growth, no hope of
sustaining and harboring life? Or is it a Wilderness that could be resurrected
into a New Creation? Out in the Wilderness of the world currently the wolves of
Satan tread the Earth seeking those lost sheep to kill them in one form or
another. This may be in physical murder or it is the death that takes place in
the soul. I begin with these profound words when I think about the notion of
war and of spiritual warfare. Spiritual warfare is a Battleground indeed, here,
the turf is your heart that could either be saved for the Lord or can be won by
Satan. Both kinds of war share one thing in common, both are very real…
I remember waking up to my roommate, Jurek, turning on
the TV and seeing like almost a vision from a dream, a horrible dream
obviously, where one airplane goes into one World Trade Tower and another into
the adjoining World Trade Tower. After that point, just barely wiping the sleep
from my eyes, I scurry to make a cup of coffee... to come back to the news going
on and on all day long. I think it’s fair to say at that very moment, at that
time, we all didn't know what to think of it, what it truly meant. This was the
morning of September 11th, 2001.
Days after this event took place I was talking with a
poet world friend of mine who wrote this poem capturing the epitome of world at
that time. She penned a lament about a man jumping from window to save
himself with his Gucci tie wafting behind him. This was the irony of the moment
where Artists and Poets and other creative people came together to express a
very real human pain and grieve... Some with an air of concern as well as some
an air of cynicism. Even before Christ officially came back into my life
2 years later with my conversion experience, I was compelled to create a very
large painted sculpture. The sculpture
eventually was reviewed by the Daily Herald in the exhibit I was in at the
Athenaeum Museum in the suburbs of Chicago. The sculpture emerged so quickly it
was as if it was created out of raw emotion…
For a moment in time, didn’t it seem as if the world stood still for
many of us?
Putting all the politics aside and everything else that
we have justified as the answer to why this even happened.... the more
important thing to look at and pray about is this: where were we spiritually,
as a people? 15 years later we can now say that the Wolves of Satan
currently prowling about is ISIS. Back then it was Al Qaeda and even
further back within the “century of progress…” the wolves of Satan realized
through the Nazis, created the Holocaust—which as we know ended some 6 million
plus lives. The fact remains, and may be
difficult to want to see or hear, but once these wolves were those lost sheep
and then something happened. Whoever was
in charge behind the 911 attacks had seen God's love as an edict, call to
murder. The numbers are lost to the surreality of the horror that we as
humanity, have in some senses, stood by and witnessed…
There’s a bigger theme percolating here that must be addressed
in a humble way. This word is best
revealed in light of both the Gospel and in Paul's first letter to Timothy as a
response to Grace: metanoia. It most
literally means in the Biblical Greek to “change the inner person.” To have a spiritual change which we don’t
truly understand to be, but it is, repentance. Repentance has become a loaded
word, perhaps too uncomfortable to hear it in a prayerful way. In the light of
the Living Word it is to be that transformational mirror of the Law of love—Christ’s
law that inspires the inner person—the soul, to a righteousness. This is not the righteousness that we see the
Pharisees and our current culture engaged within being agenda-oriented,
divisive judgments and condemnation. To the contrary, this is a righteousness
realized as children of Grace and Promise.
America in the here-and-now moving past by 15 years we
are still those lost sheep in one form or another.... Some may be angry at God
and growing more Godless and lawless, while others may be seeing the answer as
oppressive control, a move toward revised socialism. We are not anywhere
near walking towards that path God needs us to, as a whole, as a formerly Free
Nation... If those rallying for the removal of Ground Zero’s cross think they
are championing freedom…They are no better than those the prophet Ezekiel
accuses of trampling upon others for their own selves. What about the hundreds
of responders crushed under the weight of over 200 tons of concrete and twisted
metal?! Is that loving neighbor?
Oppressing others in the guise of freedom? To even think of removing
something of God’s loving presence to the countless families and surviving
victims of that horrible day?
Just the other day, I was talking with my dear friend of
29 years and former roommate, Jurek. We talked about that day. We talked about what happened, why perhaps it
happened… His painful memory of the
thousands of hours of round the clock news was hearing about those first
responders and their beepers of life tweeting away while no one above could
reach them in time to save them! It is, it was, a horrible sight to imagine…
What all this leaves my heart to question is this—where
and why have we wandered away from the shepherd's voice? Are we now willfully
controlling the shepherd? Do we as a people in American culture, society really
want God to seek us with His unconditional transforming love? This should have
us think about our gatherings for Christ. What are our congregations, our
communities of faith saying? Many are angry at their pastors. Many don't
understand the purpose of gathering anymore. Many don't understand and don't
want to grow into the truth of God's Living Word they would rather reinvent it
or circumvent the truth. They would rather wear the Gospel like designer
clothing something they can just put on to fit their needs and purposes...
God's love and loving neighbor becomes irrelevant. God’s love, Grace, Peace and
mercy are lost to the wilderness of our own making. The battlefield lines are blurred and we are
no longer being fed true justice, that is, the Grace of Christ Jesus’ as a
living repentance to be heard and incorporated.
Listen People of God here now is the Good News from the
Lord Jesus Christ! There is and will always be hope. There is and will always be
promise! Never say never! Satan says never. God has not abandoned us He has searched
out each and every one of us and saved us in many different ways! Big ways,
small ways, its inconsequential. What
truly matters is that it becomes a matter of the heart in where we live into
that lifestyle of Grace. For that
lifestyle of grace is woven throughout that wilderness. The Wolves of Satan are waiting. They are waiting and wondering how humanity
will sojourn truthfully into the future.
For what we may think is genuine progress, some are indifferent to the
looming death that is surrounding us…
There is life and it’s not just merely living aimlessly without purpose!
Evil comes from convoluted empty promises, nothingness is the foundation to the
wilderness Satan rules.
One of the most beautiful images to come from that
horrible tragedy 15 years past, is that memorial fount... Where the
foundations of the former World Trade twin towers stood, now stands a beautiful
pair of fountains. Fountains where the waters never cease in flowing. The
waters flow as a balm to this earthly gouge, this wound by and for evil as a
failed human chess match—where the stakes of humanity lay in the balance. 15
years later, things have been rebuilt, the Pentagon restored… but is it more or
less like an un-healing scab that we have quickly covered, digressed with our “earthly”
Band-Aids, never to truly heal?
Water as we know, is the source of all life not just
literally through what science has revealed to us, but spiritually as well
through our baptism, through our conversion, through the many things that we
experience as the Sheep of Christ in the wilderness of the world. Those lights
shooting out from the twin towers memorial fountains, through those waters… are
not aimlessly pointed to the above.
Perhaps we should think of them, then and now, as those search lights.
Those search lights of our inner person seeking to be found. To be truly found as a foundling living
naturally into that metanoia—inner change that IS TRUE PROGRESS!
Let us pray,
It is a broken world but we must never say never
Hope and Promise is the fuel for the New Nature
To renew and resurrect through God’s love in this earthly
realm
Loving Lord Jesus, we seek and need that inner change
May we turn those scars into bright beaming stars
Shining into that wilderness to love our neighbor by
seeking the lost
Loving our neighbor through that inner change
righteousness
Only Your Grace can reveal for our hearts to sojourn
Your love is that flowing, living water…
AMEN
September 11th,
2016; 17th Sunday After Pentecost; Proper 19; Year C; SOLA
Lectionary
Sermon By
Reverend Nicole A.M. Collins
Psalm
119:169-176; Ezekiel 34: 11-24; 1
Timothy 1:5-17; Luke 15:1-10
Below is a close up picture of one view of the sculpture made around the 911 tragedies.
It is called 'September's Trust' C. 2001 Watercolor painting, paper sculpture
Below this close up is the art and the article around the 2002 exhibit this piece was shown in
https://youtu.be/Zkhig7pghBc
The link below is to this sermon's delivery at the Gathering North Church at 7pm:
https://youtu.be/KbswcFqpnPE
https://youtu.be/KbswcFqpnPE
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