Kingdom of the Caregivers (Part Three - Our Relation with God Restored

Preached on Sunday, January 27, 2019

Scripture readings: Romans 5:1-11; Matthew 16:13-28

Wandering around Malakoff Diggins
Near Bridgeport Bridge and North Bloomfield
California, May 5, 2015

The summer when I was eight years old, I went to YMCA Camp (Camp Osceola, near Big Bear, in the mountains of Southern California). YMCA is, or was supposed to be, a Christian organization, and one morning, toward the end of my week at Camp Osceola, a bunch of the younger campers were gathered at the campfire circle and we were given a talk about knowing God, and the greatness and beauty of God and his love. I’ve forgotten most of the talk.

Then we were all blindfolded, and guided by a bunch of the older boys through the forest. This is in a part of those mountains where there are ten-thousand-foot peaks.

Suddenly, bright light shone through our blinders. We knew that we had come out of the forest. The older boys sat us down on the ground, and the talk went on, something more or less like this.

“Every one of your lives is like a walk on a trail through the forest. You might walk on your path as though you were blind and didn’t see any of the beauty or greatness of God’s creation, but you can meet God through his creation. You can know for yourself how great, beyond your understanding, God is: how high, and beautiful, and deep, and lasting his love for you is. If you could know God, you would love him and never forget him. You would never forget how great he is.”

Then we were told to take off our blindfolds. We saw each other sitting on a wide, rocky shelf, on the top of a high cliff and, across the canyon, was one of those mountains that soared far higher than its tree-line, in rocky peaks and crags.

I felt as though my heart skipped a beat and then started racing. I got goose-bumps all over.

We’re not supposed to make images of God to tell us what he is like. Any image we try to make will fall short and confuse us, and distort our way of life more than it could possible help. But I have images of God in my head.

I sometimes think of God as being like a mountain so high that it will take my whole life to get to the top and see the world on the other side. I love mountains.

I don’t think I would ever want to climb one with ropes, and picks, and my own hands. I would rather love the mountains by walking on them. I’ve walked to the top a few mountains between eight and eleven thousand feet in elevation.

One of those was Mount Rose, between Lake Tahoe and Reno. It’s elevation is over ten thousand feet. I lived close enough to take multiple walks up to its summit, and once I took my youth group to the top. Below a certain height there were multiple trails, and you could use these to see more of the beauties of the mountain. You could wander through meadows and different groves of forest on the mountain-side.

If I had lived there long enough, I would have known Mount Rose from its many sides, and angles, and gentle, and sharp, and wide places, and ridges, and ravines, all over its slopes. I loved that mountain.

That’s part of how I think of God. God is a mountain so big, so high, that you can walk all over the Lord and get to know so much about him to love and cherish. I got to know God this way, because, somehow, I met God in a new way one summer morning when I was eight years old.

Sometimes I climb the mountain of God when I contemplate deep things in the Bible. Sometimes I climb when I’m exhausted by worry, or by puzzlement over what to do next. I might climb the mountain of God when I have a voice to sing with. I do it when I walk through this beautiful desert country.

Lately I’ve been using an image of God that my Baci (Babcia, my Polish grandmother), gave me, when she heard that I was planning to go into the ministry. It’s a small white statue of Jesus holding a lamb in his arms. She thought it was going to glow in the dark. She was disappointed when I told her that it didn’t, but that I loved it anyway.

I loved her. Now this Jesus who doesn’t glow in the dark represents a long, long love that I have lived with, or tried to live with, in good times and bad times, in the church, as a caregiver to the spiritual needs of others.

So lately I’ve been holding my Baci’s Jesus and talking to him as I hold him in my hands. For me, these days, it’s a good way to climb the mountain of God. It’s part of how I know “God, through our Lord Jesus Christ”. (Romans 5:1)

In our reading from Romans chapter five, Paul tells us how he knew “God, through our Lord Jesus Christ”. We know who God is because God, in Christ, gave us a free pass into his presence, at great cost to himself.

Paul’s picture of knowing God looked like one of the wonders of the ancient world called The Temple of the Lord, overlooking the city of Jerusalem: The Temple of the Living God.

Paul’s picture of knowing God in the Temple finds the Temple changed. In Jerusalem, only the High Priest had access to the innermost room, the Holy of Holies. God had promised to make his name to live in that room.

In that culture, the word “name” means authority, and the mysterious substance of what you are and what your life means. When the Lord made his name dwell in that innermost place, it meant that you could get to be with him there, if it was allowed.

In the real Temple, the High Priest could only enter that place of the presence once a year, and only if he brought with him the blood of a sacrifice that cleansed him and his people from their sins.

Paul says that his way, and the way that he taught others about knowing God, was like a Temple where anyone could come into the presence of the Lord, any time at all, if they and their sins had been cleansed by the sacrifice and the blood of Jesus. Yes, this is how me meet and know God: “when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son,” (Romans 5:10)

Paul also says: “God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” (5:5) We don’t know God by taking off our own blindfolds, but by the Father giving us the Holy Spirit to take off our blindfolds.

In Matthew, Peter didn’t know who Jesus was until the Father showed him, and I’m sure there was the silent power of the Holy Spirit, sent by the Father, to show the true identity of Jesus to his disciple.

This happens to us, as well.

We see Jesus on the cross, crucified to bring us peacefully back home to his home, and to be at home truly in the presence of God. It’s the Holy Spirit who has the power to open our eyes to see the Lord Jesus on that cross, and to know that we are welcomed back to a relationship with God. Faith, peace, grace, glory, perseverance, a maturing character, hope, love, joy and celebration come into our lives through our relationship with God our Father, the Son Jesus Christ our Lord, and the Holy Spirit.

You don’t find these things anywhere else, although it is amazing how willing the Lord is to give all of this to his enemies. This gift is for his enemies: including us!

Maybe that’s part of the reason Jesus told us to love our enemies. Who knows just how far this grace will spread, in the end?

We were all created for a relationship with God; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It’s our true purpose. It’s what we are designed for: what everyone in the world is designed for. Think what pictures come to you, what smells, what sounds, what flavors, what words help you to know God?

There may be a word, or a sentence, or a story in the Bible that helps you to know God. There had to be some experience that exposed your need for something more, in order to know God: a newborn baby, falling in love and proposing, losing a job, being in debt, making a big mistake, walking in the rain. You found that you had a need, and that need turned out to be God.

Everyone needs this, and God is big enough to meet the needs of every one of his creatures. You understand your own needs well enough to want to give help and care for the needs that others have for God.

In our reading, in Romans, there are the treasures of faith, hope, and love: the greatest gifts of the Holy Spirit. Not everyone will admit their need for these. Not everyone understands or even knows their need for these.

People might have reasons to fear us Christians and the church; or at least dislike what we stand for, to them; although most people are charitable enough that they try to overlook these faults in us.

There will come some time when those we know, or work with, or play with will need a foundation to strengthen them, you don’t even need to call it faith until you get to a certain point, and then you can surprise them by what faith means to you.

There will come a time when the people around you will lose hope. They may feel this as weariness, or grief, or fear. You may have been given some understanding of these things, through your own life, and you know how a relationship with God will teach them hope, as it taught you. You can lead them through this change into hope.

A time will come when someone around you has their need for love exposed. I think it might be easier to talk about love, but not about the painful mistakes of love. People hide from love. They avoid the changes that love will make in their life. On Facebook, my persimmon friend David posted a joke that said: “I told my wife that she should embrace her mistakes . . . Then she smiled and hugged me.”

You have been given some gift for knowing how to care for those in need of love.

Paul’s letter is the letter of a helper, a caregiver, dealing with the spiritual needs of others. Paul was what we need to become. He is someone who has died and risen with Jesus. What we have to share, in the school of Paul and Jesus, is to know a glory that dies to bring us in. We become such people. In our turn, we die in order to rise with the Son of the Living God, and lead others where we have gone with Jesus. Just don’t forget your own need for meeting with Jesus. There’s more you need to know.