The BIG Question - 1/30/22
Call to worship:
L: From a world in which injustice sits upon the throne,
P: We turn to you, O Lord, our refuge from workers of woe.
L: With hearts from which courage has taken leave,
P: We turn to you, O Lord, our refuge from dealers in fear.
L: We have hewn out for ourselves broken cisterns that can hold no water.
P: Now we turn to you, O Lord, the fountain of living water,
A: That courage might rule our hearts and justice cover the earth.
Opening Hymn: God Hath Spoken by the Prophets #108
1. God hath spoken by the prophets,
spoken the unchanging Word,
each from age to age proclaiming,
God the One, the righteous Lord!
'Mid the world's despair and turmoil,
one firm anchor holdeth fast:
God eternal reigns forever,
God the first, and God the last.
2. God hath spoken by Christ Jesus,
Christ, the everlasting Son;
brightness of the Father's glory,
with the Father ever one;
spoken by the Word incarnate,
God of God, ere time was born;
Light of Light, to earth descending,
Christ, as God in human form.
3. God yet speaketh by the Spirit,
speaketh to our hearts again;
in the agelong Word expounding
God's own message, now as then.
Thru the rise and fall of nations,
one sure faith yet standing fast,
God abides, the Word unchanging,
God the first, and God the last.
God the first, and God the last.
Opening Prayer:
Gracious God, in Jesus Christ you introduced yourself as the help of the hopeless and the hope of the helpless, and you called us to proclaim your name and portray your character. With gladness we heeded your summons. But our enthusiasm has waned, and your mission has suffered. So we pray, O Lord, for the renewal of our vision of Jesus Christ, that our enthusiasm for his mission might be rekindled and that, once again, the helpless might find hope and the hopeless might find help.
Epistle Reading: 1 Corinthians 13: 1-13
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ²And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. ³If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
⁴Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant ⁵or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; ⁶it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. ⁷It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
⁸Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. ⁹For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; ¹⁰but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. ¹¹When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. ¹²For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. ¹³And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
Hymn: Christ Is the World’s Light #188
Prayer of Dedication:
Gracious God, our Lord and Savior, we turn to you in grateful confidence, for you are no stranger to us. Were it not for you, you could be a stranger. We do our best to put distance between you and ourselves, but you are better at bringing us together than we at keeping us apart. You confront us with a power we cannot manipulate, a goodness we cannot match, a love we cannot deny; for this, dear Lord, we bless you and pray for your blessing upon us. Let your power become to us not merely an object of awe but a source of renewal; let your goodness become to us not merely a thing of envy but a model for life; let your love become to us not merely an inescapable force but a contagious presence, that we might remember not only to whom we should give thanks, but why.
O Lord, as you have become our refuge from the world’s injustice, send us into the world to become a refuge for its victims. Let your light so illumine us that they can’t help but see you. Amen.
Gospel Reading: Luke 4: 21-30
²¹Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” ²²All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” ²³He said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’” ²⁴And he said, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown. ²⁵But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; ²⁶yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. ²⁷There were also many lepers[a] in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” ²⁸When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. ²⁹They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. ³⁰But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Sermon Title: The BIG Question
A friend once asked Isidor I. Rabi, a Nobel prize winner in science, how he became a scientist. Rabi replied that every day after school his mother would talk to him about his school day. She wasn't so much interested in what he had learned that day, but she always inquired, "Did you ask a good question today?"
"Asking good questions," Rabi said, "made me become a scientist."
This may have worked for Mr. Rabi, but it definitely begs the question, what is a good question?
If you are visiting a foreign country and are not all that familiar with the language the people speak there, then some good questions to know are, “where can I find food and shelter?” or, “what does this item cost?” and of course the ever popular, “where is the bathroom?”
If you are studying for a test at school, then you ask the questions that are going to be on the test.
If you are pulled over on the highway by a state trooper, then your first question is, “Was I speeding officer?”
All kidding aside, however, there is one question that gets asked more often than any other; “Why does God let bad things happen?”
Today’s message from Luke puts a little twist on that question, though, and that is to ask why Jesus didn’t heal everybody who needed to be healed? When he addresses this question, Jesus informs them that the prophets with healing powers that went before him did not heal everyone. He also made a very big point of saying that he could not do in his hometown what he had been doing in other places. After they heard him read from the scroll the words from the Prophet Isaiah and were super impressed, the question was asked, “wait, isn’t that Joe’s boy?” “When did he get so smart and who gave him authority to read from the sacred scrolls?”
And this questioning went on until they were ready to throw Jesus off of a cliff in order to get rid of him. It makes me wonder how the situation moved so quickly from ‘wow, he sure speaks well” to “throw him off the cliff!”
So, the big question on everyone’s mind that day was, “who is this guy? We thought we knew him, but now we are not so sure, and we aren’t gonna put up with this whatever it is.”
When we think of BIG questions, we may wonder how deep is the ocean; or how high is the sky? At its deepest, in the Mariana Trench, located in the Pacific, the ocean reaches 6.856 miles. The troposphere, which includes the layer of air we breathe, is about 10 miles high, but the atmosphere extends upward more than 600 miles. Yes, these are big questions with BIG answers; ones that can be measured and proven with science. But what about the questions that we can’t put down on paper and measure to a specific point? How do we answer those?
I have been actively preaching for over twenty years now, and there is one question that always gets me. When I would come home from church, someone in my family or in my group of friends would ask how the service went. Invariably my reply would be that it must have gone well because nobody stoned me.
The fact is that there will always be hard questions to answer; BIG questions to deal with and yes, our answers matter. When we are questioned about our faith, will we be ready to confirm that it is in the One, True God, and that our salvation comes from the grace that Jesus Christ saved us with? Or will we deny him, just like some of his closest friends did?
At the end of this passage, Jesus slips right through the crowd of cliff pushers and disappears. He doesn’t fight back or endeavor to persuade them, he just goes away. In the next verse, we find out that he is on his way to Capernaum, a city if Galilee. And in Capernaum, Jesus begins doing exactly what he had been doing in Nazareth and other places; teaching people on the Sabbath, speaking with authority. And no matter what reaction he got from people; good, bad, or otherwise, he kept preaching and teaching and healing and helping. And if we ask the question of why would he keep doing what he knows will get him in trouble and eventually bring about his early demise on this earth.
For this answer, we must go to our Corinthians scripture, the famous love chapter. It talks about love in a way that we can never fully understand. Although it has been used for more weddings than any other scripture in the Bible, this passage was never meant to keep a bride and groom together. Rather it was a passage to get warring countries to stop fighting and love each other the way God intended for us to love each other.
Love is patient. Love is kind, it does not envy, it does not boast. It is not proud, it is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. It does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, it always trusts, it always hopes, it always perseveres. Love never fails.
Perhaps the BIG question is, “How BIG is your love?”
Closing Hymn: Blest Be the Tie That Binds #557
1. Blest be the tie that binds
our hearts in Christian love;
the fellowship of kindred minds
is like to that above.
2. Before our Father's throne
we pour our ardent prayers;
our fears, our hopes, our aims are one,
our comforts and our cares.
3. We share each other's woes,
our mutual burdens bear;
and often for each other flows
the sympathizing tear.
4. When we asunder part,
it gives us inward pain;
but we shall still be joined in heart,
and hope to meet again.
In this place your healing has begun. Now begins the healing of the world. Go in peace.
