Matthew 3:1-12
Who doesn’t need a fresh start now and then?
Who doesn’t need a second chance?
A do-over?
What do they call it in golf?
A Mulligan!
Hit a bad shot.
Take a Mulligan. Do it again!
Who doesn’t need a Mulligan now and then?
Speaking of golf … a pastor was an avid golfer … played for years … went golfing every chance he had.
Well, one Sunday morning, he gets up … it was a perfect golf day … unable to resist temptation, the pastor calls the Clerk of Session and says, “Stafford, I’m not feeling well today. You’ll have to fill in.”
And with assurances from Stafford that he’ll handle the service, and a little prayer for the pastor’s health, the pastor hightails it out of the house to a golf course 50 miles away … he didn’t want to be seen.
The angels in heaven see this and say to God, “Well, what are you going to do about it?”
God says, “Don’t worry; I’ll take care of it.”
So the angels sit back to watch.
On the seventh hole, the pastor gets a hole-in-one!
The angels are baffled. “We thought you’d give the pastor a terrible game, but now you give him a hole-in-one.”
“I know,” replied God, “but who’s he going to tell?”
The love of God at work in our lives …
God is at work for good in all things … so in all things, you can find good …
I talked to a man who’s very successful … but who nearly didn’t make it … 25 years ago, a surfer doing drugs, smuggling drugs … on the edge of disaster … but he made it through … and God was there … today, he’s involved in a community of faith … ministers to young people … telling his story.
A man with a giant career in real estate and banking … a shady deal … time in prison … and now he’s got more of God in his life than ever before … he’s battling his third bout with cancer … and he’s till on top of it, still going strong, a man of faith!
A young lady who works for CLUE – Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice – played a key roll in the new labor agreement between hotel workers and the LAX Sheraton – she’s the first in her family to graduate from high school, the first to graduate from college … an inspiring young lady who faced the worst odds … in college, racism; told flat-out by some: “You’re here just because of your color.”
She loves God and she overcomes … and now she’s thinking about seminary.
They all turned it around … defeat into victory, scars into stars … loss into gain … pain into wisdom!
“You can do it!”
You can face anything and overcome it.
You can be handed a lousy set of cards, and still win the game.
Because God is near at hand … close enough for us to feel the mystery of grace …
Like standing close to an oven … you can feel the heat … or opening a refrigerator door on a hot day, the cool air rushes out, and it feels good.
God is close enough for us to feel the mystery of grace …
A message hell doesn’t want us to hear …
The Evil One delivers the message of hell every day:
You’re stuck, and you’ll never get out.
You’ve acted this way for 20 years, and it’ll never change.
Your behavior is shameful and disgusting – you’re a terrible human being.
You’re parents don’t love you; your children are going to hell in hand-basket, and it’s all your fault.
You make poor decisions; you’re a flub, you’re a flop, you’re a failure … and don’t think about changing: it’s too late … it’ll never work … you’re trapped and your goose is cooked.
The tools of hell: discouragement, defeat, frustration, resentment, jealousy, the sense of being cheated, denied and overlooked … hopeless entrapment – stuck forever; no way out.
I saw hell yesterday – In two parking lots - angry, aggressive drivers … honking horns, screeching tires, obscene gestures - everyone on their own personal mission … every car, a threat …
The stuff of hell … to tangle us up and take us down.
God has a life-giving message …
Faith, hope and love;
Grace, mercy and peace;
Patience, courage and endurance!
Because God knows what you’re made of … God knows how good and decent you are; intelligent and gifted … God knows you can do it!
God knows what you can do, even if you don’t know it right now!
I remember teaching Josh how to ride a bike. I knew he could do it. He didn’t know it at the time; only I knew it.
But Josh trusted me.
So there we are in the street … Josh on a bike he can’t ride, and Dad running down the street with him, hand on the bike.
Back and forth a few times … huffin’ and puffin’ until that magic moment … I’m still running beside him, but no longer holding the bike … Josh is riding it, all by himself … he’s doing what I knew he could always do.
And now he knows it, too … “I can ride a bike!”
We find our way through, around, under or over.
We rebuild our lives after disaster … loss of job … the end of a marriage … illness and death … and who knows what else.
Every day I’m amazed at what people endure, how folks make it … find a way to overcome!
Thomas Merton writes about his Father dying of an inoperable brain tumor the summer of 1930.
“All summer we went regularly and faithfully to the hospital once or twice a week. There was nothing we could do but sit there, and look at Father and tell him things which he could not answer. But he understood what we said.
“In fact, if he could not talk, there were other things he could still do. One day I found his bed covered with little sheets of blue notepaper on which he had been drawing. And the drawings were real drawings. But they were unlike anything he had ever done before – pictures of little, irate Byzantine-looking saints with beards and great halos.
“Of us all, Father was the only one who really had any kind of a faith. And I do not doubt that he had very much of it, and that behind the walls of his isolation, his intelligence and his will, unimpaired and not hampered in any essential way by the partial obstruction of some of his senses, were turned to God, and communed with God Who was with him and in him, and Who gave him, as I believe, light to understand and to make use of his suffering for his own good, and to perfect his soul. …. And this affliction, this terrible and frightening illness which was relentlessly pressing him down even into the jaws of the tomb, was not destroying him after all.
And then Merton adds:
“… my father was in a fight with this tumor, and none of us understood the battle. We thought he was done for, but it was making him great” (The Seven Story Mountain, p.83).
On the road to Damascus … Saul the Pharisee, intent on great harm … and God would have none of it.
With a bolt of light and firm voice, Saul is tripped up and falls flat on his face …
Saul the Pharisee falls down … Paul the Apostle gets up!
A tough, unrelenting God … who will not let us go … the God of the prophets, Isaiah and Hosea … the God who plunges the knife of love into our hearts … and twists and turns … and it hurts like hell, but it’s the help of heaven … cutting away the old and bringing in the new …
John says to the crowd:
“What I do, I do only with water … but someone is coming after me … more powerful than I am … I’m not fit to carry his sandals …
“He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire!”
The threshing floor swept clean … the wheat gathered into the storehouses of God … the chaff burned with an unquenchable fire.
A violent message.
“If God wants children, God will raise them up from the stones at your feet.”
A violent message … shake us … penetrate the layers of discouragement and pride … get to the heart; perform CPR; get it beating again.
In the Book of Revelation, letters to seven churches … the first letter to the church in Ephesus … “You’ve worked hard, but this I hold against you: you have forgotten your first love.”
“Repent and do the things you did at first” (Revelation 2:1-7).
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says: “Not everyone who says, ‘LORD, LORD’ will enter the kingdom of heaven … many will say to me on that day: ‘LORD, LORD, did we not prophecy in your name, and did we not drive our demons and perform miracles.’ Then I will tell them plainly, “I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers” (Matthew 7:21-23).
“You gave me your mouth, you gave me your hands, but you never gave me your heart.”
Violent grace … shake us, penetrate us, strip away the defensive layers – excuses and pretensions … God awakens the heart and gets it beating again.
The Ghost of Christmas Past takes Scrooge on a tour of his life – Scrooge watches the scene wherein the woman he loves walks away because Scrooge is more in love with his golden idols.
Scrooge cries out:
“Show me no more! Conduct me home. Why do you delight to torture me?”
“One shadow more!” exclaimed the Ghost.
“No more!” cried Scrooge. “No more. I don’t wish to see it. Show me no more!”
But the relentless Ghost pinioned him in both his arms, and forced him to observe what happened next.
Violent grace …
“You brood of vipers.”
“The axe is already laid at the root of the tree.”
Violent grace …
“Your sins are no more!”
“They’re gone forever!
Washed away.
Done with and over.”
To Nicodemus in the night …
To Zacchaeus up a tree …
To the woman at the well …
To the lepers and to the lame …
To you and to me …
A fresh start … a second chance!
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. Thou anointest my head with oil. My cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD forever!”
Amen!
