“God’s Communication Skills”

Sermon Delivered By Rev. Dick Stetler – March 3, 2019

Centenary United Methodist Church

    Psalm 99; Exodus 34:29-35

     

    This morning we are going to discuss our Creator's relationship with us.  How does that relationship work?  We certainly have a lot of illustrations in the Bible that suggest how God communicated to people thousands of years ago.  Today, there are a good number of people who talk about God communicating to them.  The only way to evaluate their credibility is to listen to what God reportedly had to say.

    There is a humorous saying that goes, "When we share our thoughts with God, we are considered to have an active prayer-life.  When God talks to us, people wonder if we have missed a week or two of taking our medications."  Why is that?  Perhaps it is because we seldom hear of God talking to individuals in our surrounding acquaintances.

    We have an Old Testament message this morning that gives us an illustration of God reaching out to the Israelites through Moses.  Moses had just returned to his people after receiving the tablets containing the Ten Commandments on the summit of Mt. Sinai.  Our lesson tells us that Moses' facial appearance was shining.   We are not sure what that means, but his look was so different that it caused him to hide it with a veil.  He had been frightening people.

    He only removed the veil when he went into the Tent of the Lord's presence to talk to God. (Exodus 34:34) It was while Moses was in the Tent that God spoke to him.  The form of that communication was never mentioned. Through Moses, God commanded his people what to do and how to live in obedience, thus making certain that God was in control of the attitudes and behavior of his people. 

    Due to the emotional volatility of the Hebrews during this stage of their history, they needed a strong leader to guide them through the maze in a way that would provide stability and structure to their society.

    Moses began teaching them that they, and they alone, were God's chosen people. No one else in the world was in on this.  (Exodus 19:5-6) Guidelines of conduct were established to keep the Israelites in a tightly-knit society that maintained its separation from all other cultural influences.

    When we study the various exchanges between Moses and God, it becomes a difficult task for us to know whether God was giving Moses commands or was Moses using God as a cover for his own need to control his listeners.  There were such wide swings in God's temperament recorded in the Scriptures that those incidents add to the confusion of the readers.  

    Moses wrote about a time when God tried to kill him. (Exodus 4:24) Once Moses had to plead with God to control our Creator's wrath.  Moses made such a strong case, God changed his mind and calmed down.   (Exodus 32:10-14) There was another time when God commanded Moses to kill all the leaders of Israel. (Numbers 25:4) In spite of what was written in the Book of Numbers, was this actually God communicating or was Moses giving the orders to get rid of those strong-willed leaders who were opposed to his leadership?   

    There are enough mixed signals in the Old Testament concerning what God was saying to question the authenticity of the source of such pronouncements. Various spokespersons for God have given clear evidence that God had little to do with what was being said. 

    Once Samuel said:

Now listen to what the Lord Almighty says, 'God wants to punish the people of Amalek because their ancestors opposed the Israelites when they were coming out of Egypt. Go and attack the Amalekites and completely destroy everything they have.  Do not leave anything alive; kill all the men, women, children and babies; the cattle, sheep, camels and donkeys.' (I Samuel 15:1f)

    Our doubts come into a sharp focus when we understand how Jesus' teachings moved away from all such communications coming from God. Rather Jesus provided humanity with a physical form of God's nature. Throughout Jesus' ministry, he communicated God's unconditional love for everyone in the world. (John 3:16, Matthew 5:44f)

    We could spend a lot of time discussing examples where Moses clearly crossed the line in describing what God reportedly told him.  Even the Ten Commandments are suspect.  These ten laws appear to be highly influenced by the Law code of Hammurabi, the King of Babylon, that were written 300 years before Moses delivered his tablets to the Israelites.

    What are we to think?  Today, how does God communicate to us? Clearly, Jesus had an experience at his baptism that changed his life. The form of that communication is different in each Gospel.  During his ministry, Jesus did not communicate any words that he claimed were from God.  With the knowledge that God dwells within us, Jesus assumed the responsibility to talk about God in the most endearing terms. 

     The angry, temperamental God was gone and probably never existed in any place other than in the minds of those whose powerful emotional urges were understood as God speaking to them.

    How does God communicate to us today?  Much of our prayer life has been influenced by many levels of what we have absorbed from many sources.  We have heard people say, "Prayer works!"  What does that mean? There are many people who have prayed and prayed but nothing positive resulted.  People have abandoned God because God did not answer their prayers in the manner that they had hoped even though their request was most sincere and humble. They exclaim, "If God is all loving, why did God allow this to happen?"

     One of the attitudes of prayer that works one hundred percent of the time is to talk to God in a spirit of gratitude that never asks God for anything.  When we travel through life trusting completely that God has not lost our file, we will never become disappointed that God did not grant some particular request. 

    Even Jesus asked God to spare his life and he did so from a very high-level of anxious uncertainty. (Luke 22:24) God did not answer the way Jesus had hoped. 

     A reality of our living is that life is always accompanied by death.  It does not matter how old we are, what project has to be left undone, or the fact that there are a number of people who need us to continue living.  We do not like the fact that all of us have to graduate from this life. 

    Countless times we pray for God to intervene.  However, when God knows that absolutely nothing happens to any of us when our movie ends, God never has to intervene.  When death happens to a loved one, we could just as easily thank God for the years that we had with them. We simply cannot go on living forever in these limited, physical forms in spite of how many people want us to. Think about this: Every person that Jesus healed eventually became sick again. All of them died.  His healings were only a temporary fix.

    When we are totally convinced that God's river-of-life knows exactly where it is going, we can experience any reversal in life with a sense of gratitude that trusts that our adventure has only experienced a bend in the flow of our personal river.  God cannot abandon any of us in spite of what we frequently hear from professional Christians who claim otherwise.

     Why would God give us any special consideration when God has already given us everything that we could possibly need by looking within ourselves.  (Galatians 5:22)

    When Jesus found people in pain because a miracle did not happen for them, he vented his frustration with the neediness of his listeners.  They were not listening to his message.  They were only concerned with needing a miracle.  Jesus said to a crowd:

How unbelieving and wrong you people are! How long must I stay with you?  How long must I put up with you?  (Matthew 17:17). 

    Jesus knew that Moses gave people nothing of substance.  Jesus told his listeners that God is the only presence that nourishes and energizes life in the world when people are open to accessing what is within them.  (John 5:30f) 

    Somewhere in our journey, we have to surrender our needs and desires and put in their place total gratitude and acceptance for whatever is happening.  We have no idea whether something is good or bad until we make such a judgment, or until we understand where life is taking us.  Why make any judgments? 

    When we trust God completely for the outcome of all things, we do not need God's handiwork to become visible to reassure ourselves.  Some of our conclusions come from hindsight.  Our understanding can come from what we call a coincidence, and other moments of understanding come as the result of a sudden flash of insight. 

    There was a woman in my background who was married to a highly paid telegraph operator. These were the days when Morse Code was used extensively for U.S. Military Intelligence. He was a compulsive gambler and was a poor judge in choosing winners in the numerous horse races he bet on.  Many times, he lost his entire monthly paycheck.

    This woman had a beautiful daughter and son.  She did everything humanly possible to keep her family together.  She rented rooms in their home.  She took in laundry and tailored garments for neighbors.  She cut expenses to a bare minimum so that she could pay the bills of the household.

    Countless times, her family told her to bring the children, leave her husband and return to Akron, Ohio to be with them. She refused.  She was not going to allow the problem of her husband to defeat her. I became intimately attached to her beautiful daughter, Ruth.   Had Ruth's mother retreated to Akron with her two children, Ruth would never have met my Dad, Roy.  

    There are four of us siblings in my family that have resulted from the union of Ruth and Roy.  We are grateful that our grandmother made our entrance in the world a reality without ever knowing what her decision would create in the future.   

    This does not mean that I am opposed to divorce.  I believe that is a very essential tool that liberates many people from some form of tyranny.  What I am saying is that I am delighted that our grandmother made the choice to stay with her husband.  Otherwise I would not be standing in your pulpit this morning. 

    God communicates loud and clear through whatever our life-experiences are.  However, like Joseph in the Old Testament, those who understand God's presence are those who are not looking for any special miracle coming from God.  When we learn to bloom where we are planted, we are often showered with miracles.  Being grateful for all things is a miracle-producing attitude.

     

CONGREGATIONAL PRAYER

Loving God, how often our spirits can lose focus from everything that impacts our lives.  For thousands of years, the story line of human history has varied little.  Jesus invited us to view our circumstances as opportunities to demonstrate who God created us to be.  We confess, however, that we often yield to the temptation to take sides during power struggles.  We are grateful for the wisdom to realize what strength there is in patience and what depth of spirit there is in embracing others with compassion. We are thankful that you created us to enable others to become the people you created them to be.   Amen.    

                

PASTORAL PRAYER

O God, there is so much about life for which we are grateful.  If we began listing everything that makes us joyful to be alive, we would cease to see all else.  We look eagerly for the winds of inspiration to give flight to our spirits.  We thank you for your invisible energy that surrounds us and inspires our confidence that all is well with our souls.

We thank you for faith that enables us to make decisions that have the ability to broaden our horizons.  Thank you for the changes that come without notice, providing us with extensions to our exciting adventure of living.  Our remembrance that in spite of how challenging life appears sometimes, we are never without choices.  Spare us from pleading to be saved from unpleasant circumstances.  Who knows that our being present is just what such a moment needed? Thank you for the potential that dwells within us to continue expanding the depths and health of our bodies, minds, and spirits.

As each of us feels loved and nurtured by you and one another, may we never grow weary of being the greatest sales-force on the face of the earth for what the indwelling of your spirit looks like.  Bless us today with the desire to become reflective about the quality of our lives as we begin our journey into Lent.  We pray these thoughts through the loving spirit of Jesus, the Christ, who taught his disciples to say when they prayed . . .