“Why We Feel So Blessed


Sermon Delivered By Rev. Dick Stetler – February 16, 2020

Centenary United Methodist Church

Psalm 118:1-9; Deuteronomy 30:15-20

 

    Our Scripture lesson this morning is from Deuteronomy, a book that must have become extremely troubling for Jesus. This scroll was one of the books of Law that became known as the Torah, one of the foundations of Judaism.  Historically, the books were written by Moses. I will read a brief paragraph from the Good News version that defines the substance of Deuteronomy.

Today I am giving you a choice between good and evil, between life and death.  If you obey the commands of the Lord your God, which I give you today, if you love him, obey him and keep all his laws, then you will prosper and become a nation of many people. But if you disobey and refuse to listen, and are led away to worship other gods, you will be destroyed. (Deuteronomy 30:15f)

    This scroll was a stark eye-opener for the Hebrew culture.  At that time, they were wandering everywhere with their personal ethics, doing what each wanted to do. The fact that the Hebrew culture was totally out of control was made known by the sheer number of Laws governing their activities.  (Leviticus 18) Moses used words to inspire his people to remember who they are.  He laid out the two paths that the Jews could follow but only one of them was acceptable in the eyes of God.

    The Deuteronomy scroll was uncovered during a renovation of the Temple in Jerusalem. This discovery happened during the reign of King Josiah in 7th Century B.C. No one had ever seen this scroll.  After King Josiah had the scroll read to him, he became convinced that these words from Moses would create a renaissance in the faithfulness of his people.  If they were the Chosen People of God, they had better begin acting like it. (2nd Kings 22:8f)

    What had become so troubling for Jesus was the fierce, condemning, judgmental attitudes attributed to God. We know this because Jesus began to reference God as loving, forgiving, and supportive of all the people in the world.  Jesus used his imagination to create a new narrative of the nature of God that he knew. He moved away from following the understanding that Moses had imposed on the Jews. (Matthew 5:21f)

    Rather than teaching about good and evil or redemption and destruction, Jesus decided to teach attitudes-of-being fully human.  He began the Sermon on the Mount with these words:  "Blessed are those who know that they are spiritually poor, the Kingdom of God belongs to them."  (Matthew 5:3) The next eleven verses began with the words with how blessed people will feel when they respond to their life-experiences with attitudes rooted in humility and love.  What does it mean to feel blessed?

    Feeling blessed is an experience of profound gratitude for what happens to us when we experience being loved or when we share our love with others.  However, feeling blessed reaches far beyond the boundaries established by loving attitudes. What Jesus taught was later reflected by the Apostle Paul in his love chapter of 1st Corinthians 13.

    This kind of instruction was how Jesus radically changed many of the teachings of his Hebrew heritage.  Jesus still taught the same two paths that Moses used.  Jesus used the metaphors of separating the sheep and the goats or the wheat from the chaff.  Jesus decided that people have the power of choice, and from their choices, they judge themselves.  God's nature, however, was understood by Jesus as being merciful and forgiving long before he died on a cross. (Matthew 7:11)

    Last Monday my brother celebrated his 80th birthday.  I called him and we talked for over an hour.  He lives in Luray, Virginia not far from the celebrated caverns that have made the community a major tourist attraction. The more we talked, the more I felt that I was talking to someone in a community that was frozen in time.  Roy's culture had not changed from what the Stetler siblings experienced three quarters of a century ago. We both felt blessed that we were born in a much earlier generation when there were not the vast number of distractions available to today's young people.

    He told me that, every Sunday, his church pews are filled with people of all ages.  The church's expansive parking lot becomes so overflowing that parishioners have started parking their cars on the grass areas around the church. 

    Cable television came close to Luray but it was too expensive for the company to stretch lines in such a rural area that is sparsely populated.  My brother has not turned on his television in years.  I could not imagine how he has survived without news, sports, or movies.

    In the world of the Stetler siblings, parents were first parents above all their other roles in life. Mothers stayed at home attending to the needs of their families.  Dads typically came home between 5-6:00 p.m. Families ate together and shared what happened during the day.  We had to come up with what we had learned at school.  After dessert, my father led the family in devotions.

    When people sing, Give Me that Old Time Religion, it causes me to reminisce about the way life used to be.  For me, that song is not about the uninformed theology of yesteryear; it is about how our faith was once an integral part of most people's lives. This is what King Josiah wanted for his people.

    Our culture has changed and many of us have changed with it. Pandemic distractions are here to stay.  I went to the dentist on Monday, and three times I had to get out of the way of people walking directly toward me while staring at their cell phones.  While we were at Market place last Wednesday, Lois spotted an abandoned shopping cart in the store's parking lot that still had a full bag of groceries in it. Just how distracted have some people become?

    The people who feel blessed in any particular era of time are not people that God has singled out as individuals who were worthy of divine attention.  God's loving presence has always been everywhere and is equally distributed to everyone in our world.  That presence is not increased or decreased due to a person's worthiness.

    We creatures of faith are not special; we are just different.  Even agitated and aggressive personalities that confront us are a blessing.  They provide us with the opportunity to show mercy, to forgive, and to develop patience.  Our responding attitudes will communicate to them who we are just as they were sharing who they are with us.  

     Blessings come in different forms.  God knows that some of the givens of life are rungs in our ladder of growth.  Sometimes we have to fail to find out who we are.  Sometimes, like a baby bird, we have to fall before we learn to fly.  However, failures and being seduced by the fleeting pleasures of a particular moment can also be recognized as blessings that are offering us an opportunity to make course-corrections.  Often, this process is how we learn and mature.  Almost every experience can be understood as a blessing once we assign that label to all of them.

    This past week I was trying to find a bulb for the rear right turning signal of our car.  After several failed attempts to find one, I went to the small gas station in Flatts. The attendant did not have one but he came out from his office and made several calls to see if he could locate one for me.  He was unable to locate one.

    He said, "Let's see if the problem really is with the bulb." He plugged the bulb into the socket of the left turning signal and the bulb worked.  He said:

It looks like your problem is with a short circuit in your electrical harness that governs your right turning signal. Take your car to Weir-Enterprise. Those guys know how to fix anything. 

    Since I normally take my car there for repairs, I thanked him for his timely advice and handed him some money. He refused to take it.  He said:

I am here to serve the needs of our customers by selling gasoline and other items from our modest inventory. I do not accept money for my advice.  I tell you what -- Come back and see us when you need a fill up.

    The car has been repaired, but I could not get his attentive spirit out of my mind. Right away, his words and willingness to help me revealed the kind of man that he was.  We were total strangers yet he treated me with the courtesy and kindness that one might expect from a friend. This is how our spirits work. When we express loving energy in any form, it can be highly contagious.  This is what Jesus wanted to awaken in his listeners.

    One day a young man was stranded alongside the road.  His antique Model-T had stalled.  As he stared under the hood, he heard a car pulling up in back of him.  It was a black limousine.  An old man in a suit got out and said, "What's the problem, son?"  He told the older gentleman his problem. Without saying another word, the old guy was getting his hands oily and dirty while fooling with the carburetor. 

    He said, "Get in the car and crank her up and keep cranking until it starts."  The boy rolled his eyes with an attitude of "What does this old man know?" and yet he did what he was asked to do.  As he kept cranking, the engine eventually started.  The young man was mystified because he had been working on the problem for just under an hour. As he was thanking the old gentleman for his assistance, he asked him how he knew what to do.  To his shock and dismay, the old man said:

Son, I built that car.  My name is Henry Ford. In your frustration to start the car, you flooded it.  I stopped to see if I could be of help because I wanted to meet a man who still had one of my earlier cars on the road.

    This was a moment in his life where that young man felt blessed by meeting the owner of the Ford Motor Company.  He was at a place where he did not want to be at the right time to meet Mr. Ford himself. Think of all the opportunities we have to be a blessing to others.  We have to wake up from our preoccupied, distracted world to realize how we are blessed when we become a blessing to others.

    The Scroll of Deuteronomy became that compass for King Josiah and his people just as the teachings of Jesus have become for us. We have to personalize his teachings and allow them to define the spirit by which we live. Every day we may have opportunities to be a blessing to people right in front of us. 

    We do not need values and attitudes that are timeless to cause us to reminisce about the way life used to be. King Josiah wanted the scroll of Deuteronomy to inform his people with what many of them had forgotten. Perhaps if some of us have misplaced our understanding of being blessed or becoming a blessing to others, it is time that we get those memories out, dust them off, and use them to help others to have a blessed day.

We cannot be a blessing to others without also feeling blessed ourselves. We have to get our egos off the stage of our lives.  This will happen when we remember what Jesus taught, "The greatest one among you will humble himself and become a servant to all."  (Matthew 23:11f) The key to living a blessed life is following through by making this teaching visible every day.

     

CONGREGATIONAL PRAYER

Loving God, how often our spirits can lose their focus from the array of distractions that impact 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.  Empower us with the wisdom to realize what strength there is in patience and what depth of spirit there is in embracing others in spite of our differences.  Inspire us to enable others to become the people you created everyone to be.   Amen.    

 

PRAYER

Loving faithful God, our lives often reflect our being on a seesaw.  Guide us to stop thinking about our lives in terms of "good days" and "bad days."  When we take time to study our experiences, all of them have a message of guidance for us.

Thank you for helping us to discover our confidence to step into our life experiences prepared to wage peace instead of war, compassion instead of animosity, and friendship over our struggle to be right.  Thank you for teaching us why it is crucial to let go of concerns that we cannot solve.  Help us to open our eyes to see the symbols around us that acknowledge your presence.  You know what it is we need to learn.  And you know how blind and resistant we are to seeing and understanding your guidance when a particular direction is staring us in the face.

Help us to move beyond judging others.  Help us to remember that our judgments say more about us than about anything that we might think about others. When we encounter circumstances that we do not understand, inspire us to respond with attitudes that communicate how best to serve, how best to make a difference, and how best to redefine our discipleship. May our lives represent more of your presence and a little less of our own.  Inspire us to practice stillness, silence, and smiling.  Enable us to realize that the answers we seek to brighten our glow must arise from within us rather than from some external authority.  We pray these thoughts through the spirit of Jesus, who taught us to say when we pray . . .