Second Corinthians 5:20b - 6:10 Feb 25, 2009

So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. As we work together with him, we urge you also not to accept the grace of God in vain. For he says, "At an acceptable time I have listened to you, and on a day of salvation I have helped you." See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation! We are putting no obstacle in anyone's way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry, but as servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see - we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.

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Last Sunday, while in Florida on vacation, Pam and I went for worship to Burnt Store Presbyterian, the church Pam's parents attend. After the service, we joined a bible study class and ended up having a wonderful discussion. The passage for the day was the one from Luke that says if we want to be true followers of Jesus, we have to give up everything we own and put him before all the other relationships in our lives. Luke actually has Jesus saying, "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple." Personally, I've always felt that word "hate" just had to be a misprint. It seems so out of keeping with the rest of Jesus' ministry. What sense does it make for him to tell us to love our enemies, then turn around and say we should hate our parents? Something about that just doesn't click. One guy in the class though, a man named Stewart, kept insisting we shouldn't simply dismiss the words of the Bible. If Jesus used the word hate, he felt, he must have had a good reason.

Now clearly, Stewart had a more conservative approach to the scriptures than I do. He seemed pretty intent on at least trying to take the passage literally, which is something those of us in the "liberal" tradition don't do very often. I can't honestly see Jesus wanting us to hate anyone, literally or otherwise. Still, I came away feeling that Stewart had a point. We really shouldn't casually dismiss what we find in the Bible. Yet we often do. In our tradition, when something in the Bible doesn't make sense to us, most of us don't find it too hard to simply put it aside. The problem with that is, we all too easily end up with a faith that doesn't challenge us, that doesn't call anything we do into question, that doesn't cost us much of anything, and is therefore not really worth much of anything.

By contrast, Paul's ministry cost him a great deal: "afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger...." Can you imagine being so utterly convinced of the preciousness of Jesus and his ministry, that you would willingly accept these kinds of consequences? I find it very hard to imagine. My own call to ministry has never been so costly. I've never lived in a time when proclaiming the good news was punishable by death. None of us have. I've served churches in some difficult situations, but nothing that put my life on the line, nothing that put me in prison or even made me miss a meal. Alright, I have had a few sleepless nights. The bottom line though, is that faithfulness cost Paul a great deal, and most of the time, it costs us very little.

It isn't that Jesus wants us to hate our parents, or our own lives. I don't believe that. Neither do I believe he wants us to go looking for afflictions, hardships, calamities and beatings just to prove our faithfulness or see how much we can endure. Life is hard enough without inviting trouble. But ... don't we have to wonder just how faithful we're really being if our Christianity never makes us even the least bit uncomfortable?

I find Ash Wednesday a hard service to preach, for that very reason. It isn't comfortable. We simply can't faithfully hear the voice of Jesus rising out of the gospels without coming to understand that what he wants from us is change, and change is often the last thing we want for ourselves. He wants us to change our beliefs, our attitudes, our behaviors. He wants us to change whatever it is we may be doing that isn't healthy, that isn't honest, that isn't loving and forgiving; forgiving both of ourselves and of the others in our lives we may be struggling with. He wants us to honestly face up to where we are in relation to where we are called to be. And once we have genuinely seen ourselves in this light, he wants us to open up to the reshaping grace of God's Holy Spirit. The process isn't likely to involve afflictions, hardships, calamities and beatings - probably - but it absolutely will involve change.

Something like this is at the heart of Ash Wednesday. Tonight's service is one of penitence, which is to say it calls us to repentance. Repentance is, first, an acknowledgment of those ways in which we fall short of God's grace. Then, it is an act, literally, of turning around, of going in a new direction, of abandoning all those things we use to keep God at arm's length, in favor of "Just a closer walk with Thee."

The great irony of Ash Wednesday is, that for all we resist this "coming to terms with ourselves," in truth, what we are resisting is nothing more nor less than our own best interests. The change we are asked to make, the repentance we are asked to offer, is nothing more nor less than God's loving encouragement to become what we were always meant to be.

Amen