Community Church Sermons

Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost, Year B - November 19, 2000

"Thankfully Free"

Hebrews 10:11-14

On behalf of Steve Nash, Bob Puckett, Pat Provart, Linda Collins, Pat Ouderkirk, Diana Nash, Joyce Peterson, Art Sobb, Roy Stiles, Gene Wessel - and all those who have the privilege of serving you - I want to extend to you and your family our best wishes for a warm and joyous Thanksgiving holiday. As we number our own blessings, we count you as among the very best. And we give heartfelt thanks to God for the joy of serving you. So Happy Thanksgiving!

This will be the first Thanksgiving that Sandy, Bethany and I will be away from our larger family. As we gather for dinner on Thursday, I'm sure we'll be mindful of how much we miss being with them there in New England.

In Massachusetts, for instance, Thanksgiving Day is the day of the big high school football rivalries. We will miss bundling up in all our cold weather gear to face the biting wind as our kids' former high school team battles it out on the frozen gridiron, only to lose again. Since we arrived in the area in 1989, the Mountaineers have won maybe five games, and so it's sort of a tradition to watch them get killed every year on Thanksgiving. And for those of us whose kids used to get wiped out, it's sort of neat to meet and give comfort to parents whose kids are just now going through the experience. And we pledge to meet each other again next year to share the tradition with yet another generation of parents whose kids will also be vanquished. Ah, tradition!

I, for one, will also miss running directly from the game to Greendale Peoples' Community Church where I always sneak into the very back row of the Chapel where a Thanksgiving service is held each year. For ministers, you know, sitting in the back row is a lot different than sitting in the chancel. Back there, you get to see all sorts of those little human things that you can't see from the front. At last year's service at Greendale Peoples', I saw the neatest thing from my perch in the back row. Somebody's hearing aid began to whistle. And seventy-five people went for their ears, trying to fix it! Ah, tradition!

And then the family Thanksgiving dinner that starts out with everyone being mindful of the sainted lives of those no longer with us, and of the amazing gifts God has poured into our family. But this almost liturgical beginning soon gives way to kids arguing about who gets to sit at the "big" table and who has to sit at the "kids'" table. And invariably, one of the main dishes - usually the turkey - is not quite ready at serving time, and the guys begin to grouse because they're going to miss the kickoff of the NFL game. And - almost without fail - some poor soul who has no sense at all will bring up some subject like - oh, the recounts in Florida – and maybe make some crack about how Palm Beach County must be the reason there's a duh in Flori-duh - and all heck breaks loose. Ah, tradition!

Now, I mention all this to you not to take away from the truly wonderful traditions of the holiday, but to underscore the fact that even beautiful things can have an ugly side to them. And there is, even within the Thanksgiving story, such a dichotomy that can teach us much.

My faith tradition goes back to those Pilgrim people who arrived on these shores aboard the Mayflower. Their incredible story of facing the tragedy of the first winter in the New World, without adequate housing and food, is a story of tremendous faith and courage. More than half the company died. No family was spared the loss of a husband, or mother, or child. Things got so bad that winter that they had to ration the corn - five kernels of corn per person per day. Today, in New England, many Thanksgiving meals begin with empty plates on the table, and placed upon them, a circle of five kernels of corn. So that we, in our abundance, will never forget from whence we came.

When you ask children why the Pilgrims and other early European settlers came to these shores, they will tell you they came to be free. And when pressed, the children will tell you, that most of these daring souls came to find freedom of religion. And that is largely true. America's roots run very deep into the soil of faith. It’s our tradition.

But what we sometimes forget is that even freedom of religion has an underside. You see, our American forbears came here not only to establish a freedom of religion, but also to achieve a freedom from religion. The Pilgrims, you will remember, were more accurately called Separatists, having found it intolerable to remain within an English church that they felt had replaced the authority of God with the rule of a king. Baptists, also, came to colonial America to get away from the ugly side of religion. Why, at the heart of being Baptist is the notion that each individual and each local church has the freedom to interpret Scripture out of their own Spirit-led conscience. The Baptists refused to accept creeds and doctrinal statements of all kinds, which were routinely imposed by the other denominations. And this is the tension you read about in the papers even today among our Southern Baptist friends, some of whom now want to impose statements of faith and practice, and others who want to remain free.

When you take from the tree of American tradition the leaf called freedom of religion, and turn it over, there on the other side, is the freedom from religion. Freedom from religion turned ugly.

It doesn't take a genius to look out over the world and see the terrible harm religious people have caused in the name of religion. In the name of religion, worshipers of Baal sacrificed their children. In the name of religion, Christians conducted the murderous crusades. In the name of religion, Hindus ignore the needs of the poor underclasses. In the name of religion, Israelis and Palestinians kill each other in the streets of the land each calls "holy".

This is why it's so important for those of us who follow Christ to be mindful that we are called from that kind of religion that restricts and destroys people. And we are called to a kind of religion that sets people free. That’s what today's reading from the book of Hebrews is all about.

There was the New Testament church, growing in leaps and bounds as people responded to the freedom of the Gospel. At first, most of the believers were Jewish folks, and they soon found themselves caught between their old religion and this newfound faith. In the old traditional ways of doing things, sacrifices for sin had to be offered over and over and over again. The only way to be free from your mistakes, your failures, your sins was to go to the Temple and offer the appropriate sacrifice. I daresay, a person like me could spend their whole life making sacrifices!

But early Christian leaders saw something very destructive in this system of repeated sacrifices. The sacrificial system kept people bound to the past. Though promised freedom, the people could never really become free because, as human beings, they continued to make mistakes. And so the early Christian church developed a new and wonderful teaching. A revolutionary teaching that enables people to get on with their lives.

In a nutshell, it goes like this: Jesus Christ made one sacrifice to cover all sin for all time. So come and follow Christ ,trust God for today, and leave the past behind.

I was sitting with a family one night in an intensive care waiting room. Sometime after midnight, when all the other family members were dozing, the sister of the woman who was dying came over and sat by me. I could tell she was distressed about her sister's situation. But as we quietly talked in the darkness, it became apparent it was much more than that.

Betty had lost God. She wanted me to pray for her dying sister because she could not pray. I asked her why. She said she'd done some pretty bad things in her life. She'd been running away from God for a long, long time. "God would never listen to me," Betty said.

And as I listened to Betty talk, it became clear to me that, more than anything in the world, she wanted and needed to be close to God in this moment of her sister's dying. But what was keeping her from the very thing she needed - was the past for which she was still offering emotional and psychological sacrifices, yet from which she still was not free.

Some of us here today are still sacrificing to the mistakes of our past. Parents who blame themselves for the misfortunes and sometimes poor choices of their children. People who are still tied to the bitterness and anger of a divorce that happened years ago. Men who never lived up to their father's expectations and are daily reminded of their failure. Women who poured out their lives for husbands and children, only to be rejected, and who wonder even today if they have any worth at all. People who made a mistake a long, long time ago, but who can’t get out from underneath it, even though it has cost them dearly.

Some of us are still angry about hurts inflicted in the past, and now we inflict that hurt on others as if we think it will bring us healing. Others of us live in deep prisons of resentment toward folks who've let us down, and we can't even think of those people without going back to the altar where we sacrificially remember the wound.

Most of us are chained, in one way or another, to the past. But Jesus Christ offers us a revolutionary gift. The gift of being set free from the past! Listen to what Hebrews says of those who place their trust in Christ as the once-for-all sacrifice for every sin: Where these sins have been forgiven, there is no longer any need for sacrifice for sin.

Can you hear the good news? There is no longer need for sacrifice. You can stop worshiping at the altar of yesterday. You can begin to leave the past behind. You are free in Christ to make a new beginning!

And on this week when we celebrate the blessings we have received, I want to hold before you the blessing of freedom in Christ!

Where in your life do you need to let go of the past? Where in your life do you need to make new beginnings?

I invite you this morning, to give your past mistakes to Christ. Ask him to forgive you once and for all. And ask Jesus to help you begin finding your way out of the past and into the freedom of today. In love, he offers you new beginnings! Through Christ, we are thankfully free!