Community Church Sermons

October 5, 2008

Pentecost 21

“Whose World Is It, Really?”

Matthew 21:33-46

This Sunday is one of those Sundays that looks a bit like Neyland Stadium on a football game day. Over here, people are tailgating. Over there, folks are lined up to watch the Vol Walk. And just over there, throngs are lined up to watch the Pride of the Southland Band march to the stadium playing “Rocky Top.” In other words, this is one of those days when a lot of stuff is happening all at once!

Today, we’re kicking off our Trails Through Tellico stewardship campaign. And we’re bringing emphasis to Mental Health Awareness Week and standing with many church families who advocate for the dignity and worth of family members and others who suffer with some form of mental illness. We’re passing out grocery bags today with a shopping list of food and personal items to help the Good Samaritan Center give a hand UP to people in need. And…it’s World Communion Sunday when – over the course of this weekend – Christians all over the planet will gather together at the Table of the Lord who binds us together as one.

And all that is not even to mention the worry we bring to worship today about what will happen with the economy, how we can help that struggling child of ours, how we will be prepared for the test at school, how we will navigate through that family problem, or whether we will ever feel better after that last chemotherapy treatment.

Life has a way of ganging up on us and coming at us all at once! You cannot regulate reality.

So I’ve been pondering what of all that is going on today can pull us together and provide a center from which we can deal with the many issues we face at this moment. I think our Gospel text from Matthew 21 can help, but first, let me tell you about some friends of our son Peter.

These friends have family roots that go back to Ireland. They still own land there. Every few years they fly back to Ireland to visit relatives and check on things at the homestead. Needless to say, they were quite surprised on their last visit to discover that their next door neighbor had taken over a pretty good chunk of their property and had fenced it into his land! When they confronted him about this incursion into what rightfully belongs to them, he cited some law that says if a property is abandoned for so many years, anyone can squat on it and take it over. They, he claimed, had not shown up for five years (or whatever the time requirement is), and he, therefore, was taking the land for himself!

Well, this set off a big argument, and our son’s friends had to scramble to produce evidence that they had indeed shown up from time to time. They produced plane tickets, utility bills, tax rolls, church attendance records, and even the testimony of a few not-so-sober souls from the local pub who swore they had seen them there – thousands of times!

I’m not sure the controversy has been resolved even to this day. I think they’re still fighting over whose land IS IT, anyway?

That debate is not limited to these two families either. It is at the very center of the tensions in the Middle East where one side sings, “This land is mine, God gave this land to me!” And all the while the other side sings, “This land is MINE, God gave this land to ME!”

Whose land IS it, anyway?

This question is at the center of the debate on immigration reform in our country that – by the way – will be addressed at our next At The Corner of Church and Main St. program later this month.

Whose land IS it, anyway?

And it is a question we live with right here along the shores of Tellico Lake where some say the land was unjustly taken from those who owned it before us, and others say that those who owned it before us took it unjustly from the Cherokee people, and there are others who think that is all past history and are more attentive to the present daily fight with those pesky gaggles of geese who seem to think this land is THEIR land!

Whose land IS it, anyway?

In today’s Gospel reading, a certain landowner plants a vineyard and then rents it out to some tenants whose contract calls for them to gather the grapes at harvest, press them down, and transform them into a nice Columbia Crest Grand Estates Cabernet Sauvignon. They’ll get to keep some of the good stuff for themselves as compensation, and the landowner will get his share, too.

But when harvest season comes and the landowner sends his people to collect his share, the tenants refuse. They beat and kill the landowner’s servants. Finally, the landowner sends his own son, and they kill him, too.

So Jesus asks the question, “When the landowner himself comes, what do you suppose he’ll do to these tenants?”

Let’s just say, it will NOT be a happy outcome for them!

Now there’s all sorts of symbolism in this parable. We can see in it God, and the prophets God sent, and Jesus the son, and the crucifixion. But along with all that Christian imagery is a crucial life-changing question.

Whose land IS it, anyway? And making that query a little larger, it would be good to ask the more important question: “Whose WORLD is it, really?”

I believe that question is a central question of faith. “WHOSE world IS it, really?”

Is it yours? Did you make it? Did you bring it with you when you came into life, and can you take it with you when you leave?

Whose world IS it, really?

A long time ago, a Hebrew poet penned a beautiful song that goes like this: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof; the world and all that dwell therein!”(Psalm 24:1)

The world is the LORD’S!

And discovering this great Truth of “whose world is it anyway?” can have a tremendous impact upon how you and I experience life.

For one thing, anchoring our lives in God’s ownership of the world takes away our need to try to be the general managers of the universe! If all of life truly does belong to God, then we don’t have to frustrate ourselves trying to control it. And even more importantly, we can learn that God is a good God to Whom we can trust our lives.

Will Willimon says that the most useless building in any community is the local hospital. Isn’t that an interesting thing to say?! He says that one-hundred percent of the people who go to hospitals will die – eventually! As Will puts it, “Nobody gets out of here alive.”

That’s why it’s important, even while we tend to our health issues and seek the wellness of our bodies and minds, that we also pay attention to our relationship with God. There will come a day when there will be no more treatments to be offered, no more medicine that will help, no more therapy that will work. There will be a day when the idea of human control over life will be seen for the deception it truly is, and when human hands can no longer be effective in providing us life.

But whose LIFE is it, really?

“The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world and all that dwell therein.”

Our lives are in God’s hands – past, present and future. And even when we come to the end of our days on earth, our lives will be held in the hands of a God who loves us.

True inner peace only comes when you discover that it’s not all up to you, and it’s not all up to your doctor, and it’s not all up to your financial advisor, and it’s not all up to Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke, and it’s not all up to the candidate for President you support whose election you believe will be like the second coming of Jesus and the dawning of the kingdom of God!.

God holds your life, and it is in coming to know and serve this God that you can discover how to live through and face all the things life throws at you - especially during these days of great economic uncertainty. Most of us here today – though we have been financially blessed - did not grow up in wealth. We can remember when times were lean and the future was uncertain. In some cases, we did not know where our next meal was coming from. Sandy and I remember times when all we could afford to feed our kids was Kraft Macaroni and Cheese – you know, the kind that comes 10 boxes for about a dollar! Fortunately, our kids loved it and thought it was a delicacy!

You know what I’m saying. We’ve all lived in the land of lean. But God brought us through. God has always brought us through the challenges that have confronted us. And God will help us find our way through these times, too.

A second thing we can discover when we take hold of the truth that “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world and all who dwell therein” is that there is no such thing as “me and God”. The truth of the Gospel is that there is only “us and God.” We are inextricably bound to every other human being on the planet. We need each other.

This is why it is so important that some members of our church are holding before us today the reality of mental illness. About 1 in 5 of us suffers with one form or another of mental illness, and of those, nearly half are homeless. They are living on the streets because there is so little funding for mental health infrastructure, and because the stigma of the disease is still so great that many families, friends and employers just can’t deal with it. But I want to call your attention to the families in our church and what they are doing. They are saying, “That young man who has bipolar disorder is OUR son, and we love him” – “That young woman suffering with paranoid schizophrenia is OUR daughter and we love her” – “That depressed person over there is OUR grandfather, and we love him” – “That teenager who took his own life is OUR grandson – and we love him!” And these families are not only standing up for the dignity and worth of their mentally ill family members, they are advocating for better funding of research and services for the mentally ill, and – I think, most importantly – are holding out a welcoming loving hand to you and me and others who are facing the same kinds of challenges and saying, “We will stand with you!!”.

To believe that “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world and ALL WHO DWELL THEREIN” is to live with an ever deepening appreciation for how God has connected us together – no matter who, no matter where, no matter what. And with that appreciation must come a COMMITMENT to reach across the divide to join hands with those who need our help.

And then a final thought. As we gather together with other Christians on World Communion Sunday, we need to learn that we do not own our faith! Those with whom we break the bread and drink the cup see, hear and experience the Christian Faith differently than we do. The largest group of Christians in the world today are Roman Catholics. The fastest growing segment of the church today is Pentecostalism. The dynamic center of Christianity today is not here in the West, but in the third world, mostly in Africa, and South America. Were we to think that we own this faith and that our way of worship, our way of doing church, our way of conducting mission is the one true way, we would be shocked to find most Christians disagreeing with us.

And if we would dare look at the religious world as a whole, we would discover that while Christianity is the largest single faith group in the world, it accounts for only one-third of the religious population. Two-thirds of the world’s people of faith are non-Christians.

The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world and all who dwell therein.”

To believe that God’s “got the whole world in His hands” calls us to open our own hands and extend our friendship to people of faith whoever, whatever, and wherever they may be. My experience with trying to live as inclusively as the love of God is the constant discovery that we have much more in common with others than we have differences, and that it is possible for people of different religious backgrounds to make the world a better place if we can let God be in charge of salvation and set ourselves free to do what Jesus asked us to do – to love our neighbors as ourselves.

So here we are at the table of the Lord!

We are with the One who holds our lives, the One who connects us together, the One who calls us to join in loving service to the world.

Come and commit your life to this loving God! Eat God’s bread! Drink God’s wine! Join hands with God’s people!

For “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world and all who dwell therein!”

Whose world is it, really?

You know Whose world it is!