Abba

                     Luke 15: 20-23, Galatians 3: 29-4: 7

 

 

          Behind my house, the air handler for the cooling system sits on a concrete slab. If you look closely at that slab, you will see handprints, the handprints of my children. If you were to look behind the door to my personal office, you would find photocopies of little hands and pictures of my children when they were very young. Same thing on our refrigerator. These places are a chronology of love moments and remembrances in my life as a father.

                    These days, my children are grown. They come home occasionally. They call or skype or email. Every time they contact me, I have to concentrate on letting them be who they are. You see, for me, they are not just who they are…they are also who they were. It may be a 33 year old on the phone, but for me, he is also 23 and 13 and even 3. In some mysterious way, I see each child in a continuum over the broadband of time. No matter how deep the voice or how experienced they come across, I see them as toddlers and children and adolescents even as they talk to me as adults. I find myself littered with all that history, even in the middle of a contemporary conversation.

          I think God sees us that way. In the gospel of Luke, the prodigal son returns home, having squandered his inheritance on loose living. He looks a wreck. But when his father sees him, even from afar, he doesn’t wait for the explanations or the apologies. He calls for the best clothing and a ring and shoes and orders not a meal, but a feast! For the loving father looks up that road and sees not a problem or a beggar, but his son. His eyes may identify the change in appearance, but the eyes of his heart see someone different, and he cries out in love and acceptance. That’s the way God sees us. He looks beyond the sin to see that bond between him and us. He sees us as he made us and as we can be, not just as who we are. God sees not only the imperfection of what stands before him, but also the perfection of his creation; he sees his children.

          My favorite word in all this beautiful language is Daddy. When my son grew up, he shortened it to Dad. Curiously, all three daughters still say Daddy. I love to hear it. It’s a term of endearment, of love. It’s who I am to them. Paul talked about this same feeling with the people of the Galatian church. He reminded them that God sent his only son Jesus to redeem us, so that we could be adopted as God’s own children. Adoption then and adoption now carry the same identifying marks. Once you are adopted, you are part of the family. You are the same as blood kin.

Thanks to Jesus, that’s the relationship available to us with God. We who believe now stand beside Jesus himself as the family of God, his adopted sons and daughters. So much does God love us that, in the words of Paul, he “sent us the Spirit of his Son into our hearts.” That’s right! Believe it. The Spirit of God’s Son lives within our hearts.

          When you think about your relationship with your father, or your relationship with your child or children, that’s not so hard to believe, is it? Don’t we fathers send our spirit into our children? Don’t we sons and daughters carry the seeds of our fathers’ love wherever we go?

          It’s the same with Jesus. God sent his Spirit into us. It goes with us, advises us, cares for us. We are adopted. We are family! We are full heirs to our Father’s kingdom. Paul thought it so loving, so endearing, that he compared the relationship to the sweetness one feels when calling out to Daddy, for that is what “Abba” means in Aramaic.

How long does it take for you to love your child? For me, it was love at first sight not once, but four times. I always marveled that my heart could grow to accommodate more children. I first thought that I would have to reclaim a little bit of my heart for each child, but that’s not the way it works. Your heart just grows. There is no limit. It grows to surround each child we are given. But even that is nothing compared to God. He loved us before we were ever even a thought in the minds of our earthly fathers.

          Yes, it is wonderful being a father. We have been given that gift, that privilege, by God as part of the relational revelation that teaches us about the kingdom of God and our relationship with our heavenly Father. We are fathers, mothers, sons, daughters. Each relationship carries with it a very personal stamp, a footprint that teaches us about love and life and family. It also teaches us about God.

Perhaps the greatest feeling of all is the knowledge that we too, at every age, are still defined by God as children. We who believe are invited to come close, to let down our defenses, to call him Abba…daddy.  He is there. He is always there. And he is our Father, today, tomorrow…and forever.

Revived

                                          I Kings 17: 8-24

 

 

          Elijah was one of the great prophets of Israel. He ranks right up there with Moses and Samuel as one of the leaders of true, uncompromising worship of God.  Like Isaiah and later John the Baptist, he stood out in a crowd. Messengers to King Ahaziah described Elijah as a hairy man who wore a leather girdle. He didn’t dress conventionally and he didn’t act conventionally. And if you were Ahab or Jezebel, he was the most foul, “in your face”, bully of a prophet that one could conjure up. His confrontation with King Ahab and the prophets of Baal is the stuff of legend.

          At the time of Elijah, it was almost nine hundred years before the coming of Christ. Ahab took the throne of Israel. He was the seventh in a long line of weak or bad kings and he was the worst yet. It was still about a century and a half before the fall of the Northern Kingdom. Ahab married Jezebel, the daughter of a priest of Baal from the province of Sidon.  Jezebel was an avid Baal worshiper, and it was this stage onto which a rugged individual from the little town of Tishbe was thrust upon the stage of Israel’s history.  His name was Elijah. King Ahab called him the troubler of Israel.

          Tishbe is a town about which we know practically nothing. Elijah is the only character in the Bible who is cited as being from Tishbe. It was in upper Galilee near the area we know as Gilead on the west side of the Jordan River. What all that means to us is that Elijah was a country boy.  He came from a no name town and he had no family tree. If you’ve done much reading in the Old Testament, you know that is unusual.  In fact, even the word Tishbe means sojourner or stranger. So here is a stranger from a strange town. There is nothing to prepare us for this classic confrontation between the country boy from Tishbe and the King sitting on the throne in Jerusalem and married to the daughter of a Baal priest.

          Elijah’s ministry as God’s prophet was astounding. For instance, Elijah is one of only two people in the Bible who did not die, Enoch being the other. But before God came and gathered Elijah to heaven in a chariot of fire, before Elijah called upon the 450 prophets of Baal to compete with God at Mt. Carmel, even before Elijah stood in the presence of King Ahab, totally vulnerable, squared off against Ahab, calling him not only the real troubler of Israel, but also the king who abandoned the Lord’s commandments… before all that confrontation and witness… Elijah had some testing to do. And that is the subject of today’s story.

          Have you ever had your faith tested? Of course you have, even if nothing comes immediately to mind. Maybe you have had financial setbacks, personal or family health problems, experienced disloyalty from someone close. Maybe you have gotten far enough from who you thought you were that you have doubted your faith or even God himself. If you have been in some of those valleys and you are sitting here, then you have survived a test of faith. Maybe it was your fallen nature that you had to overcome. Maybe it was Satan picking you out of the crowd and deciding to tempt you in exactly the right way at exactly the right time.  Or maybe, it was God. Maybe it was God loving you enough to harden you for the battles ahead.

Certainly in our story today from I Kings, we find not one, but arguably two, ordinary people called upon to exhibit extraordinary faith.

          After Elijah announces the coming of a drought to King Ahab, he is forced to flee for his own safety. For a while, he lives by a brook and is fed by ravens, but the brook dries up. Then God sends Elijah to a town named Zarephath. It wasn’t that far of a journey, but what an insane destination! The town was in Sidon, the home of Queen Jezebel and the epicenter of Baal worship. It was almost like hiding in plain view. Here was this character so oddly dressed that he stood out like a sore thumb and living in the belly of the whale which wanted to eat him. To make things even more incredible, he was sent to the home of a widow who was so poor, she was literally down to her last meal.

Elijah first asked her for water, then for bread. Her response? I have just enough for one more tiny meal for me and my son. I’m gathering enough sticks to make a fire and cook it, and then we can die of starvation. This is the plight of the woman that God selected to help Elijah. She has nothing! Bear in mind that this woman was not even Jewish. She lived in Sidon, a Baal-worshipping community, although apparently she thought that Elijah just might be a man of God.

Elijah promises the woman that she will be rewarded and she decides to trust him. But hey, what has she got to lose? She’s down to her last meal anyway. So she does as Elijah asks and she is rewarded with food that doesn’t run out. Elijah has passed his first test by going to the lion’s den to hide from the lion, and the woman by offering up all that she has to a stranger. Each has passed a test of faith. Each is strengthened for what lies ahead.

Now comes the real test. The widow’s son is taken ill, deathly ill. The writer of Kings says that there was no breath left in him. The widow interprets this as payback from God for her past sins. And Elijah suddenly becomes everyman, from a dispirited Job to a doubting Thomas to a scared Simon Peter to you and me.  He is crying out to God, What are you doing! And Why!

That sort of thing happens to every Christian. We read the Bible. We come to church. We say our prayers. We try to live right. Things are getting along ok and then out of nowhere, we are slammed. We are in the pit and we are fighting for our spiritual lives. Why me, is the question that invariably forms on our lips.

One commentary I consulted said that Elijah had great confidence that God would perform another miracle. I don’t read it that way. I think Elijah was confused and probably angry. He cried out to God. He asked “have you brought calamity upon this widow with who I sojourn by killing her son?” Elijah is arguing with God, clueless as to why this is happening. But in spite of his anger and doubt, he stretched himself out across the limp body of that child and cried out again. Three times he did this, crying out for God to let life come into the boy again.

And God answered. “And the life of the child came into him again, and he revived.” Not only did the widow witness the one true God in action and have her faith rewarded, but so did Elijah. Elijah, just like us, wanted God to come through, but when he did all that he thought he was supposed to do and bad things happened anyway, Elijah was forced to cry out to God in faith.  There was literally nothing else that Elijah could do but cry out to God. And he passed God’s test, because that’s exactly what he did, not once, but until God acknowledged him. Three times or thirty times, they are the same. We cry out to God in faith. And life comes into us again. We are revived.

There is a true story told by one of the first evangelists to Russia in the days before the Berlin Wall came down. Freedom to worship was still against the law. Christians would meet secretly, usually in one another’s homes. One such group was gathered one evening when suddenly the door was thrown open violently. Three Russian soldiers burst in brandishing their rifles. One of them bellowed out that anyone who wasn’t a Christian could leave, but that anyone there to worship God must stay. After a tense moment, many of those gathered filed out. Only a few remained. One soldier closed the door and locked it. Then the three soldiers put away their rifles and sat down. They too were Christians. They explained that they only wanted to worship with true believers. Those remaining there that evening had passed a test of faith that would not be forgotten.

Like those brave Russian citizens, both the widow of Zarephath and Elijah had a test of faith to pass for God. That was God’s purpose all along. It wasn’t about the widow’s sins. It was about her faith getting legs. It was the same for Elijah. He too had to let go and let God. No matter how high we go, how far we travel, there may still come that time when God will test us, not to hurt us but to make us strong.

The thing is, constantly walking with God day in and day out is much harder than being martyred for the cause. Seldom will our testing be so clean as a matter of life and death. More often, it comes in the form of bending the rules or looking the other way. It may come in the profound silence of overlooking ugliness or sin in the name of not getting involved. It could be in the refusal to dirty our hands with someone obnoxious or loud. In each of those small tests lies the way to God…or the way to hell. Each time we let our Christian principles be compromised, we lose a little more of that precious commodity we call life. We lose our Christian witness and become the walking dead of God’s people.

But each time we stand up, lend a hand, say no…cry out to the Lord, it is then that our life comes back into us again. We practice our faith a step at a time, a day at a time. We learn to trust, even if we have to be tested to absorb God’s lesson. It is then that we have not only breath, but voice. It is then…that we too, are…revived!