"Reading of the Word"
Sermon Transcript for June 19, 2005
By Rev. David Hamilton
Good morning! It’s such a privilege to be back here at Grace. I think it was about a little over three years ago the last time I was here. And I want to begin by thanking you. I know in the last number of weeks my name has been on the prayer list as I have just been recovering from pneumonia and your prayers are part of the reason I am standing here today. So thank you all very much. What a privilege to be here this day when we are celebrating fathers. And I’m here with my family and some of us are in route to a mission trip in Egypt. But we’ve planned a family reunion over these last few days; and so I am very honored to be here with my Dad and Mom, Keith and Marilyn. Maybe you guys can like just wave if you are not too embarrassed to acknowledge that you are responsible for my being here. I thought it’s interesting that we celebrate Father’s Days and Mother’s Days separately. I think that must be a marketing ploy by Hallmark Cards because you really can’t have one without the other. You know, it’s kind of a partnership thing isn’t it? I’m also privileged to have my brother and my sister-in-law, Tim and Grace; my sister, Beth; my nephew, Aaron; my wife, Christine; and my four children, Jonathan, Timothy, Sarah, and Matthew. This next week Christine, Matthew and I will travel to Cairo where we will be spending the next three weeks training 120 some mission leaders from 37 nations working in North Africa, the Middle East, and among Arabic and Turkish peoples sharing their love of Jesus. So it is quite a privilege to be able to be here in the Midwest, in Franklin, with you in route to that.
Many of you have a red letter Bible, right? Or you’ve seen one where the words of Jesus and the Gospels are in red letters. Well, I have on my computer a Bible unlike one in which many of you have. It is a blue, black, and red-letter Bible. And I’m currently using the NRSV in that translation. And what it is, the red letters are the words of Jesus; the black letters are the words of the evangelists, the narrator, the gospel writer; and the blue letters are the words of all the other speakers—Peter or James, John, a woman in the crowd, a leper, a blind man, a Pharisee. And as you see this in the various different colors it becomes very dramatic. You can almost imagine the different voices and the different inflections as people encountered each other. As I have been going through the book of Luke the last several weeks, I was struck very much with looking at where the emphasis was in that book. And, you see, in Luke there are 185 red sections—places where Jesus speaks. There are 338 black sections where the narrator, the gospel writer sets the tone and explains what’s going on. And there are 155 of the blue sections where different ones interact with Jesus.
And when I began I noticed as I went through this that the biggest red section, the biggest black section, and the biggest blue section, the longest intervention of any of those were passages that had to do with fatherhood. So I just want to highlight those three passages today out of the Gospel of Luke. And I want our attention to be drawn to these words that we might learn more of the ways of God. I’m going to start with the blue section. The longest passage when others speak is that of Zechariah. As you remember he is an elderly man who is a Levite, who has served the Lord with his wife, Elizabeth. Longing to be a father, but that was a dream that had never yet occurred. And at the very end of his life, a very unexpected thing occurs. He is visited by an angel as he is ministering to God who says that he is going to have a son. He does not believe this. This is the most ridiculous thing he has heard. And so he spends the next nine months in silence. When Elizabeth gives birth to John, eight days later they go to Jerusalem to consecrate him, to circumcise him, to name him. It was their Jewish equivalent of what we experienced today at the baptismal font. And as they were establishing their family and God, this is a day of beginning, this is a day of dedication, a day of giving of ourselves and identifying ourselves as a part of the people of God, all the friends and neighbors said, “Well you should name the baby Zechariah. That would have been the expected thing. And Elizabeth said, “No, he’s going to be named John.” When they insisted, she gave a tablet to Zechariah and he wrote, “His name is John.” And the moment people read that, his mouth was open and he began to speak. And his first words were words of praise. “Blessed be the Lord,” it begins in English. In Latin it begins with “Benedictus”. And this is the way this wonderful psalm of praises known within the church tradition.
And so in Luke, Chapter 1, Versus 68-79, you have this long declaration of Zechariah praising God. And he praises him for all that He has done in their family history. He goes back and remembers the ancestors and the prophets. He speaks of David. He speaks of Abraham. And, you know, you have to understand that God is always at work in families. God designed families. And he’s in that process. We can think of that family line, we have all of their histories here. And it’s not all glorious. It’s not all perfect. There is dysfunction there in the Old Testament. But God is still at work. He’s involved and caring and loving and shaping because families are a place of identity, a place of value, where values are shaped, a place where purpose is forged. And so Zechariah praises God for this.
And in the process, one of the things he says in the first part of this worship is he thanks God for the way he began this family identity with Abraham. He even calls to God, “The oath that you swore to our ancestor Abraham.” He says this in Verse 73. And that’s a reflection back into Genesis 22 where God appeared to Abraham after Abraham had taken his son Isaac and offered him up on the mountain. God intervened and God said this, “By myself I have sworn,” said the Lord. “Because you have done this and you have not withheld your son, your only son, I will indeed bless you.” And we know, we can fast forward several millennia that on that same hill centuries later God would offer up His only Son to bless all of us.
And I think what God was so pleased about in Abraham was that He saw Abraham run with like love, with like commitment, with like compassion. And so he was able to bless him and say, “Because of your selflessness, because of your willingness to obey me, your willingness to identify with me, I will want to bring a blessing upon you.” Fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters—it is as we gather today and as we identify with the Father’s ways that we experience the blessing of God for our lives and our families.
And then Zechariah turns and he focuses on the child. And he’s got a new child; one he called “Prophet of the Most High”. He begins declaring destiny and purpose and hope over John, his son. He prophesied that a dearth among high would break upon us. And, of course, that’s an echo of Malachi—the last few versus of the Old Testament that began those long years of silence. I’m sure during his nine months of silence he would have reflected on what has God been saying during that time? And those last words of Malachi was a promise that the Son of righteousness would rise with healing in the wings and God would turn the hearts of parents to their children and of children to their parents. And God comes to restore family.
So we see this celebration of family, a celebration of God’s purposes. Let’s go from the blue letters to the black letters. The longest section where the narrator speaks without others intervening is the last part of Luke, Chapter 3 and the opening verses of Luke, Chapter 4. And it says this, “Jesus was about 30 years old when He began His work. And He was the son, so was thought, of Joseph and son of, and then son of, and son of”, and a lots of these names are difficult to pronounce. But about 77 names later he finally comes to, “son of Adam, son of God.” And he goes through this list of genealogy. When most of us reach that we fast-forward and skip ahead because we don’t know a lot about those intervening people. But again we see the value of family; the value of belonging, of having a past and having a future. This genealogy is unique. There is another genealogy in Matthew but there is quite a bit of variety in it. In Luke’s genealogy, it begins with Jesus and works his way backward. And Matthew begins with Abraham and David and works their way forward. And Luke goes all the way back to Adam, to the foundation of humanity. And Matthew goes back to Abraham, to the foundation of the people of Israel. In Matthew the look is forward, it is always thinking, “Okay, the next this is the next son, the next son, the next son.” In Luke it’s looking backward remembering the last father, the last father, the last father. And though they are both unique in their presentations, you get the sense of identity and belonging. Ultimately Jesus is the Son of Adam, the Son of God, the One who is identified with all of us in our humanity and the only One who reflects God in the fullness of His power.
Now, the amazing thing is that right after this long declaration of genealogy in Chapter 3, you’ve got to remember that in original manuscripts, there wasn’t a chapter break, the next thing it says after son of Adam, son of God, it says, “Jesus full of the Spirit returned from the Jordan was led by the Holy Spirit to the wilderness.” And it introduces the time of His temptation. And so it’s just been said, the son of Adam, the son of God, He goes into the desert for this time of temptation and the first words out of the devils mouth are what? “If”, if what? “If you are the Son of God…” Questioning the identity, questioning the heritage, questioning the purpose, questioning who He was trying to whack into the core of His being. And Jesus knew who His Father was. Jesus knew His sense of identity. He was able to confront temptation because of the security of intimacy, because of the closeness of relationship that He had with Father and family, with God and the people of God. The enemy would like to come and challenge us in our lives and question our relationship, our intimacy, with God. “If you are the son, if you are the daughter of God..” And our response must be like Jesus’, “Yes, because He first loved us; Yes, because of His grace; Yes, because of what He has done for us in Calvary we are, by the grace of God, who we have been made to be.”
So we’ve looked at the longest blue passage and the longest black passage, that’s two out of three. We’re doing okay on time. Now we are looking at the longest red passage—Jesus. Jesus speaks in the longest portion that He has in the gospel of Luke is found in Chapter 15. You find three parables in this chapter. All of them are unique to Luke—only found in this one version of the gospels. The longest one is the last one but we often call it the Parable of the Prodigal Son. I prefer to call it the Parable of the Lost Son because it is preceded by the Parable of the Lost Sheep and the Parable of the Lost Coin and then the Parable of the Lost Son. And in these three stories are really one in the same. They are three different images of who God is.
Now in the Parable of the Lost Son, God is portrayed as the father eagerly awaiting the return of this unwise and foolish son who has taken his inheritance and spent it in careless ways for things that do not last. And the father is eagerly awaiting. Well, this same God image is reflected in the shepherd who goes out hunting the sheep or in the woman, the homemaker who is sweeping her house looking for the coin. Jesus has no difficulty in comparing God to this woman homemaker or this anxious father who is looking for his son because in a parable there is just one basic punch line. Well what is it in these three? —that God gets happy when sinners repent. God rejoices when we come back to the family, when we come back to the preferred circle of love that He gives to us.
It is so common for us to think of addressing God as Father. He taught His disciples to pray, “Our Father who art in heaven.” And we do that with great regularity. The first words that Jesus ever recorded to say when He was twelve years old and Mary and Joseph came looking for Him in the temple. He says, “Don’t you understand? Didn’t you know that I would be in my Father’s house doing my Father’s business?” The last words Jesus speaks, almost, to His disciples in the Upper Room and the resurrected Jesus are, “As the Father sent me, so I send you.” And there is an understanding throughout His life of His linkage with the Father and the purposes of the Father. But we have to realize that Jesus’ language was really shocking, revolutionary! In the whole Old Testament, God is referred to Father only 19 times. Jesus refers to God 189 times in the four Gospels. Ten times as much in His time! What is Jesus trying to communicate? Among the people of God, the Jewish people, they begin with a very vibrant faith. That faith had become more sterile, more traditional, and more distant as generations went on. And the way they usually referred to God, as “God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, He’s the God of our Fathers.” And Jesus came to be a man and God’s witness and he said, “No, God is much closer than some distant deity who is related to ancestors of old.”
You know, I’m the thirteen-generation from John Holland, the last member of the original Mayflower Company to come over to this country. And it’s not enough to know that John Holland loved God and his colleagues and came over and that he was their God. He must be my God; He must be your God. And so Jesus teaches us He is not just the God of the Fathers, He is more immediate, He is more intimate, He is more relational. He’s closer than that. He’s God, our Father. And so He invites us to intimacy. He invites us to fellowship.
I remember when I was 16 years old (that was 33 years ago), I was brought up in this home that loved the Lord and my mom and dad were missionaries. And we were on the way back to the mission field after a time of furlough in the U.S. I was 16 and though I had accepted Jesus as Savior at the age of 12 because that was the right thing to do, I really hadn’t taken pursuing Jesus very seriously in my life. I had gone through some difficult times in my second year of high school and I decided to rebel against God and against my parents. So we were in Mexico and I was suppose to be home at 11:00 p.m. and I arrived home at 2:00 a.m. hanging out with some friends doing things I shouldn’t have been doing. And I arrived home and I was going to tiptoe in--a prudent thing to do when you are three hours past curfew. I didn’t want to disturb the old folks (who were younger then than I am now). And I walked in and God had awakened my mom and she had awakened my dad and together they had been praying for the last several hours for me. And Dad had just walked into the kitchen and was walking back to the room to continue praying. As I opened the door he happened to be walking past the front door and I said, “Oh, I’m in trouble now.” And I braced myself internally for correction, but I was not prepared for what happened. He turned to me and approached me and he put his arms around me and he said, “David, I don’t know where you’ve been or what you’ve done but your mother and I want you to know that we love you and we accept you.” And the defenses I had against discipline and justice melted before unconditional love and mercy. This is the image of the Parable of the Prodigal Son. That night this story went through my head. And I burst into tears and I began sharing with them things that had been penned up for months as I had been struggling with issues of identity, value and purpose. So through their unconditional love, I came to understand more of the measure of God’s love. And I said, “I want this God to be my Lord.”
Today is Father’s Day. This God knows all the ins and outs of your life. He knows your successes; he knows your failures and there are plenty of both. And He comes to you with arms outstretched to say, “I love you, I accept you.” (Some of transcript lost due to tape change) And let us identify with His purpose. As He sent Jesus, so He is sending us that we might represent to the world the God of grace and love who brings redemption and salvation to broken humanity.
If you want to join in participation with God in His purpose on earth, would you just pray with me as we commit ourselves to our Father’s purposes, “Lord Jesus, we thank you that through you we experience Emanuel, God with us. That through you a new and living way has been open to God, the Father, and we have all been brought into the family of God. We’re no longer strangers and aliens but we’ve been adopted, we’ve been made family. We belong and we thank you for it. I pray, Lord, for anyone here who is struggling in this area. Would you draw them to yourself. Would you speak words of affirmation of your love. Thank you for your forgiveness and for your grace. And I pray Lord that we would all know the depths of your love, the love of the Father, the creator, the redeemer. Oh, Lord, we commit ourselves to your ways, to your values, to your purposes. We want to live as sons and daughters of God. If that is your desire, would you just tell God now, “God I want to live out my life this week as your son, as your daughter.” Say it in your own words, out loud, softly, quietly to yourself. But let God know; just do a transaction with Him. ‘I want to be part of your family this week. When people look at me they say, ‘Wow, you can tell he’s got the hallmarks. The ears look like the Father’s ears, the eyes look like the Father’s eyes. There is something about him that has a mark of the Father.’ We want to be your people. Continue to teach us and lead us that we might honor you and reflect you to your glory. Amen.” God be with all of you.
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