CMLC 2024-06-02 Sermon

Lord God, the way that I see the world,

the way that all of us see the world,

Lord God, it is flawed.

It is tainted.

There are so many ways in which we keep telling ourselves stories

and views that don't match what you see.

Lord God, we ask that You would be our vision.

We ask that You would be the one to show us what You see

because You are the one who is Lord of all.

You have come to this earth and given us life, light,

and our guidance on our path.

Thank you, Lord God.

In Christ Jesus. Amen.

Howdy.

And a quick thank you to Anna and Jennifer

and some of the people from Jovi

who are helping with our children's church and our nursery

going on during the worship service

and for some of the little ones that really wiggly in their seats.

So really glad that they're helping us out with that.

I wanted to talk with you a little bit today

and talk about some of the festivals

that I will oftentimes go to.

Now, you may or may not remember,

but there are usually three festivals

that I try to go to every year.

I try to make sure that I go to Renaissance Festival.

All right, absolutely. Preferably the Celtic weekend.

I'd love to be able to have an excuse to wear my kilt.

It's very awesome. Yes.

No, I don't shave my legs.

Or then, of course, the second one being a rodeo.

Even if you're not sure which person you want to hear us sing,

apparently MC Hammer was there once upon a time.

So apparently anybody could be there.

You never know. Have no idea.

But then, of course, the third is that every year

I need to try to go to Comic Palooza.

Very important.

Now, for those who may not realize, Comic Palooza,

it's a chance not just to see a bunch of people

with comic book characters,

but also sci-fi and fantasy

and all sorts of fun, different spots.

They have not just booths for people to sell things,

like books or figurines or all sorts of artwork.

But they'll even have places where little kids can go

and have pretend fights with each other.

Hopefully they'll pretend there's always somebody

with a bloody nose.

But then you would also see grown-ups going over there

with their own fake swords

and having their fights and everything.

And you're kind of like, well, I'm 44.

If I go to the little kids, I could probably win.

Okay, but, and yeah, they keep telling me no,

and it's very unfortunate.

But also this year, back to the future,

Michael J. Fox, all right, and Christopher Lloyd.

They were there.

I was hoping to go and have my photo taken with them,

but some people want to get married that weekend.

I don't know.

I mean, crazy people over there.

I guess you have to do what you gotta do.

But with all of this, though,

is that there were a lot of wonderful things to get to see.

But one thing that really threw me

was there was this one booth that was over there.

All right, and what I saw was a figurine of Optimus Prime.

Now, you may or may not know who this is.

Maybe you've been living under a rock, okay?

But there was a cartoon about these robots

that would transform into vehicles.

Okay, and so what would happen is

that you'd see these old toys that are there.

Let's see, I think there might be a picture of it, yeah.

And so what you might end up seeing

is that all of these figurines,

they might even be in their original packaging.

But then more than that, they might be in this other box.

And so what I saw, I saw an Optimus Prime.

And it was in perfect condition,

and the price tag said $60.

And I'm like, I know how much those things can go for.

That's like half price at the very least.

I mean, for goodness sake, I have to go and find out.

But I saw there was another figurine next to it

that was $70, but it wasn't quite as important

of a character as Optimus Prime.

And so I went and talked to the owners and I said,

what's going on with the figurines?

Why would this figurine cost more than Optimus Prime?

And the guy looked at me and said, you misunderstand.

That's not the price for Optimus Prime.

That's the price for the case that he's inside of.

Just for that box.

And I looked around and I saw all of these

beautiful pristine figurines in these cases that are there.

None of them were for sale, only the cases.

And I'm just sitting there like,

I didn't even know what to do with this.

It's like they were so focused on the packaging,

but you couldn't get the toy that was inside of the package.

And that really struck me,

this idea of being focused on the packaging,

but not always on the content.

See, what I would say today is that we,

are oftentimes too focused on the framework

we see outside of something.

We're too focused on the context of our world.

Too focused on the perspectives.

And we're not necessarily focused

on what God is showing us on the inside.

Now, to make sure that you know why it is

that this is tying in with what we're discussing.

Let me give you the context for what was happening with Jesus.

See, Jesus and his disciples,

they had been going through different towns

and they had been doing good works

and they had been teaching and everything else.

And they're coming through this field with wheat grain.

And what do they do?

Do they have anything to eat?

Are they hungry?

All this stuff.

And they reach out and they grab some of the heads of grain

so they can get the kernels

and they have something that they can munch on.

But as they do so, as they're grabbing this,

they're not taking the grains and milling them,

making bread, they're not going to try to bake it.

They're not trying to sell it.

All they're doing is just grabbing where it's there

and munching on the kernels.

The thing is though, that as the Pharisees see this,

they get offended.

Why?

Because the day they're doing this is the Sabbath.

You're not supposed to work on the Sabbath day.

You're supposed to be focused on God

and on worship on the Sabbath day.

Now, what do we want to try to do though,

is realize that what they were doing

was not actually working in that strict sense.

But what had happened is that there were all these extra views

that the Pharisees had put

in order to decide what was or was not acceptable.

Now, with this though, is you have to realize

that there were other times where they might make exceptions.

See, the thing is, is that there were many times

where there might be an exception made

for why something was acceptable or allowable.

And why it was that the teachers, the Pharisees,

describes different groups of people,

they would support some people and not others.

One of those examples was David.

You see, when David had been anointed to be king,

but Saul was still reigning as the king at the time,

David had to run from Saul a lot.

And what was happening is that David would spend time

often hiding with some of his men, his supporters,

but they didn't have food all the time.

So at one point, he goes up to the priest

and he says, give me the showbread.

Now, just to make sure you understand what this is,

what they were supposed to do is they were supposed to break,

sorry, they were supposed to bake bread

and put it before the presence of God.

This was an offering to God.

As that bread is hot and fresh, it stays there.

But whenever it starts getting cold

and a little bit stiff, starting to get stale,

they take it off once it's no longer hot and fresh,

and then they have to put new bread on there.

But what would they do with it?

The priests would eat the bread.

So you see, this bread was in the presence of God,

not exactly the same way as what we do with communion,

but a similar theme, a similar feeling.

Now, feeling.

Now, technically though,

David was not supposed to eat that bread.

The only people who were supposed to eat that bread

was the priests.

But they had no food.

They needed something to eat.

They were desperate.

And the priest wanted to support God's anointed.

But at that point in time,

they kept making excuses for why it was okay

to give them the bread.

It wasn't actually supposed to be his.

But the way that they viewed it,

they were making an exception for David.

Now, why is it that the Pharisees and the teachers of the law

would accept that David's context,

it was okay to eat the bread?

Why would they think that it was okay?

Because David was their hero.

David was the one that they looked up to.

David was the one that they were supposed to defend.

And yet, even though David had gone and taken bread

that was not meant for him,

and they would be able to make an exception for that,

Jesus and his disciples are just reaching

and grabbing the kernels there and munching on them

because they have nothing else.

And what do they do?

They go after him.

But you see, even the priests themselves,

there might be times to question what is happening.

You see, Jesus says, kind of like a tongue-in-cheek sort of idea.

Like, he's not really attacking the priests,

but he wants them to question things in their mind.

He says that technically, the priests blaspheme

or they go against the Sabbath.

How is it that the priests are blaspheming

or contradicting the Sabbath?

They're doing it because they're technically working on the Sabbath.

It would be sort of like, if you look at the pastor

and say, well, the pastor works on Sunday,

I guess that should be okay.

And it would be the same idea with the priests.

Is that if you try to look at it that way,

then technically every single priest has sinned

because every single one has worked on the Sabbath.

But you see, that's not the way that they framed it.

It is amazing how we as people

pick and choose who or what embodies what we want

instead of looking inside in light of God's will.

The thing is, is that the way that things are presented,

it actually shows more about what we want to see

and what we want to happen,

rather than asking what something is or is not good or right.

And that's why it is that we connect it with our epistle lesson today.

That there are treasures that are in jars of clay.

Maybe for some of you, jars of clay is the name of a band.

It does come from here.

The idea of a jar of clay

is that this is supposed to be a frail and an imperfect vessel.

Now, you can put things inside of it.

You can have water, you can have grain,

you can have all sorts of things.

But if you're looking at this vessel,

this vessel is not meant to be the treasure.

What's inside of it is what's supposed to be important.

But you see, oftentimes what we do

is we obsess about the jar.

We focus on the jar.

We make that the thing that we care so much about.

We care so much about what's on the outside.

And yet, at the same time, it's supposed to be frail.

But more than that, we are those jars of clay.

We are meant to be frail.

We are meant to be, admit that we're flawed.

It speaks in the epistle about the times

whenever there are struggles and being perplexed

and feeling abandoned.

If you are a follower of Christ,

are you going to always feel safe and comfortable in the world?

Absolutely not.

And if you're trying to always feel safe

and comfortable in the world,

then it means that you're probably getting something wrong.

Because the truth about this is that

it is meant to be something that we realize is frail.

Because then that means what God is doing inside of us

can be that much more powerful

and that much more amazing.

But the thing is, is that whether we're talking about

our perspective of the world,

or our jobs, or our life situation,

or certain people, or ideas that we have,

is that oftentimes we try to protect those.

We try to take the jar, and we glaze it.

And we set it in a fire, and we try to harden it.

And we try to make it beautiful and perfect.

We want it to be strong.

We want it to be hardened.

But what I'm going to suggest to you today

is that the jars of clay,

ourselves and the way that we see the world,

sometimes it's supposed to be smashed.

We talked a minute ago about David.

As much as many people in Israel

looked up to David and saw the future Messiah

as coming from David's lineage,

is that David was oftentimes a terrible human being.

He saw a young woman at her home,

bathing, trying to become clean after the monthly ritual

that is needed, and sends his guards to take her

and bring her to him to have what he wanted with her.

And then, when a child comes from this,

he tries to hide it.

And the woman's husband, Uriah,

dies for his mistake.

He has him killed.

And then on top of it is that God has to get across to him

what's going on, and the child dies because of it.

But it's more than that.

This is also the guy whose firstborn son

tries to overthrow him

and ends up getting killed in battle against him.

This is David who decided that he was going to have a census

because he wanted to count how many people he could take to war

if he wanted to go off against people,

instead of trusting that God was with him

or even wondering if he even needed to go to war.

And because of that, God had to smite 70,000 people

to communicate what was done was wrong.

This is the same David who wasn't allowed by God to build the temple

because he was a man of war, a bloodshed.

And even more than that, his son ends up bringing idols into the worship

and even some of their descendants bring back child sacrifice

in the kingdom of Israel.

Because the reality is that as much as they wanted to put David on a pedestal,

his reign had to come to an end.

And the truth is that the same thing happens with our own toys,

with the things that we have as well.

I was moving a lot for a while there,

and I had one of my own figurines.

It was still in the original package.

But every time that I would move,

that package would get bent up a little bit more.

It would get torn from time to time.

There would be pieces that I had to tape up,

trying to make it look good again.

The package kept getting wrinkled up.

And one day, after another move, I finally opened up the box.

And I looked and I was like,

why do I have this ugly wrinkly package here in my things?

And so I took away the package.

I threw it away.

And I put the toys up on the shelf by themselves.

And I could finally see them for what they were meant to be.

The thing is, is that as much as I was trying to protect the packaging,

it was what was inside that actually mattered.

See, in many ways, we need to stop glorifying the vessels.

Whatever it is that we think is the framework,

the means by which we want things to happen in our world,

God doesn't abide by our plans.

He doesn't abide by our framework.

But more than that is that there is only one Lord of the Sabbath.

There's only one who is actually in charge.

But here's the question, though.

Not just Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath,

that He's the one in charge,

but also more than that, He's Lord of the Sabbath.

Why is the Sabbath so important?

It's so important because that is the day when we're meant to stop fighting

and to come into the presence of God and to worship.

That is the time, that is the day

when we're supposed to go to the one who can actually make all things good

and all things new.

See, the reality is that it is time to refocus.

And what I would say, why the Lord of the Sabbath?

Because the Lord of the Sabbath is the one that can actually change us

and refocus us.

I would say that in many ways, as a world,

we're struggling to have our priorities straight.

What are the things that we actually treasure and make important?

But you see, more than realizing that you are not the Lord of the Sabbath,

you're not the one to decide what God is going to do and how He's going to do it.

But also more than that,

is that it's time to let God smash those vessels.

This isn't just, you know what, maybe if I can just tape it up a little bit

and maybe try to reorient it a little bit.

Sometimes God has to destroy something in your life.

Sometimes God has to destroy something in the world around us.

Sometimes things have to come to an end.

And that's a hard piece with that to accept.

But also in many ways, that's the piece that we need to embrace the most.

Because what I would also say is that Jesus himself is the one who started

by letting himself be broken.

As much as we may find the world today perplexing and confusing and unstable,

that means that this is exactly the time when maybe God can show himself the most clearly.

So that we can realize who God truly is and what he's actually trying to do.

But on top of that, is that Jesus himself isn't trying to be protected.

And maybe that's a piece with us as well.

Maybe we're trying so hard to protect ourselves,

is that we're not willing to let God change what needs to be changed.

So today, what I have to say to you is that broken vessels

are okay to be broken.

It's okay to let some things fall apart.

It's okay when something has to come to an end.

It's okay whenever we find out that something is flawed.

It's okay whenever we find out something just isn't meant to be.

Because the treasure of God's grace is eternal.

And nothing changes that.

So don't give up everything of value just to keep your broken vessels.

Thanks be to God.